Donkey Mountain

If CNN Moderated The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

2012-01-29T17:50:00.000-08:00

Abraham Lincoln: “This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty …

Wolf Blitzer: “I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr Lincoln, but we’re getting off topic and we only have two minutes left. It’s been rumored that you’re bipolar. Would you be willing to reveal your medical records, yes or no?”

Where Every Billionaire Is Cinderella

2012-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

Apparently, one of the more novel perks of being a billionaire in today’s world is that you get to meet with other billionaires in Davos, Switzerland once a year at the World Economic Forum, where you are treated as a deep intellectual by mere millionaires.

Once there, you can have your picture taken with Bono and Desmond Tutu, and get your balls licked by social climbing court historians like Niall Ferguson. If you’re rich enough, he might even turn off his cell phone for you, or at least put it on vibrate. When things get really hot, he’ll tilt his head back and moan, We musn’t blame the bankers! We musn’t blame the bankers!

Then you can attend seminars with world leaders, thinkers, and very serious pundits who will look at you very seriously, lick their lips, and nod very pensively as you utter portentous sounding nonsense like this: “We must utilize new technologies and formulate new strategies for coping with the unique challenges of globalization in the 21 century, particularly in emerging economies.”

Then you hop in your private jet and fly off to inspect your sweat shops.

(This tweet was posted over on the Bloomberg page that covers the WEF: MLiebreich RT @DavosDeville: The corporate dirigible has been untethered and we are up and away to #Davos! Everyone looks like ants! Tiny, insignificant ants!)

They Lost Cuba

2012-01-29T13:47:00.001-08:00

Fidel Castro has weighed in on the Republic primaries: “The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

Our Bread Is Moldy And Our Circuses Are Dull

2012-01-28T08:34:00.000-08:00

Please God, not another Republican debate …

And not another asinine statement from Sarah Palin about the liberal media’s anti-conservative bias. Here she is complaining about their unfairness to poor Newt Gingrich:

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it. But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, Congratulations! It means you have a brain.

And where would we be without yet another right-wing demagogue trying to drag us back into the nineteenth century? In this case, North Carolina Republican Larry Pittman, who wants to bring back public hangings for, you guessed it, abortionists. In fairness to Rep. Pittman, he also wants to hang rapists and kidnappers too. Hell, if you pressed him, he’d probably tell you that we should also send liberals, homos, employees of the Dept. of Education, and flag burners to the gallows as well. But I’m just guessing on that, so don’t quote me. Far be it from me to unfairly subscribe [sic] attack muffin verbiage to someone who isn’t really that bloodthirsty at all, but is, in all likelihood, just another run-of-the-mill, bush league amateur southern theocrat. The Republic is full of them.

Our bread is moldy and our circuses are dull. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think America had achieved such a solid level of peace and prosperity that it no longer needed to take politics seriously. It could afford to have its public life infested with half-wits, clowns, grifters and Bible thumpers whose minds are rooted in the Bronze Age. Of course the opposite is true. The engine is overheating. The wheels are coming off. The passengers have no idea where they ’re going and they’re scattering in a thousand blind directions.

If it wasn’t for Jersey Shore and American Idol, I think I’d go mad.

The Toad And The Vulture

2012-01-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I can’t decide who I dislike most, Newt Gringrich or Mitt Romney. They are both exquisitely loathsome in their own unique ways. They each represent different facets of the same repulsive id. Gingrich is Gingrich, a poisonous reptile who is a hypocrite by conviction: “People want to hear what I say. It doesn’t matter what I do.” He is a bona fide scourge to our democracy, a genuine menace who will bring disaster upon us if he ever makes it to the White House. The dude is cracked. That he fancies himself the savior of civilization is laughably grotesque. It’s like Hitler insisting he was a man of peace or hearing Mussolini extol the virtues of a free press. That nasty little toad is partly responsible for making our politics as low and reprehensible as they are.

But hardly a day passes that we aren’t given a fresh new glimpse into the multidimensional world of Mitt Romney’s assholianism:

A ThinkProgress examination of Mitt Romney’s presidential personal financial disclosures from May 2011 reveal that the former Massachusetts governor and his wife own or owned millions of dollars worth of a Goldman Sachs investment fund invested heavily in mortgage-backed obligations. And the current owners of those mortgage debts began foreclosure proceedings against thousands of Floridians.
Along with his investments in Bain Capital funds linked to offshore tax havens, the Romneys have large investments in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). The firm’s March 2011 annual report for the fund notes that about 8 percent of the fund is invested in banks and 24.5 percent is invested in mortgage-backed obligations. Romney’s form says he has invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the fund and his wife Ann has invested an additional $1 million-plus. Since the 2008 economic meltdown and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, this fund has done quite well, growing 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, he is a vulture, a despicable carrion bird who makes money by inflicting misery on others. Even his ‘successes’ are dubious: Dominoes Pizza? As I said, he makes money inflicting pain …

So who is worse, the slimily repellent Gingrich — backstabbing moral reprobate and self-appointed savior of America’s values, cough, gag, chuckle — or the coldly venal Mitt Romney, fake Galtian capitalist hero and dog abuser?

(I don’t know if slimily is a word, but I’m sticking to it. Call it my own little contribution to the English language.)

What’ll it be, folks? This:

Or this:

(The Gingrich picture is a fake, to be sure, but I think it accurately depicts his soul.)

Earth To Birthers: You Are Beyond Pathetic

2012-01-26T06:35:00.000-08:00

Earth to the birthers, your cause is stupid and pathetic, and you are boring:

President Obama will ignore an order by an Atlanta judge to appear in court Thursday for a hearing in a case challenging his qualifications under the Constitution to be president. […]
The Associated Press reported last week that the judge had denied a motion to quash a subpoena for the president to show up for the hearing, which is scheduled for 9 am ET. Obama may still be sleeping – it will only be 6 am in Las Vegas.
The case centers on whether Obama, whose father was Kenyan, qualifies as a “natural born citizen,” as required of a president under the Constitution. Some contend that “natural born citizen” means both of a presidential candidate’s parents must be U.S.citizens.

I’m sitting here contemplating what kind of jack-ass wastes one minute of his life on this kind of ridiculous nonsense. What level of mental, moral, and emotional deprivation do you have to exist at to pursue this non-issue issue? “Some contend” that a president’s parents must be citizens. Big deal. “Some contend” the earth is flat and the moon landing was a hoax. Some contend that birthers are sadly pathetic racists, a bunch of embittered whites who see the complexion of America changing hue and are running scared.

What does the Constitution contend? This:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Even if your daddy was a Kenyan Marxist socialist angry black radical with an anti-colonial mentality, or whatever, you can become president as long as you were born on US soil, are over 35, and have lived in the US for fourteen years. Obama is right to ignore this crap.

It Worked For Dubya

2012-01-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

If nothing else, Romney is capable of achieving Bushian levels of verbal chaos: “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

And believe in. Now go sit in the corner and eat your pudding, and don’t talk to socialists.

What’s So Funny, Guys?

2012-01-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

Oh, yeah …

The Servant Sector Economy

2012-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

Obama wants more foreign tourists to come to America, and he has a plan to make it happen. It’s all about facilitating the process:

Frequent travelers who pass an extensive background check will be able to scan their passports and fingerprints and skip long lines at immigration at more airports. We’re going to expand the number of countries where visitors can get pre-cleared by Homeland Security so they don’t need a tourist visa. And we’re going to speed up visa processing for countries with growing middle classes that can afford to visit America — countries like China and Brazil.

While we’re at it, why not require a stool sample as well? If the applicants are upper middle class or better, we can just let them mail it in.

That seems like a pretty big hassle to go through to see Disneyland. Is Donald Duck really worth a rectal search? Personally, I’d rather go to Napoleonland.

I wonder if this is the brainchild of Obama’s jobs czar Jeffrey Immelt. He also happens to be the CEO of General Electric, which has extensive operations in both China and Brazil, two countries singled out in Obama’s address. Due to their growing middle classes, their citizens might be eligible to be “pre-cleared“ by the Dept. of Fatherland Security. Do you suppose the jobs czar’s idea of putting Americans to work is to have them serve cheeseburgers and french fries to GE’s foreign middle managers? Dress in Goofy costumes and pose for pictures with their kids? Entertain the family while Dad attends meetings with GE executives where they try to figure out new ways to cheat on their taxes?

(h/t They gave us a republic.)

The Ruins Of Consumerism

2012-01-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

I saw an evocative phrase in a book I was reading about the Roman Republic, a society that, like our own, was chronically plagued by extreme inequality: The fields of the poor. The fields of the poor. That’s a very picturesque way of referring to something that, in reality, was unbearably grim and awful. I don’t think it could be done today. Modern poverty defies any such sweet-sounding descriptions: The rent is late, the overdue bills are stained with soda, and your rusty Corolla leaks radiator fluid. Judge Judy is on TV. The kids are heating up frozen macaroni and cheese for dinner, and you’re praying for a call back from the manager at Target. This is home:

Try to capture that with a poetic phrase. It’s a difficult thing to do. Trailer parks of discontent? And how could you describe the broader American landscape in which this dismal scenario transpires, the one that exists outside the confines of the trailer court? Soulless parking lots of despair? Strip malls of worn-out consumerism? The specific character of American poverty reflects the specific character, in a greatly exaggerated form, of the larger American culture that produced it. The trashier the culture, the trashier the slum.

There is a unique emptiness to the wreckage we’re leaving behind. Most of it won’t have any intrinsic beauty that posterity will be able to appreciate, as, for example, we can still appreciate a Byzantine mosaic or an Etruscan vase. It will just be a mass of cheap, disposable trash. Future archaeologists will sift through layers of sheet metal, plastic, automobile parts and broken DVDs, meticulously searching for some indication that American civilization — at least in its latter stages — had any sense of value. What were they really about, future scholars will wonder, until, at their wit’s end, they’ll be forced to bow to the truth and conclude that America, in it’s final decades, wasn’t about anything at all.

They invented plastic and never looked back!

They started out strong, producing such marvels as the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the Hoover Dam. But somewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century they inexplicably wore down. Their creativity petered out and their vigour drained away. They lost their purpose, turned inward, and proceeded to devour their own guts.

They bought and sold gadgets at a manic pace because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. Some of these gadgets were miraculous, and others were extremely useful. Most of them, however, were merely frivolous, and a few were downright dangerous. But that didn’t matter. The most important thing was that these gadgets were contantly being bought, sold and consumed; bought, sold and consumed; bought, sold and consumed in a briskly moving cycle that couldn’t be impeded in any serious way or the whole system might come crashing down. It was done for the sake of a deity called Growth.

The process itself was of paramount importance, everything else was secondary. To the people who controlled it, there weren’t any other considerations at all. It was the only thing. It was a God whose rules could never be questioned and whose belly could never be satisfactorily filled. If anyone got in the way of this divinely ordained system, criticized it, or otherwise prevented it from operating smoothly, they were run over or pushed aside. When they could no longer actively participate in it, they were thrown away as casually as burnt-out spark plugs or empty aluminum cans.

Buying, selling, consuming; buying, selling, consuming. On and on, world without end. There was no other glue that bound Americans together, nothing else they could think of to aspire to. It was, for all intents and purposes, their religion. It was so sacred to them, in fact, that in their zeal to keep it going they readily abandoned their one truly great contribution to the world: their political constitution.

When entropy set in and the system broke down, the people couldn’t figure out what to do. Signs of impending collapse proliferated like weeds, but the people ignored them. They hunkered down and continued to buy, sell and consume as compulsively as ever. Their leaders, who were as intractably corrupt as they were stupidly short-sighted, actively encouraged this behavior. They were unable to change due to a failure of will and imagination, and they gradually perished; a slow, inglorious death.

Put simply, they were stubborn fat people who ran out of money.

Recession Proof

2012-01-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

Good news everyone, it’s bonus time at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs will stoke the fury over bankers’ bonuses this week when it increases the proportion of revenues paid to staff despite what could be its worst year for earnings since 1999.
The bank — which will report its final results for 2011 on Wednesday — has already set aside 44 per cent of the $22.76bn (£14.89bn) of revenues it generated during the first nine months of the year to pay staff. The lion’s share will be shared by a small number of elite level “partners”.
[…]
This would counter banking industry arguments that remuneration policies are set up to reward those who generate good performance for all the bank’s shareholders rather than just to keep senior staff in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

So Goldman is holding out on its own shareholders in order to pay fat bonuses to its “elite partners” instead? This is the kind of thing that would get a mafioso strung up in a meat locker, but in the straight world these days it’s just par for the Zeitgeist. They’ve had the worst year since 1999, but Goldman executives will still be able buy Lamborghini’s for their favorite teenage nieces. Lovely. Oh yeah, and pay off the cops to keep the system running smoothly. Our oligarchs are recession proof.

I wonder, would Bain Capital turn Goldman Sachs around or bust it up, sell the spare parts, and fire all the staff? Just curious.

David Brooks Has An Epiphany

2012-01-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

Here’s David Brooks in his latest column: “I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”

Tune in next week when Brooks discovers the earth is actually round, witchcraft doesn’t cause droughts after all, and the stars are not, as previously believed, pinpricks in the sky that reveal heaven’s light.

We Are All Seamus

2012-01-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

I take back every nice thing I ever said about Mitt Romney, and since I’ve never said anything nice about him it ought to be easy.

True story: I was out walking the dog the other day when a nice, kind of slow fellow wandered up and made small talk. He asked me about the dog, which is a two year old golden retriever named Farley. He’s the friendliest damn dog you’ll ever meet, a burglar’s delight. He’s so friendly, in fact, he gives me at least one quarter of the bed every night.

Anyway, anyway, this guy says to me, “So did you hear about what that one guy did, Mitch Roffner, Roffney, or whatever his name is, the guy running for president?”

I try never to hear about him if I can help it, I thought. “Nope,” I said.

“He tied his Irish Setter to the top of the car and drove down the freeway, and it pissed and shit all over the place.”

I hate to say it, but my first thought wasn’t concern for the dog’s safety. My first thought that was that if this is true, it could potentially sink Romney. Yes. “Really?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, its piss was flying all over.”

Beautiful, I thought, just beautiful. Prince Romney, Lord of Bain Capital, is a stupid and inhumane jerk. And that fact that he let his dog crap all over the public highways has a certain symbolic value, don’t you think?

When I got home I Googled it up to see if it was true. Sure enough, it was true:

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.
The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus's rather visceral protest.

Sigh. Double sigh. Where to begin?

Seamus doesn’t get to ride inside the car, kids. Dogs are unpredictable and make messes, like workers. He might soil our matching denim shirts. We musn’t get dog hair on our khakis! Strap him in a cage and ignore him, like the rest of those troublesome things. What do you call them? Oh yes, the people. Sorry, dears, it’s so easy to forget they’re out there.

If we were living in better times, I wouldn’t have any problem with a Romney presidency. I wouldn’t be happy about it, of course, but whaddya gonna do? He could take his place in the dull gray parade of mediocre presidents that bejewel our history, people like Chester Alan Arthur or Benjamin Harrison, or Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, or Franklin Pierce. Just about every major political figure out there gives me indigestion. Until I head about this, though, I didn’t find him any more or less disagreeable than any of the other snakes who rule us. Excuse me, I mean legislators. He’s just another garden variety rich prick who thinks he’s entitled to the presidency. They’re a dime a dozen. They seem to emerge by fuckin’ parthenogenesis in this circus of a country we live in. But what kind of asshole straps his dog to the roof of the car for twelve hours? What were wifey and the kids doing all that time, meekly obeying daddy? These people are seriously messed up. This puts him in the Sandusky zone of villainy as far as I’m concerned, or at least the Michael Vick zone.

Do you think these plastic weirdos will treat the country any better than they treated Seamus?

The Politics Of Reality

2012-01-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, a recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that two thirds of Americans now think there are “strong conflicts between the rich and poor.”

The nonprofit think tank in Washington released a study Wednesday that reported a growing number of Americans say there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor — a number that has risen by 9 percent since July 2009.

Though 43 percent still believe the rich become so “because of their own hard work, ambition or education,” a full 46 percent think they become wealthy as a result of “connections or birth.” Furthermore,

… these attitudes seem to be shared regardless of income level. Nearly 67 percent of adults with a household income of less than $20,000 a year believe there are serious conflicts between the rich and poor, as do 67 percent of those earning $75,000 a year or more, Morin wrote.

Sharp class divisions are a fact of American life, and class warfare will be the inevitable result. Pointing this out is not, as Mitt Romney claims, to indulge in some spurious “politics of envy.” On the contrary, it is to engage in the politics of plain reality, to respond to the way things actually are. No amount of happy talk about fictional “opportunity societies” or ego-stroking rhetoric about Americans being “blue sky, can-do people” will change the fact that a dangerously high number of us know our lives are being flushed down the drain so a that a privileged few can buy $1200 wastepaper baskets, or a presidential candidate worth $250 million dollars can remodel his $12 million mansion in La Jolla, California, during the worst recession since the 1930s (all the while lecturing the rest of us about getting off unemployment and learning to work harder, like his rich daddy did).

“An imbalance between rich and poor,” wrote Plutarch, “is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Our leaders need to wake up and recognize this simple fact. They need to understand that gross economic inequality, regardless of its cause, is a dangerous and corrosive social evil that must sooner or later be soberly addressed. Free-market platitudes cooked up at the University of Chicago or in the comic book mind of Ayn Rand don’t qualify as serious solutions.

The situation is made worse when the wealth of the elite is seen by the masses as illegitimate, which is becoming the case in our present condition. The people are catching on to the fact that America is not run by the deserving rich, but by a bunch of speculators, frauds, and trust fund babies. Nepotism, grift, and strategic marriage are far more effective ways of wriggling into the one percent than hard work and genuine talent, which are much farther down the list of necessary qualifications, if indeed they are necessary at all anymore. I have my doubts. The great beast of the people has finally, thank goodness, begun to smell this out.

Just look at our recent political history. The 2000 presidential campaign was a race between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; in 2004, it was a contest between the son of a former president and the son of a former ambassador. In the latter instance, both men went to Yale and were members of Skull and Bones. Diversity.

When someone like Obama manages to climb out of the lower depths, he can only do so by shamelessly kissing the asses of the established powers. We may lament the fact that he stocks his cabinet with well connected money changers, but if he didn’t he would never win re-election (could never win election in the first place).

Of course, Obama ran in the Democratic primaries against the wife of a former president, who, by virtue of being the wife of a former president, had already been given a senate seat from a state she had never really lived in. Somewhere along the way, she learned enough about international relations to become our current secretary of state, and now she piously lectures the Syrians and the Iranians about the virtues of democracy.

Obama’s opponent in the general election was, of course, the son of an admiral. His initial entry into politics was bankrolled by his rich (second) wife, who inherited a fortune from daddy.

Viva democracy! I’m choking on all the used up bootstraps laying around here.

(Needless to say, the exact same constellation of wealthy donors contribute large sums of money to both campaigns, regardless of political party, and proceed to have their functionaries pipelined straight into high level government jobs.)

Do I need to mention Romney’s bona fide$? I think not. The voluminous commentary on Mitt’s fortune is already reaching Churchillian or Lincolnian dimensions in the blogosphere, so I’ll leave it alone, but I do have a few thoughts on Mitt himself.

He looks like the little plastic figurine on a wedding cake and appears to have a similarly synthetic soul. Much has been made of Mitt’s “flip-flopping,” but that’s irrelevant. In reality, Mitt’s mind seems totally rigid and inelastic: He unquestioningly swallowed the religious and political beliefs of his parents and never looked back. His fundamental view of the world was shaped by mommy and daddy at an early age and baked in a clay oven sometime during adolescence. That set it for all time. It can’t bend or it will break (I bet you that’s why he gets so touchy and angry when he’s challenged). So here he is, full grown Mitt, robotically spouting free market dogmas that are so grossly out of touch with our economic reality that it literally makes your jaw drop. If he showed up to a speech wearing a top hat and spats the effect couldn’t be any more jarring.

Then again, Mitt had a substantial financial interest in being obedient, as do his boys. Yes, I fear, it’s only a matter of time before Mitt’s waxwork sons begin inflicting themselves on our diseased political life. After all, princes are born to rule. Mark my words, for the hour draws nigh: Senator Tagg Romney is an historic reality waiting to materialize. You don’t honestly believe that Tagg, Matt, Craig, and Josh are opposed to the estate tax out of philosophical conviction alone, do you? Your war chest can never be too big.

The fix is in. The game is up. It’s their world, we just live in it — and they charge us a pretty penny to do so. Shit, they’d charge us for breathing if they could, but since they can’t they do the next best thing, which is poison the air, ha ha. (It’s not enough that they merely succeed. We must also be made to suffer and fail.)

Luckily the people are figuring it out.

Meanwhile Back At The GWOT …

2012-01-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

Somebody whacked an Iranian nuclear physicist on the streets of Tehran Wednesday, the fourth one in two years. The United States is denying any involvement in the hit:

The United States on Wednesday forcefully condemned a car bomb attack that killed an Iranian nuclear expert in Tehran — while just as firmly repudiating any suggestion that U.S. operatives might have taken part in the assassination.
“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists at the State Department Wednesday ahead of a meeting with her Qatari counterpart.
“The United States strongly condemns this act of violence and categorically denies any involvement in the killing,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a press statement.

I’m sure the Israelis had nothing to do with this and that the United States had no foreknowledge of the event. We are, after all, peace loving democracies who fight against terrorism. Any suggestion to the contrary is irresponsible and ought to be dismissed outright by all serious, sensible people.

On a different note, the US has resumed drone strikes in Pakistan after a 46 day hiatus, and the first one bagged four confirmed kills! That’s a respectable start to the new year. With a little grit and determination, we can beat last year’s body count of 543.

Imagine how many we could nail if Obama was not, as Mitt Romney says, an appeaser who goes around apologizing for America. Oh well, that’s life in the big city, I suppose.

Mitt’s Base

2012-01-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

If Mitt Romney is elected, he will defend upscale gourmands from European style socialism. This by way of Think Progress.

Flush with cash as other rivals limped through the summer and fall, the Romney team poured resources into data: Operatives mined reams of consumer information — from the number of purchases voters made at Williams-Sonoma to their range of financial investments — to build a model that would allow them to find and identify potential supporters. [...]
Romney’s operatives paired the voter data with several hundred thousand paid and volunteer calls. They knew his sweet spot was among older, higher-income voters — those with annual household incomes of between $75,000 and $150,000 and with upscale interests like gourmet cooking. He was particularly appealing to older women and did best — as they knew from 2008 — among self-identified Republicans.

A Hard Candy Christmas

2011-12-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

I don’t know much about CIA Christmas parties. Never have. They just don’t cross my mind. There are many things in this world I simply don’t pay attention to, like NASCAR, Broadway musicals, the mating habits of the leopard slug or Bono’s opinions about anything, and I freely confess the CIA’s holiday festivities are also on that list. So sue me.

Then again, that’s probably how they want it, right? The CIA is duty bound to maintain a high level of secrecy, and hiding things about themselves is something they do very well. They won’t divulge how many employees they have, how big their budget is or they spend the money. Nor do we know, and probably never will, why the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11 seemingly took them by surprise (or did they?).

We don’t really even know precisely what they do. We just assume they perform some function that is absolutely vital to our security and leave it at that. Without them, we’d become helpless prey to the ruthless hordes of evildoers who are constantly plotting our destruction — Russians, Chinese, Muslim terrorists, Somali pirates, mad dictators, shoe bombers, underwear bombers or any combination of the above, depending on the political needs of the moment. We’d fall into a period of terrible insecurity, such as that which existed between 1776 and 1947 when the CIA didn’t exist at all. Perish the thought. God only knows how we survived those precarious times.

But let’s not revisit bad memories. This is a post about Christmas parties, and apparently our last two CIA directors threw some doozies:

Under then-director Leon E. Panetta last year, the CIA brought in shipments of California wine, and served fried oysters, grilled shrimp and quesadillas. His predecessor, Michael V. Hayden, made sure there were musicians playing Irish music while stations set up inside the agency’s cavernous headquarters hallway served drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

And everybody who’s anybody was there. Cool kids only:

At the CIA and DNI, hundreds of guests filed through receiving lines to meet the agencies’ directors. Senior White House officials, lawmakers and journalists all mingled with officials from Washington’s clandestine world.

I could think of many colorful terms to describe Leon Panetta, but party animal wouldn’t be one of them. I figured he was just another revolving door ‘public servant,’ the kind who drifts from one prestigious government job to another as easily and naturally as an octopus gliding through a kelp bed. Turns out he’s something of an epicurean as well. Isn’t that nice? Stuff this one in the file labeled “Austerity for thee, but not for me,” or, for fiscal conservatives, “Wasteful government spending is evil, but some wasteful government spending is less evil than others.”

If it was up to me, the CIA’s party favors would consist of fried SPAM and a keg Old Milwaukee that’s been sitting in the sun all day, as well as a few boxes of chardonnay for those with more sophisticated palates. Maybe several hundred gift wrapped pink slips? An audit, perhaps? Then again, if it was up to me there wouldn’t be any such thing as the CIA, but I’m an idealist.

That that was then. This year they’re planning to scale it back:

But the CIA and DNI both acknowledged this week that the events this time around will be smaller, cheaper and off-limits to the press.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the holiday austerity reflects the nation’s financial condition. “Scaling back our holiday celebrations is just another small example of our commitment to making sure that we continue to make wise fiscal decisions across the board,” Clapper said in a prepared statement.

Another admission: I didn’t know what the hell the DNI was until after reading this article [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]. I guess I’ve been too busy living life to notice that there was yet another superfluous intelligence agency protecting us from evil. What a bad citizen I am. It’s one more post-9/11 national security contraption that will be probably be with us until the sun explodes, like the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. At any rate, they typically blow about fifty grand on their annual Christmas bash, or “roughly the cost of a Hellfire missile,” we’re informed. Thankfully, in the spirit of fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, they’re going to spend less than the cost of a Hellfire missile on this year’s office party. That’s mighty big of them, don’t you think?

Domestic Exile

2011-11-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

When I was young and dumb, I was proud to be an American. I was acutely aware of our flaws, of course, and never more so than when traveling abroad. Our congenital gaucheness positively glares in foreign climates, and our voices are flat out offensive, like a bad odor. I regret to inform you that you have one. So do I. It’s our birthright as Amurricans. Nevertheless, I got a certain thrill out of being a natural born citizen of latter-day Rome. For good or ill, America was it, the center of civilization. We were where it was at, and I was a part of it. It was a kind of privilege. When the aliens came to make contact, they weren’t landing at Ulan Bator. They were going to New York or Washington. What else would you rather be, Transylvanian? Basque? Uzbeck? Hell, no. I would have chosen to be an American if I could.

That being said, I didn’t go around advertising the fact. In this connection, I have to say the Russians did me the fine honor when I was there of always confusing me for a German or a Finn. Even my Russian girlfriend at the time said she would’ve have guessed I was German if she didn’t know better. “You don’t smile as often as most other Americans do,” she said, ha ha (she told me I was a blend of the melancholic and phlegmatic humours. Yeah, she really said that. I thought that kind of talk was snuffed out around the time of the Enlightenment, but there you have it).

The South Americans, on the other hand, had me pegged as a gringo the second I stepped off the plane. This was during the Bush-Cheney apocalypse, so whatever feeble remnants of good will they ever had towards us were dead and buried. Yet another reason, if you needed one, to despise those villains. Chileans outright call you gringo. “Hola, gringo” or “Ciao, gringo,” but they assured me this wasn’t derogatory, although it felt like it.

And reentering the US shortly after 9/11 was, I can say without fear of exaggeration, like entering a police state — a noisy, rude, clumsy and inefficient one. A dedicated terrorist would have no trouble getting past the lard-asses and ex-gang bangers who work airport security. I had two Easter Island head statues, sort of like bookends, from Chile that some sub-moronic security flunky at the Miami airport broke. They also broke a candlestick holder that was made of lapis lazuli, a rareish blue stone that exists mostly in Chile and Afghanistan. Verily, we are a land of coarse and cultureless poops.

All of this is a round-about way of saying I don’t feel any pride at being an American anymore. None. There is a cold blue spot where my patriotism used to be. The Stars and Stripes don’t stir me any more than the flags of Belize or Tonga. It is the banner of an increasingly repressive and reactionary power that, on issue after issue, is on the wrong side of history. Old Glory may as well be a freakin’ Goldman Sachs logo, as far as I’m concerned, or ExxonMobil, or the shadow of a predator drone on its way to kill people who’ve never harmed me or wished me any ill-will at all. As James Howard Kunstler often puts it, we live in a country that is increasingly not worth caring about, a giant strip mall owned and operated by piggish elites. The flag represents unappetizing figures like Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, or bland military bureaucrats like David Petraeus, or unctuous cretins like Joseph Lieberman, or mean-spirited trolls like Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell. US Inc. is the personal property of nefarious elites in the Carlyle Group and the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street, and the satanic fossil fuel industries. It has little to do with you or me anymore. We are just accessories, just flotsam and jetsam adrift with the polluted tide, “lagging indicators” who are trapped in a big machine that is quite intentionally mashing us to bits.

I get the distinct sensation that I’m an indentured servant in some harsh foreign fatherland that doesn’t care if I live or die. I feel like a subject, not a citizen. Our business class disdains us, our political class ignores us, and the police treat us all as if we’re guilty of some crime. “The police used to watch over the neighborhood,” a friend of mine sagely observed. “Now they watch the neighborhood.”

This is a country where vulpine criminals like Lloyd Blankfein wipe their asses with one hundred dollar bills while millions of honest people can’t find work or afford to go to the doctor, and the brunt of our political discourse is aimed at convincing us that this is natural, right and proper, ideal even, the best of all possible worlds when the divinely ordained “free market” is allowed full sway. Never have so many been so easily duped by so few.

My alienation has nothing to do with materialism, by the way. I’m not just bitter because I’ll never be able to afford a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a wife, one boy, one girl, and a dog named Spot. I never wanted those things anyway (matrimony has always struck me as a vaguely dirty word; if you put “holy” in front of it becomes downright sinister). No, my disaffection is intellectual. At some point during the poisonous heart of darkness that were the Bush-Cheney years, some fundamental change took place. Our country became their country. You know who I mean by they. The rest of us got heaved into the dog ditch to fight over table scraps.

It wouldn’t be so bad, I guess, if we had some countervailing or compensating virtues. We don’t. All of this ugliness exists in a cultural void. We camp outside of department stores for that abomination called Black Friday, for heaven’s sake. It just doesn’t get any lower than that, dear friends and comrades. This anecdote from the news neatly sums up what we’ve become:

Man Dies on Black Friday; Shoppers Unfazed
A man collapsed while doing some Black Friday shopping in a crowded store, and people nearby continued to shop.
Witnesses tell WSAZ.com some shoppers walked around and even over the man's body.
Family members tell WSAZ.com that Walter Vance, of Logan County, W.Va., passed away after being taken to the hospital.

That is not the behavior of a moral nation. That is the behavior of a misguided herd that’s been conditioned to believe that shopping is a civic duty. These are the kind of lobotomized fatties who flock to the TV on Superbowl Sunday to watch the commercials, for Christ’s sake. They are perfectly willing to make themselves chumps. Oy gevalt! “I tremble for my country,” said Thomas Jefferson, “when I remember that God is just.”

Thank God for OWS. It’s the most refreshing and hopeful development in the last thirty years. It may be our last chance for salvation.

Just Keep Talking, Newt

2011-11-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Newt the “Idea Man” Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich’s desire to roll back Social Security is no secret. But apparently his quest to tackle decades-old New Deal policies doesn’t stop there.
Now Gingrich is taking on an issue he says “no liberal wants to deal with” — economically suffocating child labor laws.
During a Harvard address on Friday, Gingrich blamed child labor restrictions for doing “more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy.” “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in…child laws, which are truly stupid,” said Gingrich.
“Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school,” he added. “The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

I’m surprised he would pay them. Why not just make them work in order to build character? C’mon, Newt, where’s your head? Wait, don’t answer that!

This kind of thing goes over just swimmingly with hard-assed conservatives who live in Fox World and the Limbaugh Zone, rigid, older white dudes who still think it’s Norman Rockwell’s America out there, you know, an essentially fair and benevolent place where hard work is rewarded with a middle class life and the poor are only poor because they’re lazy. Dumb, mean guys who preface all their racist comments with “I’m not a racist but …” Every family has at least one. He might even be dropping by this Thursday, no? But outside of the right-wing echo chamber this stuff sounds exactly like what it is, jarringly retrograde nonsense that doesn’t go over with average Americans, most of whom are quite comfortable with the fact that it isn’t 1870.

I’m a little tired of this media game where a new and exciting front runner pops up very week in the Republican primary. It’s become a stale show. Newt Gingrich has about as much of a shot at being president as I do. He’s as unpalatable to the mainstream as Rick Perry. Everybody knows Romney is going to get the nomination. All the rest is transparently contrived fluff, just the media trying to make a story where there isn’t one. There’s always a horse race even when there isn’t.

Newt Gingrich is a crackpot and a scoundrel. Outside of the FOX News bubble he stands painfully exposed as the charmless, truculent toad that he is. Rants about the “liberal media” are mother’s milk on the Limbaugh show, but in a nationally televised political debate they are embarrasingly out of place. Child labor laws produce inequality and keep poor kids in poverty? Yeah, right. Just ask some Chinese kid slaving away in a sweat shop about the baneful effects of labor laws. He’ll tell you.

He’s also physically repulsive and will give the children of America nightmares (that is, after their twelve hour day mopping floors and cleaning toilets). I don’t know why, but whenever I hear his name mentioned the word “sweaty” comes to mind. I just can’t imagine him without disgusting globs of moisture on his upper lip. I don’t know whether he sweats all the time or not. I don’t want to know. It’s just one of those things that ought to be true. He was the stinky fat kid in school, the one who always reeked of B.O. after recess, rummaged through your mother’s underwear drawer, ate his boogers and taught younger, weaker-willed boys how to masturbate. He’s a creep. Everyone outside of the fetid FOX News/Clear Channel bunghole sees this.

Now Newt’s list of sins is long, but none of them include child molestation. So why is it so natural for me to imagine him lurking around a playground in a trench coat, jerking and twitching in the bushes? That’s my image of his soul, at any rate. Even though it isn’t literally true it has the right, um, tone.

Put simply, Gingrich is a bad man — a bad husband, a bad historian, and a bad political leader, period. If Mitch McConnell didn’t exist I would nominate Gingrich Most Repulsive Public Figure in America (but the weird, butt-puckered, wax-like McConnell wins that contest hands down. I swear he’s not human. He has no soul and gives off the impression that he would melt in the sun. The dude ain’t right. He’s like one of the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers but mean.)

Americans occasionally get it right. We’ll get this right. No Newt in 2012. But our prospects still aren’t real peachy. We’ll have a very dull, politically safe, carefully scripted, Wall Street approved contest between Romney and Obama, a match-up that is about as exciting as oatmeal and dry toast, a duel of dissillusionment. Both will kiss corporate America’s bum and pledge to “get tough” with Iran. They’ll argue about who hearts Israel the mostest. Meaningful cuts in defense spending will not be discussed. Both of them will earnestly tell us that tough choices have to be made, which is code for cuts in social spending, and we’ll be bludgeoned half to death by the term “shared sacrifice.” Obama might make a few hollow remarks about “revenue increases” or repealing the Bush tax cuts, but his heart won’t really be in it. Go ahead and roll tape now.

Big Banks, Big Business and Big Pentagon will continue to run the show for their own narrow interests, and the water will be brought that much closer to a boil for all of us poor doomed froggies.

The good news is that other clowns will be pushed to the margins of public life where they belong. Bachmann will still blight the Senate, and I have a funny feeling Herman Cain is going to wind up with his own show on FOX, sandwiched between Huckabee and Geraldo At Large. Talk about bein’ in heaven, huh? Santorum will go on defending fetuses from homos, or whatever, and Huntsman will blend into the wall paper or dissolve into steam. Rick Perry can go back to Texas and Niggerhead Ranch where he’ll be free to drink all the cough syrup he wants. Have I left anyone out? Does it matter?

Where We’re At

2011-11-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of images of contemporary America that pretty much sum up where we’re at, a bloated, consumerist police state:

Thank God for OWS. They may be our last hope.

Thanksgiving Is An Anachronism

2011-11-12T10:40:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is gradually being bred out of the culture. We jump straight from Halloween right into the Christmas Corporate Challenge. This is a shame, because Thanksgiving is the most unsordid holiday we have. It isn’t really based on religion or nationalism, and it doesn’t guilt you into running up more credit card debt. It’s the only holiday you can wholeheartedly celebrate without feeling you’re being manipulated into serving someone else’s interests. You can fully enjoy it without the sneaking suspicion that you’re being conned.

It is true that Abraham Lincoln’s original Thanksgiving Proclamation was a bit heavy on religious rhetoric, on giving thanks to “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens” and whatnot. But it’s possible to overlook that. You can invest the holiday with a purely secular meaning without ruining its integrity.

Thanksgiving doesn’t ask anything of you except that you be grateful for small things, like food, family, friends, good health and just plain being alive. It’s simple and unadorned; even its iconography is bathed in earthy autumn colors that don’t lend themselves to flashy marketing schemes. It’s just so unlike the way we are nowadays. It’s a fading ray of light from the nineteenth century when, whatever else their faults, people were more down to earth and authentic. It just doesn’t fit in our crass age of iPhones, plasma screen TVs, Lindsey Lohan, credit default swaps and predator drone strikes. It was the invention of people who lived their entire lives from cradle to grave without ever witnessing a Bud Light commercial. Sigh. Sometimes I think I might trade away modern dentistry and small pox vaccinations in exhange for that …

Even though you celebrate Thanksgiving by gorging yourself, it still has an oddly ascetic feel to it when compared with everything else we do. Big commercial interests can’t find a really effective way to cheapen or exploit it. There’s just not a lot of profit in turkey and mashed potatoes (some, but not a lot). As a consequence, it’s becoming a second-tier holiday, far less important than Christmas or the Superbowl (an event which has become completely grotesque, the concentrated essence of all that is most wrong with us).

And please don’t call it Turkey Day. It not only sounds kind of dumb, Turkey Day, but it overlooks the point. Do you call Christmas “Toy Day,” or Easter “Dyed-Egg Day,” or Valentine’s Day “Dropping Two-Hundred-Bucks-On-The-Old-Lady-So-She’ll-Give-Me-A-Piece-Tonight Day”? It might be more honest to refer these holidays that way, but changing Thanksgiving to Turkey Day guts it of its essential purpose. It degrades the laudable act of being thankful to a mere “let’s eat.” It’s unnecessarily profane. Can we please keep some things sacred?

For some reason, whenever I hear the term Turkey Day, I picture the same type of person saying it: a pot-bellied, middle-aged, relentlessly extroverted, mindlessly patriotic white guy — a sort of low-rent Willard Scott — who always cheers for the home team and says things like “Another day, another peso” or “It’s better that we fight the terrorists over there than over here.” You know who I mean.

I want a bit of sanctuary. I need some breathing space where the air isn’t polluted with buying and selling or the worship of disposable things. Thanksgiving is a kind of bastion against that, and as such it is being kicked into the holiday ghetto with Arbor Day, a natural but lamentable development in our sophisticated age.

Hypersensitive Sociopaths

2011-11-10T07:53:00.001-08:00

Some celebrity chef named Mario Batali publicly compared bankers to Hitler and Stalin. Well, our financial Masters of the Universe, a group whose skin is as thin as their morals, got rankled about it and called for a boycott of Batali’s restaurants, some of which are apparently quite posh. This was the offending comment:

“So the ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys,” Batali said. “They’re not heroes, but they are people that had a really huge effect on the way the world is operating.”

So the guy knuckled under and apologized. I guess it was a good business decision because a lot of those Wall Streeters are probably his highest paying customers. But compare what he did with what Wall Street banks did to their their customers. He hurt Wall Street’s tender feelings and then said he was sorry; they bilked everyone, trashed the economy, got bailed out, and then turned around and said “What’s the problem?” They haven’t apologized for a thing. It hasn’t even crossed their minds that they should. They destroy millions of lives and then flip everyone the finger, but when the kitchen help gets uppity and mildly insults them they grow whiny and butt-sore (then they become vindictive). For such ‘big men’ they sure are touchy. I haven’t brushed up on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders lately, is hypersensitivity to criticism a symptom of sociopathy?

But the chef was wrong about one thing. The banksters aren’t really comparable to Hitler or Stalin, who weren’t motivated by personal profit. Whatever else you might say about them, “greed is good” wasn’t their motto. They acted for deeper if more monstrous reasons. The bankers, on the other hand, are just low criminals, seedy and greedy crooks who’d starve out the local senior citizen center for an extra hundred bucks. They’d steal the dessert off your plate if you looked away. They’re more like Mafia gangsters minus any mystique, charisma, or code of honor. The only thing they have that remotely resembles a philosophy would be a few comic book concepts lifted from the CliffsNotes version of Atlas Shrugged, and these are only used to justify their thefts after the fact and maintain their privileges, i.e. “Don’t tax the job creators” and “Don’t coddle the moochers and looters”, etc.

[Cross-posted at Bad Attitudes]

Our High I.Q. Elite?

2011-11-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

The oxygen must be a bit thin way up where Ross Douthat dwells, either that or he’s fishing for some dinner invitations from the high and mighty. How else can you possibly come up with this?

By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.
And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.
In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.
In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Our country is in the dump because our leaders are so wise and capable! Yeah, that explains it all. We would never have been mired in Vietnam if our leaders had been less intelligent. Ditto Iraq. If those Wall Street bankers weren’t so damn smart we might not be in a recession. If Jefferey Immelt wasn’t so gosh darned bright, General Electric would actually pay its income taxes and hire American workers. They’re just guilty of a little hubristic overreach, that’s all. Boys will be boys.

Let’s put out an urgent call to the more dim-witted people out there: Please come forward and lead us.

What the hell is this guy smoking? Since when is “infatuation with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world” a sign of intelligence?

One of the things I consistently harp on is the mediocrity of our leaders. One of our major political parties is dominated by pig-ignorant know-nothings and the other one ain’t much better. You basically have to believe the earth is flat to get the Republican nomination, but even wise Democrats have to pretend to be stupid in order to be popular. Watch Obama, who has a law degree from Harvard, shuck and jive and drop his G’s when he’s trying to keep it real with the folks. It’s rather embarrassing. Say what you want about him, he’s an intelligent and articulate guy. It’s discomfiting to watch him veer dangerously close to a kind of “I have been to mountaintop” black Baptist minister persona. It’s subtle but definitely noticeable. Seeing as how he usually does it when speaking to a predominately black audience, it’s also a tad condescending.

For eight years we were ruled by a certifiable moron who enjoyed a high level of popularity throughout his first term. It took a large segment of this country about five whole years —until Hurricane Katrina or thereabouts — to wake up and realize that, you know what Marge, I think Bush might be a little incompetent! He was an extreme example, of course, but the fact is your average American president has the intellectual depth of a high school football coach (and the ethics of a pick pocket) Think Warren Harding. Think Calvin Coolidge. Think William McKinley, who launched the Spanish American War because God told him he needed to Christianize the already Christian Philippines. Think William Henry Harrison, who’s greatest contribution to the country was dying within a month of taking office (he was an Indian killer). Think Andrew Jackson, who kicked off the whole trend.

Bush’s neoconservative “intellectual” advisers were complete nincompoops. A child could have poked holes in every one of their arguments in favor of invading Iraq. I remember chuckling out loud when I heard an Australian reporter describe Richard Perle as a “bit thick.” Like many other people, she bought the sales pitch that these men were deep thinkers. She was genuinely surprised to learn otherwise.

Our political class as a whole is a monument to ineptitude. Whenever I see our politicians in action, I shake my head and think to myself, “Gosh, I guess they’ll let anybody into law school.” I don’t think I’m overstating things when I say that this country is neck deep in serious shit. We might even be witnessing the nascent stages of a revolution. People everywhere are pissed, and what do our statesmen spend time on? Voting to make “In God We Trust” the national motto. This would be regarded as criminal negligence in any other profession, but we accept it as natural because we expect nothing more from them. The Republic base — they of the protruding brow ridges and signs that say “ Get Your Government Hands Off My Medicare! — demand it.

They remind you of the British political class between the World Wars — the Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax types — thick-headed weaklings who were totally unable to grasp the nature of the problems they were facing. Their thinking was as antiquated as their top hats and watch fobs, and history rudely showed them the door. We could be witnessing a similarly phenomenon. Listening to how badly our politicians misjudge our predicament is frightening. Just today John Boehner who, to use Douthat’s own terminology, could fairly be described as a “low-wattage elite,” was on TV telling us that the rich pay most of the taxes. How much more do you want them to do? he asked with a straight face. They are almost begging for history to sweep them aside.

Now our business leaders do possess a certain animal shrewdness that can be confused with genuine intelligence, but they have focused it all on the narrow aim of making a profit at the expense of everything else. The world we live in is the world they intentionally made. They want high unemployment. It drives down wages and makes people insecure so they cling to their crappy part-time jobs. They want us to be debt-ridden peons on the brink of destitution: frightened workers don’t form unions. Anyway, I don’t think intelligence is half as important in business as cannibalistic ruthlessness, which our elites possess in abundance.

I’d like to turn now to the shallowness of mainstream political punditry, as exemplified by Ross Douthat, Tom Friedman and David Brooks, but this has already gone on longer than is politically correct for the blogs, so I’ll inelegantly just drop it here.

Go Flip Burgers

2011-11-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

Just in case you needed more evidence that the 1% are swine, here it is:

Chicagoist reports that someone at the Chicago Board of Trade blanketed Occupy Chicago protesters with hundreds of McDonald’s applications, mocking the demonstrators camped outside. Employees at the organization — the world’s oldest futures exchange — have heckled Occupy Chicago protesters almost since day one. They’ve proudly hung “We Are The 1%” in their office windows, papered the movement with fliers, and sent out email spam. Now, they seem to have moved on to “job counseling.” Though it may not be very good advice, as McDonald’s recently hired just 60,000 workers out of 1 million applications they received.

Historically, this kind of behavior is followed by the sound of heads falling into baskets, but I wouldn’t expect the small-minded plutocrats who run this country to be aware of that. As I’ve said before, our rulers are just money-grubbing Babbitts with no cultural sense or historical awareness at all. Lessons from history don’t affect them because they don’t know any. The only exceptional thing about them is how staggeringly unexceptional they are. Historians will mark this fact when trying to account for the speed and thoroughness of our decline.

This kind of thing is bound to bring a few fence-sitters into the OWS camp, particularly those who have applied at McDonald’s only to be told they were overqualified. I hope they continue to act like this. It will demonstrate to the world that they are, in fact, exactly what their critics accuse them of being: greedy, obnoxious pricks who really don’t give a damn about anyone else.

When confronted by massive protests against them, protests that are supported by a majority of the American people, their response is an insousiant “Go flip burgers.” This is just plain dumb. It’s bad politics and bad public relations. You might assume that these sharpies of finance might have some rudimentary instinct for self preservation. You’d be wrong. They don’t. They are the empty husks of a consumerist society that has thoughtlesslty put them in power. They are stuffed dummies waiting to be kicked. They can easily be overthrown.

Historical Perspectives

2011-11-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

It’s time for another history minute, brought to you by Suetonius. Here he’s describing some of the bad deeds performed by the Emperor Tiberius:

A detailed list of Tiberius’s barbarities would take a long time to compile; I shall content myself with a few samples. …
Some of the accused, on being warned to appear in court, felt sure that the verdict would be ‘guilty’ and, to avoid the humiliation of a trial, stayed at home and severed an artery; yet Tiberius’s men bandaged their wounds and hurried them, half-dead, to prison. Others obeyed their summons and then drank poison in full view of the Senate. The bodies of all executed persons were flung on the Stairs of Mourning, and dragged to the Tiber with hooks — as many as twenty a day, including women and children. Tradition forbade the strangling of virgins; so, when little girls had been condemned to die in this way, the executioner began by violating them. Tiberius used to punish with life those who wished to die. He regarded death as a comparatively light affliction, and on hearing that a man named Carnalus had forestalled his execution by suicide, exclaimed: “Carnalus has got away!” Once, during a gaol inspection, a prisoner begged to be put out of his misery; Tiberius replied: “No; we are not yet friends again.”
In Capri they still show the place at the cliff top where Tiberius used to watch his victims being thrown into the sea after prolonged and exquisite tortures. A party of marines were stationed below, and when the bodies came hurtling down they whacked at them with oars and boot-hooks, to make sure that they were completely dead. An ingenious torture of Tiberius's devising was to trick men into drinking huge draughts of wine, and then suddenly to knot a cord tightly around their genitals, which not only cut into the flesh but prevented them from urinating.

And they still had Caligula to look forward to.

It’s helpful to keep things in historical perspective. We have clowns, they had monsters. So I guess we should consider ourselves lucky. Of course, we invade foreign countries to rip off their resources, launch drone strikes, set mercenaries loose on helpless populations, and round people up and throw them into torture chambers, but, you know, that’s different.

Now that I think about it, I can imagine Dick Cheney knotting a chord around someone’s genitals. I can even imagine him enjoying it.

This is the cliff that Tiberius threw his victims from:

My Blacks Are Better Than Yours

2011-11-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

You already don’t like Ann Coulter. Now you’ll like her even less:

Hannity wondered why liberals were, in his words, so “threatened” by Cain. Coulter was blunt in her response.
“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” she said, speaking of Democrats. “To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow … and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in the Republican party.”

(That's the real logo of a real restaurant chain called the Coon Chicken Inn that existed from the twenties until the fifties.)

You Heard It Here First

2011-10-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

Or maybe not, but anyway. In January 2010, I wrote a little screed about Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to dump unlimited amounts of cash into elections, turning our democracy, which was never the cat’s meow in the first place, into a full-fledged corporatocracy. It was called “One Step Closer to the Dream,” and in mid-rant I popped this off:

From now on, let’s allow them to decorate our soldier’s uniforms with corporate logos, too. Let every Iraqi and every Afghan see, emblazoned on every Marine’s helmet, the insignias of those corporate individuals responsible for bringing them freedom. Similarly, let’s demand that every elected official proudly display the colors of their biggest corporate sponsors, so we specifically know who to thank for keeping us free from the dreaded, godless specter of European-style socialism in the coming years.

Now imagine my surprise when big shot NY Times columnist Tom Friedman comes along on Sunday and writes the following:

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know. [ialics added]

How do you like that? My Big Idea is being co-opted by the mainstream media. I don’t know about you, but I think I at least deserve an autographed copy of The World is Flat or The Lexus and the Olive Tree; or, even better, one of Tom’s snazzy black turtleneck sweaters. If I had one of those I, too, could churn out dull, conventionally-minded columns and still be treated like the greatest American thinker since Ralph Waldo Emerson. What a wonderful world it would be.

No, just kidding. I really wouldn’t want any of those unholy items. I’d just as soon have herpes which, I imagine, approaches the same level of discomfort as reading one of his crappy books. I’ve never experienced either, thank heavens, and I’d like to keep it that way, if it’s all the same.

(Thank you Booman Tribune for supporting my cause!)

Modern Mudlarks

2011-10-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

George Orwell wrote the following in his “As I Please” column of December 1944:

A few years ago I was walking across Hungerford Bridge with a lady aged about sixty or perhaps less. The tide was out, and as we looked down at the beds of filthy, almost liquid mud, she remarked:
“When I was a little girl we used to throw pennies to the mudlarks down there.”
I was intrigued and asked what mudlarks were. She explained that in those days professional beggars, known as mudlarks, used to sit under the bridge waiting for people to throw them pennies. The pennies would bury themselves deep in the mud, and the mudlarks would plunge in head first and recover them. This was considered a most amusing spectacle.

I never witnessed it myself when I was there, but a friend of mine told me he saw a group of American tourists in Mexico pitching change into a fountain so they could watch poor children go splashing after it. It made him uneasy, but he justified it on the grounds that the kids were laughing and seemed to be having fun, and at the end of the day they each had a little money. Maybe so, but if concern for their well-being was the main motive, why not just give them a few bucks and let them go have fun on their own, rather than making them degrade themselves for the shallow amusement of boorish, overfed gringos?

A Mote Of Dust

2011-10-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

It’s estimated that there are between 200 to 400 hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 billion galaxies in the the universe. It’s helpful to keep this perspective in mind, provided you can do so without sinking into psychotic despair. I’ve always taken comfort in our insignificance. I find it humorous and liberating. At any rate, it helps my self-esteem: No matter how ridiculous we appear to be, odds are there is another species somewhere behaving just as badly. What a relief!

Someplace out in the Crab Nebula, there might be another globular mass of carbon and hydrogen pushing its own 9-9-9 plan, or exhorting its followers to go and slaughter another bunch of similarly composed masses of hydrogen and carbon, or indulging in some of the other violent buffooneries that have reached their apotheosis here on planet earth. Whatever. It’s probably safe to say that we are not alone. Whew.

Unstoppable Force, Meet Immovable Object

2011-10-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

Unstoppable force…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Millions of unemployed Americans are waiting for Congress to do something other than trade barbs over their job creation plans.
If lawmakers don’t act soon, the jobless see their unemployment checks start to disappear come January.
More than 6 million Americans are set to lose federal unemployment benefits in 2012, with 1.8 million running out in January alone, according to new figures from the National Employment Law Project.

… meet immovable object…

The onset of what has been described by the Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King as “the most serious financial crisis” in history has failed to dent expectations for bonuses in the City. Nine out of 10 finance professionals expect to receive an annual handout again this year.
[…]
Even so, expectations for bonuses remain among the staff surveyed by City jobs group eFinancialCareers.
James Bennett, a managing director of the group, said: “External observers may be shocked by the confidence being expressed by bankers ahead of the bonus season. However, the pay-for-performance culture is very much ingrained in the financial psyche, and even in times of market turmoil, financial institutions need to take care of their best talent in order to retain them.”
[…]
They cited “personal performance” as the most likely reason for their bonus expectations, followed by a change of employment or the performance of their company.

General Electric Uber Alles

2011-10-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

If you happened to catch Jeffrey Immelt on 60 Minutes Sunday night, you saw a perfect distillation of the kind of blinkered, self-centered corporate thinking that dominates this country and has brought the world to the disastrous state it’s in.

Immelt, you’ll recall, is the CEO of General Electric and the chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, or the “jobs czar” as he’s called in the glib vernacular of our journalistic elites. I assumed he would be speaking in the latter capacity but he really didn’t, except to offer up the familiar stinky bile about lowering taxes and deregulating industries. In reality the segment was a commercial for the dynamic wonder that is General Electric and its swell and peppy CEO. He was surprisingly candid about where his true priorities lay. This is from an exchange between Immelt and interviewer Lesley Stahl:

Stahl: Shouldn’t American corporations — don’t they have some kind of civic responsibility to create jobs? No?
Immelt: My name is not above the door. I work for investors. Investors want to see us grow earnings and cash flow. They want to see us be competitive. They want to see us prosper.

Obama’s job czar works for investors, not you. His primary allegiance is to GE and its bottom line, not improving the US economy. The shareholders want to see them prosper, they want cash flow. If that means moving operations to China and Brazil, so be it. This is the man that Barack Obama handpicked to head a panel designed to create jobs in the United States.

The whole thing was a pornographic display of everything that is most myopic and destructive about the corporate mind. So GE opens more plants abroad than in the US? That’s just the world we live in. Sixty percent of GE’s business is done overseas? Well, that’s where the customers are. GE hasn’t been paying any taxes? Hey, we’ve had an extraordinary couple of years — we were able to write off $32 billion during the financial crisis! GE sells technology to China that puts US companies at a competitive disadvantage? Don’t be afraid of China, they’re a big market. “I’m a complete globalist,” he says. “I think like a global CEO.”

At one point, we see Immelt giving a pep talk to some of his workers at a plant in Brazil:

I want you to get up everyday and want to beat Caterpillar. I want you to hate the color yellow and do everything you can to make sure we’re winning and beating the competition.

Read that again. It’s the chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness actively rooting for an American company to do poorly. That’s the character of public service in a corporate state.

I’d expect a brainwashed corporate drone like Immelt to talk like this at a shareholder’s meeting. But he’s also a quasi-public official who, theoretically at least, is supposed to put his own personal interests aside for the common good of the country. He isn’t doing so. He doesn’t even seem to think he should. He has so thoroughly accepted the reigning corporate ethos that he doesn’t see the distinction between GE’s interest and the country’s. To him they are one and the same. Which is another way of saying that that which makes Jeffrey Immelt richer is good for America. It’s the mother of all self-interested rationalizations.

Like his counterparts on Wall Street, he’s a true believer. Like them, the range of his thinking never extends beyond the narrow demands of his own business. He’s like a robot that’s programmed to view the totality of human existence exclusively in terms of profit and loss. No other value enters into his head. Almost every major problem we face today can be traced to this way of thinking.

His jobs plan is basically this: lower my taxes and we’ll talk; maybe someday wages in China will rise and GE will bring more manufacturing back to the US. Until then, think like a complete globalist! (He does favor government spending on research and development, which of course translates into enormous subsidies for corporations.) What do unemployed people do in the meantime? No answer. Those considerations don’t seem to come up at Harvard Business School, where a large number of these one-dimensional automatons, Immelt included, seem to have acquired their stunted mentalities.

And, of course, he wouldn’t be a true-blue American business leader if he didn’t indulge in a bit of narcissistic whining at the end:

Immelt: I want you to root for me. You know, everybody in Germany roots for Siemens. Everybody in Japan roots for Toshiba. Everybody in China roots for China South Rail. I want you to say, “Win, G.E.”

I just can’t imagine why they don’t.

God’s America

2011-10-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

Somebody should call Mitt Romney out on this shit:

Leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared Friday that God created America to lead the world, and accused President Barack Obama of deliberately weakening his nation.
Romney sought to bolster his credentials to serve as commander-in-chief as new polls showed him back at the top of the Republican field and in a tight potential head-to-head matchup with Obama ahead of next year’s election.
“God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers,” Romney said, in the most important foreign policy speech of the Republican campaign so far.

If America is so important to God, just what the hell was God doing for thousands years of human history before America was invented, biding his time?

If America is meant to lead and not be a nation of followers, why doesn’t he help our economy improve, lower the unemployment rate, stop home foreclosures, and smite our enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen?

Why does he continue to allow manifestly inferior men to become congressmen and presidents?

Do you think the all knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent creator of the universe has nothing better to do than sit in Heaven and root for one nation to triumph over another in some venal quarrel?

If God favors us, what have all the other nations of the earth done to make him disfavor them?

Does it seem likely that God prefers the only nation that ever used nuclear weapons against other human beings over like places like New Zealand, or Fiji, or Belize, who harm no one?

Why would God like fat, coarse, belligerent Americans — which would include grown men who wear football jerseys and support every war the US fights, regardless of whether it is just or not — over the peaceful Laplanders or the Inuit?

What happened to God in the sixties and seventies? Did he just up and decide one day that, on second thought, he kind of liked those plucky North Vietnamese a little bit better than the Americans?

Why does God allow his chosen country to get pounded by so many natural disasters?

A Rambling Post About Nothing In Particular At All

2011-10-08T09:37:00.001-07:00

I learned something new today. Bufonophobia is a fear of toads, and bolshephobia is a fear of Bolsheviks. Venustrophobia is a fear of beautiful women, which I used to suffer from but don’t anymore, and dipsophobia is a fear of drinking, which I most definitely have never had (unfortunately). I discovered these and lots more at the Phobia List, which isn’t a bad way to kill a few minutes on a slow Saturday morning, particularly when, due to my pronounced lack of dipsophobia, I had a hangover. “But I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunk,” to quote a funny old tippler I once knew. “Alcoholics go to meetings.” I was going to write something about politics, but I’m sick and damn tired of being angry and depressed. Is there a phobia for that?

Indeed there is, angrophobia.

But the best one, in my opinion, is defecaloesiophobia, which is a fear of painful bowel movements. Yet another possible side effect of paying too close attention to politics.

I don’t have much to say these days (as you can see, ha ha), because I’ve been sort of media fasting. There are times when I burn out and just have to turn it all off. The relentless barrage of noise, advertisements, celebrity gossip and general insipidity is damaging to one’s mental health. It’s all just uninteresting people doing uninteresting things uninterestingly, particularly those witless clods running for president, all of whom, with the exception of Ron Paul, can be described as either crazy, stupid, or evil.

But you just can’t escape it. I can’t even check my email without headlines popping up about some person named Amanda Knox. I do not know who this person is. I do not want to know who this person is. I do not give a fuck who this person is. But for some strange reason, influential media outlets insist that I do. Worse, they want me to care. So bits and pieces of information get electronically pipelined into my brain, a snatch here, a smidgen there. Vague impressions form, and the intended narrative gradually penetrates the fog of my hungover mind: Innocent American abused by wicked foreigners!

Well, at least the Italians rectified their error; we just ignore our mistakes. We resolve our legal ambiguities with a lethal injection (or, here in California, gas pellets).The American judicial system can’t trouble itself with sane and humane ideas like, uh, a shadow of a doubt. That kind of fastidiousness might trick people into thinking we’re civilized. The Supreme Court, which regards corporations as individuals, can’t be troubled to review the case of a very real individual who was probably unjustly convicted of murder and executed. I can clearly see that wicked bully “Nino” Scalia and the self-loathing Clarence Thomas shrugging their shoulders over lunch at the country club and saying, “Aw, fuck it. The nigger had to have been guilty of something.”

The conservatives on the Supreme Court would have been right at home in eighteenth century England, when a judge ruled that it was okay to beat your wife with a stick provided it was no thicker around than your thumb, which is where the phrase “rule of thumb” comes from.

I often used to speculate about what the long term effects of constant advertising would be on the American psyche, or our national character or whatever, but, of course, the evidence is already in. One need only take a look around. While we were busy wasting our essence on mindless consumption, driving SUVs, staring at our iPhones, gaping at celebrities, marveling at athlete’s salaries, and engaging in two of the most deplorable activities of our gadget-ridden era — tweeting and texting — our country morphed into a full-fledged plutocracy that is constantly at war.

And guess what, there isn’t a goddamn thing you or I can do about it. They’ve got us by the balls and they know it. Just how tightly do they have our ball sacks? This tightly: people are ordering food for the Wall Street protesters with their credit cards. The banks are making a profit off the people who are protesting their greed!

Fuck it. I’m taking the dog for walk.

A Small Government Conservative At Work

2011-10-08T08:01:00.001-07:00

God bless conservatives for getting big government off our backs:

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out. The new law, sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication.
“Under this bill, if a young couple plans a wedding in Amsterdam, and as part of the wedding, they plan to buy the bridal party some marijuana, they would be subject to prosecution,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for reforming the country's drug laws. “The strange thing is that the purchase of and smoking the marijuana while you’re there wouldn’t be illegal. But this law would make planning the wedding from the U.S. a federal crime.”

Where would we be without those adorable Texas Republicans? This putz would make it a crime to say, “I can’t wait to go to Amsterdam this summer and get stoned.” Instead of spending all those weekends with Rick Perry at Niggerhead Ranch he should have been brushing up on his Constitution.

Parasites On The System

2011-10-01T12:08:00.001-07:00

This is from a letter written in 1973 by one famous socialist to another (now deceased). In it, an American is trying to induce his European pal to come over for an extended stay in the US, but the latter is reluctant to do so. He just had surgery and didn’t want to leave the excellent health insurance he enjoyed in Europe. He’d previously lived in the United States for a full ten years, and seemed keenly aware of the risks of “falling ill away from home.”

Not to worry, says the American …

“You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”
… “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

So just who were these two, anyway? The answer might make George Will a bit clammy, but that’s Charles Koch writing to F.A. Hayek. He wanted Hayek to come serve as distinguished senior scholar at his eerily named Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank dedicated to dismantling the welfare state.

You have to invent a brand new vocabulary, a whole array of new concepts, to capture the full dimensions of their hypocrisy. The tools we’re currently working with are insufficient.

So I guess there’s a new lesson in right-wing doublethink for us all to learn. If libertarians pay into Social Security, it’s right and proper, moral even, for them to collect when they are eligible. For the rest of us it’s not. Check.

Thank you, sir, may we have another?

Read the whole article at The Nation.

Children Are Our Future

2011-10-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words:

(h/t Politics in the Zeros)

Less Said, Better Mended

2011-09-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

There is a saying, “The less said the better mended.” That kind of simple wisdom seems lost on contemporary America. Do you think that if we made less of a big deal out of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that terrorists might also? By turning it into such a gigantic event, we’re announcing to the world that we’re deeply wounded and scared; and wounded, scared people invite bullying. If the purpose of terrorism is to demoralize people and instill fear, the terrorists who attacked us succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. All any wannabe Jihadist has to do is yell “Boo” to turn us into a bunch of hysterical ninnies.

By all means memorialize 9/11, but do so in a quiet, dignified way. Don’t saturate the airwaves with endless, over-sentimentalized retrospectives and ceremonies. That kind of overkill cheapens the event and turns genuine grief into mere spectacle. Just for once can we not go over the top? Make it solemn and proud, modest and brief. Make it worthy of the kind of people we imagine ourselves to be, the kind of people we should be.

Most importantly, don’t use it as a pretext to justify more pointless, self-destructive wars.

But there is a sinister aspect to all of this as well. Look at New York City’s security preparations:

There are radiation detection boats in the waters, cameras that have been placed all over lower and Midtown Manhattan and there are cops with guns and tanks and all kinds of weapons, because in New York a terror attack could come from anywhere, and anyone.
“There’s no shortage of people who are willing to give up their lives for the cause,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
[…]
For openers, he has his own navy.
“We actually have the ability to have a small submarine, not manned, to check the part of the boats that are submerged,” Kelly said.
“We have a new boat on order. We envision a situation where we may have to get to an island or across water quickly, so we’re able to transport our heavy weapons officers rapidly.”
Kelly also has his own army — 1,000 anti-terror cops with tanks and weapons, carved out of the NYPD after 9/11.

None of which, one should add, would prevent a random psychopath with a legally obtained assault rifle from walking into a restaurant and opening fire, which happened in my neck of the woods just over a week ago.

Would a terrorist be so stupid as to march into the teeth of such defenses, or would they attack some soft underbelly, like Omaha or Bismark or some equally sedate and unsuspecting place? All of this hyper-security is largely ineffective, and like so much else in America it is primarily designed for show, for effect. In this case, to make us feel safe.

One need hardly point out that turning our police departments into full-fledged armies is dangerous beyond words. It’s far more dangerous than some terrorist threats from abroad which, in the long run, will have proven to be ephemeral. But when Islamic terrorism is a caption in history books (which, of course, few will read), some new existential menace will have emerged from the self-interested minds of our military, police, and political establishment. It might be the Chinese. It might be the Russians. If someone like Rick Perry manages to bumble into the White House, it might be liberals. Regardless, the mechanisms of full repression will have become an established, immovable fact, something we’ve been conditioned to accept, like torture and warrantless wire-tapping have become now.

I said, one need hardly point this out, but in a population as ignorant and pliable as we’ve proven ourselves to be, perhaps one does need to point it out, loudly and continuously, although it’s doubtful it would do any good. From the same article:

It’s been 10 years but our concerns about terrorism are still staggering and constant. Even the death of Osama bin Laden didn’t lessen the fear.
Two thirds of Americans, 67 percent in a stunning CBS/New York Times poll say killing the al Qaeda mastermind didn’t make them feel safer.
But that’s not all. A majority – 57 percent — say subway security measures are insufficient.
And as for other potential terror targets:
* Only 27 percent say airports are a lot safer.
* Only 20 percent say bridges and tunnels are safer.
* And just 14 percent say area nuclear plants are safer

All of those “unspecified threats” have done the trick, aided, no doubt, by complicit pollsters.

I don’t think I’m being overly cynical when I point out the following. Our people have become timorous and semi-literate, and our institutions are irredeemably corrupt. Given such a combination, the worst case scenario is a frighteningly realistic possibility, and the worst case scenario has nothing to do with foreign terrorists.

Putting Caddies To Work

2011-09-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

Who says there’s no bipartisanship in Washington?

An open mic caught Vice President Joe Biden (D) and House Speaker John Boehner (R) joking before President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress Thursday.
“Hey, I’m one of those barbarians,” Boehner said, greeting Biden with a handshake.
“You are,” Biden agreed, lauging. “We’re at the gate.”
“I was playing golf in August,” Boehner volunteered. “Seven birdies, five bogies. I shoot two under. So, we have lunch, sitting around for about an hour and and I thought, ‘Why don’t we play nine more holes?’”
“Six pars, three birdies and I missed a four-foot, straight-in birdie on the last hole,” the Speaker added.
“No!” Biden remarked.
“Oh, so the next day, I go to Sandhills, I shoot a 86,” Boehner added, with a big laugh. “One day I play great, the next day I play awful. But this is the round of the decade. I haven’t done this for 12 years. I shot a 67 one time.”

We’re Still Exceptional In Some Ways

2011-09-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Take heart, my fellow Americans, there are still a few things we can be proud of. I found this nifty little graphic at Cat in the Bag,

What about spousal abuse, meth addiction, alcoholism, obesity, type II diabetes, infant mortality, illiteracy, and psychopathic gunmen who kill people for no other reason than they feel like it? Surely we deserve an honorable mention in those social problems as well?

Observe that Puerto Rico is ranked #2 in divorce. That pretty much means the US is ranked both #1 and #2 in that category, doesn’t it? They’re basically American citizens, the biggest difference being they don’t have the right to participate in those inter-active reality TV shows we call elections. They don’t have congressional representation either, that’s true, but who’s kidding who, do any of us really have that? They can, however, fight and die in our wars if they so choose, which is a unique privilege we grant to our colonial subjects. I think you could say that the status enjoyed by Puerto Ricans closely resembles the one our elites envision for us in the not so distant future. So, yeah, we’re #1 and #2 in divorces.

That slightly compensates for the fact that a couple of two-bit nobodies like New Zealand and Slovakia(!) are gaining ground on us in the teen pregnancy department. The nerve of those upstarts.

A Confederacy Of Dunces

2011-09-07T06:39:00.001-07:00

I think I’m going to watch the debate tonight. It will be a test of my character: how much pain can I stand before I break? At what point will I run screaming to the liquor cabinet, desperate to blot out the inane hallucinations who keep bleating about tax cuts? I already know the answer to that. It won’t be the nauseating Reagan worship, although that’s sure to irritate the bowels. It will be when they talk about their “faith.” Yeah, that’s when I crumple to the floor like a hundred and sixty pounds of sweaty jello and plead for it all to stop.

Just look at these clods. What kind of country would allow these buffoons anywhere near the seat of power? The most ‘serious’ candidate among them believes in an angel named Maroni. Rick Perry, on the other hand, prays for rain, like human beings would have done thousands of years ago in between sacrificing virgins and eating human hearts. And Bachmann, well, Bachmann would happily burn gays at the stake if she could. It would probably give her an orgasm. Rick Santorum is Rick Santorum. The only good thing I can say about him is that he admitted to smoking pot when he was in college. It leads me to wonder what would have happened if he remained a stoner. It’s possible that he may have evolved into a decent human being. Maybe he would have studied Eastern religion, split to India or some other place that’s far, far away from here and left all the rest of us the hell alone. But he didn’t. He gave up weed, found Christ, and became a politician. Now he wants to be president. Poor us.

As for the rest, who cares? Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are repulsive ghouls. They’re far too aesthetically disturbing to occupy the White House. They’d scare the children. Ron Paul’s views on foreign policy, which, incidentally, I largely agree with, are anathema to the military-industrial-complex. No way he gets into the White House. Jon Huntsman seems like a relatively sane, somewhat reasonable man, and his mind isn’t stuck in the Bronze Age. Unfortunately for him, that’s instant disqualification in the contemporary Republican party.

It seems like a foregone conclusion to me. Mitt Romney, who believes in an angel named Maroni, will win the primary. And if he becomes president our nation will be given a whopping, perhaps even fatal, dose of Republican economics. Listening to him is surreal. To hear him tell it, you’d think that American businessmen are the most helplessly oppressed group since the ancient Hebrews. If you are that delusional in any other aspect of life it is called schizophrenia, but if you’re delusional in the interests of big business you get to live in the White House for a few years.

His big economic plan just sounds like the same stale Republican dogma that’s been ruining the country for years. That is to say, it’s presidential.

So I imagine it will eventually be Romney and Obama, two limp noodles squaring off in a no holds barred, knock-down grudge match to prove who’s more subservient to big business and Wall Street.

Where Do They Find These People?

2011-09-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

There’s just no shortage of conservative a-holes in this country. Get a load of this one..

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Yeah, as opposed to the wealthy, who always vote out of a sense of pure selflessness and patriotism. How well do you suppose this manly specimen would make out in a absolutely free market? I don’t think Spanky here would last very long, do you? It’s doesn’t look as if he’s so much as held a shovel. Have you ever noticed that a lot of hard right wing ideologues are pudgy little softies? Think of Grover Norquist or Karl Rove. Look at this guy, who’s name, should you care to know it, is Mathew Vadum. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I honestly think that if they’d have been more successful with girls back in school they wouldn’t have turned out to be the hateful little weeble-wobbles they are today. That’s my theory any way, and I’m sticking with it

Come to think of it, he slightly resembles another wicked chubby man from history, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister:

This Is A Real Shocker

2011-09-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

This will come as a big surprise to most of you, but some big name NASCAR drivers aren’t too fond of Obama. Shocking, I know:

President Barack Obama will honor NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson and the 11 other Chase drivers from last year in a White House ceremony on Wednesday – but nearly half of the 2010 playoff contenders won’t be there.
NASCAR said Thursday that five drivers — Greg Biffle, Kurt Busch, Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick and Tony Stewart – will not be attending the White House visit due to “schedule conflicts.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

I’ve never understood what’s so fascinating about an auto race. If I’m ever in the mood to watch cars go vroom, I figure I can just go gape at a fuckin’ freeway. What’s the difference?

And who gets the credit for winning the race? The driver, the car, the pit crew? Is it the people or the machine? All of the above, I guess. I really don’t know. The good news is, I really don’t care. I’d personally rather watch flies fuck. It’s even more frenetic and certainly more educational, I think.

At any rate, the flies wouldn’t be squandering a finite natural resource at a time when demand for said resource is gradually outstripping supply, which will lead to all sorts of pleasant consequences, like higher gas prices, higher food prices, more drilling, more spills, more wars in the Middle East, more political power for oil companies …

But apart from that, watching a bunch of rednecks buzz around in a circle for several hours on a Sunday afternoon is good clean fun!

And then there’s this:

For a sport that prides itself on patriotism, having so many drivers turn down the president’s invitation simply seems strange.

Yeah, it’s strange all right. I just can’t figure it out. I always thought the NASCAR circuit was a bastion of cosmopolitan open mindedness. The idea that five of its drivers don’t want to meet Obama at the White House just floors me. What do you suppose could have gotten into their heads? Do you think it’s the company they keep? I dunno:

It just beats the hell out of me.

Evolution? Who Needs It?

2011-09-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

I just reread the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I forgot what exquisite satire it is, Jonathan Swift meets Kurt Vonnegut meets Monty Python. The following passage in particular jumped out at me. It’s a description of an alien race called the Vogons, who destroy the Earth because it’s in the path of a planned intergalactic expressway which, it later turns out, doesn’t need to be built in the first place:

… billions of years ago when the Vogons first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores … when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again: they should never have survived.
The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed slug-brained stubborness of these creatures. Evolution? they said to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused to do for them they simply did without until such time as they were able to rectify the gross anatomical inconveniences with surgery.
Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought forth scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall aspiring trees of breathtaking slenderness and color which the Vogons cut down and burned the crabmeat with; elegant gazellelike creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.

Just Fall Off The Wagon, Rick!

2011-09-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

Here’s an interesting bit from Raw Story:

In an interview that aired on CNN Wednesday night, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told Piers Morgan that he had smoked marijuana while in college.
“I admitted back when I was running for the Senate that when I was in college I smoked pot, and that was something I did when I was in college, and it was something that I’m not proud of, but I did it,” he said. “And it is something I wish I hadn’t done, but I did and I admitted it and would encourage people not to do so.”

My first thought while reading this was, Rick Santorum went to college?

But seriously, somebody give that man a bong rip. I’ll even pay for it. America would be a better place if Santorum started blazing up again, maybe even passed some around to his Christian pals. They might discover that there are more enjoyable ways to spend your life than attempting to persecute other people. More enlightening too.

I envision an America where Rick Santorum is stoned. Everything is basically the same. The rich are still rich, the poor are still poor, and the middle class is still an anxious, debt-ridden wad of sinking misery. America is still declining, our political class is still corrupt, wars are still raging, and nobody, at least to anyone’s knowledge, wants to marry a box turtle. Only one thing is different: there is one less pro-life, anti-gay, evangelical right-wing Republican in the land, and I like that. It’s a real swell thought.

But there’s no use brooding about impossible contingencies, is there? He gave up weed, found Christ, and became a politician. Poor us.

See what sobriety gets you?

Disaster Perversion

2011-08-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about you, but I’m spent from this disaster porn marathon. I feel seedy and low. I need a cigarette. I need to think about something that doesn’t have the power to titillate me in any way, like baseball or algebra. I don’t usually care about weather, but yesterday I just had to watch. I was like a man possessed. There was just something about Michael Bloomberg and Chris Christie, each so different in style — one a rich little prick, the other a rich fat prick — but both so bold in the face of danger! I swear I could hear the courtiers in the big media whispering a collective prayer: “Why, oh Lord, can’t they both become president?” And the coverage, the endlessly redundant, jaw-droppingly pointless saturation coverage. It kept me utterly transfixed. I haven’t been that dumbly sedated since the time I took four Vicodin for a severe headache and watched Jurassic Park III.

When we were invading Iraq, I was watching the McNeil Lehrer Newshour one night and the guest was Zbigniew Brzezinski. At the end of the discussion, he said something totally out of left field that was very interesting. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, “There is something perverse about this.” He had this sort of weird, uncomfortable look on his face. If the sound had been turned down I’d have guessed he was suffering from gas. When asked to explain, he said, “I’m not exactly sure why, but there is just something perverse about people sitting at home watching a bombing on TV.”

I thought about that while sitting around in lurid anticipation waiting for the hurricane to make landfall. Will Atlantic City be destoyed? Will Lower Manhattan flood? Boston even? Which network will be the first to seize on the phrase “The Storm of the Century,” leaving the others to fight over “The Perfect Storm” or “Disaster on the Eastern Seaboard” or some other ludicrous appellation that reeks of action movie melodrama. How long until some conservative toad on FOX starts gloating about this being Obama’s Katrina? (Actually, I think some of them already may have.) How long until Pat Roberston said it was God punishing New York because they legalized gay marriage? There was something perverse about it.

But there I sat, glass in hand, watching in a kind of numb stupor as a lethal hurricane rolled over the East Coast. I felt like a debauched Roman. This thing killed people, and it could have killed hundreds more, just wiped them clean off the earth for all eternity, and I swear it takes a determined, conscious effort to differentiate it in my mind from a fictional media event. The coverage just makes it all feel unreal.

Did it seem to you that there was a noticeable sense of disappointment in the media when Irene was downgraded to a category 1 hurricane? They seemed to spend the greater part of the day convincing us that it was still a dangerous storm, mind you. So stay afraid, stay cautious, keep watching, and help us justify the gargantuan, over-the-top hype with which we greeted this event.

The sad, the perverse thing, is this: I bet you a lot of them secretely wanted it to be worse. I’m not saying they are evil people. I’m suggesting that their professional interests conflicted with basic morality in this case. Deep in their media hearts, they wanted a category 3 to slam straight into New York City. Imagine, wall to wall coverage of death and destruction for weeks. It’s the only thing in mainstream media land more fun than making pointless predictions about our pointless elections, or turning sinister whack balls like Rick Perry into legitimate presidential contenders.

They’d get to wallow in death and gore under the cover of journalism. They could gush with praise over the first responders and all the ordinary heroes who pitched in and helped out and did extraordinary things. They could create lots of poignant human interest stories that make us feel all right about being Americans. We’d pat ourselves on the back. Hey, you know, we’re not so bad after all.

Then those heroes would be callously ignored when they needed help paying the doctor bills. That is to say, after the bodies were buried, the water drained, and the rubble swept away, lots and lots of Americans would revert to their instinctive natural ethic, which is perfectly reflected in our current politics: I’ve got mine, fuck you.

They’d canonize Bloomberg, and then give every rat-fuck politician in the country an opportunity to stick his face in front of a camera and bleed concern for the sake of his own petty aggrandisement, even the vicious bastards who want to cut budgets and lay those first responders off, or let them die like dogs without proper health care when they fall ill. You’d need to tape a barf bag to your chest, and then lay a towel down in front of your TV so their tears wouldn’t stain the rug.

Obama will arrive in full “commander-in-chief-on-the-disaster-scene mode,” which means he’ll be wearing khakis and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the standard uniform politicians wear when surveying wreckage or getting face time with blue-collar workers. The Republican candidates, dressed the same, will do the same, and the media will treat is as if it’s something other than a hackneyed political stunt.

In short, we would (will) be deluged, no pun intended, with same formulaic narratives that the media always rolls out on these occasions. That’s what happens when monopolies run things. Choices are restricted and quality suffers.

I’m not making light of tragedy or saying we shouldn’t praise those who help the victims and clean up the mess. Of course we should. My beef is with the scripted, overblown, almost phony way the media depicts it. It’s a screen play for a TV show. We have a disaster. Now we need victims, now heroes, now villians. Now a photo collage, and now endless retrospectives. Cue fear, cue horror, cue hope, cue anger. Time for a Levitra commercial. …

There’s something perverse about it.

I just can’t feel genuine grief or sadness, or compassion or concern, when some six figure hairdo is telling me exactly when and how I am supposed to, and then suddenly switch it off to watch a commercial for a pill that will make my pecker hard. It’s obscene. There’s something perverse about it.

(I do, however, feel genuine humor when all of those TV clowns pretend to be courageous journalists by standing on the beach in a raincoat, bowling us over with such profundities as “It’s really windy right now” or “It’s really wet!”)

Sweat Shops Are The Answer

2011-08-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Michele Bachmann has a jobs program:

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday she wouldn’t rule out changes to the federal minimum wage as a way to lower the cost of doing business and lure corporations back to the United States.
The Minnesota congresswoman told supporters at a packed sandwich shop that the corporate income tax needs to be reduced because companies are moving to other countries to save money. She was later asked by a reporter whether changes to the minimum wage should also be considered to balance the cost of labor here and overseas.
“I’m not married to anything. I’m not saying that’s where I’m going to go,” she said.
She did say she wants to look at all aspects of doing business, from regulations to tax codes, and will consider anything that will help create jobs. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

Bring American companies back by allowing them to open up sweat shops here in the USA. What a grand idea! This would also cut back on illegal immigration. We can make conditions so shitty right here Latin Americans won’t want to come over any more.

This, in effect, is Bachmann’s (and Perry’s and Mitt “corporations are people” Romney’s) vision for America:

Hey, that’s better than no jobs at all, right?

The Horrors Of Austerity

2011-08-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

Try to be strong and bite back your tears:

LOS ANGELES — A week ago, Michael Heller was ready to drop thousands of dollars on a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that he’d been coveting. But the recent stock market turmoil made him rethink the splurge.
Instead of making an impulse purchase on a $3,000 or $4,000 item, we’re going to wait six months,” the 40-year-old management consultant said while shopping in Beverly Hills, Calif. If things don’t rebound quickly, he added, further belt-tightening could occur “very soon.”

I don’t think I want to live in a world where a management consultant can’t buy a $4,000 watch on an impulse, but has to wait six months instead, as if he was nothing more than a little boy who has to save up his allowance to get a new pack of Hot Wheels. It’s a travesty. It’s reflective of a deep moral inversion at the heart of our culture. He’s a management consultant, man! Think about it. Where would you be without management consultants? Where would I be? Where would civilization be?

Still crawling in the slime, that’s where.

While you were studying be a doctor or a teacher or a computer programmer, or learning how to build houses, or drive a Big Rig, or become a fireman, or even a lawyer — that is to say, when you were learning to make a product or perform a service that people, in their misguided foolishness, actually need — this guy was down in the trenches mastering the nuts and bolts of a more important trade. He slaved and sacrificed. He delayed gratification. He endured the taunts of those involved in more “useful” occupations. Why? So that one day he might become that most noble, most vitally important of economic actors: the management consultant.

You can frame a house, eh? Big deal. This guy helps companies fulfill their mission statements. You teach kids to read? Aw, that’s cute, but this guy teaches CEOs vital coaching skills. He shows them how to identify their business’s core competencies, dial them in, componentize their deliverables, leverage them, and maximize growth by implementing best industry practices. He can use the term ‘customer base’ without feeling like a total asshole. Medical research is important, sure, but this guy tells the bosses who to fire and then helps them feel good about it. Who’s the better doctor? Get the picture?.

If I was stranded on an island with only one other person, I pray to God it would be a management consultant, otherwise I’d never get off that island alive.

This man rides on the back of corporations and helps them run smoother, straighter, and more efficiently. In that sense he’s a job creator. Us parasites should be buying him that watch out of sheer gratitude. For shame.

Stories like these almost make me ashamed to be an American.

And He’s Dumb Too …

2011-08-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

Perry’s college grades were mediocre. He got a D in economics.

Something About This Man Disturbs Me

2011-08-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Whenever I imagine a fascist dictator in America, he always looks, talks, and acts exactly like Rick Perry, a bible-thumping free-marketeer who’s more Texas than Texas. The oligarchs will love him and the press will adore him. I’m just saying. When fascism finally does come to America — notice I said when, not if — it will come courtesy of this kind of figure. This is precisely what the real Berzelius Windrip will look like.

Maybe I have an overactive imagination, but I sense something sinister at the root of this man’s character. It’s just an intuition, but he gives me the creeps, like the stranger who’s been looking at your daughter just a little too long, you know, or the guy at the front door whose eyes are darting all around your living room while you’re talking to him. He’s just wrong.

There are many thoroughly detestable people on the America political scene. The English language itself is not nuanced enough to capture the full depth, color, tone and texture of, say, Mitch McConnell’s loathsomeness. I’m not kidding when I say that McConnell’s weirdly asexual visage makes me almost physically ill. Same with Dick Cheney. Same with Newt Gingrich. And, so no one can accuse me of partisanship, Chuck Schumer, who reminds me of nothing so much as a bipedal rat minus the integrity. They are complete scoundrels, to be sure, utter swine with no visibly redeeming qualities, but they are awful in certain conventional kinds of ways. At the end of the day, they are just corrupt and venal politicians. They represent a mundane form of evil that we are familiar with. I’m tellin’ you there’s something different about this Rick Perry fellow. There’s poisonous sediment in his soul.

Chase-A-Palooza, 2011

2011-08-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Our rulers are not just greedy and evil, but exceedingly sophomoric as well:

On a day when his company’s stock dropped by more than 9 percent in the stock market’s latest drubbing, you wouldn’t expect Jamie Dimon, chairman, president and CEO of JPMorgan Chase Bank, to be cheerleading at a downtown Vancouver employee barbecue that had the trappings of a rock music road tour.
But there the Wall Street wizard was, mugging in photographs with employees from Oregon and Washington and signing autographs before delivering a pep rally speech that earned him a standing ovation. While many Americans closed the day anxious about the economy and their retirement savings, Dimon steered to an upbeat message about the future of America and, of course, its second-largest bank.
“Eventually this great economic machine will start to turn, and when it does it will blow your socks off,” said Dimon, 55, casually dressed in Levi’s and New Balance running shoes at the parking lot barbecue.
Dimon’s Monday afternoon visit to Chase’s downtown Vancouver branch was part of a West Coast tour that will take Dimon and his entourage from Seattle to Southern California. Members of his road crew handed out Chase hand signs, pompoms, bandanas, and T-shirts with the message “Chase 2011 West Coast Road Trip August 7-12.” A huge black touring bus sat waited at the curb. A massive spread of hamburgers, pizza, snacks and drinks filled tables even after the mostly blue-shirted employees had eaten their fill.

Picture your dullest, most unimaginative neighbor. Give him one single skill — a talent for making money, nothing more, nothing less, just a knack for making money grow, either by fair means or foul — and there you have the American aristocracy in a nutshell. We’ve placed a bunch of Babbitts in the cat bird seat. A bus tour, really? That’s the best that this master of Wall Street can come up with? Gosh, John McCain had one; Michele Bachmann has one; Sarah Palin has one. Why not me, Jamie Dimon? I want a bus!

It’s the hot new thing in tactless self-promotion. All the cool kids are doin’ it. Why not the bankers who make it all happen?

“You do not know, my son,” wrote Swedish Count Axel Oxenstierna in the seventeenth century, “with how little wisdom the world is governed.” Or with what little maturity, one might add. We very well may be nosediving into an unprecedented economic calamity, and one of the people principally responsible holds a high school pep rally “with the trappings of a rock music road tour.” He hands out Chase pom-poms and t-shirts, and tells his audience the economy will turn around and blow your socks off. Why? Well, because we’re so awesome, that’s why (no mention of why the economy is where it’s at in the first place, or who put it there).

I would look upon these people far less venomously if any of them ever managed to say or do anything original, anything that indicated the presence of an independent or thoughtful mind. None of them do. The old European aristocracies occasionally produced scholars, scientists, writers and political philosophers of great renown. Our elites read a few pages of Ayn Rand and play golf. A French aristocrat, Montesquieu, wrote The Spirit of the Laws, which heavily influenced the US Constitution; the American aristocracy produced Donald Trump, who made Celebrity Apprentice. Draw your own conclusions.

We can’t even manage to squeeze out a Lord Byron. The cheap, tawdry rogues that come out of our financial nobility don’t compose anything but text messages to hookers, or, in a moment of unique inspiration, an inter-office email that cheerfully describes the country as a “plutonomy.”

The MBAs who are destroying the United States of America are turning it into a cultural desert first. Outside of their narrow field of expertise, which in this case happens to be fraud, they are the most unremarkable group of ‘leaders’ in history. They are, in essence, just barbarous, money-grubbing non-entities, Visigoths in two-thousand dollar suits. They know how to drink fine wine but not how to make it. If it wasn’t for their money and power, posterity would forget all about them as if they were no more important than medieval peasants or Roman slaves. Their legacy to the human race will be as barren as the ruins of ancient Sparta.

I was wondering what kind of person would go to the Chase 2011 West Coast Road Trip. What level of mental, moral, or spiritual deprivation would you have to exist at to want to attend such a cartoonishly obscene spectacle? The answer is that they were Chase employees. They probably had to go. They were forced to go suck up to the boss, and becuase there is no place else to go, they did.

The Lawrence Welk Show Goes To Washington?

2011-08-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

I’d rather be poor and me than rich and a Romney, and this is why:

Any questions?

Bleak House

2011-07-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

Is this symbolic of America today or what?

Cancer-stricken Ground Zero worker Edgar Galvis has finally received a compensation check — for zero dollars.
The 51-year-old Queens man, who suffered sinus problems and then throat cancer after months of removing toxic debris from the World Financial Center, was relieved to get a check in the mail for his court settlement with Merrill Lynch, whose offices he had cleaned.
But he was stunned when he saw the amount: $0.00.
His award had been $10,005, but his lawyers at the firm Worby, Groner, Edelman & Napoli Bern lopped off $2,579 for unitemized legal expenses.
Then they took a 33.3 percent fee of $2,124.
They also subtracted a $352 fee to the lawyer who referred him.
The remaining $4,950 was withheld for unspecified “liens,” the letter says. Galvis thinks this was repayment of workers’ compensation for aid.

There’s a sentiment I’ve been hearing expressed more and more frequently lately, and it’s coming from solid, patriotic citizens who previously never had an anti-American thought. It goes something like this, “Hey, I’ve got news for you, this country sucks.”

These aren’t pinko ne’er-do-wells like me. These are moderate, middling, ‘vital center’ types who avoid extremism of any kind. They wave the flag and support the troops. They’ve always worked hard and played by the rules. Now they are waking up to a clear, awful, unambiguous, undeniable, inescapable truth: they are being screwed, openly, gleefully and deliberately screwed, and it’s being done to them to the tune of God Bless America.

There’s a deep loss of morale that distinguishes this period from the hard times of the past. My grandmother had horror story after horror story about the Great Depression, but the idea of criticizing this country in any fundamental way would have been unthinkable to her. Same with my grandfather. He possessed an indestructible core of patriotism that was an integral part of his character. It just was. He may not have agreed with this or that political party or this or that president, but his faith in this country, its structure, its laws, its institutions, its essential virtue, was absolute.

I don’t think we have that anymore. There are a lot of theatrical displays of nationalism, lots of self-congratulatory chest thumping, but very little genuine patriotism, which is a healthy, even generous, frame of mind. The sad thing is that our country doesn’t really deserve it anymore. If America wants to be loved, she must make herself lovable. In general, hyper-militarized kleptocracies don’t inspire much affection. Our business and political elites (redundant?), our “successful’ class, openly flout the elementary rules of good citizenship and common decency. They’re trashing the place and leaving us with the mess. How are we supposed to respond, just wipe off our chins and recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Being a patriotic American these days is the psychological equivalent of being a battered wife.

The Dickensian villains at Worby, Groner, Edelman, and Napoli Bern were, I’d guess, the brightest boys in class, the apple of their mommy and daddy’s eyes. When other kids in the neighborhood misbehaved, their angry parents probably said, “Why can’t you be more like little Worby?” “I bet Napoli Bern never talks back to his mother, does he?” Now they extort sick people and laugh all the way to the bank. Sure, they’re a bunch of slimy ambulance chasers, somebody we can all agree to hate, but that wouldn’t stop one of them from getting into the Senate, would it?

Our cynicism is not only fully justified but, to these prematurely jaded eyes, morally proper as well.

A Dangerous Disconnect

2011-07-28T12:33:00.000-07:00

Just how out of touch are our ‘lawmakers’, the ones who’ve been so casually toying with our lives lately? This out of touch:

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) may have won the contest for the worst analogy of the entire debt ceiling debate.
The tea party favorite told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Wednesday that he wanted to lower the debt ceiling because when you’re broke, you have to cut back on certain luxuries.
“Well, Andrea, the thing is, when someone is overextended and broke, they don’t continue paying for expensive automobiles; they sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one,” Broun explained. “They don’t continue paying for country club dues, they drop out of the country club.”

He let the cat out of the bag with that one. In his world, cutting back is simply a matter of selling off an expensive car and no longer playing golf at a country club. He really can’t comprehend what it’s like down here for the rest of us. I imagine a majority of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle basically feel the same way.They instinctively project their own cushy financial circumstances onto the country at large and conclude that a few austerity measures won’t be so bad. Just start playing golf at a municipal course and send your kids to state college. Maybe sell the SUV and buy a Camry. What’s the problem?

“Take a haircut,” they shrug, as the country endures chronic high unemployment.

“Tighten the belt a little,” they say to growing numbers of people who rely on food stamps and welfare to merely survive.

“Sacrifice for the country’s future,” they piously intone to people who are starting to sense that they have no future at all.

They’re like the guy who pauses on his way to the gym to watch images of starving Somalians on TV for a sec, and then says, “Why don’t they just move already?”

It’s almost as if we’re being ruled by foreign colonial overlords in our own country. There are notable, even some noble, exceptions. You know who they are. But for every Bernie Sanders or Peter DeFazio, there are ten Mitch McConnells and Eric Cantors hiding behind the curtains with daggers in their hands. The good guys are just plain outnumbered.

The Poor Aren’t Really Poor, But Some Of Them Didn’t Get The Memo

2011-07-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

According to the Heritage Foundation, the poor in America aren’t really poor because most of them possess such luxuries as refrigerators, microwave ovens, and television sets. Sure, some of them might have to struggle a bit here and there, but

…if poverty means lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, relatively few of the more than 30 million people identified as being “in poverty” by the Census Bureau could be characterized as poor. While material hardship definitely exists in the United States, it is restricted in scope and severity. The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines.
As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.” In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

When you look at it, they really never had it so good. I propose we send some of these so-called ‘poor’ people down to Mexico, Central America, or Haiti, and let them get a taste of real poverty. They’ll come back with a renewed sense of patriotism and a burning desire to cut Lloyd Blankfein’s taxes, just you watch. They might even give up their coffee makers out of a sense of shared sacrifice.

Nor do they suffer from genuine hunger, as evidenced by the fact that so many of them are overweight. Many of them might experience occasional food shortages, but in fact they’re actually over nourished. Indeed, some are actually super nourished:

On average, the poor are well nourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children. In most cases, it is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than higher-income children consume, and their protein intake averages 100 percent above recommended levels. In fact, most poor children are super-nourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

See that? Thanks to McDonald’s, your average poor person will probably grow up to be bigger and stronger than Audie Murphy. Assuming they’ll be able to get in the Army with malignant hypertension and type-II diabetes, they just might the next Greatest Generation.

It’s pretty clear that poverty in America is mostly leftist fiction, something invented by statist liberals who want to take our freedoms away. But conservatives are going to have to work a little harder to get the message out, because not all the poor got the memo:

Doctors at a major Boston hospital report they are seeing more hungry and dangerously thin young children in the emergency room than at any time in more than a decade of surveying families.
Many families are unable to afford enough healthy food to feed their children, say the Boston Medical Center doctors. The resulting chronic hunger threatens to leave scores of infants and toddlers with lasting learning and developmental problems.
“Food is costing more, and dollars don’t stretch as far,’’ Sandel said. “It’s hard to maintain a diet that is healthy.’’
[…]
The emergency room survey found a similarly striking increase in the percentage of families with children who reported they did not have enough food each month, from 18 percent in 2007 to 28 percent in 2010.
Pediatricians at hospitals in four other cities - Baltimore; Little Rock, Ark.; Minneapolis; and Philadelphia - also reported increases in the ranks of malnourished, hungry youngsters in their emergency rooms since 2008. But Boston’s increases were more dramatic, said Sandel, a lead investigator with Children’s HealthWatch, a network of researchers who track children’s health. Researchers said higher housing and heating costs in Massachusetts probably exacerbated the state’s surge.

No doubt due to a culture of poverty, those ‘poor folk’ didn’t even bother to read the latest Heritage Foundation report. They were probably too focused on their PlayStations, or basking beneath their ceiling fans and talking on cordless phones.

Bachmann Just Won’t Do

2011-07-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

Michele Bachmann can never be president because she doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism:

Lord, the day is at hand. We are in the last days. You are a Jehovah God. We know that the times are in your hands. And we give them to you…The day is at hand, Lord, when your return will come nigh. Nothing is more important than bringing sheep into the fold. Than bringing new life into the kingdom…You have weeded that garden. The harvest is at hand.

Sorry, if you think America is going to burn up in the Apocalypse with all the other benighted sinners of this world, I’m not so sure you get my vote. Perdition is un-American. Besides, we don’t sin. Our country is nearly perfect by definition, or didn’t she get that far in elementary school?

So Bachmann thinks that nothing is more important than bringing sheep into the fold, eh? Nothing? Not even tax cuts? Deregulation? Eliminating the New Deal? Offshore drilling? Winning the war, honoring our warriors, abolishing public education?

Where stands Jehovah on the White House Easter Egg Roll, or the deification of Ronald Reagan, a graven image if ever there was one, even while he was a three-dimensional living being?

Bachmann’s primitive faith puts her at odds with true blue Americanism. In order to become president of USA Inc., it is, of course, absolutely de rigueur to profess a belief in God, but everybody knows you’re not really supposed to take it seriously. It’s strictly pro forma, like pretending to be happily married or liking sports. It’s just one of those things. The business community in general, and Wall Street in particular, doesn’t really want a fire and brimstone fundamentalist Christian in the Oval Office. Heavens no! A president waving a Bible around and screeching about the end times would scare investors and create uncertainty, to say the least. Mitt Romney will be acceptable to them only because his pro-business credentials outweigh his lukewarm Mormonism, which he politely keeps in the closet.

God is an accessory, like nice hair and a cell phone. It’s part of the required paraphernalia of an American political life. The peculiar demands of our demented, pop-culture democracy force you to toss some Jesus confetti around to pacify certain parts of the electorate once in a while, but that’s all. Don’t get crazy with it. The business of America is business, not saving souls. If Christ needs oil to fuel his chariot for the Second Coming, Exxon is interested, if not, not. In the meantime, keep the Rapture to yourself.

Bachmann, like most religious people, is a hypocrite. But of course she’s willing to shelve God’s commandments in favor of the temporal needs of Goldman Sachs and Raytheon, of Northrop-Grumman and ExxonMobil, if doing so will advance her career. And when the contradictions between her faith and her and ambition become too glaring, she does what most pious people do: she molds and manipulates the substance of her religion like a lump of Play-Doh until, as if by divine miracle, it perfectly conforms to her material self-interest.

But Bachman is more than just a shrewd and cynical opportunist. She sincerely believes in her neo-medieval theology. She has to. Religion offers the only professionally safe, socially acceptable way to justify her hatred of the gays. If you kick away the prop of faith, her homophobia loses its divine sanction and reveals itself for what is really is, crude and simple prejudice. Poor Michele could no longer hide behind Jehovah’s beard. She would be exposed as the mean and possibly crazy bigot that she is. Even the thickest, most bovine voter, in between episodes of America’s Got Talent and The Marriage Ref, might begin to sense something sinisterly amiss with that wild-eyed loon, even if she is fun to watch on TV.

Anyone who nourishes that kind of deeply rooted hatred against anything, be it against gays, Muslims, lawyers, mosquitoes, cabbies, broccoli, country music (guilty!), anything, lacks the temperament to be president and should never be entrusted with power of any kind (see Nixon, Richard).

Safety Never Takes A Day Off

2011-07-16T10:25:00.000-07:00

You never know, terrorists might have been financing this operation:

MIDWAY, Ga. (AP) -- Police in Georgia have shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls trying to save up for a trip to a water park, saying they didn’t have a business license or the required permits.
Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police also didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.
The girls had been operating for one day when Morningstar and another officer cruised by.
The girls needed a business license, peddler’s permit and food permit to operate, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day or $180 per year.
One girl, 14-year-old Casity Dixon, says the three had to listen to police and shut down.
The girls are now doing chores and yard work to make money.

Thank God we have such thorough professionals on the police force. You and I would just see little girls selling lemonade, but they sniff out a possible crime, even a potentially ghastly one. How did those kids make that lemonade? Was it Country Time or Minute Maid? Did they mix it with bottled water or was it from the tap? Was it fluoridated? You see the potential for dangerous mischief here?

And were they really saving the money to go to a water park, or were they going to do something else with the proceeds, like, say, donate them to an organization with possible terror links? If they were just going to a water park, why that particular one? Why not a different one? What’s the fascination with water parks, anyway? It’s just a park with water, right? Or is it? Maybe the police should investigate this, uh, “water park”…

I Guess We Have Made Some Progress

2011-07-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

The glory that was Rome didn’t trickle down much to the ladies. Here’s the epitaph of woman who died at the venerable age of twenty-seven, composed by her husband after the fact:

Here I lie, a matron named Veturia. My father was Veturius. My husband was Fortunatus. I lived for twenty-seven years, and I was married for sixteen years to the same man. After I gave birth to six children, only one of whom is still alive, I died.

Hobbes said life is nasty, brutish, solitary and short, and so it is, although this woman probably never knew the peace of solitude. For her, the great gift of life was nothing but twenty-seven dismal years of being a broodmare for Fortunatus. What a depressing bummer.

Poor, sweet Veturia, if only I could have spared your suffering by putting Michele Bachmann in your place, I would gladly have done so. (What a just and righteous God I would be!)

But it could have been worse. She might have been married to Egnatius Macenius, who

… beat his wife to death with a club because she had drunk some wine. And not only did no one bring him to court because of this deed, but no one even reproached him, for all the best men thought she deserved the punishment for her example of intemperance.

All the “best men” agreed that a dead wife was better than a drunk one. Those best men were, no doubt, the most vociforous, hidebound expositors of traditional family values around, the Tom Coburns and Jim Demints of their day. They probably complained about the decline of Roman morals while they sat and watched people slaughter each other in the amphitheater:

“I had to beat the old lady to death yesterday, Fortunatus. She got into my wine.”

“Tough break, Nate, but you have to teach ’em a lesson. Say, Veturia’s got a ten-year-old sister who’s kinda cute. You interested? I can put in a good word with her old man.”

“That depends on the dowry.”

“It’s sweet, Nate, real sweet … Wait, kill him …

“Kill him! Did you see that? He only cut that guy’s throat. He should have cut his balls. I would have cut his balls!”

“Whaddya gonna do? Rome’s been getting soft on crime lately. You coddle these miscreants and what do get? A weak kill.”

“What’s this city coming to, Fortunatus?”

“Jupiter only knows, my friend. Jupiter only knows …”

The End.

I’m Not Excited

2011-07-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

Oh goody, another celebrity pol is wriggling out of the intestines of the Tea Party movement:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.
When she signed a long-fought bill to bring more transparency to legislative voting, the Black Eyed Peas blasted through the Capitol rotunda here.
Joan Jett, a personal hero because of her fight to prove that women can rock, provided inspiration when it seemed impossible that a relatively inexperienced, deeply conservative woman with Indian immigrant roots could win a bid to govern the state where the Civil War began.
But Ms. Haley’s most enduring theme song, as it was when she campaigned on Tea Party politics and a nod from Sarah Palin, might be Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”

I don’t know much about this person’s politics. I don’t have to or want to, because at the end of the day her politics are merely incidental — a means of achieving stardom. So she adopts a few Tea Party sound bites about tax cuts and limited government, and proceeds to focus on what really matters:

Of the nation’s 29 freshman governors, her national profile is among the highest, an advantage she hopes to enhance with a memoir — “Can’t Is Not an Option” — scheduled for release by the Penguin Group in January. Telegenic and direct, she is popular with producers of national news shows. Her digital-savvy young staff issues YouTube-ready videos that show everything from her cabinet meetings to the crowning of collard greens as the official state vegetable.

Her slogan is “Get excited,” but I’m not. I’m bored and disconsolate. Yet another right-wing dilettante is busting on to the scene, just in time to fill the void created by the fading Sarah Palin. Are we really supposed to be impressed because she has tech-savvy marketers producing YouTube videos about her? Am I supposed to be overawed by the emergence of one more voracious publicity hound with an instinct for effective propaganda? Sorry, it just sounds dull and dangerous to me.

When excess skin cells accumulate on the human body, the result is psoriasis; when they accumulate on the American body politic, the results are … as you see. The real business of government is run by powerful interests behind the scenes, while “telegenic and direct” politicans prance through the legislatures slashing budgets and calling for tax cuts. Meanwhile, an adoring media gushes about the contents of their iPods. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out whose interests are served by this state of affairs.

It’s too easy quote Orwell on these matters, but I will anyway. As usual, he was spot on: “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”

Armageddon Next Time?

2011-06-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

If sodomy was going to result in Armageddon, Armageddon would have happened long, long ago, even before the human race existed in its present form. Homosexuality has been observed in lots of animals — lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and whales and monkeys, too. Mammals are programmed by evolution to rut as often as possible. Let’s face it, after eating, shitting, and sleeping, it’s really all we ever want to do. Other activities, like building Notre Dame Cathedral, stamp collecting, writing books on existential philosophy, slaughtering each other, or, um, blogging, are just ways to occupy ourselves during the in-between times, a means of whiling away all those achy blue minutes that, damn the luck, comprise the larger portion of our lives.

Mother Nature says, “Go forth and fornicate,” and we do. If two male chimpanzees fall upon each other in the heat of the moment, whether by choice or for lack of a better option, it’s a matter of complete indifference to the universe. The heavens won’t fall. The good and bad news is that our sex lives are equally irrelevant.

This is the way we are. If there is a God, it’s the way He/She/It made us. I hardly think we’ll be punished by simply doing what is in our most basic nature to do, even if some people don’t do it in ways that conform to the monogamous, heterosexual, lights-out, shades-drawn, missionary position methods favored by dull Christians (methods that they publicly claim to favor, that is).

At any rate, Pat Robertson is warning that God is going to punish us because New York decided to let people marry whomever they choose:

“I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were,” Robertson said. God “sent an angel down there and He said to Lot and his family, ‘get out now because I’m gonna destroy this whole area.’”

I can see knocking off a rapist for ravishing one of my angels, but there’s no way I would destroy an entire city —commit genocide, in fact — because the gay district threw a party. More importantly, I don’t think I could worship a God that would.

Incidentally, do you know what happened to Lot and his family after they were commanded to leave Sodom? Lot’s wife turned back to look the destruction and was transformed into a pillar of salt, leaving only him and his daughters to carry on. They went into the mountains and dwelt in a cave together, and then things suddenly got really, really steamy:

“Now the firstborn said to the younger, ‘Our father is old, and there is no man on the earth to come in to us as is the custom of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the lineage of our father.’ So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.

The other daughter followed suit the next night, and they both eventually got pregnant. Nice, eh? An entire city perished so that Lot could boink his daughters. Traditional family values. (A sidenote: It seems highly unlikely to me that it was the daughters, and not Lot, who instigated this threesome, but then the Old Testament doesn’t like women much more than the gays.)

I don’t know what’s worse, that Pat Robertson thinks drunken incest is preferable to homosexuality, or that his god is willing to reduce some of his people to drunken incest merely for the sake of killing a few queers, like some bigoted hillbilly with the omnipotent power to destroy. But to continue (with Robertson, not Genesis):

“We’re heading that way as a nation. In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived. There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, ‘what’s going to happen to America?” Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us,’” he predicted.

Pat Robertson is right. No civilization that’s openly embraced homosexuality has ever survived, but that’s because no civilization has ever survived, regardless of how it treated homosexuality. Our own “Judeo-Christian” one is visibly limping into the sunset right now, and for reasons that have nothing to do with homosexuality. The pollutants we spew into the atmosphere are a far more important factor in our impending doom than how twenty percent of the population chooses to screw. Go nuclear, spill waste into the rivers, blow up the mountaintops, kill every last fish and chop down every last tree, it’s all good, but if Bill and Frank are allowed to get married that’s it, lights out, game over, we’re all going straight into the flames. How utterly silly.

Whenever a natural disaster strikes San Francisco or New Orleans, it’s because a wrathful God is chastising them for their sins; but if a tornado hits Alabama or a river in Iowa floods, God is conveniently left off the hook. It’s strange. It’s a baffling mystery that I ponder whenever I have nothing better to do, like get laid.

Anyway, there’s bad news for the fundies: the asteroid missed. Maybe next time, Pat.

Bombing Ruins In Order To Make Them

2011-06-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

I caught this little blurb yesterday about the continuing bombing campaign in Libya:

… NATO refused to say Tuesday whether it would bomb ancient Roman ruins in Libya if it knew Gadhafi was hiding military equipment there.
“We will strike military vehicles, military forces, military equipment or military infrastructure that threaten Libyan civilians as necessary,” a NATO official in Naples, Italy, said, declining to give his name in discussing internal NATO deliberations.
But he said the alliance could not verify rebel claims that Libya’s leader may be hiding rocket launchers at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Leptis Magna, a Roman city between the capital of Tripoli and rebel-held Misrata.
Wing Cmdr. Mike Bracken, a spokesman for NATO’s Libya mission, later said it “would be a concern for us that Gadhafi and pro-Gadhafi forces would choose to contravene international law in hiding themselves in such a location.”
And, he said, “If we were to take on any targets, we would consider all risks.” But he underscored that NATO could not confirm that weapons might be placed at the heritage site.

It would be a horrendous violation of international law if Gadhafi was hiding rocket launchers in ancient Roman ruins, but not if we bomb those ruins. Such are the sticky moral ambiguities of ‘humanitarian’ war. You have to slaughter some people in order to save others. In this case, I guess, we might have to get rid of some ruins in order to make room for all the new ones we’re creating.

At some point, we’ve allowed military necessity to trump all other considerations. Everything that makes us civilized takes second place to the requirements of war. The rule of law, morality, sound economics and sensible domestic spending are all regarded as disposable luxuries while military needs are absolute. As a society we seem to blandly accept this, and military officials, like the ones quoted above, logically regard this as the natural order of things. Notice the imperious condescension: Well, children, it’s very nice that you care about those historical ruins — very good! — but us grownups have lots and lots of other grownup things to think about when we’re trying to get the bad guys. But don’t worry, we’ll try to be nice. We’ll consider the risks. We’ll make the final decisions. And make no mistake, we’ll do whatever we think is necessary.

The Romans themselves exemplified this attitude. How ironic that their spiritual descendants should be using it to justify bombing Roman ruins.

Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Palin Interrupted

2011-06-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush’s phony cowboy routine never played well abroad. Outside the protective bubble of the mainstream US media, he looked to be exactly what he was: a fake, posturing, inarticulate ignoramus. The whole swaggering high noon ‘wanted dead or alive’ bullshit played right into the most cartoonish stereotypes that foreigners have of Americans. It might get votes in the Bible Belt or at the Daytona 500, but your average German or Russian or Brit doesn’t find it too appealing. Sarah Palin, W’s intellectual and spiritual heir, is learning a similar lesson. Redneck chic is effective in places like Oklahoma or Arizona, and it gets media twits like Chris Matthews all moist in the groin area, but it just doesn’t sell in more civilized climates:

Sarah Palin wants to show to the Republican right that she is the true keeper of the Ronald Reagan flame by meeting the late president’s closest ally on the world stage.
A meeting with Margaret Thatcher in the centenary year of Reagan’s birth would be the perfect way of launching her bid for the Republican nomination for the 2012 US presidential election.
This is what Palin told Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times:
I am going to Sudan in July and hope to stop in England on the way. I am just hoping Mrs Thatcher is well enough to see me as I so admire her.

But …

It appears that the former prime minister has no intention of meeting the darling of the Tea Party movement. Andy McSmith reported in the Independent this morning that Palin is likely to be “thwarted” on the grounds that Thatcher, 86, rarely makes public appearances.
It would appear that the reasons go deeper than Thatcher’s frail health. Her allies believe that Palin is a frivolous figure who is unworthy of an audience with the Iron Lady. This is what one ally tells me:
Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.

As awful as she is, old battle axe Thatcher won’t give credibility to young(ish) charlatan Palin. I suppose you can file this under “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile” or “still the Greeks to our Romans”.

Jefferson On Inequality

2011-05-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

This is from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1785. It seems quite relevant to the issues confronting us today (italics added):

Another means of silently lessening inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any county, uncultivated land and unemployed poor, it is clear that the natural laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

Jefferson’s dubious religious beliefs already put him on shaky ground with modern conservatives (he was a deist, i.e., an atheist), but this will get him kicked out of the club for good. Land distribution? A progressive income tax? If the tea partier’s ever pull off their coup, James O’ Keefe will have to be put to work airbrushing him completely out of our past.

Conservatives have successfully pimped the notion that their ideology, their policies, and their favored religious beliefs represent the genuine ideals of America, the one true faith, as if were, of the Founding Fathers: Once upon a time, there was a perfect libertarian Eden where Big Gub’mint never intruded and everyone worshipped the Christian God. But over the course of our history, this pristine paradise was gradually corrupted by the encroachment of liberal ideas until, horror upon horror, Satan himself appeared in the form Franklin Roosevelt and perverted it beyond all recognition. Since then, America has been awash with moral chaos — atheism, socialism, Planned Parenthood, homosexuality, gun control, and, apparently worst of all, entitlement spending.

This crude teleology more or less forms the basis of our current political discourse. The tea partiers certainly believe it, but so do conservative highbrows like George Will, albeit in a slightly (slightly) more sophisticated form. Democrats, to their shame, tacitly accept it as well, and that’s why conservatives always have the high ground. Liberals wound themselves before they even go into battle by accepting the basic premises of their opponents. They don’t fight with any conviction, and consequently they lose.

But here you have the author of The Declaration of Independence writing to the author of the Bill of Rights and sounding suspiciously like a progressive. Moreover, they’re discussing something that they must have considered a pressing social problem, income inequality, which the true blue ‘patriots’ on the Right don’t lose any sleep over at all. Imagine that, a bunch of idiotic, right-wing Bolsheviks are trumping Jefferson and Madison in today’s political debate. What an absurd crime.

Why doesn’t our side seize a little history back?

Dumb And Confused

2011-05-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

A recent poll suggests that rank and file Republicans aren’t too enthusiastic about their party’s likely presidential candidates. 45 percent express dissatisfaction with them, which is up from up from 33 percent two months ago; and although 41 percent of those polled do like them, that figure is down from 52 percent. The numbers are trending in the wrong direction for the likes of Romney, Trump, Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and the other assorted clowns and dullards who are lining up to participate in next year’s silly season.

At first, I thought our not-so-right-honorable-friends on the right had succumbed to a freakish outbreak of common sense. I thought that maybe, finally, the average workaday conservative was catching on to the fact that the Republican party doesn’t represent their interests. To the GOP’s upper management they are useful idiots and rubes; to its corporate sponsors they are just an irksome labor cost, the one half of the working class they’ve hired, to paraphrase nineteenth century robber baron Jay Gould, to vote against the other half (he said kill, but we’re not quite there yet). I was almost ready to open my arms, figuratively speaking, and the give them a nice warm welcome to the Land of Disillusionment where all of us progressives dwell. Instead I made the mistake of reading on.

In politics as in life, whenever you give someone the benefit of the doubt you usually wind up regretting it. That observation holds ture here. It turns out that grass roots Republicans haven’t passed through political (or emotional, or intellectual) adolescence yet. Far from it. They don’t have any intractable disagreements or deep ideological divisions with the party heads. Not at all. They just don’t like them because they’re too damn dull.

In North Carolina, retiree Robert Osborne is hoping New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will decide to run. In Indiana, farmer Brent Smith wishes Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour hadn’t backed away. In Georgia, stock clerk Susan Demarest would love to see somebody more like Ronald Reagan.
Ohio’s William Johnson just wants somebody who’s not a “cold fish.”
“I don’t expect them to get up there and start doing karaoke, but we need somebody with a little more spunk,” says the Columbus steelworker.
[…]
Lori Raney, who owns a drapery workroom in Canton, Ga., says she’s sure to vote for the party’s eventual nominee. But so far, she says, no standout candidate has emerged. She’d be happy to vote for somebody with a level head, but says a lot of voters demand something more.
“Nowadays, people don’t really care about qualifications and common sense,” she says. “They want the celebrity figure to run for president. Republicans just don’t have the celebrity-type figure.”

How confused and misguided can people be? Did they play with mercury or eat lead based-paint when they were kids? It’s as if too many years of Rush Limbaugh, FOX News, and Glenn Beck have melted their brains into a gunky, viscous goo; a puddle of liquid cerebral fat that’s useless for cognition but gives them the ability to make simple gestures and noisy gurgling sounds. This, in my own crude and cynical shorthand, is how these working class Republicans seem to think:

I want someone who will cut taxes for billionaire CEOs, eliminate welfare, cut unemployment benefits and ship American jobs overseas, but only if he’s not a cold fish.
I’m a stock clerk who makes eight dollars and hour. I wanna vote for a candidate who will bust unions and abolish the minimum wage, ensuring that I live in poverty forever. A real Ronald Reagan type. If only there was a spunky candidate for 2012 who would promise to do that.
I own a drapery workroom in Georgia. I want a solid conservative president who supports free trade policies that will put me out of business, but only if he’s a celebrity-type figure.

It really is amazing how so many people have been conned into voting against their own interests. It has to stand as one of the most remarkable triumphs of propaganda in history.

(Update: I just read that the Donald is not running, further diminishing the star quality of the Republican field. If this continues, these poor conservatives are just going to have to buckle up for four more years of Negroid socialism)

Koppel On Democracy

2011-05-16T12:41:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what Ted Koppel’s political philosophy is? Me neither, but he shared a bit of it anyway on a blog in the Washington Post a few days ago. Apparently, having a serious face doesn’t make you a serious thinker:

“Democracy.” Let’s dump it; toss it on the scrap heap of history. The concept remains worthy, but the word is rapidly being exhausted of all residual value.
Democracy is much more than the elimination of an undemocratic leader. What we have seen this year, unfolding on our television screens and laptops, looks like democracy, but as any Parisian schoolchild can recount, the path from the barricades to a functioning parliament can be tortuous. After the Jacobin terror sent more than 14,000 victims to the guillotine, France (and most of Europe) got Napoleon, whose excesses ultimately led to a restoration of the monarchy. Five years from now, we are more likely to see another Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, or another Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, than to see a functioning representational government in any of the countries now undergoing the “Arab spring.”

Look closely. You’ll see the unspoken assumption here is that we Americans are exceptional. Almost alone among nations we got democracy right; everyone else seems to get it wrong, starting with those cheese-eating wimps in France. The Arabs, being unschooled in the Byzantine nuances of parliamentary government, will likely get it wrong too. Of course, it would be difficult to learn democracy if your country had been ruled for thirty years by a dictator who was armed and bankrolled by the United States, an untidy fact that Koppel tidily leaves out; and if, as he suggests, Egypt sees another Hosni Mubarak emerge within five years it will no doubt be because the US, wary of ‘instability’ in the region, will have decided to throw its support behind him.

The path from the barricades to a functioning parliament can indeed be torturous, particularly when the United States is standing squarely in the way. This is something that every Nicaraguan schoolchild can recount.

Since nobody else can seem to handle democracy, then, we should just drop it from all our foreign policy considerations. Face facts, dump idealism, and go all Bismarck on everyone. After all, we kind of do that anyway:

Truth be told, our government’s commitment to democracy in other countries is almost whimsically inconsistent: clearly greater in Libya than in Saudi Arabia, less in Bahrain than in Iran. We are constrained from actively promoting democracy in China by our enormous national interests there; but in Congo, where our interests are negligible and the outrages against democracy are constant, we do nothing.The misappropriation of the word is so great as to be silly.”

Whimsically inconsistent, he says. That’s cute. It reminds you of the famous British saying that their empire was acquired “in a fit of absentmindedness.” It neatly overlooks the calculated brutality and deceitfulness that infuses our, or any empire’s, foreign policy. It suggests that our intentions are always good and our blunders are all just innocent mistakes.

Our commitment to spreading democracy is, of course, thin, but it’s not because we’re “whimsically inconsistent.” On the contrary, the US is scrupulously, meticulously, predictably, depressingly, violently consistent: we support governments that obey our orders and serve our interests, period, tout court. If they happen to be democracies, great; if not, no problem. As long as they play ball with the US it’s all good. If they don’t, if they should choose to break out of our orbit and follow an independent path, then we hound and harass them, turn them into world pariahs, impose sanctions, and, if they’re a grave enough threat, meaning if they cut too deeply into profits, we mark them down for regime change. Their virtue is judged entirely on the basis of their obedience to Washington. Their particular form of government is irrelevant. Our attitude in this regard is best summed up by a remark that Franklin Roosevelt supposedly made about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

So Koppel recommends that the US follow a policy of realpolitik in its foreign relations, but we already do. We always have. That we pursue our own interests to the exclusion of other considerations is so glaringly obvious, so childishly basic, that it boggles the mind that a so-called ‘serious’ journalist should be recommending it as if it’s some novel idea. Where has he been the last two-hundred years? Has he never heard of the Mexican War, the slaughter of the Indians, the Spanish-American War, the suppression and occupation of the Philippines, the forcible extortion of Panama from Colombia, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, and Allende in Chile? The list goes on and on, right down to the invasion of Iraq and the current bombing of Libya. Democracy doesn’t just take a back seat in US foreign policy, it gets thrown off the fuckin’ bus. This country has kicked, scratched, clawed, bitten, beaten, bloodied, lied to, cheated, bribed, stabbed, shot, poisoned, bombed or imprisoned anyone or anything that ever stood in its way. You don’t become the richest and most powerful nation in human history by being nice, peace-loving democrats. You get there by being the most ruthless sons-of-bitches on the planet.

This stuff is A, B, C; the history of American foreign policy 101. Anyone who hasn’t drank the Kool-Aid of the Washington Establishment and its legions of court historians knows this. It’s incontrovertible. How is it possible that Mr. Koppel, whose career has spanned a fair amount of recent American history, can be so obtuse? If he’s really that ignorant, we should adopt the British custom of referring to TV anchorman as “newsreaders” instead of journalists. On the other hand, I’ve heard Koppel deferentially refer to Henry Kissinger as Dr. Kissinger, so chances are his omissions aren’t completely innocent (as a general rule, whenever a serious TV journalist addresses Kissinger as “doctor,” what follows will be a load of bullshit).

But who cares about Ted Koppel? Not me. Not you. Not anyone who lives a sane, normal human existence. But I’d bet that the overwhelming majority of Koppel’s TV colleagues think just like him. The transparent propaganda that served as “news” during the run up to the Iraq invasion is proof enough. Should you require more, just look back on the fawning and triumphalist coverage of bin Laden’s assassination. Wolf Blitzer was positively swooning. All the anchors on the alphabet soup networks were. They acted like pubescent groupies at a pop concert. It was nauseating. If you got too caught up in the thrill of it all, you’d miss the fact that their coverage consisted almost entirely of interviewing public officials and treating their statements as holy writ. There was no context given except the one provided by Washington. The insipid journalists who presided over the whole overblown spectacle not only didn’t ask any critical questions, but seemed constitutionally incapable of doing so.

They’re not necessarily dishonest. It genuinely never occurs to them that the US sometimes wears the black hat and our leaders often lie. They’re true believers in Ted Koppel’s grade-school conception of America and its lofty role in world affairs, a viewpoint that exaggerates our virtues, ignores our crimes, and blames others for our mistakes. They are, weirdly enough, honest propagandists.

We need to dump them. Toss them on the scrap heap of history. The concept of TV journalism, embodied by people like Ted Koppel, remains a worthy concept, but it is rapidly being exhausted of all residual value.

Congratulations, You’ve Been Had

2011-05-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s the good news: Six in ten Americans think that we should end the war in Afghanistan now that Osama bin Laden is dead.

Here’s the bad news: the US government always does the opposite of what the people want:

The House Armed Services Committee is expected to take up a defense authorization bill on Wednesday that includes a new authorization for the government to use military force in the war on terrorism. The provision has set off an argument over whether it is a mere update — or a sweeping, open-ended expansion — of the power Congress granted to the executive branch in 2001.

[…]

The provision states that Congress “affirms” that “the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces,” and that the president is authorized to use military force — including detention without trial — of members and substantial supporters of those forces.

The president isn’t giving up his war-making powers, no president voluntarily would, and our list of enemies is being broadened to include the “associated forces” of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If you thought bin Laden’s death was the beginning of the end of the war, sorry, but thanks for playing. We may begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan this July, but the so called ‘war on terror’ is here to stay, at least for the near future. Too many people are making too much money on this venture, and their vote$$$ count more than ours.

The poor dumb people thought this was all about avenging 9/11. Won’t they ever learn? This country isn’t in the business of winning wars, it’s in the business of waging them, and it’s big business. Those who study and are a part of our Homeland Security should care about securing the homeland. Waging wars does the exact opposite. The war on terror won’t end unless gigantic, mass protests force it to end or the Pentagon spots a more profitable conflict somewhere else; say, for example, a ‘cold war’ with China, which could give the military-industrial complex multiple orgasms for decades to come.

So the “associated forces” of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have joined the ranks of our official enemies. What, exactly, does that mean? Who are these “associated forces” and how do we identify them? Do our attacks dogs have the ability to smell them out? At what point do we determine that we’ve killed enough of these dark and nebulous “associated forces” to declare victory and come home? Will one of our soldiers trip over a putrefying Afghan corpse one morning and discover that, lo and behold, it’s the single last official “associated force” of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban?

Congress can stop this nonsense. Then again, you or I could win the lottery.

It looks like our soldiers in Afghanistan have some more fighting to do before they get to come home and file for unemployment. And here’s a message to all those yahoos who celebrated the death of bin Laden like they were at a Superbowl party: congratulations, suckers, you’ve been had.

“It’ll Save The County A Lot Of Money!”

2011-05-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

When it comes to cutting the budget deficit, hard choices have to be made. Everything must be on the table, we’re told, and true statesmanship consists of having the courage to suggest cuts in domestic programs previously considered untouchable, like Social Security. But will cuts in social spending be sufficient? Once you’ve eliminated public education, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, child support services, county health services, public libraries, public transportation, public utilities, national parks, subsidies to cowboy poets, and the dog catcher — in short, once we’ve returned to the glory days of 1800 — what’s left to cut if we’re still in the red? Our wars will still be raging and tax hikes are off the table, so chances are we’ll still be throttled with massive deficits. Clearly, we’ll have to strike out in bold new directions to put our fiscal house in order. But where?

Think outside the box:

In 1905, the citizens of Springfield, Ohio, were a little upset that a black man accused of murder was going to have a lengthy and expensive trial. Some were also convinced that he would get off with a mere slap on the wrist, presumably because our justice system was just as soft on crime back then as it is now (“He’ll only get fined for shooting in the city limits,” one citizen complained; Michael Savage’s great-granddad, perhaps?). So they decided to take matters into their own hands. They stormed the jail cell where the accused was being held and beat him to death. Then they shot his body full of holes and strung it up from a telegraph pole for the entire town to see. Journalist Ray Stannard Baker witnessed the event and recorded the aftermath. See if you can recognize Alan Simpson’s ancestor:

That was the end of that! Mob justice administered! And there the Negro hung until daylight next morning — an unspeakably grisly, dangling horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his bare body: he dripped blood. And, with crowds of men both here and there at the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: “A dead nigger is a good nigger.” And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most despicable of all, was congratulating the public:
“It’ll save the county a lot of money!”*

We’re being greased into accepting the idea that everything must be secondary to cutting budget deficits. Okay, then. Why not do away with long and costly trials for those who are plainly guilty of a horrific crime? Not petty criminals,but major felons. The worst of the worst. Why should hardworking Americans be forced to pay the legal costs of someone who is, probably, almost certainly (we think), guilty of a heinous crime, like child molestation, murder, or rape? Why give them three hots and a cot and pay for their cable TV? That’s more than their victims ever got, right? Why not just dispatch them lickety-split and save a dollar? Maybe even put a few liberal public defenders out of work as an added bonus? (I’ve heard this argument many, many times from many, many people. And you’ve had that debate with your Republican uncle, haven’t you?)

We’ve already established the legal precedent that terrorists don’t deserve due process. Take the next logical baby step. Why should common criminals be afforded rights we routinely deny to suspected terrorists? We have to stop pussyfooting around about deficits and get serious. We can’t be hamstrung by quaint legal concepts or impractical theories about unalienable rights. Those luxuries are reserved for solvent nations. If we can boot old and sick people to the curb, why should we be squeamish about handing over Jeffery Dahmer types to the mob? It’ll save us a lot of money.

Since we’re not racists anymore, we don’t have to confine ourselves to only lynching black people. We’re living in more progressive times: anyone accused of a major felony is fair game, be they white, black, yellow or brown. Maybe even include the mentally ill — anyone who isn’t a fetus or a millionaire. It would make for great television. Visionary entrepreneur Donald Trump could host the show. Lynching a white person would prove to the naysayers that he’s not a racist.

It doesn’t really sound that implausible, does it? I can easily picture Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, or John Boehner sitting around on Fox and Friends calmly discussing the net economic boon of summary executions, can’t you?

*Quoted from The Progressive Movement 1900-1915, Richard Hofstadter (ed.)

Everybody’s Doin’ It

2011-05-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Building aircraft carriers, that is:

ABOARD THE CHARLES DE GAULLE – Despite growing controversy about the cost and relevance of aircraft carriers, navies around the world are adding new ones to their inventories at a pace unseen since World War II.
The U.S. — with more carriers than all other nations combined — and established naval powers such as Britain, France and Russia are doing it. So are Brazil, India and China — which with Russia form the BRIC grouping of emerging economic giants.
“The whole idea is about being able to project power,” said Rear Adm. Philippe Coindreau, commander of the French navy task force that has led the air strikes on Libya since March 22.
“An aircraft carrier is perfectly suited to these kinds of conflicts, and this ship demonstrates it every day,” he said in an interview aboard the French carrier Charles de Gaulle, which has been launching daily raids against Moammar Gadhafi’s forces since the international intervention in the Libyan conflict began March 22.
[…]
“All around the world there are major and not-so-major navies now looking into getting into some form of sea-based airpower,” Willett said. “They may not want to be global powers but they certainly want to have some regional power-projection capability.”

The end of American hegemony is clearly visible, and other powers want to be the big kids on their own block after we’ve limped off the scene. Bully for them. We’ll always have a strong enough military to protect ourselves from attack and that’s all we need. Who cares if Brazil dominates South America and France has more ships in the the Mediterranean than we do? If any other country threatens our supposed “interests” abroad (i.e., oil) it won’t be as if we lack the power to stop it.

But all of that’s moot. This will just be another excuse to maintain current levels of military spending, if not increase them. Prior to the Big Bin Laden Death Party Extravaganza, a distinct whiff of sinophobia had begun filling the air. It will be likely to grow if our zeal for fighting Muslim terrorists begins to wane, which just might happen since bin Laden is gone. The Military-Industrial-Complex must be fed, and the unseemly mob that partied like rock stars after hearing about bin Laden’s death will need a new enemy to hate. Cold War with China would be just the thing. TV could be filled with ominous images of Chinese aircraft carriers floating past Taiwan, and ambitious politicians could warn us of an impending “carrier gap.” What fun it would all be.

Regardless, it would enable us to sustain the unsustainable status quo, which, at the end of the day, is all Washington really wants anyway.

A note on the “unseemly mob” I mentioned: Yes, I’m glad bin Laden is dead. I have no use for spoiled rotten millionaires who can’t find anything better to do than kill people, especially in the service of religious fundamentalism. Yes, I think we were probably justified in killing him the way we did. But a truly proud and great nation wouldn’t have turned the event into a frat party. A few moments of solemn, dignified thanks that justice had been done were in order, followed by a sober reappraisal of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Reality TV Nation doesn’t do that. It turns every event into a self-congratulatory spectacle. Forget about the better angels of our nature or Roosevelt’s admonition that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The emblematic rallying cry of our time is “Look at me, ain’t I great?” The rest of the world has caught on to just how hollow we really are. One of their responses, apparently, is to build more aircraft carriers.

Little Balls

2011-04-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamt I was Lloyd Blankfein’s caddy. He was playing golf with Jamie Dimon, and the two were discussing how difficult it was to be rich investment bankers in a hostile and uncomprehending world:

“You know, Jamie, after a hard day of doing God’s work, I need to come out and put a little ball into a little hole.”

“Me too!” Jamie exclaimed. “Especially nowadays, when the whole world hates us no matter how much good we do. It’s so frustrating.”

“Sometimes putting a little ball into a little hole is the only thing that takes the hurt away.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

“Say, do you wanna keep on hitting little balls together, Jamie?”

“Let’s!”

“People think that just because we’re rich we’ve got it made. That’s why they hate us. They think that once you become a billionaire all the problems in your life just melt away. It isn’t so. Money doesn’t solve everything. Don’t the poor understand that? Don’t they understand that there’s more to life than money?”

“Apparently not. They also lack higher understanding. For example, I went on CNBC once and tried to explain that when banks foreclosed on their homes it was actually good for them because it’s such an excellent form of debt relief. For some people, it’s almost a hundred percent debt reduction.”

“God’s work, actually!” Lloyd interjected.

“Exactly. But did anyone get it? No. The people are so obsessed with their little homes and their little savings that they lose sight of the big picture. They can’t see what’s in their own best interest.”

“Or appreciate the finer things in life, like putting little balls into little holes.”

“Precisely. It’s like they have some some kind of neurosis.”

“A clinical illness! It almost makes you feel sorry for them.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Lloyd.”

“Oh, silly me. Sometimes when I’m putting a little ball into a little hole I get giddy and lose my head.”

“No worries. It happens to the best of us.”

“Hey, Jamie, wanna have a little fun? Let’s call the president and tell him that if the US doesn’t bomb Nova Scotia the markets will get spooked and collapse. I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars he does it.”

“Where’s the challenge in that bet? Of course he would. They always do what we say. Sigh. If only all of my employees were as obedient as presidents.”

“If only. But you’re right. It’s just that ever since I became a master of the universe things have gotten so, well, boring. I mean, after you’ve crashed the world economy and utterly destroyed hundreds of millions of lives, what’s left to accomplish? Where are all the thrills? For the life of me, I can only imagine one: putting little balls into little holes.”

“Same here. It shows how highly evolved we are, Lloyd.”

“I’m so glad someone understands.”

(Games played with the ball, and others of that nature … stamp no character on the mind. Thomas Jefferson)

Living History

2011-04-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn’t heard, the budget deal that the Big Enders struck with the Little Enders on Friday is historic, historic. I’m not sure why, exactly. It looks like a typical grubby political compromise to me. Why not just leave it at that? Why the spurious attempt to endow it with some kind of importance that everybody knows it lacks? Pot roast isn’t filet mignon. Stop making asses of us all by insisting that it is.

I’d venture to say that the American people have had their fill of history. In the last decade we’ve seen an historic terrorist attack, two historic wars, the historic accretion of executive power, the historic elimination of historic constitutional rights, the historic Great Recession, and the historic election of a black president who, it deeply saddens me to say, is in danger of becoming an historic mediocrity, a honey-tongued Herbert Hoover.

All this in a county that is notoriously indifferent to history.

Truthfully I’m almost beyond caring about it. One group of slimy politicians called Republicans quibbled with another group of slimy politicians called Democrats over which of my limbs are expendable. American bombs are still falling abroad, Goldman Sachs is still making historic profits, and We the People are reduced to being helpless spectators to our own evisceration. That’s all we’re going to be with these kinds of ‘historic’ leaders.

By the way, here’s a lesser known part of the historic deal:

Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said the budget bill included his proposal to remove gray wolves in Montana and Idaho from the federal list of endangered species. This would enable the two states to manage their wolf populations and to allow hunting of the animals if they choose.
“This wolf fix isn’t about one party’s agenda,” Mr. Tester said. “It’s about what’s right for Montana and the West.”

I guess that’s the best that two hundred years of American democracy can achieve: screw the poor and kill the animals!

A Tale Of Two Histories

2011-04-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

This is the way history should be written. It’s from The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood (1938):

The year 1618 was like many others in those uneasy decades of armed neutrality which occur from time to time in the history of Europe. Political disturbances exploded intermittently in an atmosphere thick with the apprehension of conflict. Diplomatists hesitated, weighing the gravity of each new crisis, politicians predicted, merchants complained of unsteady markets and wavering exchanges, while the forty million peasants, on whom the cumbrous structure of civilization rested, dug their fields and bound their sheaves and cared nothing for the remote activities of their rulers.

Those were the days. Not the seventeenth century, mind you, but a time when historians still acknowledged their discipline as a branch of literature and knew the value of a good editor. Not so much anymore, I’m afraid. Alas, the following is the kind of clunky nonsense I had to read during my short and inglorious career as a grad student. It’s from Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (1991):

One might quarrel with some of the positions taken (the author is a sociologist, not a Roman historian), but it is nevertheless striking to find the degree of emphasis laid here on the “systematic moral life plan” and “transcendent ideological power in human history” offered by early Christianity in relation to its growth in the context of the Roman Empire. What is different, then, in these approaches from the familiar strategy in which Christian ideology plays a secondary role in relation to economic and institutional factors is the stress laid on articulation and ideology as dynamic factors in themselves.

The first example inspires you to keep reading, even if you don’t care a thing about the Thirty Years War; the second is like paddling a canoe through wet cement. The former is wise and worldly, relevant; the latter is lifeless and sterile, of interest to nobody but a group of cloistered academics. One breaches the realm of art; the other is, to use its own species of jargon, a “cultural production.”

Whenever I regret my decision to drop out of graduate school, I reread passages like example No. 2 and all my angst disappears. I squandered many sunny days wading through such awful stuff and, more painfully, struggling to write about it. It was like trying to wring sweat from a corpse. You can only lurch past words like “diachronic” and “hermeneutics” so many times before you cry out in revolt, “My kingdom for a concrete phrase!” and go running off to the nearest bar for a glass of something strong, a volume of Orwell’s essays tightly in hand.

Toxic Folly

2011-04-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

Somebody asked me other day if I thought the world was coming to an end. “No,” I answered, “The earth is doing what is always has done. We just happen to be in the way.”

Of course, we might be coming to an end, but that’s an entirely different issue. It does seem that the earth might be trying to shake us off as a dog would fleas, but I don’t think we’ll be exterminated by natural disasters. No, when we go down it will be as a result of our own ineradicable character flaws. As in a Greek tragedy, our innate defects are carrying us inevitably towards our demise. You know, like Napoleon’s ambition and Hamlet’s indecisiveness. Or are those examples too dramatic? Perhaps we’re more comparable to a stupid kid who jams a fork into a toaster or huffs too much model glue from a paper bag. When I look at our response to the nuclear disaster in Japan, I know which example I find more fitting.

As radioactivity blankets the globe, the leaders of this, the bestest, most splendoriforous country that God ever devised, tell us it’s all a-okay. You get more radiation on a plane, they assure us. There’s no need to go wobbly on nuclear power. We’re just going to learn how to do it better as a result of Japan’s mistakes. I swear, if John Boehner’s grand kids are born with flippers he’ll still insist that we keep pursuing nuclear energy. Ditto, I’m afraid, for Obama, although his flaw isn’t stupidity. It’s weakness. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that John McCain and Joe Lieberman also insist that nuclear is safe. Maybe they’re hoping that a little strontium-90 mixed in with their Ensure might be just the thing for erectile dysfunction. (Normally I wouldn’t poke fun at the elderly or the impotent, but in the case of those two I’ll happily make an exception.)

No amount of military failure deters us from war, and no amount of oil floating in the ocean deters us from off-shore drilling. Why would a little contaminated baby formula deter us from using nuclear power?

It might have taken a meteor to knock off the dinosaurs, but such drastic measures won’t be necessary for us.

Putting Kids To Work

2011-03-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

You can’t accuse Republicans of hiding their agenda. This would be funny if it didn’t stand a strong chance of passing:

Republican lawmakers are pushing a bill through the Maine Legislature that would rollback child labor laws enacted by the state in 1991.
The bill, LD 1346, establishes a “training wage” for employees under 20 years of age at $5.25 per hour for their first 180 days of employment and increases the amount of hours minors can legally work. The proposed “training wage” is over two dollars less than the state’s current minimum wage.
The bill also would eliminate the maximum hours a minor over 16 can work during school days and allow minors to work over 50 hours a week when school is not in session.
Another bill, LD 516, is headed to the Senate floor for a vote after being passed along party lines by a Senate committee, with Democrats voting against the measure. It would allow minors 16 years and older to work up to six hours a day and until 11pm on a school night.

If you’re eating or drinking something, swallow right now and put your glass down so you don’t choke: supporters of the bill say it will help kids save for college. $5.25 an hour! Yeah, Harvard here they come. And you thought conservatives didn’t care about jobs and education.

How long before they suggest not paying teens at all on the grounds that work builds character? It discourages sedentary lifestyles and can even prevent type II diabetes, doncha know. If this goes through, watch every Wal-Mart in Maine shitcan everyone over 20, hire a bunch of teenagers at “training wages,” and then advertise it as a public-spirited program that helps the youth of America.

If they start to lag on the job, they can be fortified with radiocative milk that California dairy farmers will now be looking to unload at cut-rate prices. Wal-Mart can deduct it right out of their paychecks.

What a great time this is for us history buffs. We’re going to get to see just what it was like to live in 1900.

Lilliputian Politics

2011-03-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I’m not the biggest fan of NPR. I do listen to it from time to time because it’s the only place to get any substantive news on the radio, but it’s mixed in with so much pretentious trivia that I just can’t stomach it for very long. I’ve shut it off many, many times in eye rolling embarrassment. And something about the hosts gets uncomfortably under my skin; they make me squirm, actually. Their quietly bland, maddeningly neutral personas give me lucid flashbacks of kindergarten, where a similar group of annoyingly soft spoken adults taught me how to finger paint and learn shapes. After every segment about, say, basket weaving in Ghana or a farmer who writes poems about cats, I expect one of them to come and say, “It’s medication time.”

I turned on NPR the morning after the 2004 elections, groggy, hungover, depressed, and heard some unctuous weasel gloating about how the Democrats were just going to have to get used to being a permanent minority party, going to have to learn how to be become docile pets and obey their Republican masters in the new conservative millennium. He dripped with smug condescension and the nice, soft, soothing, soporific host didn’t offer the merest peep of a critical response. He could have stolen her lunch money and she would have passively allowed it in the interests of ‘balance’. For a moment I thought I was in a state of hypnogogia, that twilight phase between sleep and wakefulness when you have the most vivid nightmares. It turns out I was only hearing the voice of Grover Norquist, the creepy little conservative neuter who admires Lenin’s political style and wants to shrink down government and strangle it in the bathtub. So much for NPR’s leftist agenda.

This why the House vote last week to defund NPR was such a silly farce. Why are the Republicans so gung-ho about getting rid of it? It only receives $5 million in federal funds, so the idea that this is a necessary budget cut is laughable. We give more to oil companies every year in subsidies. And, of course, we spend more on our military than every other country in the world combined, an amount that will probably go up as a result of “Operation Odyssey Dawn.” It’s like cutting Top Ramen out of your household budget after buying a forty-thousand dollar car and then lecturing the kids about the importance of thrift.

Besides, it won’t pass the Senate anyway and the Republicans are well aware of it. Everybody knows this had nothing to do with money and everything to do with politics and ideology. But what politics and what ideology? Are Talk of the Nation and Fresh Air really that subversive? As I see it, the biggest danger they pose is that you might fall asleep at the wheel while listening to them. It was a stupid play put on by Republicans for the benefit their drooling base, which just can’t bear the thought of a tiny fraction of their tax dollars funding anything with a smattering of intellectual content (no matter how feeble that content sometimes is). God forbid their children should be sneaking off to listen to threatening programs like Car Talk or Science Friday.

If it we didn’t live in such perilous times it would be funny: club wielding Republican dunces attacking wishy-washy liberal broadcasters in a Lilliputian quarrel over nothing much at all. But in the overall context of our very real problems this kind of petty nonsense is frightening. It’s like worrying about a hang nail when you’re dying of cancer.

He Didn’t Come From No Monkey

2011-03-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

Meet Florida Republican State Senator Stephen Wise. He doesn’t like evolution and thinks intelligent design should be taught in public schools. He’s sponsoring a bill to get intelligent design, which he calls “non- evolution,” included into the curriculum as a much needed counterweight to fact based science. The ironically named Sen. Wise has a pithy retort to Darwinism that should silence those fancy pants evolutionists once and for all. It should, in fact, be carved on a slab of granite and placed in front of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which, among other things, has an exhibit showing Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden with the nice, vegetarian kinds of dinosaurs.

This is it: “How come we still have apes if we came from them?”

Betcha can’t answer that, can ya?

The More Things Change …

2011-03-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

I was trawling through a used book store the other day and stumbled across a couple of gems by I.F. Stone, The Haunted Fifties and Polemics And Prophecies 1967-1970. I bought them both for a grand total of seven dollars, less than the cost of two gallons of gas in these parts. Such is the value we place on wisdom in this country. In thumbing through them, I’m struck by the depressing continuities in our politics. Truly, the more things change the more they stay the same. Here’s Stone describing the Democrats in 1955:

The Democrats will make capital in the West on power; keep mum on civil rights for Negroes; do nothing for labor; jump on Reds as hard as Republicans to prove their purity; exploit the discontent of the security program and at the same time kick up a fuss about cuts in the defense budget to show that the Republicans are the ones who are really “soft” about communism. The country, generally as contented as the Borden cow, will take all this without a moo as long as business holds up.

Sound familiar?

(Here he is on Donald Rumsfeld … Whoops. I mean John Foster Dulles: “Smooth is an inadequate word for Dulles. His prevarications are so polished as to be aesthetically pleasurable.”)

A Bridge Too Far?

2011-03-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

There’s at least one Republican out there who cares about unemployment and wants to do something about it:

Congressional candidate Jack Davis shocked local Republican leaders in a recent interview when he suggested that Latino farmworkers be deported -- and that African-Americans from the inner city be bused to farm country to pick the crops.
Several sources who were in the Feb. 20 endorsement interview with Davis confirmed his comments, which echo those he made to the Tonawanda News in 2008, when he said: “We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities. Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work.”

It’s somewhat heartening that the GOP establishment has officially repudiated Mr. Davis, who’ll now have to go slumming around among the tea partiers to get support for his candidacy. Said one Republican official, “Maybe in 1860 that might have been seen by some as an appropriate comment, but not now.”

Indeed, the Republicans don’t want to go as far back as 1860. They’ve always preferred wage slavery to chattel slavery. 1870 will do just fine.

The Millionaire Blues

2011-03-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

America’s millionaires are a little insecure about their status these days, and why shouldn’t they be? When the richest 400 people in the United States have a net worth of $1.27 trillion — more than fifty-percent of the population combined — a mere million dollars is chump change, a pittance. Simple millionaires just aren’t feeling rich anymore:

More than four out of ten American millionaires say they do not feel rich. Indeed many would need to have at least $7.5 million in order to feel they were truly rich, according to a Fidelity Investments survey.
Some 42 percent of the more than 1,000 millionaires surveyed by Fidelity said they did not feel wealthy. Respondents had at least $1 million in investable assets, excluding any real estate or retirement accounts.
“Every person in the survey is wealthy,” said Sanjiv Mirchandani, president of National Financial, a unit of Fidelity. “But they are still worried about outliving their assets.”
[…]
“They compare themselves to their peer group ... and they are also thinking about the long period they will have in retirement and want more assets” to fund their lifestyle, said Michael Durbin, president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services.

Chalk this up to one of the many ways that life is unfair. They made a million dollars but they still don’t get to feel rich, at least not in comparison with their peer group. Damn the luck. Thirty years ago they would have been sun gods, but now the poor bastards might as well take up bowling and drive Toyota Camry’s.

So millionaires are fretting about how not to outlive their assets during a prolonged and luxurious retirement. What a dilemma! I need a Valium and a glass of Cristal just thinking about it; maybe even an extra hour of Pilates to work out the fear. Of course, one could recommend that they postpone their retirement or adjust their ‘lifestyles’ to fit their income, but that would require them to think and act like mere commoners. It would force them to prioritize and maybe, gulp, make a few sacrifices. But what’s the use of being a rich American if you have to stoop to that? The juiciest perk of being wealthy in this country is that you never have to sacrifice anything at all, not for anyone or any reason whatsoever. That’s the point of the game. To suggest otherwise seems rude and un-American, blasphemous even, like farting in church. It’s just not done.

The iron laws of American etiquette are as follows: You never discuss politics or religion with your in-laws. You never ask a woman her age. You never point out that American troops aren’t always brave or heroic, and you never, ever, seriously suggest raising taxes on the rich. I’m not being snarky or hyperbolic. I mean it. In all of the chatter about cutting deficits, every alternative — even, to some extent, scaling down defense spending — is considered except one: increasing revenue by raising taxes on the rich. It’s not on the table.

It turns out, however, that our submerged class of forgotten millionaires is feeling a little better about their lot in life now than they were just two years ago. Whereas 42 percent of them don’t feel wealthy in the present year, that number was as high as 46 percent back in ’09, so progress has been made. If this trend continues, more than half of all millionaires should be feeling “moderately affluent” or “well-off” at about the same time the official unemployment rate hits twelve percent.

A Young Man With A Future

2011-03-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

Say what you want, this kid’s on his way:

At his high school graduation last year, Tyler Coyner told the audience his goal in life was to become a hedge fund manager. Coyner was the class’s salutatorian and finished his time at Pahrump Valley High School with a 4.54 grade point average. That number may be slightly higher than it ought to have been, as Coyner was the founder of a business that charged students money to raise their GPA’s, by breaking into the school’s computer system.
Police say Tyler Coyner, 19, was the ringleader in a group of 13 students who have been charged with conspiracy, theft and computer intrusion in connection with the case. Last year, Coyner somehow obtained a password to the Pahrump Valley High School’s grade system and, over the course of two semesters, offered to change grades in return for cash payments, police say.
Born with some serious business sense, the grade deal wasn’t the only thing Coyner had going on. Police apparently found “equipment for making fake driver’s licenses” in Coyner’s dorm room at the University of Nevada-Reno (in addition to a flat screen TV, allegedly borrowed from Wal-Mart). Anyway, back to Coyner’s dreams- as his seems to be a victimless crime, much like insider trading, anyone want to hook him up with a summer internship?

If he doesn’t wimp out and “find Jesus” like so many other prisoners, he should have a bright career on Wall Street.

I’m not a parent, so thankfully I’ve been spared the trauma of having a child approach me and say, “Daddy, when I grow up I want to be a hedge fund manager.” But if that ever happened, I think I would react with the same horrified shock as if I’d walked in on him molesting his little sister or mutilating kittens. His parents should have seen the warning signs.

Pulling Up Stakes

2011-03-12T12:12:00.001-08:00

For the last few hours, I’ve developed a funny urge to move back east. I don’t know why …

They’re No Good At Accounting Either

2011-03-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

Here’s the good news. All this talk about spending cuts and deficit reduction might be opening people’s eyes to the big, fat, bloated, stinking, shitting, $700 billion dollar a year pig in the middle of the room, defense spending.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money from public retirement and health programs, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday showed.
The poll found 51 percent of Americans support reducing defense spending, and only 28 percent want to cut Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor. A mere 18 percent back cuts in the Social Security retirement program.

Hurray! So rather than beating up on public service workers and grinding down what’s left of the middle class, let’s start cutting the fat from the Pentagon first. It’s really not that complicated, is it?

Uh, well, here’s the bad news. We’re not really sure what or where the fat is:

Treasury assistant secretary Richard Gregg told a Congressional panel there were “serious financial reporting issues” at the Pentagon, which in the current proposed budget before the Congress receives $553 billion, or some 15% of all US annual spending.
The remarks came after the US government watchdog the General Accounting Office (GAO) named problematic defense accounting standards as the primary reason it could not produce a full assessment of government spending in fiscal 2010.
The GAO cited “serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DoD) that have prevented DoD’s financial statements from being auditable.”
Gregg said that Treasury, Defense, the GAO and the White House budget office have agreed a strategy to resolve some of DoD’s “more significant accounting and audit weaknesses.”
The GAO report on fiscal 2010, released in December, said the auditor had no way of being sure if the defense department had the assets it recorded and whether they were in the condition claimed.
“As in past years, DoD did not maintain adequate systems or have sufficient records to provide reliable information on these assets,” it said.

They can’t win wars and they can’t manage the books. Sounds like a wasteful public agency to me. Sounds like there are a whole lot of incompetent service workers sucking off the public tit here. Not as bad as kindergarten teachers in Wisconsin, mind you, but still pretty bad — after all, most Pentagon employees are loyal Americans devoted to the defense of our country, whereas teachers usually vote democratic and listen to NPR.

Well, “problematic accounting standards” work just dandy for Wall Street. Why not use them at the Pentagon as well?

Bottom line, don’t expect ‘significant’ cuts in defense any time soon.

Team Players

2011-02-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

Would that we had more leaders who were willing to resign or get fired. People who’d speak truthfully and with common sense, even if it damaged their careers. In short, leaders with conscience and genuine conviction. In 1915 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned when he saw that Woodrow Wilson was steering us into the First World War. Such an act at that level of government today is unthinkable. I mean, honestly, can you envision somebody like Joseph Biden or Hillary Clinton resigning over a matter of principle? The whole idea is not only laughable but weirdly anachronistic, like wearing powdered wigs and dueling. People just don’t do that anymore.

I’m not talking about obscure functionaries, low level diplomats, or any of the honest yeoman who went into government service thinking it was a noble calling and belatedly discovered that it isn’t. I know some of them can and do quit their posts for moral reasons. I mean high profile figures, secretaries of state, defense, vice presidents, the types who show up on Meet The Press and whose actions could, as they say in the mainstream media, “resonate” with the American people.

But it just doesn’t seem to happen. The upper ranks of US officialdom are dominated by blinkered careerists who speak in cliches and instinctively go with the flow for the sake of their own advancement. They adopt the institutional group think of whatever organ they serve and never question its biases or limitations, even when, as in the case of the US foreign policy, such group think is almost always spectacularly, mindbogglingly wrong. Collapse of the Soviet Union? We didn’t see it coming. 9/11? We didn’t see it coming. We’re not going to get bogged down in Afghanistan, we’re gonna rock their world. Insurgency in Iraq? No way, they’re going to welcome us as liberators. It’s going to be like D-Day all over again! Revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya? Well, again, we didn’t see it coming.

I’ve always thought that Robert Gates typifies this mentality. Here’s a man who’s spent his entire life worming through the innards of establishment institutions, the Eagle Scouts, the Young Republicans, the Air Force, CIA (which he even headed), the National Security Council, and, of course, the Defense Department. It’s as if he was born to spend his old age on a golf course with George H. W. Bush and James Baker. It’s true that he doesn’t inspire the same antipathy one feels for his immediate predecessor, but that’s because he doesn’t inspire anything at all. He’s just a dull, colorless company man who obediently follows orders and never rocks the boat. That’s how he got where he is.

So imagine my surprise when I read this:

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

This seemed like a pretty striking thing for the secretary of defense to say. Not only does he appear to be criticizing current military policies, but he’s taking a kick at Rumsfeld as well. Maybe Good Soldier Gates, former Eagle Scout, harbors a few original opinions after all.

If you go to the full text of the speech you’ll see another interesting quote:

And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more – we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.

We have never once gotten it right! Finally, I thought, a government official is spilling the beans when it can actually make a difference, rather than waiting for the dust to settle and then offering the “right” opinion in his memoirs. At this point, you’re rooting for him to take the next logical step and repudiate the interventionist policies that produced so much failure in the first place.

But, as you might imagine, he doesn’t. It turns out he has no problem with multiple interventions abroad, we just need to learn how to do them more successfully. His answer? Abandon full-scale invasions and go back to using “unconventional capabilities.” You know, like the ones we used in Vietnam with such great success.

From the look of things, the Army will not repeat the mistakes of the past, where irregular warfare was shunted to the side after Vietnam. The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq – invading, pacifying, and administering a large third world country – may be low. But in what General Casey has called “an era of persistent conflict,” those unconventional capabilities will still be needed at various levels and in various locations. Most critically to prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly – and controversial – large-scale American military intervention.

Alas, Gates is merely his master’s voice. A team player. He simply offers a few tactical changes to the doctrine of preemptive war so that our rotting imperial project can keep lurching along. Don’t use tanks anymore. Use psy-ops and guerrillas instead. No doubt his audience of West Point cadets took it all to heart.

Libya here we come!

AmericHuns

2011-02-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

Good luck with this.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.
“The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,” the statement said.

Of course we changed their city in ugly and destructive ways. Or course we displayed deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. Take a look at what we’ve done to our own landscape, peacefully and of our own free will:

This is a country that produced McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dancing with the Stars, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Jersey Shore, Eminem and the people who love him, and Lady Gaga. These things aren’t just tasteless excretions at the fringes of our culture. These things are our culture, the Gothic cathedrals of a trashy, consumerist age where everything is for sale and nothing is built to last. We’re a people who eagerly gather around the television on Super Bowl Sunday to watch commercials, for Christ’s sake. Our entire country is becoming a vast, generic strip mall that’s increasingly devoid of character and individuality. Most of us, having spent our entire lives in this environment, don’t even realize there’s anything wrong with that.

We are, as the saying goes, a people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Call me cynical, but I don’t think appeals to our aesthetic sensibilities are likely to gain much traction.

MBAs For Jesus

2011-02-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

The term “Christian business professional” gives me a mild sense of visceral unease, like the words gonorrhea, peace officer, botulism and smegma. It just doesn’t sit well. You’ve seen them, unwrinkled, affluent white Republican types driving a Cadillac Escalade along the 405 freeway in Orange County, California, or some equally soulless and manicured place; the obligatory ‘Support Our Troops’ magnet on the back bumper next to the Jesus fish, cell phones glued to their ears, their faith and their earthly desires joined together as one. Untroubled minds in an untroubled universe. Dante never envisioned such horrors.

But then Dante never read the Wall Street Journal. For some reason I occasionally do. Pardon the lack of links, but I’m getting this from the paper copy and the online version is, of course, behind a pay wall. Long live free markets!

Friday there was an op-ed piece about a group of up-and-coming young Christian MBAs involved in something called the faith-at-work movement, “Doing God’s Work — At The Office.” They’ve solved a dilemma that plagued previous generations of Christian professionals, namely, how to reconcile the requirements of their faith with the requirements of business. In other words, how to get rich and still get to Heaven. I’ve never personally known any Christians who lost sleep over this, but apparently they exist. Their solution is, I dare say, inspired:

Their mindset is captured by Dave Evans, co-founder of the videogame giant Electronic Arts and a design professor at Stanford. Mr Evans talks more like a theologian than a former Apple engineer. He points out that Genesis says humans were created in the image of God, so all of our work — not just church work — is holy. We are called to be co-creators, with God, of a flourishing life on Earth. “It is really a profound act of engaging the kingdom of God.”

See how easy that is? All work is technically God’s work, so all work is okay. God made dirt so dirt don’t hurt, brothers and sisters. Do you design weapons at Raytheon? No problem, it’s God’s work. Do you peddle synthetic CDOs to unsuspecting dupes who will go bankrupt as a result of your advice? Rejoice. It’s God’s work, my friend. Are you a claims adjuster for a health insurance company whose profits depend on denying people coverage? Relax. Bend your knee and pray for two minutes. God will tell you that it’s all okay. That old lady was meant to get sick and die. The fact that you allowed it to happen means you are an agent of God’s will. See you at the company convention in Aruba!

And tell St. Augustine to take his hair shirt and shove it. Making a buck is a profound act of engaging the kingdom of God.

Every year they have a conference at Yale where, presumably, they come up with shrewder ways to proselytize at work or something, I don’t know. Maybe they conjure up bigger and better ‘Christian’ rationalizations for things like mass layoffs, wage cuts, outsourcing and political lobbying. You know, activities that characterized the life of Christ when he walked among us. I have a funny feeling there’s a scandal involving booze/drugs/hookers looming in this conference’s future, but for now the attendees are still pure. Frighteningly pure. Behold the CEO of tomorrow:

“I believe God has called me to the business world,” says Brian Myhre, who will graduate from Harvard business School in May and return to work at the Boston Consulting Group. At last year’s conference, says Mr. Myhre, “I appreciated the speakers who have led organizations and are able to treat employees as Jesus would and distribute profits as Jesus would.”

(There are a couple of remarks about how to treat employees. These lambs of Christ are planning to be the bosses, motherfuckers.)

So do you think this means they’ll treat their workers fairly and pay them a living wage, as Jesus would? Do you think that these future financial analysts and CEOs will donate their bonuses to charity and voluntarily render unto Caesar for the sake of those less fortunate, as Jesus would? Do you think so?

Me neither.

Gradualism

2011-02-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

This is unfortunate, but we have to get serious about spending cuts and deficit reduction. There’s simply no other way to restore fiscal sanity to our nation:

President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget will cut several billion dollars from the government’s energy assistance fund for poor people, officials briefed on the subject told National Journal.
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, would see funding drop by about $2.5 billion from an authorized 2009 total of $5.1 billion. The proposed cut will not touch the program’s emergency reserve fund, about $590 million, which can be used during particularly harsh cold snaps or extended heat spells, three officials told National Journal.

Nobody ever said Winning the Future was going to be easy.

Of course, we don’t have to completely lose our heads over all this deficit reduction stuff. Oh no. No, sir! Our evolution toward a more efficient capitalism, free of government interference, will be gradual enough prevent too much shock to the system:

Since 2003, some of the world’s biggest financial companies, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase and Prudential, have taken advantage of a federal subsidy that will cost taxpayers $10.1 billion — and most of the public has never heard of it.
Investors have used the program, called New Markets Tax Credits, to help build more than 300 upscale projects, including hotels, condominiums, office buildings and a car museum, on streets far from poverty, according to Treasury Department records released through a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

“Some of the subsidized luxury projects,” we are informed, “may not have required federal aid at all.” Would that have been the car museum or the condos? It doesn’t say.

No doubt the deficit hawks will target this egregious example of government waste after they slash the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. They’re probably just moving slowly and with caution. It’s called gradualism.

Rome wasn’t built — or destroyed — in a day.

A Good Man Down

2011-01-29T11:04:00.001-08:00

A long time family friend tried to kill himself the other night, and he did it in a most unusual way.

First some background. He served two combat tours in Vietnam with the special forces, and rumor has it he was involved in a lot of very, very hairy shit. He never speaks of it at all. I mean never at all, zip. Stupid me, I slipped up one day and asked him about it.

“What I did in Vietnam was bullshit,” he said, and that was that, period. His tone was firm and the meaning was crystal clear: drop the subject.

Underneath his gruff, stubborn manner is a very kind and decent man. He was a good father to his children and raised his second wife’s kids as though they were his own. It’s not a cliche to say that he’d give you the shirt off his back. He’s also funnier than hell. But Vietnam scarred him, and he dealt with it through a combination of alcohol and meth. He’s also diabetic. Bad luck always attracts more bad luck. In his case some of it is self-inflicted, but a lot of it is not. His wife recently died and he’s been a broken man ever since. Back on speed. Back on the bottle. Got fired from his job. A full cycle of defeat. He looks like terrible too, frail, emaciated, unkempt. It’s no secret to anyone that he’s completely given up on life.

The other night he enticed a cop to pull him over and then sped away. After being chased for a while he finally stopped, at which point another cop wheeled around to block him from the front. While they were still sitting in their cars, he put his truck in reverse and slammed into one of them. Than he gassed it forward and crashed into the other. At this point the details get sketchy and contradictory. One person told me he drew a gun, another says he didn’t. I don’t know. But police opened fire on him and shot him in the hand. Everyone spontaneously reached the same conclusion. He wanted to get shot. He tried to commit suicide by cop.

He’s still alive, but his story is over. He’s going to die in prison.

Meanwhile, according to Raw Story, the lovely and gracious Michele Bachman —avid support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is proposing to cut spending on veteran’s health and disability benefits. My hero.

Tell Us Something We Don’t Know

2011-01-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

This will probably come as a shock to most of you, but Goldman Sachs robbed us and then lied about it:

Goldman Sachs collected $2.9 billion from the American International Group as payout on a speculative trade it placed for the benefit of its own account, receiving the bulk of those funds after AIG received an enormous taxpayer rescue, according to the final report of an investigative panel appointed by Congress.
[…]
The details underscore the degree to which Goldman — the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history — benefited directly from the massive emergency bailout of the nation’s financial system, a deal crafted on the watch of then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had previously headed the bank.
“If these allegations are correct, it appears to have been a direct transfer of wealth from the Treasury to Goldman’s shareholders,” said Joshua Rosner, a bond analyst and managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co., after he was read the relevant section of the report. “The AIG counterparty bailout, which was spun as necessary to protect the public, seems to have protected the institution at the expense of the public.”

Goldman initially claimed that the money from the AIG bailout went to their clients. They didn’t know anything about $2.9 billion going directly into their own accounts. It’s a plausible lie. When you make $22 billion in profits over a two year period, it’s easy to overlook a measly $2.9 billion. All those zeros can be confusing. Besides, as George W. Bush once observed, accounting issues are not always black and white.

Shared Norms For A New Reality

2011-01-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

I was hoping to attend this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, but I seem to have misplaced my invitation. What a pity, because this year’s theme sounds pretty deep, “Shared Norms for a New Reality.” Looks like I’ll have to follow the proceedings from afar, which will be a bit limiting because the press is barred from covering some of the events. So we won’t get to keep up with all of the action, such as one panel discussion featuring the President of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn: “The International Financial System: Back On Track?”

I guess secrecy is going to play a role in the new reality just as it did in the old, and not all of the new norms will be shared.

At least I’ll be in good company, because “none of the U.S.’s main financial regulators, such as Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary L. Schapiro or U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler are on the list of participants.” Fancy that. Maybe they’re busy this weekend. Maybe they just don’t ski. It’s a brand new reality out there, so who can say? Regulators are no fun to party with anyway.

So what’s this new reality they’re talking about? Things seem pretty much the same to me. Gravity is still operating. The same laws of physics still seem to apply. Life is just like it always has been, a few spots of color on a field of gray. Eat, sleep, go to work; eat, sleep, go to work; eat, sleep —hey, look at that, I got laid! — go to work. (Life, said H.L. Mencken, isn’t so much a tragedy as a continual process of standing in line.)

Nevertheless, the greatest minds of contemporary civilization plus Bono are gathering at a posh Swiss resort to have seminars on just this very topic, so something must be in the works.

Something is. Here’s the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab:

WEF founder Klaus Schwab explained that this new reality means understanding the impact of globalization and the Internet. “We are now living in a completely digitalized world and a completely globalized world, so we have to find some new mechanisms and values to deal with this post-digitalized and post-globalized world,” he told CNN’s Richard Quest.
He stressed the same problems of unemployment and inflation exist but “we deal with those problems in a completely new context.”
“For example, you have the shift in the geopolitical and geoeconomic center from north to south, WikiLeaks, I could go on and on.”

I think I know what he means but I’m not quite sure, which suggests a good theme for next year’s meeting: “Moving Toward a Post-Jargon World, Free of Meaningless Verbiage Designed to Bullshit and Confuse People.”

Digitalization and globalization are, I presume, code words for technology and free trade, both of which have put a lot of people out of work, diminished living standards, poisoned the environment, and created an astronomically wealthy elite who are deliberately attempting to subvert and destroy democratic institutions all around the world, most of which, especially here in the US, are empty hulks already.

That, as I see it, is the “new context” he’s referring to in which to deal with things like unemployment and inflation. Fair enough. The problem is that most of the elites who are attending this pretentious ski trip are completely in thrall to the free trade/free market ideology that created the mess in the first place. They have no intention of questioning their basic assumptions on economics or how the world should work. In fact, they have no desire to solve any of these problems anyway, none. For them the party’s just getting started, and what they’re really seeking is a way to keep it going despite the obvious disasters it has produced.

You’ll never guess how some of them propose to do it:

Nestlé CEO and WEF co-chair Paul Bulke explained the post-crisis reality will require a complete re-think of our priorities and value systems to address the current volatility and uncertainty in the world.
“In the short term we must manage the debt crisis, we can’t continue living beyond our means,” he said in an interview posted on the WEF website. “We have to organize ourselves in response to new challenges and refresh our regulations, especially in the developed world.
“But over-regulation is not a good option. You cannot regulate honesty for example. I’m a true believer in a principled approach to business, rather than an excessively rule-based system which will only asphyxiate initiative and growth. [italics mine]
“The wiser choice is to agree to share norms for our new reality based on strong and explicit global principles -- the very ingredients needed to fuel development.”

Surprise, surprise. The solution to the problems caused by free market capitalism is more free market capitalism. Brave New Reality demands that we live within our means, i.e., we must cut social spending and impose austerity measures, and avoid an ‘excessively rule-based’ system that stifles initiative and inhibits growth, i.e., we must deregulate businesses and lower taxes.

Somewhere along the way, businessmen will agree to become honest and behave themselves as a matter of general principle, a shared norm. It’s no accident that this fellow refers to himself as a true believer.

The free market cultists have the ball on the goal line, and now that the defense is weak and injured they’re trying to jam it into the end zone.

But none of this really matters anyway. The real purpose of this bogus event is to make deals and schmooze with the rich and powerful. It’s all about “chasing successful people who want to be seen with other successful people. That’s the game.”

$52,000 gets you basic membership, another $20,000 gets you in.

Free Market Solutions

2011-01-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

Every morning I wake up praising God and every night I go to bed an atheist. Similarly, I wake up thinking things can’t be that bad in this country, and then I look around and realize that, well, they are, they are. Is it really possible, I ask myself, that a nation’s richest and most powerful people can be so utterly lacking in patriotism and common decency that they’ll sit back and rake in money hand-over-fist while their country rapidly devolves into a third world garbage dump?

The answer is a resounding, “Yes, it is!” To paraphrase something I heard Thom Hartmann say, they don’t mind being rich men in a poor country. In fact, they are actually making money off of our impoverishment:

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money. In the video posted below, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is “a very important business to JP Morgan” and that it is doing very well. Considering the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has exploded from 26 million in 2007 to 43 million today, one can only imagine how much JP Morgan’s profits in this area have soared. But doesn’t this give JP Morgan an incentive to keep the number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program as high as possible?

In a more reputable industry — namely, the porn business — this is known as double penetration. On Wall Street it’s just smart business. If you’re good enough at it, Obama will call you a savvy businessman. Its most expert practitioners might even be rewarded with a job in the White House. The rest of us are left naked, gagging, and covered in filth.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, once claimed in an interview that he was just a banker “doing God’s work.” Now his counterpart at JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, can make the same claim. He’s helping poor people.

He’s also helping workers, because when people who use these debit cards have problems with them and need assistance, their calls are routed to workers … in India!

So what about the question raised in the excerpt above? Doesn’t this give JP Morgan a perverse incentive to beef up welfare rolls and maintain high unemployment?

No. According to a JP Morgan executive, up to 40% of people on food stamps have jobs. That is, many people who work part-time at Wal-Mart for minimum wage are still eligible for some forms of public assistance. So JP Morgan doesn’t have an interest in keeping us out of work. They only have an interest in depressing wages and keeping us partly out of work. That means you can have a fullfilling career as a cashier or a stock clerk and enjoy the ennobling feeling that comes from using food stamps. Is this a great country or what?

(h/t Politics In The Zeros)

Money Well Spent

2011-01-19T14:27:00.000-08:00

Last June, I posted something about the Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV as it’s known in the business. It’s basically a blimp designed to “provide commanders with real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information, all from 20,000 feet.” The Army had awarded Northrup Grumman a five-year, $517 million contract to produce three of these awesome beauties, which are guaranteed to bring about victory in Afghanistan. But just in case the LEMV doesn’t live up to expectations, there will soon be an even larger, more ungainly blimp on the horizon, blocking out the setting sun and gobbling up what remains of our money, the Blue Devil airship:

No, wait, that’s not it. This is:

This is from the article in Wired:

Come this fall, there will be a new and extremely powerful supercomputer in Afghanistan. But it won’t be in Dave Petraeus’ headquarters in Kabul or at some three-letter agency’s operations center in Kandahar. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.
That is, if an ambitious, $211 million crash program called “Blue Devil” works out as planned. As of now, the airship’s “freakishly large” hull — seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp’s — has yet to be put together.
Provided the Air Force can get the blimp in the air, and the gadgets on the blimp. The first flight is scheduled for October 15.

It would be tempting to rant about the despicable folly of a declining superpower wasting money on blimps for a doomed war effort, particularly as growing numbers of its own people live on the edge of destitution. We’ve got a so-called ‘cat-food commission’ recommending ways to whittle down our already inadequate social safety-net. Economists talk of chronic high-employment as the ‘new normal’ like they’re discussing the latest trends in high fashion. And our president, apparently enjoying his seat at the big kid’s table, writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal decrying the evils of government regulation, as if a few overzealous bureaucrats and a little red tape are the only things standing between us and a new economic utopia (and he’s unleashing a plan to do something about it, damn it). Amid all of this upside down, surrealistic moral perversion comes word that we’ve got $211 million to spend on blimps for a war that our own generals privately admit is a failure.

Once again, we’re left to wonder if our leaders are evil or merely stupid. The most accurate answer, I’m afraid, is an Obamian “a little bit of both.” Sure, this project will employ lots of people for the time being. It will also occupy a few techno geeks who, indifferent to the human consequences of their work, will gush about the orgasmic wonders of the Blue Devil’s supercomputer like it’s the greatest thing since Legos. Gosh, Mr. Peabody, with the equivalent of two thousand core servers on board, we can process up to 300 terabytes per hour. Cool! (Translation: They’ll be able to spy on more people more quickly and kill them more efficiently than ever before).

In short, it will keep the military-industrial complex clanking along for a little while longer. So break out the popcorn and soda and let’s celebrate.

That’s the stupid. Now for the evil.

We’re wasting money we don’t have on things we don’t need, and our political and economic elites (redundant?) are hopelessly devoid of will and imagination. They can’t come up with a single way to employ significant numbers of people unless it involves making weapons and killing people. This is appalling and irresponsible. It is blind and stupid and ultimately suicidal. But it’s also beside the point. From our leader’s perspective, the money we’re spending on things like LEMV’s and Blue Devil surveillance blimps isn’t being wasted at all. It’s being put to a very practical use. The fact is, we’re not developing weapons designed to win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; we’re using Iraq and Afghanistan as laboratories for perfecting weapons designed for use against us.

All of this super-duper bitchin’ technology will be hitting the streets (and skies) of America right at the time our abused and exploited population finally wakes up, realizes how ruthlessly it’s being screwed, and starts getting unruly. It’s already happening. Just recently, the Army deployed something called the Active Denial System to Afghanistan “for testing.” It’s a giant mobile taser that shoots a non-lethal heat ray that makes the victim feel like they’re being roasted alive, but, theoretically, causes no lasting damage.

(A spokesperson for something called the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, which is the Orwellian outfit in control of this device, insists that it doesn’t cause a burning pain, merely an “intolerable heating sensation, like opening an oven door.” Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall.)

The Army claims they were never actually used because they were “not politically tenable” and there were some minor, unresolved technical glitches, such as a “potential for death.” But that hasn’t stopped Raytheon from devising a smaller version of the Active Denial System called the Silent Guardian which is now being used in the L.A. County Jail. The National Institute of Justice wants Raytheon to make a portable, hand-held model that can be shot like a pistol or placed under a rifle. The wheels are in motion.

So while we stand in the unemployment line, our government dispenses public money to Northrup Grumman and Raytheon, who then create weapons that can be used to batter us into submission when we finally get sick and tired of standing in the unemployment line. A perfect circle.

It’s not a waste of resources. It’s money well spent. You’ll see.

Towards A New Sociology

2011-01-12T10:11:00.000-08:00

George Will weighs in on the Tucson shootings, and points the way towards a new method of sociological analysis:

It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.
The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.
And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today’s (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, “climate of hate.”
Demystification of the world opened the way for real science, including the social sciences. And for a modern characteristic. And for charlatans.
A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

I’m not aware of many people who think that all human behavior can be traced to its social environment. I’m not positive about this, but I think most social scientists — as well as most laymen — would argue that the human psyche is formed by both nature and nurture. It’s not exclusively the product of one or the other. But even so, could such an idea properly be called a superstition, no different than believing thunder is caused by the gods? There is no evidence that Thor causes thunder; there is evidence that a person’s surroundings influence their personality development. One is an unwarranted assumption with no basis in fact. The other is a scientific theory that can be tested and evaluated.

For example, what would happen if you took the son of a successful philosophy professor, gave him a privileged upbringing, and then sent him to Oxford and Princeton for some clever social engineering? There’s reason to believe that he’d become a pompous conservative intellectual with a seething hatred of the poor, the working class, and liberals in general. I can think of one prominent example right off the top of my head.

Having grown up in such soft, secure circumstances where his future was assured and he would never know the pain of labor, debt or anxiety, it would be easy for him to conclude that the world is a basically well-ordered place. From which flows a political philosophy. It is actually the crux of conservatism. Since the world is basically fine, those who would seek to change it are a potentially dangerous menace. They are, at best, naive do-gooders. At worse, they are wicked levelers driven by a sense of envy and failure. It’s not his fault they lacked the prenatal foresight to be born into a prosperous family. Nor is he responsible for their inability to succeed in this, the best of all possible worlds. Regardless, if they get their way, it might screw up what for him and other conservatives is a pretty good gig. And it is why there is a reflex to blame progressives first.

Conservatism is little more than a smug, elaborate rationalization for established privilege. If the barefoot serfs in the tea party don’t recognize this and realize they are being played for suckers, that’s a pity. They are the products of a bad environment, and that bad environment is itself the product of a predatory and dishonest political philosophy.

George Will is right about one thing, though. Bad social science does open the door for charlatans and political opportunists who, in the guise of experts, can shrewdly deceive the ignorant. Take this example, written in 2008 as a response to then candidate Obama’s comment that some bitter Americans “cling to guns or religion” in tough times:

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a “paranoid style” of politics rooted in “status anxiety,” etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.
Obama voiced such liberalism with his “bitterness” remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

Here, clearly, is a half-baked explanation serving political opportunism. There’s no evidence that Obama has ever read Richard Hofstadter. Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t. Maybe Obama’s liberalism —such as it is — came from some other source entirely. Maybe it’s just a consequence of the random and the inexplicable in human experience. We simply don’t know. How can you seriously suggest that a comment Obama made in 2008 is the direct result of his having somehow imbibed the ‘spirit’ of a dead historian?

And where did Obama’s embrace of Wall Street come from? Milton Friedman, who earned his PhD from Columbia University? Surely Dr. Friedman must have left some residue behind for Obama to absorb as well?

That’s what you get when you go postulating causations! The writer of that piece should have known better, because the writer of that piece was, after all, George Will. But you already knew that.

So I guess the first principle of a non-charlatan based sociology is this: Environment doesn’t effect behavior except when it does, and it usually only does so if it suits George Will’s biases. Perfect. All else is but a misguided attempt to banish “randomness and the inexplicable from human experience,” the foolish hobgoblin of many modern minds.

So, if Sarah Palin exhorts her groupies not to retreat, but reload, or if Sharon Angle blathers on about Second Amendment solutions, or if Glenn Beck openly fantasizes about killing Michael Moore, it’s not likely to influence some gun nut’s behavior. It’s all good in the hood.

On the other hand, the spirit of Richard Hofstadter, which mysteriously permeates the halls of Columbia University — the restless Ghost of Liberal Condescension Past — had a direct, traceable influence Obama’s conduct in 2008. Perfect.

There is no such thing as a “climate of hate” that can influence behavior. There is a climate of liberal condescension that can. Got it.

I can’t wait for lesson number two in Willian sociology, although I already know what it is: The virtues of the ad hominem argument; or, it’s not called hypocrisy when conservatives do it.

Miracle On Wall Street

2010-12-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Here’s a nice human interest story just in time for the holidays. An informal poll of 98 Wall Street bankers conducted by Esquire magazine found that two them — count them, two — thought their bonuses were too high and they actually deserved less. Forget that 56% thought they deserved more, or that the largest banks set aside more money for bonuses than the GDP of thirteen foreign countries combined, and that unemployment remains chronically high with no real prospect of improvement. Forget that our economy is in the dump and that the savvy businessmen who created this mess, rather than attempting to change it (or being sent to prison), are carrying on as usual, swinging from the chandeliers and pissing in the sink like a horde of billionaire Visigoths with no thought for tomorrow. No, let’s focus on the positives. In this case, a genuine Christmas miracle.

The next time you feel like taking a pitchfork to the banksters, remember there are at least two of them out there who have some measure of decency. They’ve obviously reached that stage of development when the first faint stirrings of morality begin to emerge. Kudos for that. They must have come from two parent homes. Unfortunately, they’re still not fully adult. When asked how they planned to spend all that money, one of the two answered, “A big-ass Mac and a lot of taxi cabs.”

A big-ass Mac and a lot of taxi cabs. Chalk up another victory for trickle-down economics! And shake your head once more at the mind-numbing immaturity of the American aristocracy.

Fidelity, Bravery, And Integrity

2010-12-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

You’ll be happy to know that the FBI is staying one step ahead of child pornographers. Take this example out of Philadelphia. It’s sure to elicit groans of relief from all concerned citizens:

She’s not on the most-wanted list, but yes, the FBI did issue an alert about Barbie.
The doll.
Apparently, they were simply trying to give law enforcement agencies a heads up — that the new “Video Girl Barbie” comes with a hidden camera, which could be used to record child pornography.
“The alert’s intent was to ensure law enforcement agencies were aware that the doll, like any other video-capable equipment, could contain evidence and to not disregard such an item during a search,” the FBI explained in a statement.

In other words, during the course of a search, it’s imperative that agents remember to raid the toy box. You never know, a group of armed men stealing some little girl’s Barbie doll might be the only thing that keeps that little girl safe from predatory adults.

By the FBI’s own admission, these Barbies haven’t ever been used in a crime (yet). They’re just guessing that they could be. They have no experience or empirical data to go on, just a hunch. This means that some enterprising G-Man, probably working alone in a quiet, solitary place where he wouldn’t be disturbed, gleaned all these dark and prurient uses for “Video Girl Barbie” solely on the basis of his own instinct and imagination. I bet you couldn’t have done that. I know I couldn’t. But hey, we’re not professionals, are we?

Somewhere J. Edgar Hoover is smiling, although he’s probably trying to send a desperate message from beyond the grave to all of his agents in the field: Don’t forget the Ken doll!

Gays In The Military

2010-12-08T12:59:00.000-08:00

Here’s a letter written in 1779 by one young soldier in the Continental Army to another:

Cold in my professions, warm in friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power by actions rather than words to convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that till you bade us adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

Later, the same author, apparently feeling somewhat jilted, wrote his friend again: “I have written five or six letters since you left Philadelphia and I should have written you more had you made proper return. But, like a jealous lover, when I thought you slighted my caress, my affection was alarmed and my vanity piqued.”

How did those two queens get in the Army, anyway? Seeing as how homosexuals disrupt unit cohesion and lead to an overall decrease in troop morale, it’s a miracle we went on to beat the British. I guess we dodged a bullet there, whew!

Oh, by the way, the author of those letters was Alexander Hamilton. He was writing to one John Laurens, a fellow with whom he shared a very, um, strong friendship until 1782, when Laurens was killed by the British. Hamilton’s son later published their correspondence, but felt it prudent to redact a few lines from the first letter quoted above. “I must not publish the whole of this,” he scribbled in the margins. Hmm.

That’s my contribution to the DADT debate. Repeal the dumb policy already and let’s move on to more important issues.

If You See Something, Say Something

2010-12-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Yet another reason not to shop at Walmart, brought to you by the Department of Homeland Security:

Shoppers at Walmart will soon have something other than glossy magazines and chewing gum to look at when in the checkout line: A “video message” from the Department of Homeland Security asking shoppers to look out for “suspicious” activity and report it immediately.
It’s part of a new Department of Homeland Security program that could see Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s face on video screens in malls, retail outlets and hotels across the United States.
The Walmart video, which will soon be launched at 230 locations nationwide and may eventually be expanded to nearly 600 locations in 27 states, features Napolitano thanking the retailer by name for participating in the program.
Napolitano then says: “If you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store, say something immediately. Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help, ask a Walmart manager for assistance.”

The good news is that this program will be conducted just as incompetently as everything else they do; the bad news is that incompetence never deters them from plunging forward.

“In the coming months, the Department will continue to expand the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign nationally with public education materials and outreach tools designed to help America’s businesses, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe,” DHS said in a statement.

You know, it’s about time big government teamed up with big business to keep the country safe. It’s the one thing that’s been lacking in our otherwise healthy civic life. I recommend posting mug shots of Julian Assange throughout all the stores. Maybe make the employees wear little buttons on their vests that cheerfully warn us against visiting Wikileaks?

What marvelous synergy. Walmart makes you fat, the Department of Homeland Security makes you fearful. Working together, they’ll make you a snitch, too! Soon, they’ll bring about the almost complete uglification of the American character.

So DHS wants us to report suspicious activity, eh? Fine. From now on, I’m going to notify them about everything I see in the Wall Street Journal or hear in a Pentagon press briefing.

Down Goes Palin, Up Comes Something Worse

2010-11-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

We Americans deserve some good news for a change, don’t we? Unfortunately, we ain’t gettin’ any:

(CNN) – Sarah Palin may not have the biggest fan in former first lady Barbara Bush.
“I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful,” Barbara Bush said. “And she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.”
Bush, along with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, spoke to CNN’s Larry King in an interview set to air Monday.
President Bush discussed the Tea Party movement, and although he said “some of the ideas make a lot of sense,” he said he isn’t sure how the new movement will fit into the larger political landscape.

We’re not sure where the Tea Party movement fits into the landscape, and we hope Sarah Palin stays in Alaska.

It looks like the country club wants to put the Tea Party back in its pen, and what better way to begin the process than by cutting off its standard-bearer at the knees? Now, responsible citizens everywhere should rejoice at the Tea Party being marginalized. The sooner these dangerous morons are made irrelevant the better. And it’s a pure delight to see that insufferable, narcissistic, soul-draining, attention-sucking vampire Sarah Palin get smacked down a bit, even if the person doing the smacking is equally unappetizing and unwholesome, albeit in different ways. But once the sweet taste of schadenfreude disappears, we’re left with a rancid, nay, poisonous flavor in our mouths.

Ma Bush’s comment can only herald the approach of yet another American tragedy. Its outlines, I’m afraid, will become more and more distinct in the coming year, like the shape of a monster slowly rising from a swamp: President Jeb Bush.

You know it has to happen. It’s one of those bleakly inevitable facts of life, like tooth decay, old age, and death. We know it’s in our future and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to about it. If the last decade of American politics has taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing so stupid, so disastrous, or so bat-shit crazy that the electorate can’t be duped into voting for it. Given that context, another Bush in the White House doesn’t seem so far-fetched. At any rate, it looks a hell of a lot like Ma and Pa Bush are trying to pull the weeds out of Jeb’s path to the presidency, which they no doubt regard as his unalienable birthright. The first one that has to go is Palin.

The next one who will have to be removed is Mitt Romney. Right now he’s the only other viable candidate for the Republican nomination. But he might not be too hard to handle. He’s a bit of a lightweight and he follows a goofball religion that many Evangelical Christians regard as heresy. Many of them would never vote for him.

Consider this. As a Mormon, Mitt Romney believes that Joseph Smith was visited in the 1820s by an angel named Maroni, who thereupon gave him a set of gold plates with holy scriptures engraved on them. Conveniently, this new and improved word of God was written in a language known only to Joseph Smith called “reformed Egyptian.” Even more conveniently, the gold plates were never seen by any other human being except Joseph Smith himself. Funny how that works.

Why not just believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Their existence is just as plausible as a plate bearing angel — fluent in reformed Egyptian, mind you — named Maroni. Karl Rove would have a field day with this. Drop a leak here, conduct a push poll there, sprinkle a few dark insinuations around the media. With the proper manipulation, he could have every Evangelical from Lynchburg, Viginia, to Orange County, California, howling that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist. Forget that some of them already say this about Obama. Since when do religious zealots care about logic or consistency?

Mitt might have a fortune and the right kind of hair, but his kooky religious beliefs place him just a shade too far outside the mainstream. I’d bet money the Bush family secretly views him as not the right kind of person.

That leaves Jeb. He’ll have the full support of the Republican Establishment, including Rupert Murdoch’s evil media empire, and a bottomless trough of corporate money. The trial balloons are already floating. You don’t need to understand reformed Egyptian to interpret the signs.

But don’t worry. We’ll have Barack Obama fighting in our corner.

An Embarrassment of Riches

2010-11-18T15:25:00.000-08:00

Here’s a quick snapshot of American democracy in action. This is from Democracy Now!:

A new study shows members of Congress saw a boost in personal wealth as the U.S. economy suffered the worst of the economic recession. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lawmakers’ personal wealth increased an average 16 percent between 2008 and 2009. The number of millionaires rose to 261, nearly half the total members of Congress. The median wealth of a House member topped $765,000, while the average for a senator was more than $2.3 million.

Being a congressman is good work if you can get it. It’s also recession proof, like being a Wall Street investment banker or corporate CEO. And it’s not like our legislators don’t deserve to be handsomely compensated. After all, they do such fine work. In fact, you could say that whenever Congress puts its hand to the plow a downright miracle ensues. For example, take a look at what the People’s House accomplished just yesterday:

Jobless benefits will run out for 2 million people during the holiday season unless they are renewed by a Congress that’s focusing more attention on a quarrel over preserving tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year.
It’s looking iffy at best whether Congress will renew jobless benefits averaging $310 per week nationwide that are presently claimed by almost 5 million people who have been out of work for more than six months.
An extension of jobless benefits enacted this summer expires Dec. 1, and on Thursday, a bill to extend them for three months failed in the House. Democrats brought the bill to the floor under fast-track rules that required a two-thirds vote to pass. Republicans opposed the legislation because they were denied a chance to attach spending cuts, so the measure fell despite winning a 258-154 majority.

You have to pay for the best to get the best, and we’re obviously getting our money’s worth. Will Rogers was correct when he pointed out that America’s got the best politicians money can buy.

So a chamber full of millionaires and near millionaires couldn’t manage to extend unemployment benefits through the holidays, Lordy be! Will wonders never cease?

Meanwhile, Republicans scream bloody murder at the prospect of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and the spineless hypocrites in the Democratic party will meekly go along with them. I can hear Harry Reid right now, stammering away like Elmer Fudd in defense of the Democratic party’s next big cave-in: “Ow-ow-ow, we can’t waize taxes during a wecovewy, that would sth-sth-sth-sthlow job cweathion!”

So people like Lloyd Blankfein will get to keep their tax cuts, but somebody who’s been laid-off as a result of Mr. Blankfein’s chicanery won’t get a measly three-hundred dollar a week unemployment check during Christmas time.

There’s a word for that kind of fucked-up, inverted system and that word ain’t democracy.

plu·toc·ra·cy /pluˈtɒkrəsi/
[ploo-tok-ruh-see]

1. the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy.
2. a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.
3. a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.

There’s another word that also springs to mind, pathetic.

The Ugly Truth

2010-11-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

There’s not a whole lot I can add to this note of appreciation from the rich:

Let’s be honest: you’ll never win the lottery.
On the other hand, the chances are pretty good that you’ll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That’s because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class. Let’s face it — you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!
As a result, you don’t have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you’d probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That’s why we’re so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about “justice” and “equal opportunity” in America.
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there’s never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it’s already occupied by us — and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. But at least there’s usually someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people.
Always remember that if everyone like you were economically secure and socially privileged like us, there would be no one left to fill all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. And no one to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. And certainly no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!
You also probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. And even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're also afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to “break out of the mold.”
Naturally, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Black against White, male against female, American workers against Japanese against Mexican against.... We continually push your wages down by invoking “foreign competition,” “the law of supply and demand,” “national security,” or “the bloated federal deficit.” We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as “elections.” Happily, you haven’t a clue as to what’s really happening — instead, you blame “Aliens,” “Tree-hugging Environmentalists,” “Niggers,” “Jews,” Welfare Queens,” and countless others for your troubled situation.
We’re also very pleased that many of you still embrace the “work ethic,” even though most jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your one and only life right out of you. We obviously don’t know much about work, but we’re sure glad you do!
Of course, life could be different. Society could be intelligently organized to meet the real needs of the general population. You and others like you could collectively fight to free yourselves from our domination. But you don’t know that. In fact, you can’t even imagine that another way of life is possible. And that’s probably the greatest, most significant achievement of our system — robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, your ability to think and act for yourself.
So we’d truly like to thank you from the bottom of our heartless hearts. Your loyal sacrifice makes possible our corrupt luxury; your work makes our system work. Thanks so much for “knowing your place” — without even knowing it!

Just A Thought

2010-11-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

Somebody should have stopped those Greeks from thinking, because when they did they came up with stuff life this:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

- Epicurus [341–270 B.C]

Missed It By That Much

2010-11-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

Right now, hundreds of millions of agonized souls on our poor, desecrated, war-scarred planet are wistfully pondering what might have been had the birth order in a certain American family been reversed …

Undoubtedly the most startling moment in Matt Lauer’s conversation with George W. Bush came in the first five minutes of the interview, when Bush recounted his mother’s miscarriage — and how she had showed him the fetus in a jar.
“She says to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s a fetus,’” Bush recounted to Lauer, referring to himself in the third person. “There’s no question that it affected me,” Bush added.

Missed it by that much! Sigh. What fates impose, that men must needs abide …

I won’t comment on why Barbara Bush had a fetus in a jar or why she showed it to teenage George. God knows what kind of twisted psychodynamics underlie the relationships in that clan. Don’t forget, this is a woman who thought Hurricane Katrina worked out well for the poor blacks of New Orleans. If you wanna delve into that psyche, be my guest. I prefer not to ruin my breakfast.

Besides, the skeletons in the Bush family closet don’t concern me half as much as the skeletons they produce outside that closet, out in the world where those of us who don’t stuff miscarried fetuses into Mason jars live.

None of this matters anyway. This tiny glimpse into the morbid inner-workings of la familia de Bush will go almost totally unnoticed, as will George’s tirelessly reiterated excuses for invading Iraq. Do you know why? Because no one watched the interview.

NBC foolishly ( or intentionally?) aired it opposite Dancing With The Stars!

The special edition of “Matt Lauer Reports” drew approximately 7 million total viewers, with a 1.7 rating/ 4 share in the adults 18-49 demo and a 2.2 rating/ 5 share in the adults 25-54 demo.
[…]
On Monday, during the 8-9 PM time period where the Bush interview aired, ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” won the hour with nearly 19 million viewers, while new editions of CBS comedies drew 8.8 million viewers and “House” on Fox drew 9.6 million viewers.
The Bush interview also drew lower demo numbers than the program that normally airs in that time period on NBC, “Chuck.”

Is this a sad statement on our political apathy as a nation, or the beginnings of true wisdom? Who’s dumb and who’s dumber: those who watched sitcoms or those who watched Bush try to defend his disastrous presidency? I’ll let you decide.

What do I know. I watched Monday Night Football.