Gravity and Grace

Inverted Valentine

2012-02-14T00:25:00.004-05:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Thank-You Note

--Wislawa Szymborska

I owe so much to

those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree

that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not

the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,

the freedom –

love can neither give

nor take that.

I don’t wait for them

as in window-to-door-and-back.

Almost as patient

as a sundial,

I understand

what love can’t.

From a rendezvous to a letter

is just a few days or weeks,

not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,

concerts are heard,

cathedrals visited,

scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers

come between us,

the hills and rivers can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit

if I live in three dimensions,

in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space

with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize

how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”

would be love’s answer

to this open question.

U.S. Attention Deficit Continues to Increase

2012-01-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

Reading an article in the Times about the efficacy of Ritalin/ADD drugs on children reminded me of an opinion I've long held and not yet foisted on the world, namely: the reason so many people need a little neurochemical boost in order to pay attention is that so much of what we're asked to attend to is so profoundly boring. The article summarizes research which found that, over the long term, drugs like Ritalin do not improve children's academic performance. Of course these drugs are not designed for long-term use or to increase attention span permanently, but rather to quickly, effectively, and temporarily mask fatigue and sharpen focus. In fact, as the article notes (in passing), "similar types of drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks."

This point deserved a little more sustained attention, it seems to me. Perhaps the author's pharmacy had run out of Ritalin this week, so here's the thing. I remember elementary school, and it was generally boring and frequently repetitive. Yes, I went to public school, but I hasten to add that I went to generally decent public schools in a small town, with an everyone-knows-the-librarian and everyone-knows-your-parents kind of atmosphere. Still, the teachers had classes with students that ranged from the pale, ragged, tired children from the trailer park to the perky, dotted-upon, well-dressed children from enriched environments. And we were all going to do multiplication tables over and over until poor barefoot Tommy (there really were a couple of kids who were sent to school barefoot--and this was in 1985) kind of, sort of, got it. This is what we want public education to do, Leaving No Barefoot Trailer Park Child Behind and all, yet for those of us who understood quickly or already knew how to read/spell/multiply, it meant a lot of in-between, waiting time. Time in which we were expected to Behave Ourselves and Be Quiet and Sit Still, too, which is basically a kind of Chinese water torture for smart seven-year-old boys. Hence, Ritalin! Which will help these little kiddos do boring, repetitive tasks for much longer, thereby keeping them occupied while the teacher drags Barefoot Tommy into the 21st (or at least the 20th) century.

The problem that ADD drugs solves is not the problem of any individual child. Ritalin solves the problem of managing a classroom of children with widely varied backgrounds, abilities, and intelligence. It is a solution for teachers and administrators, not children. If we had an intelligently-designed public education system; if we funded it fairly, fully, and equably, so that we could dramatically reduce class sizes and retain talented teachers; if, in short, we were willing to strip away the past 30 years of piss-poor decisions that deliberately and with malice aforethought eviscerated public education in this country and go back to the raw solid idealism that was the foundation of American public schools, we wouldn't need to talk about the "long-term efficacy" of putting our children on amphetamines.

Postscript: Meanwhile, tuition at private schools in New York City is about to hit $40,000 per year.

Wherein I am Skeptical, Yet Longing to Believe

2011-12-09T21:22:00.001-05:00

At the meeting of the Republican Governor's Association last week, infamous pollster/soulless minion of Satan Frank Luntz went over the latest, newest, hippest ways to ensure that absolutely no truthful or 'reality-based' information is disseminated by anyone on Team (R). Among intriguing pointers such as: 'Don't say 'capitalism' and 'Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class,' Luntz also casually mentioned that he is 'so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death...they're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.'

I'd so much like to believe that he said that without a tone of mockery and ridicule--that he really is haunted by the spectre of OWS, waking up in a cold sweat from nightmares of being pursued by hippies with puppets. And I've seen Luntz interviewed several times, and he seems 100% humor-free, so I can't imagine he was trying to make a little lighthearted joke as an icebreaker. Because it is Luntz, though--the evil genius behind 'death taxes' and 100 other catchy ways to bludgeon Democrats in every debate since 1994--I can't help but wonder what his game is here. I feel that I'm being played, somehow, but I'm not sure how.

In the meantime, Republicans can't talk about capitalism as if it's Everything You Ever Wanted for Christmas, Every Day! That's happy news. Keep up the good work, kiddos! Oh, and keep some milk on hand to wash the pepper spray out of your eyes.

Being 1 of the 1%: Nice Work if You Can Get It

2011-11-28T13:07:00.001-05:00

I use 'work' in the loosest possible sense here.

Fun article in the Times today ('A Family's Billions, Artfully Sheltered') about the Lauder family and their hijinks. Apparently the Lauders are not really into the whole taxpaying thing. And who can blame them? Asking people who are worth $3.1 billion to pay more than 17% in taxes is just so unjust. If Ronald Lauder hadn't dodged $135 million in taxes, he just might not have been able to afford that Klimt painting--which he so generously donated to his own private art foundation. And then deducted the 'gift' from his taxes, as one simply must, n'est ce pas?

Apparently the Lauders have so aggressively pursued every possible tax shelter, loophole, and ambiguously worded tax code that several loopholes have been closed just because of them. Does that make for some awkward moments in St. Bart's, I wonder?*

A few minutes later I came across this little blurb from Progress Illinois. Apparently a bill has been introduced in the Illinois state senate that would give tax breaks (amounting to $250 million a year) to a couple of companies, including one CME Industries. That name rang a tinny little proletarian bell of rage in the back of my mind, so I went back to the Times article. Sure enough, CME Industries is one of Lauder's 'companies,' which is organized as a Dutch holding company, conveniently headquartered in the Bahamas, and 'operated' in Central Europe. Yet they forced the Illinois senate to give them tax breaks by threatening to leave the state. Fascinating.

*'Don't be silly, darling, only the plebes go to St. Bart's now. We all have our own islands. Ronald had his constructed out of a mixture of diamond dust and rabbit tears. Isn't that fun?'

A Modern Revision

2011-11-08T23:29:00.000-05:00

The Moving Finger texts, and, having texted,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half an :)
Nor all thy Tears wash out an LOL of it.

Going FDR

2011-09-23T04:09:00.000-04:00

A few pithy words from FDR, a man well worth plagiarizing (hint, hint, Obamanos):
--'I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.'
--'Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.'
--Of the 'captains of industry': 'They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.'
Elizabeth Warren is running for Senate. I love her (we've been friends on facebook for two whole years now, and all) and I sincerely hope she beats Senator 'I Have a Truck!' Brown in the 2012 election. Here's an example of her general awesomeness: Look, a concise, powerful argument put forward with humor and energy in under 3 minutes. Learn from this, o ye Democrats.

'Their number is negligible and they are stupid.'

2011-09-06T02:26:00.000-04:00

So wrote President Eisenhower in 1954, about a 'tiny splinter group' who believed it was possible to eliminate the social safety net provided by Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. It was quoted by Mike Lofgren in his recent piece for TruthOut, which is well worth reading in its entirety. I particularly liked Lofgren's characterization of Democrats' political action as "feckless, craven incompetence." Democrats might as well take that as a motto--nicely alliterative, pretty catchy, and even has the added appeal of truthiness.Lofgren points out, as have ever so many other people, that Democrats just cannot seem to get their little kitty minds around the necessity for consistent, clear, and emotionally resonant messages, phrases, captions on LOLcats, anything at all that actually means something to anyone ever. The Democrats have a particular genius--if that is the right word--for being generic. They can take "You are being completely fucked by health insurance companies, and it's bullshit, and it is also bad for business" into the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Not only is that unforgivably boring, but it is also, actually, a goddamn lie. The tragically deformed, stillborn creature that was the healthcare reform bill actually didn't protect patients OR make care any more affordable at all--no price caps, no collective bargaining on prescription drugs, not even guaranteed universal coverage for seriously ill children. So everyone knows on some level or another that the Democrats are both lying to them and boring them at the same time. And if we're going to be lied to, we want it to be entertaining, at least. Throw in some monkeys and fireworks and "death taxes" and whatnot. Democrats: neither bread nor circuses, that's the problem.

A Modest Proposal: The Undeserving Olds

2011-07-13T18:13:00.000-04:00

As many pundits have repeatedly punditized, cutting Medicare or Social Security is the third rail of American politics. No politician can even hint that the thought once crossed his mind, during an interminable bus ride in Iowa 45 years ago. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) a fiercely organized lobby with hundreds of thousands of members, all of whom have a great deal of time on their hands and 2) everyone is sentimental about grandparents, who hand out bits of folksy wisdom and Toblerones. This is in notable contrast to The Poor, who only hand out methamphetamines and crack babies.

In our rapidly hobo-izing society, however, some hard truths must be acknowledged. Belts must be tightened, bootstraps must be pulled, cat food must be eaten. Just as there are deserving and undeserving Poor, there are clearly undeserving Olds. Many, many old people are quite cranky and mean-spirited. They don't have jobs, and most of them aren't even trying to get a job! Worse, a staggering percentage of them are on drugs--drugs paid for by YOUR TAX DOLLARS. What kind of example is this for the youth of America? What message does it send to them: that if you simply manage to live long enough, the taxpayers will keep you in a life of leisure? Most of these people don't even have the common decency to be grateful for the hard working Americans who keep them in golf carts and Early Bird Specials at the Golden Corral: 44% of Social Security recipients and 40% of Medicare recipients don't believe that they are the beneficiaries of government programs.

Nuts to all that. Time to means-test the Olds--not by income, but by actual meanness. Did you beat the family dog? Cheat on your taxes? Threaten your neighbor? Did you never, ever volunteer at a soup kitchen? Then I'm sorry, but we simply can't reward that kind of behavior.

Why Every Guy in America Should Be Sending Lots of Money to Planned Parenthood, Right This Minute

2011-05-11T04:05:00.000-04:00

Because here's the thing: somehow, in all of the wankery and douchebaggery and windbaggering about abortion, an essential point is completely overlooked--and the constitutional right to the ownership of one's own body becomes merely a 'woman's issue' (read: 'irrelevant' 'frivolous' and 'hysterical'). So let me go ahead and make a point of it: abortion is the reason dudes/guys get to have casual sex at all.* We might plausibly say that dudes/guys are in many ways the primary beneficiaries of legal abortion in this country.

Why so? Because women know that dudes/guys are not to be relied upon for the long haul, not for anything that really matters. Women know that a dude/guy is going to flake out when you need them most. Confronted with an overflowing toilet, a broken-down car, or Jesus, even just curtains that need to be hung, a dude/guy will suddenly have Very Important Things To Do Elsewhere. When faced with something even more pressing and non-negotiable, something like, say, a screaming infant, a dude/guy will suddenly have Very Important Things to do...in Peru. Or Tibet. Costa Rica, possibly. Places where, mysteriously, there aren't reliable phones or internet connections or telegraph wires or carrier pigeons. 95% of women see these guys for what they are, but are willing to play along for reasonably decent sex for a short period of time. In general, though, women are relentlessly practical and rarely sentimental (though occasionally delusional). No woman wants to have an unplanned pregnancy, and there is not one woman in the world who would think of an abortion as a real good time. Every woman hopes to never have to make that choice. But the fact that there is the chance of a choice means that women make different decisions than they would otherwise. It means that at 2 a.m. in a bar they're not looking at someone who could be the father of their child, but at someone who is cute enough for now. On the one hand, there's simple addition and subtraction; on the other, calculus and non-Euclidean geometry. It's an entirely different category of calculation.

To cut to the chase, your average dude/guy's chances of getting laid in a bar on a Saturday night decrease by approximately 90% once abortion is outlawed. Women's knees would slam together in such force that a mighty and terrifying thunderclap would be heard across the nation. Any guy who likes getting laid, but is not yet ready to be a father and a husband--that is, any guy who is not yet ready to be a man--should be holding up pro-choice signs on the steps of every Capitol building in every state.

*Distinguishing dudes/guys from men; these days men are vastly outnumbered, I'm sorry to say, by dudes/guys.

Wherein I Am Once Again Inspired by the Republicans

2011-04-25T00:40:00.000-04:00

Every couple of years, some Republican dickhead suddenly leapfrogs to the head of the Stupid Parade and begins wildly gesturing, like a sociopathic drum majorette. And the media marches right along behind, providing the horn section. This year, it's Congressman Paul Ryan (Wisconsin, and what a great year that state has been having). His budget has been treated by the media as if it were an Actually Reasonable plan put together by someone who passed macroeconomics in college. In fact, of course, it is a Willfully Insane plan put together by someone who blames liberal professors for his mediocre grades in college.

The media should--but rarely does--show what proportion of government spending these proposed cuts are. $38 billion is simply not very much money relative to the overall size of the federal budget--and Republicans know that. They also know that $38 billion dollars is an almost unthinkable amount of money to people who are making $28,000 a year (the median income in the United States).

The Obamanos are up to their usual tricks, if by 'tricks' you mean 'Frantic bullshitting.' As David Stockman points out in his editorial in the Times, both parties are playing a game of kick-the-can (wouldn't 'kick-the-hobos' be a much more fun phrase?). The money quote from the editorial is this one: 'A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.'

So true...Wait, bills actually have to be paid? Can't we just run our little Ponzi scheme indefinitely? We should ask the expert. You know Madoff's not doing anything right now--let's get him on this, chop chop.

Here's the thing. People don't like taxes because most people don't think they get anything for the taxes they do pay. Part of this is our rampant sense of entitlement, since roads, firefighters, schools, the police seem to be regarded as Gifts from God--and God doesn't need to be paid back, obviously. But part of it is that Americans are on the hook for some big ticket items--little details like college tuition, the annual 20% hike in health insurance costs, maybe even keeping all your teeth--that in other, mythical lands are paid for by taxes. When everyone gets something from a system, it's hard(er) to bitch about it. Which is what I said about the Obama health care plan a hundred years ago: it provided no tangible, immediate benefits to anyone, and would therefore cost the Democrats the midterm election.

What's phenomenal to me is that even that bullshit, half-assed plan is likely to be stripped down by the Republicans. But the Democrats made that a political possibility by writing and passing such a bullshit, half-assed bill that no one really supports it or even really gives a shit about it. So we continue down our fantastical Road to Imbecility.

Something for Nothing

2011-01-25T01:26:00.000-05:00

One of my friends once told me a story about going to a party, getting quite un-sober, and (as one tends to do at social gatherings) picking up a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness . "Suddenly," she said, "I thought, wait, why IS there something rather than nothing? My mind was blown for at least the next ten minutes."

Over the last several months, I have come to realize that there is something so that there can be nothing. And I came to this realization without going to India, or even to a weekend yoga retreat. I simply asked myself why I no longer felt like writing out the witterings of my mind on the wall of the Internet. It was clearly because I no longer had something I wanted to avoid doing, something pressing that I could ignore in order to do nothing. It turns out that in order to want to do nothing--in order to enjoy, however furtively, wasting time writing blog posts--there needs to be something you should be doing, but are not. Once I no longer had something to do, I didn't want to do nothing, either.

Finally, some Serious Somethings have caught up with me at last, so I am sure that I will now feel a deep need to respond to a Salon article about wingnuts, or a NYT article about Williamsburg.

(In truth, I can never read past the second paragraph of any article in the NYT about Brooklyn, because I inevitably break out in Hipster Hives--a symptom of my tragic allergy to hipster-hood. Also, 85% of the articles are about Hipsters Having Children ("My, What Big Strollers You Have!") and the thought of all the chunky-glassed, tattooed, Pendleton-wearing locavores wheeling their Concept Children around makes me wish I still enjoyed drinking, because chewing on my desk is so hard on the teeth.)

Rather Dusty Around Here

2010-10-20T03:26:00.000-04:00

In between the last post and this one, I finished The Dissertation. All of my daily word allotment was forced to go toward constructing social-science-y sentences about things like "dimensionalizing." What was left at the end of the day was utter gibberish, and while that would make the blog fit in nicely with certain other blogs, I expected better of myself. Also, I was at my parents house, and they have cable. Project Runway called.

Even after defending the dissertation, though, I noticed a certain lassitude about picking the blog back up. I'd heard that Sarah Palin had a reality TV show, and that Kate Gosselin was going to be on it when they took their broods a'campin'. The fact that despite my adamant refusal to pay for television I somehow, through a process of cultural osmosis worthy of further study, knew all about John and Kate+8 + John's lover + bodyguards, etc., was deeply irritating.

And the Tea Party candidates are so ridiculous it's hard to get ginned up about them, as well. All these folks hating government so very much that they're willing to spend vast amounts of money to get into government, but only so that they can then dismantle it and take away their own jobs. Right. Bureaucrats willingly working themselves out of a job, for the good of the people. I have heard of such things in legend and song.

Also, if one doesn't read the news for a while (not counting, of course, the cover-to-cover reading I give The New Yorker every week), it comes as a surprise to pick up the Times again and realize it's all kind of same-ish, and somehow it doesn't seem like much of anything has happened at all. Then there are things that happened as much as a month ago--floods in Pakistan, for example, or that minor little incident in the Gulf of Mexico--about which I would like to hear more. What is happening in Pakistan? Were the displaced people able to go back to their villages? Are there even villages to go back to? Is there clean water? What happened to the crops? What kind of aid is getting through? And last but not least, how might we make ourselves ever-so-friendly to the Pakistanis, in the hopes that they do not auction off their nuclear weapons to the highest bidder in order to buy wheat?

As for the Gulf, everything is A-OK there again, I assume. The ocean and marine life just kind of rolled with the whole thing, developed a tolerance for eating tar and the ability to wash themselves with Dawn dish soap, and now it's all good again. BP still exists, still paying dividends, imaginary money still doing its thing through the worlds various stock markets/casinos. These are some things I would like to know about. But I glance at the NYT top ten articles list every day, and so far, the old journalistic tactic of fingers-in-ears-while-humming seems to be keeping Serious In-Depth Reporting at bay.

From 'A Municipal Report' by O. Henry, 1912

2010-08-24T15:52:00.000-04:00

"'There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'--New York, of course, New Orleans, and best of the lot, San Francisco.' --Frank Norris

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into detail.

Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Baghdad of the New World."

Driving The Carolina Way

2010-08-01T20:51:00.000-04:00

Photo source here.

I recently returned from a trip to Southern California, where I lucked into the hippest rental car I've ever had, a 2010 Jetta, and put it through its paces driving the 5, the 405, the 10, the 710, the 210: 4 or 5 lanes in each direction; minimum acceptable speed: 75. It was fantastic. I had forgotten the great pleasure of driving fast. I had forgotten this, because I live in North Carolina.

When I first arrived in Carolina, lo these many years ago, I had to learn some new driving skills, like deep conscious breathing, and being mindful of the amount of enamel I was grinding off my teeth. I listened to a lot of music and became very familiar with all of the voices on NPR. I released certain assumptions: for example, that the point of driving was to Get Somewhere, and get there in less time than it would take with a horse and buggy.

As I readjusted to taking 45 minutes to go 9 miles (and not between Santa Monica and LAX, mind you, but between Durham and Chapel Hill) I composed some observations about driving in Carolina, which helped me unclench my jaw and pay attention to Terri Gross instead. Here they are.

--A stoplight turning green does not mean that you immediately proceed briskly through the intersection, on the assumption that the people behind you are also wishing to make their way to the rest of their lives in a reasonable amount of time. Instead, you should pause, graciously, in case any of the cross traffic might just need a wee bit more time, or if the spirit moves you to ask for the Lord's guidance in that little personal matter, or to make sure that the car in front of you is really committed to going through the intersection. The first five cars through a light here take up probably 1/2 of the time the light is green, as everyone moves in this kind of accordian-ing motion, waiting for the driver ahead to get a good ways through the intersection before proceeding. If you are the driver in front at any green light, you should not feel pressured to move when the light turns green, but take as much time as you wish to dial a number or change the radio station or fix your hair before proceeding. Rest assured that no one will honk.

--This is because no one honks their horn here. Honking is obviously a rude and Yankee-like thing to do. More to the point, honking will not move the Carolina driver, but will instead provoke them to display the astonishingly mannerly stubbornness that Southerners have perfected.

--If a traffic light ahead turns yellow, you should maintain your leisurely speed until the intersection, possibly braking to consider the situation, and then accelerate just enough so that you make it through the light, but the 26 cars who have been behind you for 7 miles don't. This marvel of timing takes practice, and you should not expect to master it if you are from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.

--Turn signals are best regarded as something which will be a dangerous distraction for other drivers, and used sparingly. If you feel you must use a signal, you should wait until you've already made a lane change or turn, and then signal, which will just clarify things for everyone.

--On the other hand, hazard lights here in Carolina have some special, magical properties. You may have been taught that hazard lights should not be used when driving, but are to alert drivers to a breakdown that they might have to navigate around. Here, hazard lights apparently cast a spell which suspends the rules of the road, so that you can go 15 miles an hour in the fast lane, 4-wheel on the shoulder, reverse in traffic, or whatever notion comes into your head. In bad weather, hazard lights are thoughtfully turned on (and kept on) while driving, to alert people to the fact that it is snowing, raining, or maybe just looking a little hazy-like.

--If other cars are merging into the lane in which you are driving, you should not feel that you must change lanes to make room for them, even if there are no other cars to your left and you have plenty of time. Instead, proceed as if there are no merging cars at all, and let them try to figure it out. Perhaps they will even come to a complete stop on an on-ramp, causing cars behind them to curse, swerve, and brake--this is none of your concern.

--You should assume that speed limits are the maximum speed your motor vehicle will tolerate, and go about 5 miles an hour slower, just to be on the safe side. Anyone who is in a rush all the time probably doesn't love their Momma like they should. And maybe they're on their way to burn Atlanta. In any case, no sense in trying to make things happen sooner than they're gonna, so take it easy, admire the perfect cream-on-parchment white of a magnolia blossom and all the rest of the Good Lord's handiwork, here in the Southern part of Heaven.

Mind the Gap

2010-07-12T20:24:00.000-04:00

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that the income gap between the the richest one percent and everyone else tripled between 1979 and 2007. Average after-tax incomes in the top 1% bracket, adjusted for inflation, increased 281%. That is not a typo: THE INCOMES OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA INCREASED BY TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT IN LESS THAN THREE DECADES. (Sorry for the pajamas-media-style all caps, but there are times when only all caps will do--not when responding to news stories with insightful comments like: TEH IMMGRANTS TAKE R JOBS SEND THEM BACK TO WHERE THEY COME FROM WE DON'T SPEAK MEXICAN HERE LOLOL!!!!--but when communicating something truly astounding.)

Go forth, read the report, be astounded (or have your suspicions grimly justified, whatever suits your temperament). One of the arguments my Republican friends make against European-style 'socialism' is that it hinders social mobility. I'm not entirely clear on why this would be so, but the gist seems to be that people coming from Europe to America found more opportunities here to Horatio Alger it up, without being sneered at for not going to Eton. Seems like it has been a while since Europe got on the "I don't really care where your money is from, as long as it is enough to pay for the upkeep of my 150-room ancestral mansion" bandwagon, but I was willing to grant that there was some truth to the idea that there was greater equality of opportunities and relative lack of class-based snobbery in the United States. Seems like a lot more people are making their money the old-fashioned way, though--that is, putting in a lot of time and hard work waiting for their trust fund to mature (check out this article about the creative ways in which the rich in America are enabling their great-grandchildren to be lazy shitheels).

Also, let's not forget that universal health care systems might contribute to greater social mobility. Lack of teeth is more of a barrier to the upper class than lack of, well, class.

Link Low Down

2010-07-07T00:34:00.000-04:00

The Dutch win 3-2 over Uruguay today to move on to the World Cup Finals. That's the good news. I wish I were in Amsterdam, but then, I always do.

The BP/Government Police State (Salon) I mentioned a while back that I was disturbed by the apparent collusion between state and local law enforcement and BP. My illusions about who the police actually 'protect' and 'serve' have long since been dispelled, of course, but I still have this feeble belief: state agents should not be acting as rent-a-cops for any corporation at any time. Of course the Professional Bootlickers Association that calls itself 'the media' are being ever so cooperative with the limitations imposed by BP. I bet they've convinced themselves that actually reporting about the death of an entire ecosystem would just cause people to unnecessarily panic, so they're actually doing a good thing by ignoring it. Also, Lindsay Lohan got sentenced today, so they're, like, really busy.

Yves Smith and Rob Parenteau have an interesting article about the miserly behavior of corporations and how it's impacting the economy. In brief: corporations acting only with regard to short-term profits = long-term shit for everyone else. On a similar note, a wrist-slitting article in the New York Times about the totally abysmal employment rates of the Millenials, or whatever lame-ass name this generation has been tagged with of late. (Myself, I like to call the children of Boomers the Echoes: just a hollow refrain.)

Then there's this guy, who has studied some fractals and determined that the market is due for its biggest downswing since we were all trading chickens and butter. He thinks that the Dow will go as low as 1000. In which case, let's hope that we all invested in actual chickens and actual butter (and actual guns), because otherwise the Mormons will be the only ones who survive.

This is why I am really uninterested in adulthood (or at least, this is one of my many rationalizations for refusing to grow up). If we make it past 2012, I'll see what I can do about Being Responsible and Taking Things Seriously.

Let My People Go

2010-06-30T16:59:00.000-04:00

With governments in virtually every developed country playing like it's 1933 (causing Paul Krugman to triple his anti-depressant dosage), I have a (totally non-self-interested) proposal that will make the economy grow in a chia pet-like manner: forgive student loan debt owed to the federal government.

The rapid inflation of tuition costs at universities has been driven in no small part by the fact that the amount of loans available to students always rises to meet these costs. Students are now graduating with more debt than ever before, debt which they must begin to repay 6 months after graduation and which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.** Most of my friends are facing loan payments of between $250 to $700 a month. This will put a real damper on their ability to, well, buy things, things that would make the economy grow: houses and refrigerators and plasma screen TVs and whatnot. Currently, people may have federal loans forgiven if they work in certain public interest sectors--but only after they've made 120 payments on time. That would be 10 years of payments, after which the government might just think about maybe calling the rest of your loan a wash (for extra fun, which jobs qualify as "public interest" jobs is not specified, so you only find out after you've spent 10 years scraping money out of your probably very modest public-interest-job paycheck whether or not the government will forgive the rest of it. Good times).

A well-educated populace is a public good, no matter what the Republicans say, and it's irksome, to say the least, that students are held to their 30-year repayment plan while AIG fucks up and gets 100 kazillion dollars, or whatever it ended up being. So: forgive some of the loans when the student completes her degree (this is what the Dutch do--loan students money, but forgive the debt when the student completes college, thereby motivating people to both a) go to college and b) finish college. Those wacky Dutchies!) And the rest of the loans could be forgiven after the student makes payments on time for a reasonable amount of time, something perhaps less than a decade. These loans surely represent some very small proportion of government revenue, probably not even enough to pay for another super secret jet project or 1/2 of Dick Cheney's annual cyborg upkeep.

We will all solemnly swear to spend this money in a frivolous manner.

**I've always found this interesting. I suppose that the concern is that most students would graduate and immediately declare bankruptcy, before they get their grubby little hands on any real assets. Yet I can charge many thousands of dollars of useless items on my Citibank card and have them be dismissed in bankruptcy (of course, the generous folks in the government made it a lot harder to leave debt behind with their little bankruptcy reform--excuse me, "Consumer Responsibility"--act in 2004. For corporations, of course, debt is just another word for "don't worry, there's a bailout coming." Responsibility is for suckers who haven't gotten their own lobbyists.)

Abandon Hope, Mortal Weaklings...Dick Cheney Will Not Die

2010-06-30T01:43:00.000-04:00

I've been skipping most non-World-Cup-related news of late (shockingly, everything has continued to go as shittily as it does when I am paying close attention, bringing my delusions of grandeur into check once again) so missed the news item about Dick Cheney going into the hospital for some reason. Of course everyone sat up and hoped a little more than they have since 2008: was that a rainbow? A shooting star? Could the Doomsday Face Shooter actually expire?

Alas, and of course, no. As I once explained to someone, Dick Cheney's heart is powered by the tears of kittens, which have a radioactive half-life of millions of years. He'll be scuttling around with the cockroaches, eating Twinkies, when the rest of us have either a) been swept up into the arms of Baby Jesus by the Rapture, or, if we did not Recognize The Truth in time, burned and flayed alive by the devil (something like that, I really can't keep my Jesus-freak eschatology straight) or b) died in worldwide floods and famines brought on by global warming, over-population, and BP (something like that, I can't keep my eco-freak eschatology straight either).

The Distress of Our Time

2010-06-16T01:32:00.000-04:00

"Our era is not the first in history in which the dominant feeling is distress, anxiety, a sense of waiting for one knows not what, nor the first in which men feel they have the painful privilege of being a generation destined for an exceptional fate. Since history is past and exists only on paper, it is easy to entertain the illusion that all previous periods were peaceful compared to the one in which we are now living, just as twenty-year-old adolescents always feel they are the first to have ever experienced the anxieties of youth. Nevertheless, one can say with no fear of exaggeration that the part of humanity in our little corner of Europe that has ruled the world for so long is going through a profound and serious crisis. The great hopes inherited from the three preceding centuries, especially from the last--hopes of a progressive spread of enlightenment, of general well-being, of democracy, of peace--are rapidly crumbling. That would not be so serious if it were simply a matter of disillusionment affecting certain intellectual circles, or certain spheres particularly taken up with political and social problems. But the conditions under which we live are such that the distress touches and taints every aspect of men's lives, every source of action, hope, and happiness. Private life, in its daily course, is less and less separated from public life, and this is the case in every sphere. There have previously been times in history when great collective outbursts temporarily reduced private life to insignificance; today, however, it is the enduring conditions of our existence that prevent us from finding in daily life any moral resources that are independent of the political and social situation.

Our feeling of security is profoundly affected. That, however, is not something absolutely bad; there can be no security for man on this earth, and the feeling of security, beyond a certain degree, is a dangerous illusion that falsifies everything, that makes minds narrow, limited, superficial, and stupidly satisfied; we saw quite a lot of that during the so-called period of prosperity, and we still see it in a few--increasingly rare--sectors of society in which people feel protected. But the total absence of security, especially when the catastrophes to be feared are incommensurable with the resources that intelligence, action, and courage might be able to provide, is no more favorable to the health of the soul. We saw an economic crisis in several large countries deprive a whole young generation of any hope of ever being able to enter into the social structure, earn a living, and maintain a family. We have a good chance of shortly seeing a new generation in the same impasse...The fear of war--a war in which nothing would be left intact--has stopped being a subject of lectures or pamphlets and has become a general preoccupation; it is increasingly becoming a daily preoccupation as civilian life is everywhere subordinated to military preparation. Modern means of communication--the press, the radio, the cinema--are powerful enough to day to rattle the nerves of an entire nation. Of course, life always defends itself, protected by instinct and a certain layer of unconsciousness; nevertheless, the fear of great collective catastrophes, awaited as passively as tidal waves or earthquakes, increasingly colors the way each man sees his personal future.

--Simone Weil, 1938.

Oh, Super.

2010-06-15T20:27:00.000-04:00

Another speech.

I agree with Joan Walsh over at Salon.

What a coincidence.

2010-06-14T21:03:00.000-04:00

"U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan." "Nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral reserves," how about that. I'm sure this will be good for someone--not the Afghani people, probably, but someone.

Perhaps BP is looking to diversify.

When You Are Engulfed In Oil

2010-06-08T22:44:00.000-04:00

As the Great Unmitigated Horror in the Gulf began, I was reading An Unreasonable Woman. This book--highly recommended, by the way--is the story of Diane Wilson's fight against Formosa Plastics, a privately owned chemical manufacturer whose environmental violations were so egregious that they could no longer build plants in their home country, Korea. So instead, they came over to the U.S., where people aren't so picky. And they located in Texas, where they don't believe in the federal government no how, anyway, and the only people concerned about environmental degradation are those damn liberal elitists in Austin, gettin' in the way of The Free Market and Profit, in total defiance of Our Lord's clearly stated preference for capitalism.

There are so many things to say about this book, which opens with a truly horrifying map of Calhoun County, showing the number of chemical plants that line the waterways into the Gulf of Mexico. Along with Formosa, there are: BP Chemicals, ISP, Union Carbide, Alcoa, and Dupont. These plants are tightly clustered together, packed into little Calhoun County, which has the dubious honor of being the most toxic county in America. Now here's a fun fact I didn't know: the EPA doesn't test chemicals for toxicity before approving their manufacture. Instead, they tell the chemical plants to go right ahead, and it's up to...whoever has the time, I guess, to prove that any given chemical is toxic. Which makes sense, since it would be so onerous for the Environmental Protection Agency to do something like Protect the Environment. It's clearly not in the job description, because the words are in a different order.

When they discover exactly how toxic these plants are making their county, do the citizens rise up en masse and slay them? Or at least insist that the new Formosa plant will be built so as to minimize toxic discharge into the air, rivers, and ocean? Actually, no. They throw them a couple of parties and spend a lot of time bootlicking, because the plants create jerbs, and the plant owners make sure there's a little something for all those nice councilmen-and-women who help get their permits through. (Oh, and here's another fun side note: the EPA can waive the requirement for an environmental impact report, even in the case of a company manufacturing literally millions of tons of chemicals which are known to be toxic. Being the helpful folks that they are, they waived this requirement for Formosa--a company which had been booted out of another country because of their total disregard for environmental regulations. Formosa just had to fill out a one page form that said there would definitely be no harm to the environment, and they, like, totally swore on the Bible, for real.)

And why do so many citizens of Calhoun County need jobs, might we ask? Well, because most of them were fishermen or shrimpers, and there aren't enough of either in the Gulf to support them anymore. The collapse of the fisheries being a totally independent incident which has no provable connection to the chemical plants along the waterways.

Let's cut to the chase here, since I have a dissertation to finish sometime this year. Government at all levels--local, state, and federal--has apparently abandoned the job of acting in the public interest. Instead, their primary role seems to be to protect corporations from the public. Where Formosa can demand--and get--EPA approval in one day, it takes nearly 3 years for Wilson to get her case against the plant heard, and she had to go on a 30 day hunger strike in order to make it happen. Citizens who voice concerns are told that there is a process for grievances which must be followed in every detail, and then maybe some desk jockey at the EPA will give it a looksee in a few years.

And it is all too clear, from this soul-crushing article by Tim Dickinson, in Rolling Stone, that this contempt for the public good does not vary with administrations. Dickinson details the ways in which the Obama administration simply continued to follow the Bush playbook, and this led directly to the BP oil spill, which will be destructive beyond our worst nightmares, I think. The Obama administration colluded with BP to downplay the magnitude of the spill, giving lowball estimates which they knew were false. They have left the cleanup in the hands of BP, despite the fact that BP is clearly more concerned with it's stock price than with the Gulf Coast. Despite the fact that BP had the worst safety record of any oil company by far, the Obama administration approved their plan for the Deepwater rig without anyone reading it--as Dickinson points out, the application refers to wildlife that does not inhabit the Gulf (walruses, for example). BP just cut-and-pasted from another application for a different rig. The article goes on, and it is just infuriating at every level. There's no way to make it funny, so I'm not even going to try.

Oh, All RIGHT, I'll Write About Sarah Palin Again

2010-06-05T15:21:00.000-04:00

I just read a good piece in Harper's (by Jack Hitt, and unfortunately behind a subscription wall) comparing Palin's career path--if it can be so called--and Ronald Reagan's. Hitt's point was that Palin is essentially a reversal of the Gipper, since he went from entertainment to politics while Palin has gone from politics to insane...I mean, to entertainment. This is a lady who will stand up and say anything, as long as it's written on her hand in permanent ink before the speech. For example, yesterday she blamed environmentalists for the so-awful-I-can't-even-think-about-it BP oil spill. See, if only the environmentalists hadn't been all protest-y about drilling right by the shoreline, where it's easier, then the oil companies wouldn't have had to go to all this trouble and work so gosh dang hard just to get a lil' oil for Real Merkuns.

So, yeah. I've figured it out. Sarah Palin is a reality show. This is why her sheer, flabbergasting idiocy doesn't bother people: they're used to the Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of Suburban Nightmares. Sarah Palin is the "dumb Christian hick girl goin' to the big city" character that was obligatory on The Real World from the get-go. And when she gets up and says things that even David Brooks couldn't believe, well, it's just cause she's so innocent and whatnot and it's mean to make fun of her, cruel critical liberals, etc. The fun part is, we all know what happens to this character, her inevitable fate: to get drunk and have sex in a hot tub in front of cameras. This is what everyone is waiting for Sarah Palin to do, and this is why she is still on TV. Everyone is just pulling up lawn chairs for the inevitable downward spiral, hoping for a paparazzi crotch shot when Sarah exits a sports car (or snowmobile).

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, Bad Fences Make Your Neighbor Sarah Palin

2010-06-01T17:59:00.001-04:00

(Pic via Gawker via Huffington Post)

Being from a rural area, I have seen some half-assed, white trash building projects in my day. Usually, though, the people who build them have an excuse: they must fix things with baling wire, toothpaste and duct tape, because they are Poor. So I'm at a loss to explain this fence that the Palins recently put up to thwart the journalist living next door. The woman is clearly making money these days, since people are apparently more than willing to pay for Shrill Ignorant Shrieking Harpies to make their eardrums bleed, so money can't be the reason this fence was apparently built over a tree stump. Sheer Wasillabilly laziness (and/or graft; perhaps this is the fence the "lowest bidder" built) is the only plausible explanation.

Now, if she'd hired a Mexican, that job would have been done right.

If I Were A Better Person, I Might Feel Sorry For Them

2010-05-27T17:21:00.000-04:00

Those sad fools heading the GOP keep making attempts to "listen to real Americans" by putting up little 'ol websites & inviting comments. This is because they feel compelled to keep up the populist front, so that all of the Angry Whites and Bitters* can continue to fixate on the mean gubmint and not notice the thorough reaming they are getting by corporations.

Unfortunately, teh Interwebs appears to be populated mainly by vicious and apparently unemployed liberals who immediately swarm to any such site and start proposing things involving Truck Nutz. Then they all laugh at each other's jokes, just like the cool kids used to do when they were in the hallway smoking pot, while some people were just trying to have a prayer session before school starts, okay? Then the other people who comment are people the Republicans really don't want to be publicly associated with, who have numerous suggestions about the proper weaponry for the Upcoming Race Wars. Basically, the Republicans should just give up on the whole open-forum website idea and own up the fact that they really don't care what a bunch of hicks from the swamps think anyway. Of course they won't do this, but it would be good to see: a swanky website that requires you to donate $10,000 to the RNC before you can even enter, and then cigar smoke wafts gently out of your computer and your disk drive begins to dispense Talisker and you start to chuckle quietly about how well the whole dismantling-the-education-system 30-year plan turned out.

But as Wonkette notes, there are, in fact, some Real Americans who do get a word in edgewise, and they sound both reasonable, and sad.

*Sounds like a fun new cocktail, but is not.

It's Never Going to Stop, Man...Now Hop Quick, Like a Bunny!

2010-05-25T16:57:00.000-04:00

That line is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Benicio del Toro/what was his character's name again? is clinging to a merry-go-round in Circus Circus, and Johnny Depp/Hunter S. is trying to get him off it. When Benicio says, "Make it stop," Johnny Depp points out that the merry-go-round never stops--much like life itself, the wheel of samsara, or myriad events that confirm my total cynicism.** It's deep, see?

So, quick, like a bunny, onto the report that found that the regulators from the MMS--who were supposed to be overseeing tiny little details like oil rig shut-off valves, but who ever needs to use those, right?--would let industry officials fill out the forms in pencil, and then the "regulators" would go over them again in pen and turn them in. I vaguely remember mocking the MMS back in the day, when a bunch of these guys got caught doing cocaine and sharing hookers with lobbyists from the various industries they were supposedly overseeing. I figured that they had just signed away all national parks to Halliburton, as this was standard Bush Administration policy, whether high or no. Then I tried not to think about this anymore--which was apparently the course of action taken by lots of people, until some 200 million gallons of oil poured into the Gulf. And while the Obama administration is clearly going to emphasize that this report covers 2005-2007, when, you know, THOSE GUYS were in power, it turns out that the current Administration selected a BP executive as deputy administrator for land and minerals management. How about that, surprise, surprise, surprise, &c. Also, seems like both BP and the Obama Administration significantly under-reported the amount of oil pouring out of the well.

Suggestion: there are currently many people unemployed in Gulf Coast states, no? Perhaps they could be hired to wash some pelicans and save some wildlife? And perhaps BP could just go ahead and pay all of them a nice wage, just out of the goodness of its shrunken, withered corporate heart?

**The Theme of the Month is "defending my cynicism," apparently; I just noticed that 3 of the last 4 posts are about being cynical. I suppose that, as a graduate of a notably lefty-hippie-idealist university, I have some lingering need to defend my misanthropic views, which were generally at odds with the general tenor of debate in my undergrad discussion sections. What Blogs Are For: Finally Saying What I Wanted To Say to That Hippie That One Time in 1997.

Today in Republican Jackassery: You Say Christian, I Say Hypocrite, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off.

2010-05-18T20:00:00.000-04:00

Many people have already mocked George Rekers, not only for his moustache, which is eminently mockable, but also for claiming that homosexuality can be 'overcome' and 'cured.' And to prove it, he went online to a site called, yes it is true, Rentboy.com to find someone to help 'carry his luggage' on a trip to Europe. Perhaps he felt God was dilatory in giving him tests to prove his faithfulness and non-gayness, and decided to set up a little test of his own.

I will now assume that all conservative Christian men who vociferously demonize homosexuality are, in fact, gay. Actually, I've been operating under this assumption for quite some time, and its accuracy is now approaching Euclidean levels of certainty.

Then today, in a refreshing change--from the gay hypocrisy, I mean, not from the generic hypocrisy--a Republican (Christian, conservative, the usual) member of the House, Mark Souder, resigned because he had an affair with one of his staffers. This kind of thing is usually not worth even reporting, because hypocrisy is always squalid and boring. This story has a little extra fun, though, because Souder at some point made a video promoting abstinence. Co-starring--how could it be otherwise?--the staffer with whom he had the affair.

I guess it wasn't a very effective video.

Why I Am a Cynic, Part 998 of a Countably Infinite Series

2010-05-15T18:22:00.000-04:00

>> So it seems that the Powers That Be may have "underestimated" the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf by just a smidge. Luckily, I always have my Cynic's Trump Card at hand: the "Oh, well, we're probably all fucked anyway" card. One doesn't actually win anything by playing this card, although if this card is played often enough, one does eventually have the ability to shrug in a Gallic fashion, while smoking Gauloises.

>> One might remember that prior to the passage of the health care bill, I had some minor concerns about the lack of price controls and the vague language used about the new "restrictions" on the insurance industry. Funny story: the insurance industry is now lobbying to "ward off strict regulation of premiums and profits under the new health care law." They would like to define an "unreasonable" increase in premiums as anything "more than one trillion percent in one year." Also, since they are now required to spend a certain amount of their money on actually providing health care services to people, they would like to expand the definition of "health care service" to include "paying people to review and reject health care claims." But I guess this is still better than what we had, because...now they have to haggle out in the open?

Thought Roulette

2010-05-12T20:19:00.000-04:00

>> During the great health care debacle, I wanted to make a point about how much it would cost certain Senators to buy their health insurance on the open market. The only thing was, many many Senators qualify for Medicare, which meant 1) I couldn't say, "See, your health insurance would cost $1500 a month and wouldn't cover your wife's stays at the Betty Ford Clinic" and 2) our Senate is clearly populated by the olds. Today, Alex Pareene (formerly of Gawker, now apparently of Salon) noted that this Congress is officially the oldest Congress ever. Apparently, being senile does not disqualify anyone from voting on minor little things like wars and whatnot. I grant that it's hard to differentiate between senility and batshit insanity, but still...Call me cynical (if you haven't already) but somehow I doubt that these guys are making decisions with the seventh generation in mind. ("Global warming? How soon will Manhattan be under water? 2030? Fuck it, I'm not going to be around for that.") Fun fact: Senator Robert Byrd was born the year the United States declared war on Germany the first time.

>> Sarah Palin is publishing a book. It is entitled--and I am not making this up--"America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag." Now while I can see someone, perhaps not Sarah Palin, but someone, having reflections on family, and it is possible to have reflections on faith, I am baffled as to how exactly one reflects on flag. Not the flag, not a flag...but just flag. Do articles of faith prohibit the use of articles in text?

>> Apparently, the Tea Baggers in Maine have managed to replace the Republican party platform with their own platform, which is a very special blend of crazy. Among other things, while going all out for "the rights of the unborn" (in passing, "the unborn" is an oddly creepy phrase) they also want to reject the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Child. Interesting. If only those children could un-born themselves, they could have some rights back. In the meantime, we will stand proudly with Somalia as the only nation that has not ratified this treaty. They would also like to "discard political correctness" and "Investigate collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth"and something about "Return to the principles of Austrian economics" which, um, irony alert?

One thing that I find very strange about these folk is their propensity for taking an outraged stand against things that no one is actually proposing (for example, a one world government or currency; or for that matter, is political correctness really so oppressive? When you want to call a woman--say, Hillary Rodham Clinton--a bitch, do people materialize out of nowhere and staple your tongue? Isn't this whole anti-political-correctness thing really a little temper tantrum because you can't call the other kids names anymore?)

As for the "collusion between government and industry" in perpetuating the "global warming myth" this is just so retarded I can't even get into it, especially because Sarah Palin just showed up to staple my tongue for using the word "retarded." It's okay, though, it's not "political correctness" if it's for Jesus.

Yeah, What He Said

2010-05-08T14:47:00.000-04:00

A great clip from the Ed Schultz show (the sound is a little funky, but it's worth it). Mike Papantonio, an environmental lawyer, breaks down the right wing response to the oil spill. Bonuses: he calls Rush Limbaugh an "AM radio burnout," says there's an audience for this "crazy bumpkin" talk, that corporate America knows that there is this exploitable audience (we may run out of fossil fuels, but we'll never run out of stupidity), so they "release the flying monkeys" like Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

2010-05-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

I am frequently accused of being a cynic. And this is so, though of course like all cynics I think I am simply a realist. Example:

IDEALIST T.A.: So my students would really like more time to work on the essay, so could we get those paper topics out earlier? They're really committed to their topics.

CYNICAL SELF: 95% of those kids are going to write their paper the night before it's due, probably after buying Ritalin from the kid down the hall.

IDEALIST T.A.: No! Well, maybe your kids aren't as inspired as my kids are by this class (smiles at professor).

CYNICAL SELF: Or maybe my students aren't trying to bullshit me into getting them extra time to find a paper on the internet, because I scare them.

IDEALIST T.A.: You're such a cynic! I could never live like that. I like to look for the best in people, don't you?

CYNICAL SELF: No.

So anyhow. Apparently the Gulf of Mexico is where the military dumps much of its unexploded ordinance. And it is also, as you may have recently noticed, where a lot of off-shore drilling activity takes place. I'm sure this adds just that little bit of extra excitement oil rig workers need.

This reminds me of trying to read Ghost Wars, an excellent book that I will probably never finish. Because it starts with the war between the Soviets and the Afghanis, which was, first of all, really for no reason whatsoever, some Cold War nonsensery about spreading or supporting communism. And then in a shocking turn of events the Reagan administration gets involved, and starts handing out expensive and very effective weaponry to basically anyone who showed up saying they were going to fight the Evil Commies. The part that kills me is that they expected people to turn them back in after the war with the Soviet Union was over. Instead, they used them to fight each other, and now they use them to shoot down American planes. Fun!

In both situations, people had to think that Everything Is Under Control, betting that the outcome of the situation would be the best possible outcome (The Afghanis would never descend into sectarian civil conflict, and will always be on our side; oil companies can be trusted to be cautious when drilling in a minefield). This is why cynicism is actually a helpful attitude, and clearly more cynics should be consulted about policy making, and oil drilling licenses, and the minor problems that may occur when we litter the ocean floor with bombs.

Put Down the Science Before Someone Gets Their Quarks Poked Out

2010-04-28T16:18:00.000-04:00

The desire to "prove" that events in the Bible were actual, historical events has always seemed at odds to me with, what's that other thing, oh right: faith. Why run around digging up Mary's shekels and superhydroatomatizing or whatever the Shroud of Turin when you know it had to happen that way because God said so? God's word isn't good enough for you people? You believe Glenn Beck without proof, but God, him you've got to check up on? Can't you leave all this "proving" business to those geeks who ruined the curve for you in high school?

This is brought up by the (from Fox News via Wonkette, so take it as you will) finding of some wood chunks on some mountain in Turkey that they think was Noah's Ark. They determined that these wood chunks are 4,800 years old. How did they determine this? Divine revelation? ISBN codes? No, they used carbon dating. This is funny, because when other scientists use carbon dating to suggest that there are many things on earth more than 6,000 years old, that is taken to be The Devil at work. But if it proves that Noah's Ark existed, then it's totally incontrovertible fact.

It must be awesome to be an "evangelical explorer," though.

Goldman Sigh

2010-04-27T22:30:00.000-04:00

I enjoy a farce as much as the next person, but these Goldman Sachs hearings are a bit much. The routine of sitting Wall Street down for a Stern Talking To, Young Man, What Do You Think Your Mother Found In Your Room Today?--it's getting a little stale, no? To continue the analogy, it's like telling a teenage boy who has already knocked up a couple of girls that he should Be Responsible and Careful from now on, and here are the keys to the car, your mother and I will be out late.

States Which Should Be Given Back to Mexico

2010-04-25T19:07:00.000-04:00

Not that Mexico would take them, but add Arizona to the list. I'm more than willing to give them Texas, as well. But then we'd have all these Texans trying to get into Louisiana and Oklahoma, desperate for low-paying agricultural jobs, and then we'd have to pass a law that authorized police to demand identification and residency papers from anyone with a drawl or a Stetson or a "Don't Tread On Me!" flag, tiresome.

Anyway, you have to just love a state--that only exists because of massive federal subsidies on water, the Hoover Dam didn't build itself, nutheads--which spends all its time voting against taxes and Martin Luther King Jr. day and daylight savings time and I don't know what. It's a goddamn crime that anyone in Arizona even has a lawn for illegal immigrants to mow.

Then again, isn't Arizona full of retirees living on Social Security and enjoying their socialized healthcare? You know, if this bill actually was effective in deporting illegal immigrants, then a state full of lazy bastards living off the welfare state would have to get out there and do some honest work for a change.

Sarah Palin's Voice Violates the Geneva Conventions

2010-04-21T15:14:00.000-04:00

I wanted to find a clip of Sarah Palin making a joke, in order to further explore my deep and profound insight about the connection between conservatives and humor, or lack thereof. But 5 seconds into the first clip, I thought, "So that's what a Pomeranian put through a wood-chipper sounds like" and abandoned the project.

So I typed "Sarah Palin 'community organizer'" into Godggle and put up the most recent clip that came up. No idea if it's actually applicable, but feel free to watch it and let me know. "Community organizer" is a phrase Palin frequently uses as a laugh line, and her audiences do, actually, laugh at it. While teh nutz may find the idea of community organizing hilarious, it is not actually humorous. There is a difference between the way we laugh when someone falls down (cf. "America's Funniest Home Videos") and the laughter that comes out of a kind of "Oh, shit" moment when a boundary is crossed. Humor reveals those hidden social conventions, arbitrary beliefs, truisms and cliches that pass for 'common sense.' Really good humor makes skeptics out of the audience; it should shift them from in the group mind to out of the group mind. This is antithetical to the conservative project, which is to make conventionality comfortable and invisible.

Things I Did Not Know.

2010-04-12T18:49:00.000-04:00

We (by "we" is meant: Wal-Mart) are importing potatoes from India.

Don't they kind of need those potatoes themselves? Don't we have an entire state dedicated to potatoes? We must end our dependence on foreign potatoes!

Thought Roulette

2010-04-12T02:34:00.000-04:00

~ A while back someone friend requested me on Facebook. Their name sounded vaguely familiar--I thought they were a friend of a friend with whom I'd gone drinking a couple of times--so I accepted. Now I'm increasingly sure I don't actually know this person, but I haven't unfriended them. Somehow, a stranger's life (or, anyway, their status updates) are almost as interesting as those of people I do know. Draw your own conclusions.

~ The depths to which we have sunk: hallucinogens are being studied for their possible therapeutic effects, under "rigorous protocols and safeguards," of course. As long as it's happening in a lab, with scientists, then it's real. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of goddamn hippies making excuses for not being Good Americans. George Carlin says:

~ You know, the really unforgivable thing about conservatives is that they are so rarely funny. (Funny on purpose, I mean, but even when they're funny in a "Like such as what, Katie" way, it's only funny in the same way watching someone fall down is funny--monkey funny, primal funny.) I think it is because the true foundation of humor is the tragic, and conservatives generally respond to tragedy with sentimentality. Perhaps this will be the topic of my seventh unfinished dissertation.

~ By the way, if you have a bottle of Scotch you'd like to trade for a dissertation topic, email me.

On Decency

2010-04-09T22:39:00.000-04:00

Classy, compassionate woman in Tennessee finds adopted child not up to her standards, returns to sender. Bonus: she put the 7-year-old boy on a plane to Russia by himself. Because that's how she returns things to Amazon, right? (2 stars, Child not as described, somewhat damaged, still defective after 6 months!)

On Anger

2010-04-05T19:50:00.000-04:00

There are so, so many things in the world to be angry about, that allow one to go about filled with righteous, life-giving rage. One could be angry about unjust wars (pick one!), children dying of preventable diseases, children dying of starvation, various and sundry experiments with genocide, and, really, let's not even get started on Infuriatingly Awful Things That Happen to Women Everywhere, or The Environment, or Animals, because the anti-depressants are just starting to work over here. So there are these big, enraging things, and then there are the little daily outrages, the kind that make you mutter "Motherfuckers" in the library and disturb the girl who's like, totally trying to post a clever status update on Twitter ("In Davis lib! So boring!").

The news that the top hedge fund managers made a collective $25 billion dollars last year (in case you're wondering, no, there are not 25 billion hedge fund managers; in fact, this was the combined income of just 25 men) was of the latter variety of anger (if it had a flavor, it would be nuts, surrounded by bitter nougat). To add a topping to my anger nougat, it turns out that hedge fund managers only have to pay 15% income tax on that income! Know why? Because income made from managing other people's money is taxed at a lower rate than regular income--treated as long-term capital gains (which, by the way, up there on the Scale of Outrage is the fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than regular income anyway, because I think money for which people actually WORK should be taxed at a lower rate than money that your other money earned for you, while you were summering in Mauritius). Hahahahahaha, motherfuckers.

So while these Tea Bagging Lunatics eat an outrage sandwich comprised of racism (Obama is a muslin kenyan witch doctor!), fearmongering (death panels! kill grandma! take our guns!), and falsehoods (see above; also, health care reform=socialism, Sarah Palin=Real American, &c.) they don't pay any attention to the fact that someone who made 2.3 billion dollars last year--during the worst economic recession since the Depression, while the unemployment rate topped 10%--paid taxes at a rate half what a middle-class American pays. Or the fact that no one in the world needs 2.3 billion dollars a year in income anyway, goddammit. They know they're being manipulated, that something is not quite what it seems, but they are so gullible that they blame the brown people and the government and think that corporations are on their side somehow, and big business needs defending. They honestly think that their interests are the same as the interests of rich people. Because everyone will be rich, someday, in America.

Newfangled Ingredients to Add to Your Arugula

2010-04-01T18:53:00.000-04:00

Today in the Times--and in the most read articles list, yet: an entire article about growing horseradish. Bonus "Classic NYT Ridiculosity" points:
+2 The author's boyfriend is named "Rock."
+5 The author talks to someone who wrote a dissertation on horseradish.
+2 Horseradish is praised for it's "anti-cancer properties."
+1 The article mentions the Oracle at Delphi.

Obamapologists

2010-03-31T19:06:00.000-04:00

"Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time."

Oh, rly? Ya, rly. (In passing, I wonder if text-speak will be a key part of the evolution of language, so in 500 years, many words will omit vowels all together, srsly.)

A few weeks ago I agreed with Glenn Greenwald that Obama feels free to dismiss the left in this country because pissing them off is virtually cost-free. Nate Silver and some other members of the White Liberal Males Who Love Obama SOOOO Much said that this wasn't true, the health care bill was really demonstrative of Obama's fantastic masterful strategy, and all those little tiny problems leftists had with the bill are going to go away POOF later on. Obamagic!

And now I present to you, the American Left: offshore drilling! The rigs are going to be in the shape of one big middle finger. This is no doubt a core part of Obama's cunning strategy to get some Republicans to vote for the cap-and-trade bill (this is actually being suggested, which is re-fucking-diculous, fr rl.)

Today in Religion: I've Had About Enough of This Shit

2010-03-29T19:44:00.000-04:00

Comic Relief:

Muslim extremists blew themselves, and several dozen other people, to the Afterlife-if-there-was-one-but-sadly-actually-NO. Apparently the suicide bombers were all women. Progress!

Also, if these absolutely insane people were brown religious lunatics named Muhammed, Obama would have been impeached by now. But they're white religious lunatics named David and Josh and John, so therefore by definition cannot be terrorists. Oh, hey, don't read this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, or look at this Map O' Crazy they made.

Government is Not the Problem. Unchecked Corporate Oligarchies Are the Problem.

2010-03-28T23:20:00.000-04:00

...As I believe Reagan once said.

I read the recent Times article on Tea Partiers (though they don't seem to be having that much fun, so "partiers" really seems like a misnomer). Apparently many of the people in this Giant Blob of Monstrous Ignorance were galvanized by losing their jobs in the recent economic Troubles. And who is to blame for the disappearing middle class, and stagnant wages, and health costs that quadruple every few days? Who has been the beneficiary of the "deregulation" of markets based on Friedman's Magical Freedom Market Theory? [Hey, remember how deregulation of energy markets in California was supposed to reduce costs because there were hundreds of mom-and-pop nuclear reactors out there just dying to get in there and compete? And instead, energy bills went up by 300% in one month? And certain people at Enron got obscenely wealthy because they played fun little games, like creating artificial scarcity and then demanding huge amounts of money to turn the lights back on? Good times, good times.] Who is to blame for shipping jobs overseas and dismantling our education system...&c., &c.

Well. THE GOVERNMENT, obvs! Yes, if the government would just get out of the way of freedom fighting corporations, everything would be swell. And if government could also provide all of the services everyone now takes for granted, but not collect any taxes in order to pay for said services, then we would once again truly be aligned with the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

During the Depression, when people also rose up in anger, they realized that they were at the mercy of impersonal economic forces that were totally beyond their control. The only way to mitigate the impact of the inherent instability of markets was a) to regulate them--N.B. this is not the same as "giving the banks 1.4 trillion dollars" b) to create a minimal social safety net (very minimal, why, it's the minimal-ist there is in the industrialized world!) and c) to guarantee certain basic rights for laborers. What a bunch of crazy Marxists! When this happened, everyone in America became instantly un-free.

But these--what's a polite word here?--I guess I'll just fall back on "motherfuckers"--no, ignorant motherfuckers have elaborated their own sophisticated political theory, to wit: “If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said [editor's note: this man is on Social Security. Of course]. Dude, totally, I know, I was, like, going to build my own F-22, but then the government, like, just gave me one? So I just stayed in and burned flags instead, and they were supposed to be made out of hemp? but it totally didn't get us high, so it was lame.

What Fresh Hell is This?

2010-03-27T19:29:00.000-04:00

I have previously insulted the Catholic Church in this blog. I will now resume.

What is the deal with these guys? What is up with the fornicatin' and prostitutin' and gay fornicatin' and, oh yeah, molestin'? Is the Catholic Church just one particularly well-organized, well-funded, and fabulously dressed secret sex society? To be honest, most religion seems to me kind of suspect from the get-go. But okay, some churches provide the kind of communities that most people no longer have, and many of them do indeed go forth and do good works.

However. The Church as headed by Der Popenfuhrer (thanks, Jesus' General, for that one) has arguably done more harm than good. First they went after American nuns, which is a good idea, since so many women want to be the unpaid, unappreciated workhorses of a byzantine patriarchal organization. They went ahead and said they didn't think condoms were much help after all, because Every Sperm is Sacred, Even Sperms with HIV. Then they went back and clarified their stance on women as priests, from [quietly] "No, we don't think we'll be doing that anytime soon" to "Women are all sinful whores vaginas are scary never mention this again."

So I guess what I'm saying is that the Catholic Church is the originator, the Ur-Dudes, if you will, of the "Bros Before Hos" ethos.

And now all this bullshit. Some dude in a dress molests 200 deaf children, but while suggesting
that birth control is not actually counter to "God's will" is grounds for instant excommunication, molesting disabled boys is just fucking fine. Then there's this other guy in a gown in Germany, who had his little peccadillos reported to Ratzenwhatsit when he was head of what used to be the office of "The Inquisition" but is now called something much more bureaucratic, like "the Office of Making Reports Of Child Abuse Go Away." The Church got some guy to throw himself on the sceptre for that one, but oho, look what the Times is reporting today:

But the memo cited by the Times says that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest's reassignment, the newspaper reported.

The Vatican's response to this bit of news is:

The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.

I know, right? Seems like every goddamn day I hear about the Unitarians covering up for criminal pedophiles in their organization.

In the case of this shitheel who abused children who literally could not speak of what was happening to them, there was apparently an "internal" investigation, which showed that the abuse was not as widespread as had been claimed. They determined this without interviewing any of the victims. I guess they wouldn't have to, since God would just transmit the truth to them through their fillings or however he communicates these days. This is a good one:

Fasani said the diocese maintained that it did not interview the alleged victims because they never made a formal complaint to the bishop. The diocese also said it didn't know how to contact them, even though they are all members of a Verona deaf association with ties to the church-run school.

Somewhere, someone from the Bush Administration is saying, "Hey, they copied our notes!"

Today in Republican Jackassery: All of It

2010-03-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

Having lost the vote on health care reform, the Republicans continue to throw all their toys out of the crib (and then cry, hold their breath, and wet their pants when they don't get them back*). After the bill was passed, Americans got on board: a 9% increase in approval. It's the "I've been a fan of the Saints forever!" syndrome: everyone loves a winner.

It's one thing to do all you can to defeat a bill, but even I'm surprised at the continued all-out freak out: really? You're going to sue the government to stop this bill? You're going to insist on enforcing minor parliamentary rules and send it back to the House? After a year of debate? I never expect the Republicans to do what's right, but I do expect them to do what will get them elected. What's the campaign slogan here: "We went to the mat to make sure your pre-existing condition excluded you from health insurance!" "We stood up for the right of every American to go bankrupt because of health care costs!" You all, every single one of you jackasses, voted against it--when they start euthanizing Grandma, can't you just stand on that?

I still think this is just one of the weirdest social phenomenon I've ever seen: people literally up in arms about the government trying to help them. A suggestion: if we want to continue to go with this idea of American Exceptionalism, perhaps we should aim for something other than exceptionally ignorant and exceptionally reactionary.

*Just read Wonkette, who has also noted the similarities between actual toddlers and Republicans. Something about David Vitter and diapers should be thrown in here, but we are above such cheap jests, of course.

Right Thinks Left is Huge Stoned Carousing Sexytime Socialist Feminist Monstrosity; Left is Actually Sitting in Corner, Sucking Thumb

2010-03-22T17:20:00.000-04:00

So, when I was little my brother and I had an inflatable punching bag. It was weighted with a sandbag at the bottom, so whenever you hit it, it would pop back up. As a bonus, it had a clown on it.

This is pretty much how the wingers seem to view the 60's: something that they keep punching, which keeps popping back up to spite them, and leer at them with a scary clown face, and they're not even on LSD.* For instance, today Glenn Beck (I really must stop talking about this guy; I feel like the more we talk about him the more substance he has, like how Voldemort came back to life when Ginny Weasley wrote in the journal that turned out to be a Horcrux...or something) wrote** on his Twitteringy: "Attn: 60s sanfran radicals--we will rise and crush in Nov. Together like NEVER b4. You WILL fail bcausr WE R COMING."

Yeah. Sanfran radicals! Who still run everything and get everything they want, like abortion parties and gay marriages and arugula, and gay aborted arugula, which Real Americans would never eat, because it can't be fried, and also there's no pork product involved. I guess the only way B-who-must-not-be-named and his ilk can keep up the fiction of victimization they have going is to keep inflating that old 60's clown. Meanwhile, the American left, such as it is, is fighting the good fight known as "finding reasons to get out of bed."

*Not to be confused with LDS, though Glenn Beck is under the influence of that.
**It is with great self-restraint that I don't "ironic quotes" half of the things on this blog, mainly the half that deals with wingers "writing" or "reading" or "thinking."

Shiny Happy HCR

2010-03-22T14:06:00.000-04:00

Part of the reason Republicans fought this bill so hard (besides being obstructionist jackasses) is that they know it's nearly impossible to take away entitlements once they're in place. Even Republicans can't touch Social Security or Medicare--remember Bush's push for privatization of Social Security in 2004? The market was up, people were making money (or stealing it, whatever!) and it seemed like Grandma could get rich, if it wasn't for that mean old gubmint. And they still couldn't do it: Republicans can do a simple cost-benefit analysis as quickly as the next corporate lackey, and they knew a vote to end Social Security would be like voting themselves out of office.

Here, refreshingly, is a clip wherein a conservative seems like a reasonable human being. Frum manages to avoid using the words "communist" "socialist" "government takeover" and "shoved down our throats," for which I thank him.

Group Think: Just as Irritating on the Left as on the Right

2010-03-19T01:01:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, but did I miss some kind of everyone-gets-a-kitten deal that would explain why all of a sudden everyone on the Left (Daily Kos et al.) picked up their pom-poms and started cheering for this health care reform bill?

Let's review. The bill contains no cost controls, no public option, and very little oversight or regulation of insurance companies by the government. This was true before, and it's true now, so what has changed to convince liberals to support this bill? Specifically, I really really want to know what Obama said to Kucinich on the plane that not only made Kucinich agree to switch his vote, but also has him running around evangelizing like some kind of born-again Centrist.

As is depressingly usual, the left in this country is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this means that the Corporatist Dems can safely ignore anyone to their left, because the left will always fold when confronted with the "It's the lesser of two evils" card (it trumps the 'principled objections' card every time!). People: the lesser of two evils is still evil. I mean, JESUS CHRIST ON A CRUTCH. Everyone on the left is having a good time pointing out that the Republicans never met an earmark they didn't like while Bush II (Bush I, Reagan) was in office, and our Little Middle Eastern Escapades were paid for by off-books accounting that would have made Arthur Anderson proud. So true. Yet if the Bush White House had made a backroom deal with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit hospitals that resulted in mandating that millions of Americans buy their shitty shitty products, vastly increasing their profits while not requiring them to, you know, actually provide health care, what would Markos Moulitsas have said then? Would it have been, "Well, you know, this contract with Halliburton isn't great--I mean, we asked them to provide the troops with food and water for $85 billion dollars a day, and they agreed to give them each a can of soda and a pack of gum for $165 billion dollars a day--but now is not the time to question these trifling details, because something is better than nothing..."

Amusingly, the Democrats and the Leftists Who Love Them Too Much have bought the line that they have to pass this bill because if they don't, then they'll be seen as weak. But this bill is entirely predicated upon the weakness of the left in this country, and the certain knowledge that no matter how bad the Democrats look, the Republicans always look worse. This means that the Democratic establishment counts on the fact that the left will always turn out to vote for them because the Right looks like (well, okay, has actually become) a bunch of Christ-crazy rednecks who'll ship women back to the kitchen and shove gays back in the closet.

For example, in the very post that details the back room deal and K Street strategy of the White House, Miles Mogulescu (hitherto, and probably henceforth, unknown to me) writes,

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: Whenever I write blogs which are critical of Obama and Congressional Democrats for making corporatist deals, I get numerous comments from people who believe they are progressive but say they will never vote for Obama or Democrats again, that they will stay home at the next election, or that they will vote for small third parties who have no chance of winning. It's not my intent to encourage those views. Do people making these comments really think bringing Republicans back to power would make things better?

Well, Miles, the real problem here is that these are our only two options. This means the American voter is constantly trying to object to the status quo, and it doesn't actually matter which party is in power. They're just going to go the other way, because it's the only way they have to punish the corporate toadies, lackies, and shoeshine boys who have shipped good jobs overseas, allowed American cities to crumble, perpetuated vast inequalities of wealth and status, and permitted the shameful iniquity that is reality television.

43 Stone? Today in Crazy British Measurements

2010-03-18T12:17:00.000-04:00

Do you ever click through on a link and then think, "Why the fuck did I do that to myself?"

No. Probably just me, then.

So I clicked through on a link that said, "Super-sized mother determined to become world's fattest woman" in part--though this is no justification--because it was from the British Daily Mail, and I though, "Aha, maybe the Brits are going to make a run at the Grossly Obese Nation Award." But no. The woman is of course American, though she does hail from New Jersey and not the Traditionally Obese States of the South.

This article is so full of wrongness. For example:

Ms Simpson already holds the Guinness World Record as the world's fattest mother, when she gave birth in 2007 weighing 38stone.
She needed a team of 30 medics to deliver her daughter Jacqueline during a high-risk Caesarean birth.

Just sit there and let the implications of all that filter through. Or don't. Save yourselves! Go on without me! As I, without regard for my mental well-being, continued to scroll down, I thought, "This implies a man" and so it does. Not one man but many men!

You might expect her long-term partner Philippe, 49, to advise her to slim down, but instead he encourages her to eat more.
He met Donna on a dating site for plus-size people and is a self-confessed fat admirer, although he himself only weighs 150lbs.

...To fund the massive $750 weekly food shop, she runs a website where men pay her to watch her eat fast food.

Hahaha, this woman spends more per week on food than I do per month on rent! Maybe the whole family just lives in her vagina.

Yeah. That was totally gratuitous. I just added my own Ingredient of Wrong to the Stone Soup of Wrong that is this article. I'm going to step away now.

fn. A "stone" = 14 pounds, apparently. Here's a conversion site, if you want to know your weight in medieval units.

Who You Really Are

2010-03-17T19:39:00.000-04:00

The New York Times tends to cycle through iterations of certain topics. Foodie things, usually linked to sustainable, local, etc., themes, but also variations on the Really Expensive New Ingredient Which is Suddenly Necessary (for example: kaffir lime leaves. Himalayan or Hawaiian salt. Expensive liquor--you will buy a bottle for $45 for one tablespoon for one recipe, and then it will stickily gather dust in that cupboard above the fridge, where Creme de Menthe and Kahlua go to die). Then there are the Hateable People Columns, which involve some of the following: Park Slope, kids with trendy names--Ava, Lotus, Madeleine, what have you--which leads to trends in child rearing and the Cult of Parenthood, "affordable" apartments for $500,000, young architects/designers (who paid too much for an "affordable" apartment and now have to borrow $10,000 from their friends to make the mortgage), people who made beaucoup de dinero in the city and then left for The Simple Life in the country, making artisanal tofu and goat-cheese-body-wash in their perfectly restored 19th century farmhouse. I really could go on, but I'm too lazy to keep looking for links.

Then there are the What The Kids Are Doing These Days columns, all agog about Twitter and How to Friend Your Child on Facebook. A subtheme of these--and this, I promise, is the point of this post--is ZOMG there is no privacy on the Interwebs!!! The tone of these articles is always shock, dismay, surprise, be afraid. And it always shocks, dismays, and surprises me that they are continually being reminded of, and terrified by, something that has been apparent for quite some time now: should a malicious person wish to find out all kinds of things about you, with the purpose of running up bills at Outback Steak House and Best Buy, or because they want to be on the cover of Stalker Weekly, well, they can. There is a certain opacity to our lives now. It's like living in a house with frosted windows: passers by can get a fuzzy idea of what's going on inside, and really determined passers by could probably find the clear space at the edge of the pane and look in. I don't really know if this is a good thing, but it is now an understood thing. Most of us have come to accept this state of affairs: we trade some level of risk for some level of convenience. Banking online probably increases the risk that someone will be able to hack into my account information (and, actually, my ATM card was replaced by the bank a couple of years ago because the account number, and that of many others, "had been compromised") but it also meant that I could pay my bills from abroad, thus preserving the sanctity of the all-important credit rating.

An essay that Jonathan Lethem wrote (in How to Be Alone) made me think a bit differently about this issue. Lethem pointed out that in many ways we all lead much more private lives now than ever before; that, in fact, no one is watching us. We aren't surrounded by people who know our parents or siblings, let alone our grandparents. Most of us aren't even around people who knew us as a child. My brother and I have now lived apart for almost as long as we lived together growing up; I went away to college when he was 14 and moved to the other side of the country 8 years ago. What I'm trying to say, very poorly, is that we may have a lot more information about people, but we don't have any context for it. Which makes it sort of like getting individual sentences from War and Peace and thinking that you know the whole story.

No one is watching us. There is a freedom in that. We can violate convention without fearing ostracization. We aren't ascribed character and history because of who our family is and was, the way they fit or didn't fit into a community and place. But there is something lost, too. We live our lives without witnesses. When we say we "bear witness" to someone, it means we have agreed to carry something of theirs within ourselves, and to tell the truth--to testify--about it when called upon. I'm not the first, and I won't be the last, to observe that without these witnesses we must all carry our selves. Since no one knows us, we must tell who we are through how we act, all the time, and when those actions are not what we think they should be, we must be the arbiter of mores and the enforcers of our own solitary conventions. So we are constantly, restlessly, piecing ourselves together.

This ceaseless activity of putting and pulling ourselves together is often quite tiresome. One has to make decisions all the time: how should I act in this situation? Or more precisely, how does the person I think I am, or wish to be, act in this situation? How do I get other people to see me as [insert positive character trait here]? There is a lot of anxiety in this situation, because we're trying to control a lot of moving parts. We're trying to get ourselves to act a certain way, to do what we think we should do in widely varying situations, trying to get it right. We have to keep the film moving through the projector, so we keep cranking away. In addition to the mountainous task of controlling ourselves, we're trying to get other people to think we got it right, to applaud at the show we're putting on, so we're also trying to control how other people think of us--we're trying to control other people's minds.*

It's not really surprising, then, that people (in this country in particular, I think) are self-centered in so many senses of the word. The self, this flimsy construction, becomes the only referent people have, their only sense of continuity in time. And it is something for which we feel solely responsible, because we can't depend on other people to be present for any length of time to help maintain it.

*"This exercise in futility is brought to you by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals."

Today In Republican Jackassery: The Texas School Board Edition

2010-03-13T20:28:00.000-05:00

The Texas School Board, on a party line vote (Idiots 10/Relatively Sane 5) revised the social studies curriculum to correct for the well-known liberal bias of history. Fun! What shall schoolchildren in the Lone Star state learn?

Separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, except for that nasty leftist Thomas Jefferson, were all totally devout Christians who wanted a Christian nation (which is definitely in the Constitution, amiright? I'm sure the Founding Fathers spelled out the necessity of theocracy in great detail, because that worked out so well for Europe).

In addition to learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., they shall learn about the "violent philosophy" of the Black Panthers, lest they wrongly think that black people are non-threatening.

They will be instructed as to the "unintended consequences" of the Great Society programs. These consequences were not specified in the article, but since affirmative action and Title IX were singled out, we can assume it's about The Terrible Things That Happen When The Women and Coloreds Get Uppity.

Capitalism will be re-named "the free enterprise system," because capitalists are tired of being called pigs. (And, to be fair, pigs are probably tired of being associated with capitalists.)

Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment-biased writings did not inspire anyone to revolution; the peasants of Europe were all about St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, those freedom loving philosophers.

Blow Me Down Flat

2010-03-11T19:35:00.000-05:00

I open the Times today and..will it be believed? I saw a headline that made me happy. And that headline involved the Democratic party. The Democrats in the House had all taken their Ritalin, and then (after alphabetizing their CD collections, then deciding it was better to organize them by color) decided to end earmarks that award no-bid contracts to for-profit companies. Then, this evening, I see that Democrats are fighting to attach President Obama's reforms of the student loan industry to the health care bill. Of course, the Senate is having none of it. They probably spent all day on the phone trying to reassure their corporate sponsors, so that they could preserve their sinecures until they keel over dead. Because I was up late recoding data--having accidentally deleted Great Britain; no one seemed to notice--I'm lacking my usual savoir faire. So my sophisticated argument here is: fuck the fucking Senate. It was supposed to be a body that tempered the whims of the masses, not a lifetime appointment for obstructionist blowhards. Thomas Jefferson, confronted by Ben Nelson, would go back to Monticello and make a Death Apparatus out of tobacco leaves and hemp.

That being said, let us pause for a moment and realize that never, since the dawn of the Blog Era, has there been a day in which I could fully support any piece of legislation introduced by my elected representatives, much less two in one day.

But not to worry. I'm sure the green shoots on my Tree of Hope will shortly wither in the Frost of Reality.

Thought Roulette

2010-03-08T13:59:00.000-05:00

I am sorry to say (rather belatedly) that Al Weisel, better known to many as Jon Swift, has died. It's hard to pull off satire when reality itself is so absurdist, yet he frequently did it.

I saw Jon Stewart's piece on Chat Roulette, another one of those Intert00b "trends" that I cunningly avoid by never, never watching news programs. (Speaking of satire, when Wolf Blitzer and the CNN bobbleheads unveiled their Twitter "analysis" of the State of the Union...well, even Voltaire folded his cards. Lest you think I actually watched the CNN vomitorium,* I saw that, too, on The Daily Show.) As surprises exactly no one who would give it a moment's thought, what was supposed to be a way to use the internet to get all interconnected and whatnot turned instead into another Penis Forum. It's a new and exciting way for men to broadcast high-def video images of their genitalia, thus fulfilling some kind of primal urge which I frankly do not understand. My first thought, upon hearing about Chat Roulette, was: "That sounds lame" because most people are, let's face it, pretty boring, and you have to meet a lot of them from day to day anyway. So why go out of your way? My first thought was not, "Hey, now strangers can be unwittingly duped into seeing my vagina! Won't that be TOTALLY AWESOME for them?"

And so we see, class, that men and women are different from one another. Perhaps an effective deterrent for this would be a lot of women going online prepared to point and laugh, but we're busy, you know? Hm. In fact, maybe if we get enough men doing this simultaneously, we can have a world-wide coup d'etat by The Ladies, and get some shit done around here.

Which brings me to the next chamber in my Thought Roulette, which is the weird way that Douthat and sundry other conservative men consistently invoke The Femininist Menace, a global force of shrieking harpies armed with castration tools and restraining orders and sexual harassment suits. Yet when I look around I see that even among my liberal and educated female friends there is not a feeling of similarity, much less solidarity. And where Friedan and Friends, bless them, had some hours when the kids were at school and the husband was at work, during which they could contemplate their suburban anomie and then get together for coffee, well, the times, they have a'changed. Hard though it may be for these conservative men to understand, most women don't call themselves feminists anymore, and also don't really give a shit about them or their transparent toddler-like attempts to get attention through provocation ("Didn't you hear me? I said Hillary was shrill! Nyah nyah nyah.").

This lack of attention or regard from The Givers of Life/Witholders of Sex/Substitute Mommy Figures is, of course, what drives these guys nuts (and, possibly, drives them to put their penises on Chat Roulette). When I read Brooks or Douthat, I am reminded of the invariably unattractive conservative boys in the political science courses I taught, most of whom got a C-. And I wonder about retroactive grade changes.

*The Intert00bs inform me that "vomitorium" means a passageway in a theatre "situated below or behind tiers of seats through which people can spew out at the end of a performance" and not, as I meant to imply here, a place where people go to force feed themselves and then regurgitate in the presence of others. Ah, well. Details.

Exercises in Futility

2010-03-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

Against my better judgment, I clicked through to David Brooks' latest, entitled "Wal-Mart Hippies." You know Brooks is just dying to come up with something that will measure up to the pithy standards set by his "Bourgeois Bohemians." Reading the article, which was a piece of sheer wankery, as usual, I contemplated the erotic jolt of self-satisfaction that Brooks must have felt when he came up with the idea of Wal-Mart Hippies. How clever, how counterintuitive, why, it's practically even countercultural [chortle chortle].

But arguing against someone who honestly thinks that hippies, even at their most self-indulgent, are just like Tea Baggers holding up signs that say "The Zoo has an African Lion, and America has a Lyin' African" is just...it's hard to come up with a metaphor here...like clearing the brush on G.W.'s ranch. Darned if it doesn't keep growing back.

So I was pleased when I blog I've been enjoying recently--Bats Left/Throws Right--did a nice little takedown. To Brooks' trenchant observation that "One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart" DogHouse Riley appends, "One wore Tea Shades; the other carries Tea Bags. One failed Drug Tests; the other passes Purity Tests. One "grooved" on "Free Love"; the other is a collection of knuckle-walking Troglodytes with handguns in place of penises." And he has the wit and perception to have the same response to Brooks' use of a Rousseau quote* as I did, namely, "I didn't know Bartlett's had a book of Easy Political Quotations for Out-of-Context Uses."

Anyway, Brooks' "point" seemed to be that Tea Baggers and Hippies are all anti-establishment, man, you know, they just want everyone to be free from The Man and Authority and The System but bullshit because the Tea Baggers would have no problems if The Man was Dick Cheney and The System was segregation and they all got something for nothing and to piss on a Mexican on holidays, to boot.

As I said, an exercise in futility. But read D.H.Riley's whole post. It's funnier than mine.

*Guess which one? Go on, you know it. Is has to be this one, right?: "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Sadly, no. It is: "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains." Ten bucks says Brooks had to double check that that wasn't a quote from Marx. And Brooks is always throwing in these little "intellectual" references, like the ones in this article, which I assume he thinks will get him into the Cool Kids Clubhouse of New York Times readers, but which actually will just annoy anyone who has actually read Rousseau beyond the first fucking sentence of the Social Contract.

Republican Jackassery: The Jim Bunning Story

2010-03-05T16:26:00.000-05:00

A heartwarming tale of a former professional baseball player who became Senator from Kentucky; a man of such principle and courage that he alone stood against the tides of opinion (and 99 other senators) to stop the immoral and wasteful extension of unemployment benefits to people who are just clearly too lazy to fight them Mexicans for jobs picking lettuce. He did this despite significant personal cost: he missed the South Carolina--Kentucky game.

Republicans (as noted by Krugman in his editorial today) have decided to revive the argument that welfare benefits (including unemployment benefits) provide a disincentive to work. The idea (or, well, "idea") is that people will only work if they are forced to do so--if the consequences of not working are homelessness, starvation, and a brutal death at the hands of a meth junkie in the cruel cruel streets, amidst the cold falling rain. This little story fails to explain why anyone in Western Europe works at all, when they could just loaf about the place, smugly drinking a nice little Bourdeaux.

Yet I think it also hints at a grim glimmer of truth about the kinds of jobs that are available in the United States today. Many jobs are so miserable, so meaningless, and so underpaid that people must essentially be coerced into taking them. Even jobs which pay well (corporate, white collar jobs) are totally soul-sucking. I hope the person who invented the cubicle is now in a cubicle for all eternity, where the only thing he will have to read are tattered Dilbert cartoons pinned to the cubicle walls. If we accept that the Republicans are the pro-business (and emphatically not pro-free market) party, then it is essential that Americans continue to accept this wretched state of affairs, earnestly working for Wal-Mart for $7.75 an hour with no benefits, paying a higher tax rate than the Waltons do, and thinking unions are the enemy.

Glenn Beck is a Teenage Girl

2010-03-01T14:12:00.000-05:00

“When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.” --George Carlin

Even though he has only been on Fox News a short while, Glenn Beck has already pole-vaulted himself into the Crazy Wingnut Hall of Fame. Which is why I haven't written anything about him: too easy. Like kicking a baby clown. But when friend H. said "Glenn Beck is a teenage girl" (in re: the crying, and the weird thing he did with Sarah Palin, where he read his journal to her on air) well, I had to find some way to pass such a witty observation on to you, the masses (all four of you).

I looked for the clip in which Beck cries about loving his country, but it wasn't in the first three clips I found. And I love you people, but not enough to sit through more than three clips of Glenn Fucking Beck, I'll tell you what. The first one was a sit down with O'Reilly in which they had a little gabfest about progressivism. Beck was big enough to say that Obama is not "technically" a Marxist. Because in Marxism, Beck says, there is a revolution, and progressives just come to get you bit by bit. Marxism is like a big shark, and progressivism is like a bunch of piranhas, I guess. Then O'Reilly chimed in about how he got Obama to admit that he was in favor of the redistribution of wealth, which gave one furiously to think: hey, wait, isn't capitalism a system for the redistribution of wealth? Once you move beyond bartering a chicken for some butter, any system of trade is inevitably going to redistribute wealth from some people to other people. But, you know, whatever. They then chortled about the "fact" that progressives want to "take all your stuff."

I only made it through 45 seconds of the next clip I found, which was about some guy whose daughter had been kidnapped, and Beck swore she wouldn't be forgotten, &c. &c. Who knows what that was about. The above clip is one in which Beck decides that the White House is peopled with "radical Marxists" (so Obama pals around with radical Marxists, even though he isn't technically one himself).

Watching these things is painful because it's just baffling that anyone, anywhere, believes what this man is saying. Do they not ever ask themselves, "Hey, what exactly is a Marxist?" or "Since this guy is anti-big business, I assume that Fox News is a Mom & Pop media group?" The Rude Pundit has a great post up (which is part of the impetus for this post) about Beck's version of history, in which Calvin Coolidge* (!^@%@&!!) was a great President, and Progressivism died because of Wilson's failed League of Nations (uh, no). Strangely, he forgets to mention the active Socialist movement in the United States during this same time period, or even the numerous experiments with communes throughout American history.

I suppose the point of this post (beyond "Hey, what a jackass that guy is") is that it's hard to see how reasoned debate can work with people who believe what this man is saying. It's like negotiating with the inmates of the insane asylum about how the asylum should function.**

*In my AP U.S. History Class (crowd: elitist! [throws tomatoes]) we were told that the only thing worth noting about Coolidge was his campaign slogan, which was "Keep Cool With Coolidge." This had to have been a lame slogan, even by the low standards of campaign slogans. Was he promising everyone ice cream? Otherwise, Coolidge was just filler between Wilson and FDR.

**That metaphor may be revised later, when I have more time to think about it. Other suggestions for appropriate metaphors are welcome.

The Enthusiasm Gap

2010-02-25T14:11:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald has a nice post up at Salon today about the only tactic the Democrats consistently employ: ye olde bait and switch. As Greenwald puts it, the Democrats are "willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it." Then, when it comes to brass knuckles, they all lay down and play dead.

You know who I don't want to be? Ralph Nader. I don't want to be all self-righteous and bitter and craggy and go around saying that both of the parties that are supposed to represent us are actually just paid subsidiaries of corporations. But it's hard to avoid.

By the by, it's interesting that corporations are people as far as free speech goes (and ownership of property, and so on) but not as far as taxes go. Harper's informs me (in one of their soul-crushing indexes) that Goldman Sachs paid 0.6% of their income in taxes last year.

Blackwater

2010-02-21T19:18:00.001-05:00

Watching 60 Minutes (explanation as to why I'm watching a show whose target demographic is 30 years older than I am: I'm at my parent's house) and they are doing a piece on Blackwater airplane crash in Afghanistan. Several Blackwater employees ("contractors," "mercenaries") were killed--and apparently, at least one of them was alive for quite some time after the crash, but no efforts were made to rescue them. Outraged families sued, as is the American Way. Blackwater claimed it had no responsibility, because the crash happened in Afghanistan. Apparently, under Islamic law, employers are not responsible for what happens to their employees.

Take a moment to ponder the fantastic-tude of an American company, paid some ungodly amount of money because we've outsourced our wars to private companies (which has proven to be so much cheaper, no?), hiding under Islamic law to escape from taking responsibility for their employees. The mind boggles.

Puritans are Boring

2010-02-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

Gawker, which is rapidly moving up on my list of Blogs I Read Instead of Writing My Dissertation (on some days even topping Wonkette, which has somehow become less funny recently? Or perhaps I just prefer the pop-culture breadth of Gawker at the moment) recently had a post which was merely a title: Jonathan Safran Foer Was Right About Everything. Since I sincerely doubted that, I clicked the clicky and found another discussion of his recent book: How You All Should Think and Eat, about which there has been much chatter among the liberal twitterati. The point of the post was that those of us who have limited our consumption of meat to humanely raised, grass fed, $25.99/lb at Whole Foods meat are just fooling ourselves. Because only 1% of animals are raised and slaughtered this way (the argument ran) there will never be enough animals raised this way to satisfy the current demands for meat, therefore (it follows as the night the day) we should all be vegans.

I admit to being deeply conflicted about eating meat. And I am one of those self-deluding people who limits my meat consumption to the above-mentioned criteria, which means, since I make very little money, that I don't eat that much meat. I understand, and agree with, the arguments against eating meat, so I have no defense, really, just a liking for the occasional really rare steak.

Yet this is another example of generally agreeing with a left-y argument about something, but being deeply irritated by the people making it, all the same. Jonathan Pretentious Three Names Foer is exactly that kind of chunky-glasses-wearing, Brooklyn-brownstone-living, over-self-analyzing, postmodern-masculinist-writing, type of person that makes Real America hate the Left. As an added bonus, he is also the type of person who makes the Left hate the Left.

I fail to see why puritanism and self-righteousness on the Left are any more appealing than the same things on the Right, e.g.: "People shouldn't have premarital sex/eat meat. It's immoral and causes harm to people who do it and to the society as whole. Because people have sex/eat meat, the world is going to end, and it will be All Your Fault for having sex/eating meat. God/The Planet is displeased with you, and since I do not have sex/eat meat, I am better than you."

When someone from the Concerned Christian Women of America or whatever says something like the first phrases, Leftists line up en masse to point out that, in fact, people like sex, have sex, and are going to continue to have sex until Iran gets the bomb and blows us all to Kingdom Come. But when someone from Brooklyn or PETA say things along the line of the second, this is not seen as imposing an irrational worldview on others (as the CCWA ladies attempt to do) in order to placate a famously temperamental deity, but rather as rationally deduced moral precepts for the betterment of humanity.

And one more thing these two threads have in common: they are totally lacking a sense of humor about their own ideological position. Because this is SERIOUS, people, THE WORLD IS GOING TO END, chickenlittle * infinity.

Srsly?

2010-02-10T03:21:00.000-05:00

I have two perceptive and trenchant and witty blog posts in draft form, only needing a little spit and polish...but instead, I'm going to post a picture of Sarah Palin's hand. On which she wrote notes. In order to answer questions--in front of an extremely friendly audience of Teabaggers, who would have cheered if she had said nothing. Actually, she effectively said nothing, and they did cheer. But let's not quibble.

The best part is...well, I can't decide. There's the mocking of Obama for using teleprompters (by the way, I've never understood this meme from the Teabagging Right'ers. I do believe EVERY FUCKING PRESIDENT SINCE WHENEVER TELEPROMPTERS WERE INVENTED has used a teleprompter. I think it has to be that knee-jerk, anti-intellectual reaction: "He thinks he's so smart, but lookit how he has to read his speech on a telly-prompter thingy."). And then there's the fact that what she has written on her hand is: "Energy" "Budget(crossed out) cuts" "Tax" and "Lift American spirits." Are these really things she couldn't have memorized? It's not like she had to refer to some Nash equilibrium proof. It's six words. Six. lousy. words. How hard could it be...never mind.

Oh, and she hasn't ruled out a run against Obama in 2012. Good to know. Though I think she's going to need bigger hands.

Salinger and Solitude

2010-01-28T17:46:00.000-05:00

Americans are fascinated by people who voluntarily choose to shut their gates against the maddening crowds. Well, fascinated by famous people who do so. If you're just some guy living in a cave in Santa Cruz, you're probably just a sad failure of a human being who uses Eastern spirituality to justify his lack of motivation.

On the other hand, if you're J.D. Salinger, and you walked around campus proclaiming that you were going to write The Great American Novel--and then actually did it--shouldn't you stick around to enjoy the mindless adoration of vapid acolytes? We bought your book, so we each bought a little tiny piece of your soul. Now you have to tell us what you had for breakfast, your views on the current political situation, and whether or not you like Labradoodles.

The fascination with Salinger's relentless solitude far outstrips interest in his work (what little of it there was, after all). The same is true for Thomas Pynchon, another author invariably described as a "recluse," which puts one rather in mind of a poisonous spider. The fact that they've made a point of anonymity and silence seems to offend people, who then become quite determined to scale the walls (literally and figuratively--people were apparently always trying to get into the Salinger estate--which is usually described as a "compound," a word one tends to associate with cults, and which doesn't get applied to, say, Oprah's house in Santa Barbara). It is strange, because by and large most Americans don't care at all about authors, and wouldn't recognize John Updike if he foisted his aged, impotent alter ego on them at Starbucks.

Americans do not do well with rejection (which is why we dislike the French so much--because they don't seem to like us), so to want nothing so much as to be left alone is taken as more than writerly reticence. It causes unease as it implies the rejection of taken-for-granted values; self-evident truths, if you will. The point of writing a book (or any other endeavor not directly associated with commerce), is to get acclaim if not wealth (though preferably, of course, both). It is to get a seat at the table of influence. It is to elevate oneself. Otherwise, what is it all for? Why bother? That someone could not want to eat the bitter fruit of fame, that they would refuse to be the object of adoration or idolization, that they would wish to keep some part of themselves to themselves: this is now anathema to the American public, almost all of whom would gladly trade their life story for shekels and spotlights.

Salinger's withdrawal, and his refusal to write for public consumption, is therefore puzzling and disconcerting. He wouldn't even give interviews to explain why he wouldn't give interviews. His solitude obliquely critiqued our national obsession with attention, our perpetual toddler-hood. When asked what we want, all we can say is "More!" And Salinger said, instead, "Enough."

Pitchforks! Torches!

2010-01-28T14:53:00.000-05:00

Oh, David Brooks, you mewling, puking, shitheel of a "columnist." I hope that whatever university you went to (did you go to a university? a) it's hard to tell and b) you damn elitist) has rescinded your diploma. I would continue to eviscerate you, but Matt Taibbi has already done so in such a masterful manner than anything I say would be but a pale imitation.

The Upper Deck of a Large Ship, Somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean

2010-01-26T15:28:00.000-05:00

Obama: The arrangement as it stands is unsatisfactory. We must have change! We must work together, first class and second class and steerage passengers alike, for a more just and equitable distribution, a distribution that does not favor the special interests of the stewards or the captain, but one which we all determine, together, with hope for a better future...

Passenger 1: Sir, what are you talking about? And why are you standing on that soap box? It's really cold out.

Obama: I am talking, of course, about the arrangement of deck chairs! Some people have deck chairs with better views! Some people have more deck chairs than they can possibly ever sit in at once! We must redistribute the deck chairs!

McCain: When I was a P.O.W., we didn't have chairs! We had sharpened bamboo sticks to sit on, and they gave us character and a lifetime of random bursts of anger. Bunch a pansies!

Passenger 2: Where did that other soap box come from?

[Several hours of rhetoric ensue, with commentary from people who have put on hats with little pieces of paper that say "Media" on them. Passengers take a vote: they're not entirely sure what they're voting for, but the grumpy old white guy is scary, so they go for the other guy. Mostly, they just want everyone to stop talking.]

THE FOLLOWING DAY

Obama: All right people, let's get to it. We have promised change, and we will deliver! I suggest we begin by reupholstering, and then move on to deck chair placement.

Democrats: Maybe we should wait until Al Franken gets here.

Obama: Oh. All right.

Passenger 1: Seems like there are already a lot of you...maybe you should just get started. We don't have work at the moment, so we could help...just tell us what to do.

Passenger 2: Look, it's Al Franken! 'E's kinda funny lookin', innit he? Right, let's go, before it gets cold again.

Democrats: Well, Ted Kennedy's sick. And he's really the man who knows fabric around here. We really can't move forward without him.

Passenger 1: But there are, like, hundreds of us just standing around. Can't we just...

Passenger 3: Hey, I heard there's a former beauty queen in the lounge. Apparently she doesn't say anything that makes sense, but she's really pretty, and if we get lucky, she might wink at us.

[Passengers take off for a while. Return to find Democrats standing in place, as if frozen, although it is 80 degrees out. Obama is now sitting on his soap box, but is still talking.]

Democrats: Okay, we've picked a fabric!

Passengers: Wow, that's really ugly. It's like, shit brown and bile green. Don't we have some gays around? They're good at this kind of thing.

Democrats: SHHHHHH! Don't say the "G" word! This was the only fabric we could agree on. We had almost settled on something kind of neutral and beige-y, but Lieberman insisted on this one.

Passenger 1: And you couldn't have thrown him overboard?

Passenger 2: Okay, well, whatever, the fabric sucks, but it's better than nothing, and maybe the sun will bleach out most of that utterly vile green later. Hand me the scissors.

Republicans: Just a minute there, sonny boy.

Passenger 3: Who are these guys? And, seriously, where the fuck do all these soap boxes come from? How could we ever need this much soap?

Captain: Oh, we had some extra space for some reason. So we stocked up on soap boxes. These guys love 'em!

[Passenger 1: Dude, what do you think was supposed to be in that space?
Passenger 2: Well, I hope not something we might actually need.]

Republicans: That fabric is clearly SOCIALIST fabric, and not fabric that Jesus would love. Also.

Passenger 1: How's that? Socialist fabric?

Republicans: We saw a teenager once wearing a Che Guevara shirt that was exactly that green color. And didn't the NAZIS wear brown?

Passenger 2: JESUS CHRIST ON A CRUTCH!

Republicans: Where? Where? Jesus is here? Hold on, we have to fix our hair.

Passenger 2: No, just, never mind.

[Republicans are crestfallen.]

Republicans: Anyway, it's clear that that fabric will kill people.

Gullible Passengers: OMG! Socialist fabric that kills people! Europeans! The freedoms! [RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE]

Democrats: Okay, well, you could be right, maybe we could just use less of this fabric. What if we just cut the amount of fabric in half?

Ben Nelson: I'm sorry, but I must insist that Nebraska receive twice as many deck chairs as other states if I'm to vote for this fabric. But this is only because of my principled stand against abortion, and not because I get really really high off the fumes of power.

Democrats: Obama, do you want to chime in here?

Obama: No, I'm due to give another speech in the bar. [Exits.]

Passenger 2: Where did all these horses come from?

[Interminable horse trading ensues.]

Democrats: Okay, we did it! We can give 1/4 of the fabric to 1/2 as many deck chairs, and the steerage passengers will be allowed to sit on them for one hour on every other Sunday.

[Count heads.]

Democrats: Wait, we're one short.

Passenger 2: But there are still so many of you!

Scott Brown: I drive a truck!

Passenger 1: Who gives a fuck?

Gullible Passengers: OOOOOOH, a TRUCK!

Democrats: Oh well! Guess we can't reupholster the deck chairs this time! Let's go to the bar.

[Obama shows back up. Dems are milling about, drunkenly. Republicans are masturbating in a group. Glenn Beck is crying with joy. Rush Limbaugh has exploded and left one hell of a mess.]

Obama: What happened here?

Democrats: Well, some guy with a truck showed up and the Republicans said some mean words, so we gave up!

Obama: But I promised people a change of fabric!

Democrats: Well, frankly, our chairs have great fabric, and plenty of padding. So, fuck it.

Obama: Okay, okay. [Attempts to move 1 deck chair 1 inch.]

Republicans: [Pull guns, aim.]

Kucinich: Did anyone else hear that noise?

Republicans: JESUS IS HERE!

Kucinich: No, it's an iceberg.

Republicans: JESUS IS HERE!

Captain: Boy, is my face red! Guess there should have been lifeboats where those soap boxes were!

Passengers 1 and 2: HOLY FUCK.

Captain: Not to worry! There's enough room for 1/5 of 1/2 of you!

[Republicans, weapons out, stampede the lifeboats, trampling old people and shooting small children.]

Democrats: Wait, what's happening?

Captain [to other passengers]: Okay, so, luckily we've got a soap box for each of you! We think they'll float. For a couple of minutes.

Obama: I will not abandon my soap box! I will go down with this soap box!

[Deck chairs start sliding wildly about the deck as the ship tilts.]

Obama: Look! The arrangement of the deck chairs has changed!

Finis.

Stop Feeding the Breeders

2010-01-25T23:42:00.000-05:00

This was really too good to pass up: the lieutenant governor of South Carolina, who is apparently trying to fill the hiking boots of a certain Mark Sanford, compared poor people to stray animals in a speech the other day. It was awesome. Then he suggested that people receiving public assistance should have to earn their life of luxury: "he said government should take away assistance if those receiving help didn't pass drug tests" and attend PTA meetings.

So I expect that the heads of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as grateful recipients of billions of dollars in government assistance, will be lining right up to take those drug tests, no? I mean, we all know that the only people who do drugs in this country are poor people, so I'm sure that all those stockbrokers and CEOs will be pure as the driven snow. And if parents receiving 200 bucks a month in food stamps for their children have to do some kind of community service, well, I can hardly wait to see what's required of people who received (on average) half a million dollars of taxpayer money.

The Party of No

2010-01-25T16:12:00.000-05:00

So now the Obama administration has come up with another series of incremental, surely-no-one-can-object-to-these, proposals. They include a tax cut for middle class families, allowing a credit of $900 for child care (which I think is what babysitters now charge to take care of your child on a Saturday night). The Republicans, naturally, have objected to these proposals. That's right, the Republicans are against a tax cut, despite the fact that tax cuts are the only "idea" recently proposed by the Republicans to solve any kind of problem. From this we can conclude a few things. First, that even if the Democrats adopted the Republican platform in its entirety and tried to base a bill on it, the Republicans would vote against it. ("Putting Regan on the five dollar bill? Only a communist would suggest such a thing! This is yet one more step towards adopting a global currency!") If I were running the Democratic party (and I again note that they have thus far failed to consult me) I would abandon all hope of working with these people. Take it as a given that they will vote no on everything, and see what other possibilities you have. Possibly you should get rid of the fucking filibuster.* Just a suggestion. I would also realize that there is nothing to be gained by putting forward incremental policies. Even apart from the fact that they have as little chance of passing as more radical proposals would, such policy proposals gain you no support among the public. They are not enough to make a tangible difference to most people, they are not based on actual ideological commitments worth fighting for, they are, in short, boring.

*Digression on filibusters: they strike me as so inherently undemocratic that I can't really see the argument in favor of them. Yes, I know that the Democrats want to keep the filibuster so that, when they are inevitably in the minority again because of their short-sighted, lame-ass, ineffective governing, they can threaten to use the filibuster against insane conservative judges. I note two things: one, the Democrats never really had the spine to actually filibuster things far worse than conservative judges (cf. 2000-2008, wars of, tax cuts for the wealthy during, massive boondoggles by government contractors during, lack of accountability or oversight during). And two, all that happened was that Bush then appointed slightly less insanely conservative judges, who ruled basically the same way as the insane judges would have anyway. The Senate is already undemocratic: it is bullshit, frankly, that South Dakota gets as many votes as California, but okay, I see the point of allowing smaller states to have a say. Sort of. The filibuster, though, means that senators from states that are, say, Nebraska, can hijack entire bills until they get the pork they want.

Good Times

2010-01-21T17:03:00.000-05:00

Two outraged posts in two days gives me that good ol' 2004 feeling.

In your busy life, do you take a moment to spare a thought for the victimized, the downtrodden, those who are without voice and without power? And when you do, which corporation comes to mind first? Is it poor, beleaguered Citigroup? Is it Wal-Mart, so nobly promoting "Buy American" campaigns against so much opposition?

Well, fear not, friends, because 5 men in black robes have come to the rescue (which makes it feel very 2000 around here). Through blinding leaps of logic, they have determined that money is the same thing as speech, and that therefore money is protected under the First Amendment in the same way as, say, an unknown blog written by some outraged grad student somewhere. And if money is speech, then your right to put your money where your mouth is cannot be abridged. From here it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to remember that 1) somehow corporations have the same rights as individual people, that is, that they are treated as persons under the law, and 2) these corporate personages coincidentally have a lot of money, which they would like to give to political causes just out of the goodness of their hearts, for the betterment of society yet 3) are unable to do so because of mean rules made up by elected people so therefore 4) the right of corporations to free speech has been abridged, which is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

So brace yourselves for the absolute ungodliness of what is about to follow: the floodgates have been opened (in an election year, no less) and there is now no limit to what corporations can spend on elections and candidates. Whereas before, our elected officials were kind of like a high-class escort service, discreet negotiations in nice hotels, now it's going to be more like crack-hungry prostitutes in the back seat of a Mazda.

What is also awesome about this ruling is that it makes a lovely Orwellian (sorry, sorry, I know anything Orwellian is now cliche, which should really tell us something about the current state of affairs) point. All of us are equal, but some of us are more equal than others. All of us have the right to free speech, but some of us have a LOT more free speech than others.

Alex Pareene at Gawker said it better: "The Conservative Justices are all Constitutional Originalists who don't believe in Judicial overreach or legislating from the bench, which is why they completely overturned decades of established campaign finance law and negated previous Supreme Court decisions. Because, you know, it's what the original Framers intended: multinational corporations, unlike black people, are 5/5ths of a person."

Why I Un-Friended You on Facebook

2010-01-20T18:49:00.000-05:00

Dear Girl From High School Who, Now That I Think About It, Was Actually a Bitch,

I accepted your friend request yesterday because, hey, why not, you're friends with lots of other people I moderately liked in high school and what's one more person on my news feed anyway. Then the very first status update I see from you says, "Brown won in Massachusets! That's _one_ more thing against socialism in this country!"

And you know what, I just wasn't in the mood. I mean, I realize the Democrats did their usual impression of a party run by arrogant retards, and they chose a candidate who was basically mediocre on every register, and then assumed they would win, and then Obama sort of meandered in during the fourth quarter when Rahm Emanuel finally went, "OH SHIT, we might lose TED KENNEDY'S seat to a COSMOPOLITAN CENTERFOLD" and so on. And I despise the Democrats for it, I truly do. But the fact that we're now probably not even going to get a bill (that was only-slightly-better-than-nothing anyway, and don't get me started on this socialism nonsensery) through because of a handful of voters in one state who thought that driving a pickup truck around was some sign of character...well, fuck that noise.

Current NYT headline: "Obama Weighs Shift in Health Plan, Seeking G.O.P. Backing"--well, that took all of ten goddamn minutes. Keep standing up for what you believe in, Obama! Otherwise we'll think your campaign was just a bunch of beautifully delivered empty rhetoric.

Anyway, if anyone was asking me (and I notice that they are not), a couple of things. First, I think Obama actually moved on health care too soon. I think he should have spent the first two years on a dedicated jobs creation program, a la FDR. Put people back to work, get them spending money, get the economy moving. Then, when the economy is on the upswing and everyone is feeling rather more benevolent and less pinched, proposing a new government program might have been a little more palatable. Too late now! Hunker down and eat some organic beets, because the Democrats are going to get spanked in the midterms. Oh, and your legislative agenda is now DOA. So kick back. Maybe Jersey Shore is on. (I'm building on a nice post by Brad at Sadly, No! here, by the way).

Secondly, since you're getting kicked to the curb anyway, you might as well go out screaming. Withdraw the POS bill and replace it with one that actually does something. Go full tilt: universal healthcare, goddammit, make them block it. Make them stop little Susie from getting her asthma medication and Grandma from getting her insulin. Make them stand up and defend corporations that directly (and immorally) profit from the illness and misfortune of Americans. Sack up and actually ask for the change that you believe in. A clear, simple, short bill, one that everyone can read and understand:

Resolved: that every American, regardless of occupation, income, race, class, or gender, is equally deserving of life-sustaining medical care. That every American should be at liberty to choose an occupation best suited to their abilities and desires, and that this choice shall not be hindered due to the necessity of getting or keeping basic health care for themselves and their children. That good health is essential for the pursuit of happiness to which we are all entitled. Starting today, every American will be able to receive basic medical care from the doctor of their choice. Cost controls have been put into place so that a blood transfusion in Kansas City costs the same as in Duluth. Insurance companies have agreed to become non-profit entities; they have done so because their only other option was to be put out of business by a single-payer system. We have lifted the ban on importation of prescription drugs, because we also believe in a free and competitive market, from which American drug companies are currently protected, at great cost to the American people. You and your children will keep your health care regardless of job loss or relocation. You will keep it regardless of the profit margins of your employer. You will keep it if you are already ill, and you will keep it if you have the misfortune to become ill.

We have sided with the American people over the powerful, moneyed interests who would stop children from receiving care and who would subject our grandparents to the indignity of deciding between food and medication. We have sided with small business owners who are burdened with the rising costs of providing health insurance for their employees. This is the right thing to do, it is the fair thing to do, and we are pursuing it because we are convinced of its rightness and fairness. Because we are convinced that the benefits of this will so greatly outweigh the costs. We are pursuing it even if it means that we lose the next election, and the next; we would gladly sacrifice our own shallow electoral pursuits for the good of the American people.

(All right, the last line is a bit much.)

Some People Are Bad People

2010-01-14T00:02:00.000-05:00

Or, chickens are better people than people:
George Carlin - Chickens

Zacmac | MySpace Video

There is a Bible passage (there's a phrase I don't use very often) that used to puzzle me, but which I now think is the societal-level equivalent of one of Newton's Laws of Motion. It says, "To them that hath shall be given, but from them that hath not shall be taken even that which they have." The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; those of us who already have plenty keep getting more, and those that have nothing keep getting screwed. I am, of course, thinking of the terrible tragedy in Haiti, a country which was already part of the Axis of the Seriously Fucked Up, and which is now rubble.

So Rush Limbaugh (I keep waiting for that man to explode. When will it happen? Will it be on YouTube?) said he wasn't going to donate money to relief efforts in Haiti because they're already getting our tax money, whatever the fuck that means, and that this will just "burnish the Obama administration's credentials with both light and dark skinned black people" please die already, okaythanks. But the topper, as always, goes to Pat Robertson, who opined that Haiti was hit by an earthquake because they did a deal with the Devil.

And this is why I don't believe in God. Bear with me. See, Pat Robertson has to believe that there is a reason for things. He believes in an omnipotent, watchful, vengeful--but not unjust--God. If bad things happen to good people, then they clearly were not actually good people. The proof is in the pudding, the shit pudding, the natural disaster dessert flambe. So when sucky bullshit like this happens, Pat Robertson has to scratch around in his empty little bag of tricks and pull something out. Gays, lesbians, fornicating, uppity womenfolk, deals with the devil, what have you: you got what was coming to you! (As Jesus so eloquently said.)

The thing is, though, that this means that Pat Robertson has to believe that, along with the (only apparently) good people who were killed, the infants and children who died in Haiti yesterday made a deal with the Devil too. He has to think that no one who died in the earthquake (or who will die, be raped, starve, or catch an easily preventable disease, in the aftermath of the earthquake) is innocent. He has to believe this, because there's a corollary assumption: he, Pat Robertson, has succeeded not because of a fortuitous combination of race, education, background, timing, and con artistry, but because God loves him more, because he is a good person. In a way, I envy the simple egotism of this belief system. Bad things only happen to bad people, and it is their fault that they are bad, so let's not lose any sleep over it.

More proof that there is no God.

Nuts.

2009-12-08T13:12:00.000-05:00

In response to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, some other "scientists" are holding an alternative meeting down the street, where they are telling The Real Truth about global warming. One of them apparently is advancing the shocking thesis that the Earth is warmed by the Sun, rather than by the rays of light from Jesus' heart.

One thing I've never understood about skeptics of global warming is that their conspiracy theory involves vast sums of money. One Graeme Capper of some nutty organization says, ""There are people who know they are lying and do it simply for money and others who think they are doing good," he said. "But they not good scientists."(I don't know whether to put sic there or not, since I don't know if Graeme speaks pidgin English or if it was just poorly transcribed.) My right-wing boss once gave me a "book" called The Green Conspiracy, or something like that (there's no way I'm looking this up), and the premise of the book was that all these scientists were making scads, tons, piles of money by taking part in this conspiracy. To which I say, quoi? Do these people have any idea what the academy pays? Do they not understand that people who get Ph.D.s have voluntarily chosen to spend 6-8 prime earning years making slightly less than a gas station attendant?

In this alternate reality, liberal elitists with all their fancy book learning are making millions of dollars lying to ordinary people, just cold forcing people to recycle and not dump sewage into streams even though the Founding Fathers SAID WE COULD SHIT WHEREVER WE WANTED IT'S IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS PEOPLE. Meanwhile, those oil companies who are booking record profits every quarter? Just altruistic truth-tellin' Real Americans, clearly.

Men in Dresses

2009-11-29T13:20:00.000-05:00

I've been reading the book Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell. It's a fine book, though it really can be boiled down to: Pope Pius XII could have done something other than collude with the Nazis, but he didn't, and here are 100 examples. It does not make me regret leaving the Catholic Church.

I haven't been to a Catholic church since 1997 or so. At some point I realized: 1) A lot of unmarried and (officially) childless men, wearing dresses, were talking very earnestly about the importance of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. This just seemed somehow a bit off. 2) More importantly: a lot of these preachy moralizing men were actually abusing children, lots of children, over many years, and the church hierarchy was often complicit in these abuses. The church actively sought to protect abusive priests (though much of the attention has been focused on pedophile priests who abused boys, I think it's vital to remember that many girls and women were also harassed, raped, abused, and exploited by priests). Around the time that this scandal leaked out, the pope-before-this-pope got all shirty about the possibility of women becoming priests, like it was just totally unthinkable and wrong and wasn't going to happen on his watch, etc. Aha, I thought, this is it: pedophile priests, okay, women priests, totally not okay. Now we're all clear, and I can do something else with my Sunday mornings.

A recent and lengthy report in Ireland details sadly familiar abuses and cover-ups. Meanwhile, the current pope, Pope Very Scary German Man IX, goes about the place acting as if the last 1500 years of history (and in particular, the last 100 years or so) have never happened at all and we should all just forget about trifling things like birth control and women's rights and the HIV epidemic in Africa, but make sure to send money to those nice men in fabulous hats and red leather shoes, c/o The Vatican, Rome, Italy. It's as if he has seen Somewhere in Time, and he hopes that if he and the cardinals just dress up in period clothes and concentrate really really hard, we'll all wake up in a previous century.

And now, for something completely different.

2009-11-24T14:22:00.000-05:00

I have made the heroic decision: I will avoid writing about Sarah Palin in today's blog post. I will instead write about how the world is ending. You're welcome.

As all of the leaders of the developed world have decided to treat the Copenhagen Climate meeting as a nice junket amongst the beautiful Danes, rather than a chance to press forward with meaningful coordinated action, this seems like a good time to find out that climate change is quickening. Scientists have been concerned about a feedback loop for some time, realizing that as the ice at the Poles and elsewhere melted, more dark surface area of the Earth would be exposed, absorbing rather than reflecting heat. This would in turn mean more of the sun's heat was retained, melting more of the ice, which would again decrease reflective surfaces, which would make the Earth warmer, and so on, and so on. As this happened, the time in between each of these things would get shorter, causing everything to cycle more rapidly, increasing the pace of climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a series of wrist-slitting articles about this in New Yorker a while back, in case you're interested, but your time might be better spent building a boat/moving to high ground/deciding to believe in Jesus, just in case.

So anyway, yeah, that worst case scenario is now the actual scenario. But what's cool about this is it's not like voters in 2100, as they paddle to the polls, can rectroactively punish politicians from 2009 who failed to act by unelecting them...unless that large hadron collider in Bern has some more interesting applications than we currently know.

Update 11/25: Obama will, after all, be traveling to Copenhagen and will be offering a specific commitment to reduce carbon emissions.

Doing the Right Thing: The Democratic Edition

2009-11-22T12:32:00.000-05:00

So it's no secret that I hold the Republicans in the House and Senate in near-universal contempt. At best, they are pork-rolling blowhards; at worst, they are misogynistic racist hypocritical blowhards. There are several who seem to me to be actually, perhaps certifiably, crazy, and then there's the orange one. Finally, all of them commit the unforgivable sin of being boring (a sin for which their Democratic counterparts must also confess, and do penance, hopefully involving watching their own speeches on the House or Senate floor on a repeating loop for all eternity).

But the Democrats, the fucking Democrats. I loathe the Republicans, but I don't have to vote for them. Great! But I also loathe the Democrats, and I do have to vote for them. Fuck! Democracy in this country seems to have come down to a choice between batshit insanity (seriously, "Creationism"? "Death panels?" "Glenn Beck?") and corporate sellouts. Now that they might start debating the Health Care Reform bill (seriously? again. Didn't everybody already have a chance to get up with some pretty charts and pictures their interns made for them and say crazy shit, like our friend Virginia Foxx from right he-yah in Nor' Carolinah) suddenly there are a bunch of Democrats who see this as a chance to hold the bill hostage in order to loot the treasury for their own state. Mary Landrieu, for instance, has inserted into this monstrosity of a bill language that gives a bunch of money to her state, Louisiana, without actually calling it "Louisiana." Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas has courageously come out against the public option, American Hero that she is.

And Joe Lieberman, I can't even TALK about Joe Lieberman, because there aren't enough drugs in the house to sedate me afterwards. All of these politicians are using a bill which should help tens of millions of their fellow citizens (who are, in fact, human beings who deserve health care as much (or more!) than these assholes in Congress) to do the kind of thing Americans already hate them for--porkbarelling, power-hungry, lobbyist-driven politics. Rather than actually considering what might be for the good of the nation, they are using this for their own personal and political gains.

A plague on both their houses.

All Palin, All the Time...

2009-11-17T15:38:00.000-05:00

Is not what I'm intending this blog to be. Nonetheless, between Palin lashing out at the Newsweek cover as "sexist" and The Guardian writing an article about Michelle Bachman ("The new wave of female firebrands striking fear into the heart of liberal America") I just couldn't resist. It's like a mild ongoing irritation, somewhat similar to eczema--an itch that begs to be scratched.

Anyway. It makes my little women's head spin when I consider these two radical Christians (let's not call them conservatives, because they do not want to conserve anything, they want to make things other than what they are, to make reality conform to some fantastic fiction in their mind of What Should Be and How People Should Act) get to have it both ways. Not in a fun, sexy way, although since they are Christian Republicans, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out they were having things many, many ways, but the whole "Women's libbers have ruined Merka and motherhood and killed babies" sacred-unchanging-gender-roles thing, coexisting with getting to scream sexism about any criticism leveled at them. Nonononononono, you don't get to do that! You think people should be sexist! You think people should be defined by their gender and sexual orientation! You can't (Sarah Palin) take advantage of your femininity (you think Bill Kristol liked you for your appreciation of French film and your subtle critique of Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht? Think again, sister) and then be all offended when people comment on your looks and femininity. If you weren't all about having it both ways, you wouldn't have dragged your kids, Basket, Hamper, and Window, hither and yon to prove that you were a nice, soft, vagina-endowed American and not a scaaaaary, mean, castrating and possibly secret-penis-having lady like Hillary.

In short, as I may have mentioned in this blog one or a hundred times before, it is just so irritating (scratch scratch scratch) that these women who are themselves power hungry harpies walk through the doors that the women's movement and women themselves have pried open and then just shit on everything the women's movement has stood for and done. Like they would have gotten where they are without the women's movement. Like Sarah Palin would have been anything but a question in Alaskan Trivial Pursuit if it wasn't for Hilary Rodham Clinton and her hard work and accomplishments. It was Hillary who scared the Republicans enough to even think about nominating a woman, and Hilary has paid the price for being who she is--a tough, highly educated, highly achieving, non-cookie baking woman--over and over again. The scrutiny and insults that Hillary has endured are a price that Palin is unwilling to pay. She wants her medals of honor without having ever seen battle. I call bullshit.

Update: Here's a quote from Going Rogue that I would have added to my "Actual Student Quotes" list, had it been turned in to me: "In national politics, some feel that Big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy. Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what's good for business is bad for people. (That's what Karl Marx thought too.)" And everyone knows that Karl Marx was wrong about everything!

And, yes, I fixed the spelling of Hillary's name.

Rogueish

2009-11-16T14:51:00.000-05:00

So Sarah Palin "wrote" a book. Her continued relevance astonishes me, but then, so do the Birther/Teabagger people (recently seen on a bumper sticker: TEABAGGING IS FOR NUTS). For example, this whole thing in the NY-23 race, where the Republican candidate--who was leading in the polls--was pushed out by her own party in favor of a "real conservative" who promptly lost the race, giving the Democrats a seat they had not won in 100 years. (Thanks!) Amazingly, this loss was then claimed as a "victory" by the grassroots crazy movement.

Perhaps if mental health care was better funded in this country, some of these people could get the help they so evidently need.

Media Matters is having a good time documenting the inaccuracies in the book and in Palin's public appearances. One thing that continues to bother me is Palin's valorization--both by herself and by Christian conservatives such as James Dobson--for choosing to have her baby even after learning that he had Down Syndrome. The key point here is choice, and from Palin's perspective there should have been no choice other than to have the child. So she should not be lauded for that decision which was no decision. Without choice there is no virtue.

So, Funny!

2009-11-02T15:41:00.000-05:00

For the laffs, I tried to find out how much it would cost certain people (that is, Senators, who currently have just fantastic awesome healthcare: John McCain, Joe Lieberman, various idiots from Alabama/Arkansas/Alaska) how much it would cost for them to buy health insurance on the "open" market. Hahahah, though, the first three Senators I tried all qualify for Medicare. So even if their lush, single payer, publicly provided, taxpayer supported health care were to suddenly be taken away because the American people suddenly became rational and voted them out of office (note to self--do Senators/Congresspeople get health insurance even after leaving office? If so, consider running for Congress--2 years of work for a lifetime of free health insurance? Deal.) they would still get single payer, publicly provided, taxpayer supported health care.

Oh. The hilarious. It burns.

Sorrows

2009-10-27T13:23:00.000-04:00

"We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them,
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our
interior year,--not only season--they're also place, settlement, camp, soil,
dwelling".

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Weeping Weemens, Part One

2009-10-25T12:48:00.000-04:00

There have been a number of articles recently about the happiness, or lack thereof, of women. In this case, the discussion has largely been spurred by a Wharton study that showed that women today are less happy than they were in 1972. This is supposedly a counterintuitive finding, since apparently one would expect that women today would be ever so much more fulfilled, what with being allowed to be in the workplace without having their asses pinched and so forth. That hoary old anecdote about Freud ("After all zeze years, I still do not know vat vomen vant") has been giving a good airing. Then there's the inevitable anti-feminist smugness on the right: "Okay, so you got what you wanted. Happy now? No? Well, hafuckinghahaha. P.S. God hates you."

Which brings me to today's topic: "Why I stopped studying feminist theory." Basically, it's this: feminist theory has not come to terms with the fact that what we've "won" as women in the last 30 years seems to be only the right to work harder and longer than before. It's right to point out, as many women of color have done, that the stay-at-home mother model (the source of Friedan's discontent in The Feminine Mystique) was a distinctly middle class model. Few women of color had the opportunity to develop the malaise of the suburban housewife. Still, feminist theory, and feminism, is dead today because it fails to address this issue: apart from almost all women having to participate in the workforce (because of the decline in real wages and the astronomical increase in costs of living over the last 30 years, making it very difficult to support a family on one paycheck) not much has really changed and not much is all that much better. Whereas in the 1970s there was recognition of the essentially inegalitarian nature of society, there was also a concurrent hope that this, too, could be remedied. Now, we are bankrupt of this hope. Having won the "right" to work in jobs that are often mind-numbing, bereft of actual human meaning and purpose, for 40 hours a week, and then continue to do all of the work we always had to do of caring for our partners, children, and households, seems like a fucking hollow victory.

In the meantime, some people have taken some parts of feminism to heart: men. Feminism has liberated men from the idea that they are or should be responsible for the fiscal well-being of their family. It has freed them from feeling that, before they have or start a family, they need to demonstrate their capability and independence, their reliability and consistency: in other words, that they need to have, and keep, a J.O.B. These are now considered quaint notions. Thanks, feminism!

In the meantime, most men have not felt a concurrent increase in responsibility for other forms of care for their family and household, namely, doing the fucking dishes. What has happened, it seems to me, is that now it all falls to women: financial caring and physical caring. Men know if they do not do it--whatever it is--well, someone will; and women know that that someone is them. This is an incredible burden, and it is hard to see the upside. Most women don't feel more happy because most women don't feel more free.

Perhaps it is (in fact, it just is) unfair to lay this solely on a failure of feminist theory. Perhaps the absence of real, material social change after the Third Wave is exactly why feminist theorists now spend most of their time tinkering at the margins, hanging out in postmodern world where things aren't things at all. Especially in the United States, women's roles have changed but society (and consequently government) has adamantly refused to accept that this is the case. Women would be happier if they had help and support: subsidized day care, paid parental leave, a functioning educational system and, you know, universal goddamn healthcare. This is at least in part why our sisters in Sweden and Denmark are happier than we are.

Instead, American women, with an energy that is truly incredible, keep trying to hold it all together. For the most part, they succeed--but it leaves little energy for advocating for a more just and equitable distribution of resources.

(Image at top is a magnet by Ann Taintor.)

Seekers

2009-10-22T11:36:00.000-04:00

In California, one becomes accustomed to the fact that a certain number of people one meets (say, one in ten) is on a quest of some kind. They are searching for something--many things--and they go through books and gurus and retreats and crystals, only to remain, usually, in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. It's modern ennui, but draped in purple batik wall hangings and scented with incense. It's essentially the American Dream of total fulfillment, with a spiritual rather than a material end.

So these are the people who would pay $9,695 to attend a "spiritual warrior" retreat in Sedona led by some guy who apparently made 9.4 million dollars in 2008 by selling snake oil. Snake oil being, in this case, videos, books, CDs about getting everything you ever wanted, but doing so by manipulating the universe to your own ends (that is, a variation on The Secret*). Three of the participants in this particular sweat lodge actually died, which reminded me of two things: one, Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority, and two, the lengths to which Americans will go to get everything, the denial of the satisfaction of low expectations (as the happiest people in the world, the Danes who are interviewed often say that they benefit from having low expectations--they just want a normal, comfortable life). There is something so childish, it seems to me, about this idea: that we can have everything we want, all the time; that the universe exists to fulfill our wishes.

It makes me sad to think of these people literally killing themselves to try to get somewhere else, to be someone else, to find answers when there are none.

*For the best review I've ever read on Amazon, scroll down to the first review for The Secret, by one Ari Broullette. Sir, I salute you.

Obam-over-it

2009-09-29T13:54:00.000-04:00

Flipping through my cell phone, deleting old--very old--text messages, I came across the texts from Election Day last November. Although I was not an Obama supporter at the level of many of my friends, among whom there was a lot of Hoping and Believing and Can-Doing, I was rather proud that the U.S. had pulled it together and voted for a black man with a funny name. The Republicans made it easier, of course, by nominating McGrumpy and the Wasillabilly (so, thanks!).

I knew that Obama was not going to be the second coming of FDR, and that if we were lucky, he would land one-cigar's-width to the left of Clinton and hang out. But--and here's where I was standing in my own puddle of lukewarm hope--I did think that maybe he would be assertive in his leadership. Okay, okay, actually, of course what I wanted was for him to kick the Republicans in the teeth, a la Preznit "I just won 50.9% of the vote? That's a mandate, dammit! Let's invade another country! Whatsay, Dick?" [Cheney: "Sure, George. Here's your little wooden horsey. Giddyap."]

Instead, it's all "We definitely will have universal health care...or maybe that's a little strong...maybe we'll just have a public plan people can pay for themselves, on the market...maybe we'll just give children doctor's visits every other Thursday in November...well, perhaps we can just mail out coupons for free thermometers, and some band-aids"* or "Stockbrokers should definitely not do this!...or, okay, well, so they shouldn't have done that, but we will talk very sternly to them about it and ask them to count to at least ten the next time they decide to tank our economy. Okay, count to three. Can we just count to three?"

I saw Strobe Talbott, of the Brookings Institution, give a talk last week. He said that it was crucial that Obama win the vote on health care, so that he can claim it as a victory and then move on to other pieces of legislation that are pressing--climate change and arms control. These two issues--global warming and the proliferation of nuclear weapons--were, he felt, the two threats that endanger the future of humanity. I certainly agree with the second assertion; I'm less convinced about the first. Is something better than nothing? If the bill is bloated, and costly, and doesn't give many people a tangible benefit, I fear we will lose not only 2010 but possibly the White House in 2012. Not only will the Obama administration be tagged with all of the failures of the bill, but they will also be painted as wishy-washy, the party, once again, that can't seem to engage all of its gears at once. Or even any of its gears at all. If Obama does pass a weak bill, something like the Baucus bill, then he better hope that he can get through cap-and-trade in a hurry, before the midterm punishment happens.

*Cf.: ""I favor a public option. We're going to do our very best to have a public option. But remember, a public option is a relative term," Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday."

The Obama Blitz

2009-09-21T09:38:00.000-04:00

Probably not the best word to use when referring to this particular President, but away we go anyway. Over the weekend, President Obama made the Stations of the Cross, going around to talk shows to try to 'splain 'splain 'splain about this here socialistic whatchamagummit. The Times reports that "Obama Insists that Insurance Will Be Affordable". Apparently, middle class families in the $66,000 to $88,000 range--essentially two parents working, with average jobs--will "only" be asked to pay up to 11 to 13% of their income for insurance. I mean, what the hell, that's only tuition at a relatively good state school for little Johnny or Suzy, am I right? And, by the way, is this 11-to-13% of pre-tax income? Even better. It's like tithing! Only to the insurance industry.

Again there was some talk of "subsidies" for people who couldn't afford to pay the premium, but not a peep about price controls other than "expanding competition." Perhaps we will all buy our insurance through ebay! Or the drug market. I can just see the black market of health insurance right now: "You want your low co-pays? I got your $10 office visits right here..."

The whole thing about subsidies without price controls is weird--it seems to me like the government will then be on the hook for a whole lot more than they're bargaining for, and more than it would cost to just give people insurance. If we have to subsidize the amount that the insurance companies will charge parents of children with special needs, for instance, then we're going to be into it for something like $5000 a month, when we could have, you know, just allowed them to buy into Medicare. Oh, AND the subsidies are in the form of tax credits, which I somehow hadn't caught before, so you'll still have to pay your tithe up front, and then you'll get a store credit for it. With which you can buy an F-22. I hear they're cheap these days.

But the fun part, for me, was reading this quote, from the same article: “Right now, everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance,” Mr. Obama said on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC. “Nobody considers that a tax increase.” Here, Mr. President, is one disgruntled citizen who does realize that that is a tax increase, a particularly regressive tax, a massive transfer of wealth (let's say it again) to private, for-profit companies. I have to pay GEICO so that I can pay the state to register my car. It's a great system.

I remember when they made car insurance mandatory, my mom thought it was ridiculous. She thought, why not just charge everyone a penny more per gallon, and provide basic insurance coverage for everyone with a license? If people wanted more insurance, they could of course buy more. This would take largely take care of the problem of uninsured drivers as well (which, in my part of California, meant another $10-$20 a month for people with insurance, because there were so many uninsured people driving). And, fairly enough, the people who consumed more gas, and who were therefore on the road more and more likely to be in an accident, paid more. Mom's current idea is that we tax toilet paper to pay for health care--an extra 5 cents a roll, and health care for everybody.

On Craigslist

2009-09-20T19:23:00.000-04:00

Ah, Craigslist. Like the proverbial little girl-with-the-curl, when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's horrid. Idly scanning through housing listings, I have discovered a few things. In our area, most of the postings are by apartment complex managers, who seem to post multiple times a day with slightly varying descriptions ("Fantastic Carrboro apartments!! Only one left!" and then a few postings down, the same apartment complex: "Multiple floorplans available! Convenient to everything!"). I believe I have discovered a Craigslist law, to wit: the more exclamation points in the description/title, the less likely it is you want whatever it is that is being titled. The amount of exclamation points in listings for housing, for example, seems directly proportional to how depressing the apartment complex actually is. If it's in ALL CAPS and with EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! then there has probably been a murder/suicide in the complex in the last month--but your drug dealer will be CONVENIANTLEY [sic] NEARBY!

No Public Option, Then Just...No.

2009-09-16T22:27:00.000-04:00

I listened very carefully to the President's speech last week. Here's the thing that I find really unnerving, and no one seems to be asking questions about it: what about price controls? The whole rhetoric of "no one will be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition" [applause applause] "because we're going to outlaw it" [applause applause]...well, here's the thing. Really, no one is denied insurance right now because of a pre-existing condition. I bet that if you're willing to pay $25,000 a month, you could probably get insurance no matter what kind of chronic illness you have. Of course, it would then probably cost more than you would pay out-of-pocket for your treatments, but whatever. It's meaningless to say that insurance companies won't be able to do this, that, or the other thing, when they can easily say, "Oh, no, we offered Parents-of-Child-With-Leukemia coverage, and they didn't take it" when the Parents-of-Child-With-Leukemia were offered a totally unaffordable premium. Not one person in the Obama administration has said word one about capping what the insurance companies can charge people who are now required to purchase health insurance.

This makes me deeply suspicious. After all, I have had to pay auto insurance for the last 15 years--required to do so in order to get a license and register my car--and I therefore consider this a tax that I pay for which I have yet to receive anything. Now, I'm sure that as I type this a tree branch is swinging threateningly over my car and I'll have to come back and xxxx this sentence out, because of the karma. But the point is, I, and a hundred million other people, have been forced by the government to support private, for-profit companies. It's fucking lame, is what it is, and now we're seeing the lamery repeated on a much, much larger scale. I don't care about paying taxes to a democratically elected government who I can (theoretically) hold accountable for services which I, or my loved ones, will receive. I am a big fan of the post office, public schools, public libraries, municipal water and sewage treatment facilities, public immunization programs, and so on, and so forth. I am much much less a fan of being forced to essentially tithe my income so that a C.E.O. of some insurance company (who is totally unaccountable to me or any of his customers) can buy that vacation home in St. Bart's for his third trophy wife.

Is anyone else at all concerned about this? Does no one else hear the insurance companies fappity-fapping away at the thought of the tens of millions of people who will now be their unwilling dupes--er, "clients"--at whatever rates they choose to charge? And that this is why they've been so surprisingly docile during this whole carnival?

Oh, Obama did say that if one couldn't afford this new mandatory help-the-rich-get-richer charity donation, then one could get a waiver. Not, my fellow Americans, a waiver of payment, or a voucher for insurance. No, you could just get a waiver so that you wouldn't get in trouble for not purchasing your overpriced bullshit SupraEcono(trademark!) Insurance Plan. Which, it seems to me, does not actually solve any problems for anyone at all--those who most need health insurance will still not get it. They will just have to fill out paperwork now, showing why they cannot afford the thing the government requires them to have, but for which the government will not pay.

So, fuck it. No public option (p.s. still pretty lame--it will start happening in fucking four years, on some insurance exchange whatever? By which time who knows how many people will have actually died because they didn't say that they once had a blister this one time, during band camp?) no fucking dice.

Irrationality

2009-09-06T15:57:00.000-04:00

The reluctance of the American public to accept even the option of a public health care system (which, after all, should only increase competition and make the market more efficient: if government run programs are as inefficient as critics claim, then the more efficient private insurers should easily win out, right? There is little evidence, it seems to me, for the idea that private industries are less wasteful than public utilities, but whatever) seems so odd. After all, ultimately, they are being offered something, which they may take or leave, but why does it seem so threatening?

This highlights an essential fact which neither economists nor political scientists have fully assimilated: people are not particularly rational most of the time. I'm reading Kahneman's paper/lecture on "Bounded Rationality" and in it, he says: “The value of a good to an individual appears to be higher when the good is viewed as something that could be lost or given up than when the same good is evaluated as a potential gain” (Kahneman et al., 1990, 1991; Tversky and Kahneman 1991). This explains, in part, the resistance to the change. The good that people have--in this case, half-assed insurance provided through employment by companies which have a monopoly on a particular market--suddenly seems much more valuable because people believe they will lose it. Whereas previously, anyone who had any experience with filing a claim with their health insurance company should be aware that the private insurance offered is just, simply, not very good.

Of course, this leaves unexplained the people who do not have any kind of insurance who are opposing this reform. Perhaps they think that the good they might one day have will be taken away from them even before they have it?

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting piece up today about the way firefighting serviced used to be privately provided. People in a certain neighborhood would pay a subscription for the support of a firefighting company. Soon it became apparent that this was a public good (fires not being great respecters of imaginary lines) and that if your neighbor's house caught on fire, your own was at risk. We all pay for the lack of public health care in this country, which creates a system of perverse incentives for everyone involved.

The Need for Boldness...and Universal Coverage

2009-08-24T12:17:00.000-04:00

It is so frustrating to see the Democrats rocking back on their heels, once again shocked, shocked by the misinformation and outright lies about the health care plan. As usual, they look like kids who are new to the schoolyard and keep trying to give the bullies lunch so they won't get beaten up. So they give the bullies their lunch (and their lunch money, and their favorite sweatshirt) and guess what happens? They get beaten up anyway.

The Republicans were never going to support this health care reform, period. What they are doing is coyly holding out the idea that if only certain changes are made, certain things are stripped from the bill, then maybe they'll consider voting for it. And the Democrats, who seem to want to do this bipartisan bullshit (why? who cares? what's the electoral upside to this? I bet you a hundred fucking thousand dollars that no one in America votes based on whether or not someone is "bipartisan") keep falling for it. But what is really going on here is this: the Republicans will dangle their meaningless promises, and get the Democrats to effectively castrate their own bill. Any meaningful change will be eviscerated, and what will be left is a bloated, incomprehensible cluster of fuck that will do nothing, but somehow cost a kazillion dollars. All of the Republicans will still vote against the bill. Then, in the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans will point to this bill, rightly call it bullshit, say "Government is not the solution to problems, government is the problem" and point out how they staunchly voted against it, because of the freedoms. Then the goddamn Republicans will win back the Senate and proceed to fuck the Democrats six ways from Sunday.

And all the Democrats will be shocked, shocked, that the Republicans are such mean old bullies.

The only health insurance reform worth contemplating is a system of universal coverage. It is the only way that Americans will have a simple answer to the question: what's in it for me? It is the only way to undercut the current propaganda which says that some people (some brown people) will get something at the expense of other people (some nice old white people). With a universal plan, everyone gets a health insurance card in the mail next week that they can then use to get actual health care. Just like Medicare. For everybody.

Sadly, though, it's party politics like it's 1999. Where once again we are reminded that Democrats too are corporate shills, bought and paid for, and they're not about to go against the insurance industry or the pharmaceutical industry. Even if it's better for people, better for the society, and essential for American businesses to remain competitive in the global market.

Thanks for the change, Obama. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

The Prosperity Gospel

2009-08-15T23:36:00.000-04:00

I find Christian fundamentalism (of the American flavour) fascinating, and from time to time have lost myself in the woods of the Internet, following a breadcrumb trail about things like the Quiverfull movement, Proverbs 33 Women, male religious groups like the Promise Keepers, the Dugger family, and so on. Mentions of the "prosperity gospel" picked up a couple of years ago, but my plate was already pretty full with learning about how Proverbs 33 women escaped from the cruel shackles of "feministic thinking," so I passed.

The New York Times occasionally throws up these pieces of How the Religious Among Us Live, and today they had another article about more prosperity preachers. This couple, the Copelands, have a ministry worth 100 million dollars a year. They get this prosperity through the grace of God, of course, who moves lower-middle-class people to send them $2000 to get a new Gulfstream. So that they can fly around the world ministering to people, of course: because a merciful God would never want you to fly coach (actually, I think that this is true, and that airline travel will convince anyone of the absence of God).

I should get worked up about this, but it just makes me sad. And it also makes me think, not for the first and not for the last time, that the real racket is religion. I should start one of my own. The Eternal Church of Mockingness and Cynicism.

Howl.

2009-08-10T18:26:00.000-04:00

So Sarah Palin (who has obviously become a bugbear of mine) recently posted to her Facebook page this gem: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Such a system would be 'downright evil,' indeed! It would be as if certain people had jobs which were rather arbitrarily decided to be worthwhile and deserving of healthcare (i.e., 'productive'), like C.E.O.s and Governors of Alaska, and others were equally arbitrarily decided to be not deserving, like the caregivers at daycare centers helping children with special needs.

This quote has been passed around the Intertubes, and Timothy Egan mentions it in the NYT today. I read Egan's post, and then scrolled down to the comments, expecting liberal solidarity, if not even groupthink. Instead, I found THE HORROR, THE HORROR, Real Americans:

'TJ': Yet, being an illegal citizen, who doesn’t even have the right to be in the US in the first place, will be eligible to have free health benefits, off the taxpayer’s money."

'Barbarian': Just attack the messenger, the only one with the spine to look at the fine print and the implications for privacy rights and human dignity...Personally, I don’t want my government, that also taxes my estate, getting involved in recommending a living will. LOL." [Is your estate worth a lot more than most, these days? Because the Estate Tax was basically repealed by your friends, the Republicans. I'm just sayin', LOFL.]

'Ogre' : "I see the combination of Obama, the Democrat Senate & Democrat House as a real danger because there is no real debate, no balance to hold the reins of a government that is growing, gathering power and repressing more & more personal rights." [ What a fascinating time to become concerned about all three branches being controlled by one party. It is CERTAINLY unprecedented.]

And, The One Who Made Me Stop Reading, because I do not have nearly enough hard alcohol in the house (let alone anti-depressants, which I can no longer get because I don't have healthcare, but what the hell, I'd be the last to say I'm a productive member of society) brace yourself for: 'Nancy Rody,' who writes,

"You still don’t get it. We are NOT Abortionists or Euthanasia supporters. We are Christians. We believe ALL life is sacred from the moment of conception. All life weather useful to society or not. It is that special quality that defines us as human beings.

God’s people are those who reach outside of themselves to love and care for others. I do not consider this a health bill but a death bill. A bill that sets up a commission to decide on who will live and who will die. It is promoted as being good for all Americans but it is a lie pushed on the American people by supporters of “Planned Parenthood” and other groups that helped form this legislation.

This comment may end up on Obama’s email blacklist. Put there by a politician who has not read the bill or a “Death Care” supporter but I would rather be on that list than to stand before God and say I did not fight back against this legislation. Also, please make sure my name is in bold extra large lettering. I admire John Hancock for putting his life on the line by signing the Declaration of Independence in a bold and large hand."

Writerly Envy

2009-07-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

I wish I had written this, (in re: Sarah Palin): "It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged."

New Social Dilemmas: Facebook

2009-07-21T15:32:00.000-04:00

To announce a relationship on Facebook or not: that is the question.

New Theory: The Entire State of Alaska is a Trailer Park

2009-07-07T20:22:00.000-04:00

No, look, I know, it's supposed to be a beautiful place, despite the blackflies and the mosquitoes and the locals. Caribou and salmon and endangered wilderness and wildlife and whatnot.

And yet...Sarah Palin continues to give evidence that what I believe to be true is true, to wit: that it is amazing that no tornadoes have made their Wrath of God-ful way through Alaska yet. After all, we're talking about a family values, conservative Christian whose seventeen year old daughter was [allegedly! don't have your lawyer send me a letter] impregnated under her very own roof. And apparently everyone in Alaska knew about this little family matter before Palin was even selected to be McCain's running mate (oustanding due diligence, there. I imagine the people in charge of investigating her background are now crack analysts at the CIA...but at least they're not gay.)

What a nut.

I was not going to post about this (because why add my voice to the shrieking chorus, etc.) but then she just had to go and say this: "If she were in the White House, she said, the 'department of law' would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.'I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out,' she said. I particularly like the sotto voce snideness of the next line in the article: "There is no "Department of Law in the White House."

Unclear on the Concept

2009-05-28T13:42:00.000-04:00

The California voters, in their usual good sense (this is what democracy looks like!), refused to raise taxes or borrow money from Wall Street in order to close the state budget deficit. The arc of tax cuts is long, but it bends towards bankruptcy.

This is a direct result of Ye Olde Voter Referenda, a direct democracy project that really sounds a lot better on paper than in practice. Prop 13 effectively froze property tax rates in California, so many people living in Malibu, for example, are still paying the same amount of property tax as they were in 1980. This is nonsense. People have therefore abrogated their responsibility to the community--and yes, I do believe that taxes are a civic responsibility. Prop 13 means that California is disproportionately dependent on income taxes and sales taxes for revenue, which in turn means that when the economy gets flushed down the Toilet of Capitalism everyone gets hit with the shit.

So now The Governator is going to cut...wait for it...food for children, health care for children, education (again!) for children. You know, because those mouthy little brats should really pull themselves up by the bootstraps and get to work already. No one is saying word one about cutting the budget for prisons, which is the state's largest expenditure other than education and social welfare. The Governator (and the Legislature) pushed through a bill for a $12 billion prison expansion--when? oh, in January. Interestingly, while crime rates overall have been declining dramatically, the California prison population has exploded. I'm sure that there are no significant campaign contributions coming from the people who benefit from the prison industrial complex to anyone in California state politics. Oh, my, no. So fuck the children. They don't pay for media buys.

Also, really really charming comments on the San Jose Mercury website. Just lovely thoughts like:

"By eliminating CalWorks and other welfare to work programs, it will force Americans to finally do those jobs that they have turned their noses at. It will force many illegal workers to return to their country of origin as welfare recipients are forced to finally do the work that is available for them. Remember that Americans were those workers that worked in hotels, did construction and performed janitorial services, but welfare and workfare programs made too many lower income Americans lazy and it resulted in expanded welfare roles and induced illegals to come her to work these jobs."
"We cannot afford to support the losers who cannot hold a job; and we shouldn't have to educate their loser children." [because an uneducated populace is good for everyone! and certainly won't hurt our competitiveness in the global market.--Ed.]
"What about the laid off workers?" you ask? Try moving to another state. Or another country. The real question to be asked is:"What about the 90% of the people who have job(s), pay their debts and are being taxed to death to support lazy welfare queens and even lazier state employees feeding from the public trough?" [Why, I pass dead people on the streets everyday, done to death by taxes. I can't believe more attention has not been paid to this pandemic.--Ed.]

There are more. Enjoy.

New Theory: The Onion is Running the Republican Party

2009-05-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

What else, really, could explain the hilarity of "Teabagging?" And this:

And then we have peerless reasoning like this, courtesy of the NYTimes' new Bill Kristol (apparently not an improvement, but with a funnier name) Ross Douthat. In his "column" he writes about how the tricksy tricksy left, led by Obama, is going to Gay Marry everybody after everyone gets Free Abortions (and a lollipop! This is socialism!). See if you can follow the reasoning here: "But as Peter Berkowitz noted in a prescient essay for Policy Review in 2005, the gay marriage movement is working with the grain of American political history, in which the expansion of rights 'steadily erodes the limits on individual choice established by law and custom.'" I see: giving people more rights destroys other people's ability to make choices. Interesting. So, for example, when African-Americans won rights, that just totally destroyed the individal choice that individual white people were making to enslave them. What a bummer.

this feeling

2009-04-18T18:23:00.000-04:00

In German, I'm sure, there is a word for this feeling: wanting to be wanted. And another word for: wanting to want.

Iowa, Vermont

2009-04-07T15:25:00.000-04:00

This was a banner week for gay rights activists--the Iowa Court finding that the ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, and the Vermont state legislature overriding the governor's veto to make same-sex marriage legal. Vermont is particularly important because it is the first time that same-sex marriage was made legal by legislation and not by a judicial ruling.

Perhaps because homosexuality was presented to me by my parents as a simple statement--that some people love people of their own sex, and some love people of the opposite sex--I've never fully understood the anger and resistance that this issue seems to engender. It is not simply a religious issue--Prop 8 wouldn't have passed in California if only religious people voted for it. There seems to be a deep uneasiness about this issue, and I wonder if it doesn't come down to gender and our ideas of what a woman is, what a man is, and what they do together in a marriage. If it doesn't threaten the idea that marriage is an institution that is primarily of benefit to men and for the protection of male lineage and property.

Opponents of gay marriage are always saying that gay marriage threatens or devalues heterosexual marriages, and I've never understood this until I thought of it this way. In a way, gay marriage does undermine the traditional marriage--which is inherently unequal.

Michael Steele, Exit Stage Left

2009-03-12T13:22:00.000-04:00

Well, that was quick. Apparently Michael Steele, the putative head of the RNC, gave an interview in which he suggested that abortion was a personal choice for women to make. He also seemed to indicate that all gays might not be doomed to eternity in a fiery pit.

Now he will be forced to leave, as the entirety of the Republican party platform can be summarized thusly: weemens in the kitchens, sodomy only with strangers in bathrooms, and tax cuts.

Something For Nothing

2009-02-17T14:50:00.000-05:00

Whenever I talk to my Orange County Republican relatives, I notice this disconnection in their thoughts about government, taxes, and resources. Specifically, they take almost any opportunity to complain about paying taxes--any kind of taxes, local, state, Federal, property. These taxes, they all believe, go to welfare mothers who have children just to get more benefits, lazy people, and Mexicans. Simultaneously, they all expect the following: good public schools. Firefighters. Police (oh, they love the police!). Roads and highways in good repair. And more roads and highways being built so that they don't have to sit in traffic. They also seem to take for granted: clean water coming from the taps. A sewage system that is not the gutter in front of their million-dollar homes. Air that, in Southern California, is cleaner than it was fifty years ago, despite the fact that there are millions more cars on the road.

They seem to expect that the government should be able to do all of these things for them, while asking nothing from them. They want something--the infrastructure and benefits of a civilized society--for nothing.

This Deep Thought post was inspired by Republicans in the California State Legislature, who have blocked the passage of a budget for over 100 days now. Apparently a lot of them took some kind of bullshit "no tax hikes" pledge that supercedes the well-being of their constituents or the social stability of the state. I wish there was some way to isolate these communities of no-new-taxes assholes and say, all right, fine: you don't have to pay taxes. In return, if your house burns down, well, here's a goddamn hose. Good luck. P.S. Enjoy homeschooling your children.

Unclear on the Concept

2009-02-14T12:34:00.000-05:00

John Boehner, in opposing the stimulus bill: “The president made clear when we started this process that this was about jobs,” Mr. Boehner said after the vote. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. And what it’s turned into is nothing more than spending, spending and more spending.”

Yes. Well. How is it, exactly, that one creates jobs without spending money? Oh, right, tax cuts for the wealthy. Then they can hire more nannies, and--hey, let's just go 18th century--scullery maids. You'll get one half-day off a week, 12 pence in spending money, and hand-me-downs on Boxing Day.

Even if one were to give tax cuts to the middle class (Republicans guffaw, puff cigars) that still wouldn't create jobs. The idea--if it can be so called--is that you give people tax cuts, and they immediately hie themselves off to Best Buy and get stuffs. This, in turn, makes manufacturers make more stuffs! For which they need to hire people, and thus, tax cuts=jobs.

There are just a few little problems with this virtuous cycle. One: most people are so screwed, economically and otherwise, right now, that they will not be taking their pittance and spending it at Best Buy or Wal-Mart or wherever. They will be using it to pay down their debt, or pay their mortgage, or keep themselves afloat while they look for new jobs, since everyone has been fired. Two: even if people did decide to spend money on stuffs rather than milk, most of these factories are overseas. So Americans buying manufactured goods does not translate into American jobs. It may help the Chinese, or the Indians, but not us. See? Three: Even if, in a sort of [then a miracle occurred] way, tax cuts did magically rebound to create American jobs, this would still take a while. And we don't have a while, okay? We need to hire people immediately, post-haste, and the only entity apparently capable or willing to do that is the Federal Fucking Government.

Can we make intelligence tests a pre-condition for being a member of the House or Senate? Can we require some basic courses in economics? Biology? History? Jeebus.

I Now Think

2009-02-08T23:33:00.001-05:00

Whenever Maureen Dowd is talking about "America," she is actually talking about "Maureen." Example: "Once upon a time, America thought Prince Charming would glide in and kiss her, reviving her from a coma induced by a poison apple of greed, deceit, carelessness, recklessness and overreaching."

What is the Sound of One God Laughing?

2009-02-05T12:29:00.000-05:00

The god named Irony, who has been tirelessly working lo these past eight years, takes another swig of scotch and, voila: Unemployment Offices Cannot Process Claims Because All Government Offices Had to Fire People. That's right, the people who process unemployment claims are themselves unemployed, due to the notable lack of, oh, what is it again, cash money.

Zen Mind Says: Fuck These People

2009-02-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

So, the G.O.P., in a desperate ploy to increase their marginal status, has decided to oppose some things in the stimulus bill. Which is cute, since they're not going to vote for it anyway, even if they all got their own personal taint washer/bidet.

Here are things that Republicans think Real Americans don't need:

Functional sewers. Since we'll all be living in the gutters anyway.
Museums. Because they're elitist.
Computers. If Granpa did without 'em, you don't need 'em.
Wildland fire management. We want California to burn. Burn, baby, burn.
Centers for Disease Control. Only brown people and gays get diseases, everyone knows that.

Having Doubts

2009-01-27T19:31:00.000-05:00

About whether or not humans should have litters of children. Disturbed by this quote: “Her stomach was huge, indescribably huge,” Dr. Henry said. “At a certain point, we don’t even measure.” Also interesting is the fact that the woman's partner is not mentioned anywhere in the article. Please, dear god, tell me this woman has help: 1 infant is a full time job. Eight is a day care center.