Rather Dusty Around Here

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

"'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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

Another speech.

I agree with Joan Walsh over at Salon.

What a coincidence.

"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

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

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

(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

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!

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.

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

>> 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

>> 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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

~ 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

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

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

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

"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

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.

...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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.