the defeatists!

Hierophanies and...autoclaves and general madness

Hierophanies and...autoclaves and general madness PT II

Rational people with rational ideas can't function in our government these days, so PANIC!

Michael Farrell, Veterans Today Columnist 

IN THE crowded field of Ebola alarmists, Rand Paul of Kentucky stands out. Before he was a Republican senator with presidential ambitions, he was an eye doctor. Apparently the Hippocratic oath does not cover panic-mongering: Dr Paul has popped up on talk-radio shows, alleging that when Barack Obama or his scientists say that Ebola is rather hard to catch, they are fibbing. Or, as he puts it, they are downplaying the risk that Ebola might spread across America for reasons of “political correctness”. Ebola is “incredibly transmissible”, Dr Paul has asserted, talking of doctors falling sick even after they suited up and took “every precaution”. The Economist, Oct 14, 2014

Hand to Hand with Ebola

No one is ever going to elect me to public office. First of all I wouldn't run and secondly, if I won, I'd demand a recount. And then defect to New Zealand.  I think I'd be a great philosopher-king, but I couldn't put up with the continual salesmanship and bombast that our current situation demands. Although I think a lot of the folks who comment here and some of our writers could benefit from a few deep breathes, some relaxation exercises, and maybe a nice cold drink to calm down, Veterans Today isn't anywhere near as loony as lot of the right wing stuff we're seeing.

I think our editorial positions on a lot of stuff -- most things -- are "This is all screwed up and why can't anyone fix it?" I suspect for a lot of us -- left, right, center, floating above the fray somewhere -- are channeling St Ross of Perot and his rather simple "Don't ignore the crazy aunt in the basement...if the car doesn't work, you lift up the hood and you fix it!" Ross and Jimmy Carter were both Rickover boys in the nascent Nuclear Navy, and they brought an engineering approach to everything. Rational people with rational ideas who, despite differing ideological views, believe that with common sense, honesty and good faith you can accomplish a lot.

Which sadly, doesn't work a lot of the time in the world of government. Especially now, since engineering is based on scientific principles in a way that social science and things like politics and governance and economics are not. So just because there's evidence to support something doesn't mean we have a way to implement it. If you doubt that, I refer you to the last 3 and probably the next three Congresses. Like many observers and many economists, I keep waiting for the confidence fairy to appear and get us back to full employment, high 401Ks and a booming economy. I don't think it's going to happen, and there's some reason to think that the current stock market dip is a sign of another rough ride.

So, ISIL is either below the fold of newspapers or not the lead article on sights anymore. Rachel Maddow was primarily about Ebola last night; Shep Smith over at Fox has been forthcoming and honest in his coverage. This is a complicated problem and

This is tiring

who the hell knows what we're going to see happen in the world. What we're not going to see, in all likelihood, is a pandemic in the United States. But, the usual suspects can hope...and claim there is one. And it's obviously Obama's fault, and the Democrats and the women and the Gays and...no, not really.

Plagues and pestilence are pretty much in God's territory. He did it; or, to be theologically correct, the supreme being of the universe did it. There, does that make you feel better?

What we're arguing about is policy and that hasn't got a lot to do with the disease. For example, the Republicans, especially John "Why do we have all these Czars in the Obama Administration?" McCain demand that there be a Czar so there will be somebody in charge. Fine. Constitutionally, the Surgeon General of the United States, a Cabinet-level appointee is in charge at the direction of the President. We just don't have one. I seem to recall that one of the Bush appointees ultimately indicated that he wasn't so sure about the germ theory of disease, but that may be me oversimplifying again. Since the position has been vacant since 2013, we've had a nominee, Doctor Vitkek Murthy since late last year.

Yeah, we have a nominee, a physician with the usual long list of credentials, Yale Medicine and Business Schools, successful entrepreneur, attending physician and an instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. He hasn't been confirmed because the NRA threatened to score the vote on his nomination because he would like to see more laws and regulations for guns in this country. Given the number of people killed by guns in the US and the damn near universal agreement in public health circles about some additional restrictions being a good idea, a public health expert and scientist who adopted any other position would probably also believe that the sun and planets revolve around the earth and the earth is flat...all those satellite photos being faked.

Since the Senate is adjourned, I don't exactly understand why the President hasn't done a recess appointment here.

Of course, lately I don't understand this President at all.

We don't know what Solomon would have done had neither claimant not opposed cutting the baby in half, but the point of the story was that the wise king knew that the real mother would do anything to save her child. President Obama would seem to be so wedded to some concept of rational discourse and fairness that faced with the same situation, he might still have the baby cut in half. Regardless, the solution here is simple -- if Doctor Murthy still wants to be Surgeon General, make him the damned Ebola Czar and then let him have authority over the empire of the Surgeon General in order to find a solution. Instead, they appoint Ron Klain, a somewhat anonymous White House and Democratic operative. What the hell are they thinking? 

Ron Paul and Friends out for a Sunday drive

Well, I don't know. Most Czars have damn little to do with the problem they're appointed to fix and the one's who do the best jobs seem to be the one's who are highly capable executives and leaders. Murthy is more of a technocratic operator but has some leadership success and does understand public health really well. Klain is a government technocrat who's been chief of staff to two vice presidents, Gore and Biden. The theory here was that he's the guy who can integrate the government response and coordinate all the agencies that will be involved. Unfortunately, most of the agencies doing things will be health care related, and I suspect a lot of the "stuff" of getting this controlled will be pretty highly technical. While I'm sure he's a competent guy, if the Administration didn't know this was going to excite those who thrive on panic and despair and hatred, they're even less situationally aware than I already think they are. When you're being chomped by alligators and nibbled by ducks, you don't need more damn gators or ducks. 

The administration has confused their duck-nibbling, gator-chomping swamp with a petting zoo. 

Back in 2005, a group of friends and I started The Defeatists. Our basic approach was that defeat and disaster was inevitable so approach it with that in mind. I think we were being satirical, although at times I wonder.

Anyway, I think the correct response to this nonsense by the President and Vice President is to invite John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to the White House, offer them some Merlot or some Wild Turkey, and then hand to the two Republican leaders their resignations.

"You won't cooperate, you won't negotiate, you spread lies, despair, gloom and all for your own political advantage at the expense of the welfare of the nation and the people. To hell with  you, you broke it, so you bought it..."

Then leave the room. Have Chief Justice Roberts dragged in and tell them to wait. Give them a half hour to think of what they want to propose as an alternative.

These guys aren't stupid. President-designate Boehner would probably really be in tears. McConnell would definitely be doing his turtle routine. 

This would be the ultimate Defeatist karate -- the two leaders don't want to be in charge of the government and Roberts isn't really interested in trying to preside over a major constitutional crisis the government; they just want to piss on it.

Make them put some skin in the games, and see how they respond. Then maybe we might get around to getting something done about stuff...lots of stuff.

(To be continued)

 

Net Neutrality and other things we probably should be worried about...or should have worried about!

 

 

The problem with irony is that not everybody gets it. -- Ray Wylie Hubbard

]

John Oliver is a British expatriate doing satire in the United States. He'd been interesting on The Daily Show before subbing for John Stewart, and now he's got his own gig on Sunday nights for HBO. I realize that some of our readers will read "Jon Stewart" and "British Expat!" and rush to a default position blaming Zionists and the House of Windsor for everything. Don't do that, at least for a moment.

You see, Oliver has exposed a great truth of 21st Century existence -- if you want to announce something evil, make the announcement in the midst of something incredibly boring...and then discuss it only in talking points and make use of absolute bullshit in most of the talking points. Like it or not, musicians, poets, fiction writers, historians, satirists and some academics are the only ones in public life actually saying things that we should hear. And, because you might" not be able to dance to it", or "who wants to read some poetry" or "I'll wait for the TV shows"or" the books are too long or too complicated" we just read the commentary if that. Which is largely made up of talking points based on lies and absolute bullshit. One of my friends, economic analyst and musician Eric Garland tweeted recently that after reviewing Piketty and some of the complaints against him, he no longer believed that the complainers had read Capital in the 21st Century. I asked him if he had only recently learned that there was no Santa. Sshocked to hear that I didn't believe in Santa anymore.,Eric was concerned that I won't believe in the confidence fairy either. (I don't.)

So, if you don't like Healthcare and loathe Barrack Obama, don't complain about the affordable care act on its merits, but rail about the need to vote to repeal the "Job-Killing, Economy-Busting-Medicare-Killing Death Panel Obamacare Bill" which is a nice way of saying absolutely nothing. If you were to go into the Congressional Record and review the legislation introduced since 2010 in the House to repeal the Affordable Care Act, you'd find lots of such titles. Silly but that's what they've been doing; this is Karl Rove/Lee Atwater crap played out legislatively -- attack the other guy's strengths by denying them, and troll them downwards. It may or may not work in the short run, but if you're basically a spiritual ORC, it works well at degrading the public debate and making our civil society something more akin to the French Assembly of 1793 than Hamilton, Jay and Madison's vision of how a Democratic Republic is supposed to work.

The issue that got Oliver wound up as shown in the video above is Net Neutrality. As is typical with changes to Federal Rules and Regulations, the briefings are incomprehensible and full of jargon, acronyms and legalese. It's boring, violates all the rules of rhetoric, and makes about as much sense to most of us as four or five pages of organic chemistry. However, in this case it's fairly simple -- Net Neutrality requires that internet access by providers be equal. You put your stuff online, and it goes out at whatever speed your modem and network can handle and it gets downloaded and read at whatever speed your customers, readers or the NSA is currently handling. The current effort to change the rules is pretty simple -- you allow the providers of internet services to charge extra for premium speeds.

The big online providers contend that this will make the people paying for that additional speed get a faster connection to the consumer, but will not put those buying the basic distribution system at any disadvantage. To ensure this, we have the FCC which is now run by the guy who used to be head lobbyist for the CABLE and WIRELESS industries, and of course, we all know that we can trust lobbyists. And, the cable companies and internet providers...which already exist with monopoly basis and use all sorts of bizarre tricks to maximize profits while shafting consumers. We all have our horror stories about how lousy these firms are, and now we're going to trust them to do the right thing by us all. How bad could it be? (Very...extremely...totally!) What could go wrong? (Everything...)

Yeah -- problem is that in their Ayn Rand-derived world view, screwing us is not only their right but their civic duty. In the vulture capital world of cable-broadband-Wall Street-and big time politics, there should be no consumer protections, no truth in advertising protections, no guardians for the guardians guarding the rights and well-being of the people. The FCC does have a couple of problems though --it has to convince Congress and it has to get through the public rule review and commentary period. Frankly, this is a chance for those of us who complain about the failure of democracy to at least twist a few tails here. Oliver's piece reveals the address where you can email you comments on net neutrality. He has fun with that, addressing internet trolls and encouraging them to step up to the plate and tell this bunch of politicians, bureaucrats, thieves and whores that you're not happy about this. You will hold the agency and the elected officials responsible for this attempt to stifle competition and reduce freedom of expression through the use of money to deny access to free speech.

Now, the Cable-Broadband industry are major players in our dysfunctional political financing and politicianing whoring black market. So, both sides of the aisle are pretty vulnerable here. The only way this works is if we actually exercise that free speech and scare these people. Regulators and Congress-critters are shy, timid things when the voters actually make noise. As a progressive Democrat, Secular Humanist and Skeptic there are few things I can agree with some of my colleagues here at Vets. Vets by the way, is not so wealthy that we could pay the freight for high end access or else the editors have been kidding me. But, we can all get behind this idea -- the internet is one of the most democratic things we have in terms of leveling the playing field. Granted, one of the problems with democracy is the lack of quality control, but when left and right and moderate and downright scary extremists can agree on something, and make some noise, the bureaucrats and politicians tend to jump on the me-too train.

Be aware, of course, that eternal vigilance will be necessary to make this a permanent state of affairs, but that's OK. One thing that I've figured out is that if we want to protect liberty and freedom in the expanding chaotic democracy that is the 21st Century is that evil keeps coming back. Figuring out a way to banish it forever may well be impossible. But, that is no reason to accept it as inevitable. Actually, eternal vigilance is almost cliche these days-- protecting freedom and equality requires a rare level of being OCD...and, not boring.

Oliver's rant on Sunday, June 1 resulted in the volume of email in the public commentary mailbox at the FCC to basically explode. We need to keep it exploding. Here's the address:  [email protected].

 

When Ayn Rand and Friedman bit you in the butt

I knew this was going to happen, as did a lot of us. Theoretically, it was the stuff of public health discussions and philosophy of science and ethics for a long time. First clue that the end was coming was probably when MRSA became a big issue. But, a friend of mine with too much time on his hands Facebook-ed this  earlier today with the note that it was time to start singing the doom song.  Since he's a system administrator for start-ups by profession, he's used to everyone running around saying the world will end tomorrow...in this case, it might.

Another reality is there’s not much money to be made in making new antibiotics, so we saw a lot of drug companies who left the field of antibiotic development because of this combination of factors, that it was getting really hard to discover, to develop new antibiotics, and you don’t make a lot of money in selling these drugs, so the market really wasn’t there. …I can’t tell a patient who has a resistant infection, “If we can get you through this next six months or this next year, there’s going to be a great drug that’s coming.” Or I can’t tell oncologists, for example, “Well, six months from now we’re going to have therapies to offer you; we’re going to have something to combat these infections.”

The drugs aren’t there. And we know it takes a long time to get drugs from the development stage through testing and into the market. Right now, I can’t tell you when you’re going to have a new antibiotic to treat these highly resistant Gram negatives. The best I can say is it’s probably going to be several years, but I can’t point to one that’s in development and say, “We’re going to have that one in three years.”

There is a temptation to be snarky here. "We don't have effective antibiotics? No problem--get some turtle dung, eye of newt and blood of frog and go to town. Maybe some fire...yeah, lots of fire." Unfortunately, this is actually kind of real and is another reason why we should be spending a lot of taxpayer money on developing new therapies. Instead, the Rs are worrying about a bad software site. Bengazi. The fucking national debt that they exploded, TARP that they demanded. Here's the thing -- if we have a succession of plagues caused by diseases we could have treated but now can't, everyone is vulnerable. EVERYONE. The weaker and less healthy will get sick first, but everybody will be at serious risk. This demands a systemic response to which the Ryan-Boehner-Barton-McKeon response will be something along the lines of denial, blaming Obama, scheduling days of prayer and perhaps having Teddy Cruz's dad, the faith-healing Cuban minister (Santeria, anyone?) do some TV faith-healing. After all, it's OK in their minds to swear in to the Congress by TV?

Of course, the Randian-Markets are Magic crowd can indicate the cited interview. After all, this was on PBS, on Frontline. Commie bastards! And the guy in question is a government scientist. Pointy-headed, drone! A damn take wants us to worry...ok, how about the head of R&D from Pfizer, Dr. Charles Knirsch?  The drugs aren't there. They're not even working on them...

Q. But did that mean that you had to close down the antibiotic thing to focus on vaccines? Why couldn’t you do both?

A. Oh, good question. And it’s not a matter of closing down antibiotics. We were having limited success. We had had antibiotics that we would get pretty far along, and a toxicity would emerge either before we even went into human testing or actually in human testing that would lead to discontinuation of those programs. Again, the science was difficult, and we have these other platforms, these vaccine platforms that are state of the art that we think that the prudent allocation of capital addressing very, very important medical need, we would devote the resources to those programs.

Q.  So you decided essentially to shift the capital away from antibiotics and toward vaccine platforms.

A. Yes.

Q. And there were, according to people we’ve talked to, promising compounds at that time. You certainly had what some people described to us as the best and the brightest in the world working on some of these things at Pfizer. But you just said to me that there were problems with them and that there were difficulties, so I just wonder, was this program not the best and the brightest and one of the best in the world?

A. I don’t know which programs you’re referring to. Could you be more specific? Some of these programs right now haven’t even been moved into animal testing.

Now, I want any reader to understand this -- Pfizer is doing this not because they're greedy bastards, or at least, not solely because they are greedy bastards. They're doing because they see antibiotics as a dead end and they need to do something else which is going to require some hard and expensive research, development and clinical trials taking years. They didn't see the "return on innovation," and saw too much risk due to the difficulties of the science involved and the "uncertain regulatory pathways." In other words, things cost too much to do, too much risk of failure and then it just takes time to get a drug through testing, even if it's fast tracked. Should the new antibiotic cause serious side effects that outweigh the benefits, the legal liabilities are incredible. "So, get the divining rod out, Myrtle, we need to find a new well and different magic beans."

I'm honestly not knocking big Pharma so much as capitalism -- the unchecked Capitalism and greed advocated by the Republican Party of the "de-regulate, we're sorry BP, Enron didn't do anything wrong" era. Dr. Krnirsch speaks about public-private partnerships involving government research, universities and what really amounts to cross-fertilization between the various big and small pharmaceutical firms as scientists move between academe, government and business. Frankly, this is one place where the revolving door is not only not a problem for the nation, but where it works to our advantage. But, the fact is that scientific research is part of that "discretionary" funding thing shut down as non-essential during the latest Tea Party led unpleasantness. We're spending a lot less on pure science than we used to, and people like Palin, Cruz, Lee, Bachmann, Demint, Anne Coulter, Hannity and O'Reilly and so on delight in laughing at research studies and the boundary-less nature of what government has funded in the past.

Basic research costs more and more because it's less and less basic, and science is pretty much boundary-less by it's nature. If you are a PhD in biology specializing in primates, you have a deep understanding of math, statistics, chemistry, and some familiarity with physics, earth science and other more esoteric things besides how monkeys work. Basic science and hard science is not something best left to the private sector because the private sector, even the hugely financially successful Pharmaceutical industry, is not designed to take on high risk, low return efforts.

The ideal drug for Pfizer is Viagra, which was initially developed as a tool for hypertension. The physiological effect of lowering blood pressure in the male reproductive organs those allowing better circulation was a side effect that became the reason for the drug's existence. As it came closer and closer to going off patent, Pfizer began to look at it as a mechanism for combating teenage hypertension. In fact, lower doses of the drug are marketed for some types of hypertension but are off patent; the primary money-making purpose for the drug is ED and those patents do not expire until 2019. However, there's nothing to prevent a physician from subscribing the lower dose and less expensive and possibly generic version for ED. They'd just have to prescribe multiple pills...When Canada allowed manufacture of generic Viagra, Pfizer countered by lowering the prices for the real stuff and then appealed saying that the Canadian legal system had erred. As a result, Canada invalidated all the patents on Viagra in Canada.

Scientific and medical research is not about making money; pharmaceutical firms are about making money. As we shift funding for research more to the private sector and less to the public sector, there will be less of the hard science and more of what might be considered technology, which can be described reasonably as the effort to take some scientifically known elements and apply them to resolve engineering problems of one type or another. Writing computer code is an example of a technological use of known scientific processes (coding, math logic, binary math, etc. etc. etc.) some of which is invisible to the writer and can be. But, re-designing the structure of micro-processors to depend on some as yet unknown principle of quantum mechanics or organic as opposed to inorganic chemical compound is science; the basic science lies in discovering that as yet unknown principle or compound.

Business excels at technology because the risk is an engineering solution; not so much at the other aspects of the continuum. The firm answers to the shareholders who may not be willing to absorb the losses of failed experiments trying to turn peanut butter into jet fuel. (That image is homage to Jerry Harvey and the Abilene Paradox, a great explanation for what's going on in Congress and the Republican party. Thank you Dr Harvey for again helping us all understand.) S

o, how do we get the hard science done? Lots of it is done in the great research universities around the world, funded by foundations, Pharma and government. In this country, the only organization that can absorb the cost and the risk of this sort of research -- consider it to be a form of scientific infrastructure -- is the Federal Government. Not funding that risks not having the next great innovation; more to the point, in this incredibly complex organism that is the human community, it risks not being able to respond to the next crisis because no one has even thought of the problem.

The return on investment for a firm in basic science is really limited; the return for the nation on all infrastructure -- intellectual, technological, industrial, transportation, communication -- is incredible largely because the nation is the only one who can afford to do it. To those who worry about burdening future generations with debt, I suggest they consider if the future generations would like to have a future based on eye of newt and fire in hovels and caves connected by goat carts where strep throat and pneumonia kill 50% of the population before age 12, or something marvelous. If it all falls apart, the debt is going to be not an issue; survival will be questionable. We are a community, all in this together; failing to act that way as our right wing compatriots recommend is infuriating, and amusing, and really just an awful idea. The good news is when the universal pandemic  comes, like the black death, plutocrats and senators and their families and supporters will suffer as much if not more than the poor, hungry, weak and those who serve them. However, it's cold comfort -- doing something now seems a far better approach than this when it's too late.  

Consensus is a hell of a drug…clashing Armies, widening gyres and hollow men

When you're working in a group, it's hard to know what you truly think. We're such social animals  that we instinctively mimic others' opinions, often without realizing we're doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the "pain of independence."

 

Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The "evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority."

This is not to say that we should abolish groupwork. But we should use it a lot more judiciously than we do today.

                                        Author Susan Cain interview with Gareth Cook, Scientific American Jan 24, 2012

A while back, I did a post on politics over at the Defeatists recently.  One of my frustrations with blogging and one reason that I have cut back is the lack of feedback, by the way. Comments are welcome, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, most of the comments over there seem to come from people who are trying to sell something like Gucci handbags but have been fascinated by some brilliant thing one of us said, either recently or a couple of years ago. We're about due for the annual "How dare you say anything bad about boy bands, you misogynist bastards, especially you, Commandante AGI!" which has some interesting semiotic undertext in it. However, this one was from a real human being who was interested in what I said and conflicted…I might be right, but what the hell…

Here's the conversation. Any emphasis is mine…

Good post, good post...but what if the "middle" is, objectively moronic and absolutely wrong? The middle says:

"We need to invade Iraq and kill or displace a million people and turn the country over to the Shiite theocrats, but we will do so with properly audited spending and well-trained troops who will follow the letter of the rules"

The middle says: "Medical care funding in this country is broken so let's require people to buy overpriced private insurance with their minimum wage jobs".

Sometimes, to parpaphrase Jim Hightower, "the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines or dead armadillos"

And...do you really see any Democratic Party politicians with any position or any influence in the party (which means...Jesse Jackson does not really count) as being anywhere near as crazy as the current GOP? Really? Which ones? I can't think of any...I'm a little younger than you but I remember Jimmy Carter and Dukakis and their ilk...and they are NOT Santorum or Gingrich, let alone Bachmann.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:48 AM

The middle is also gung ho about the upcoming hot war with Iran...either run driectly by the United States or by our good buddies in Israel. (Another nuclear power. Hmmmm....why is Israel "allowed" to have nuclear weapons?"

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:59 AM

Not sure where the middle is...you see it further off to the right than I do. Oddly, we could take either Eisenhower or Nixon and their social policies as a starting point for the middle, and we'd look pretty leftist today. Imagine the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the Great Society in swing today...but, of course, what we got is what we got and determines what we're gonna get near term and possibly long term. What that doesn't do is allow us to just give up. I remain convinced that the lesser of two evils is the better choice. By having Bush beat Gore, how did Nader make things better? Devolve for 8 years and here we go again? (Nader is not to blame completely for Bush -- lots of things conspired to make things this bad.) However, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush can be summed up with two names -- Samuel Alito and John Roberts as well as one Supreme Court Decision -- Citizens United. A Democrat wins in 2000 or in 2004, even an uninspiring Democrat like Kerry, and money doesn't equal speech. However, it's probably time for my periodic Yeats post...

Posted by: Crusader AXE | 31 January 2012 at 11:47 AM

I guess I am gloomier than you.

I wished I believed things could be "reformed". I think Chalmers Johnston nailed it. Even as things devolve and crash and burn, the people that benefit from the system still have plentiful opportunities for looting and rent seeking. And, the system promotes sociopaths (no...I am not saying everyone in government is a sociopath...but still, there are a lot of 'em).

People like Obama merely provide a cover, a gloss, for the ongoing predation. Arguably, Obama has made things worse in that the "anti-war left" (a feeble force given America's history as a violent culture based on conquest)) was lulled to sleep and ineffectiveness.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 02:04 PM

From a guy who calls himself "The High Arka"

You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them. Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder "fewer" innocent people. The crucial difference between voting for Obama in the real world, and choosing to allow him to murder only 3 preschoolers in the example above, is that the example above describes a terrible choice being made one time only. The presidential farce is recurring. Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. Times ten or fifty or a hundred. Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children--your choice. At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along and say, "Enough"? At some point, it must become apparent to you that the game is never going to end.

The children are going to keep dying--there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders. Choose your "party." How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and "choose" which rich, powerful national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. The fucking crusades, or the genocide of the neanderthals. Count the bodies. Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, "Enough"?

Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there. When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only the deaths they cause, but their entire horrific game? It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as "a little less murder than we could otherwise commit," it will never end. When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first, who refuse to compromise by saying, "I guess it's fine if Obama kills people, because he'll kill fewer than Gingrich will." (This is, essentially, what that haughty piece of shit George Clooney is saying as the televised 2012 contest approaches) A few crazies, and maybe someday, more. It's as daunting a task as any, but it has to happen for the killing to stop: human individuals--without an automatic, reassuring group consensus--refusing to support killing any longer.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 04:31 PM

I'm guessing Brian isn't the High Arka, but HA is definitely invited to the conversation…

This bothered me, and I was blogging about it. However, I was composing on Typepad, which my Defeatist brothers continually caution me against because a couple of times a year the Google or the Typepad Hobbits decide to fuck me over and eat everything I had written. I learn for a while, and then revert to form…so, I have brief moments of sanity, interspersing the Einsteinian standard insanity of doing something again and again and being surprised when it goes wrong. Terribly wrong. So, I dropped it for a while.

However, it's still bugging me. I'm a lifelong Democrat who thinks that Jefferson, Jackson, both Roosevelts and Truman were among the great presidents, but the greatest was Lincoln. Lincoln would have serious problems in today's Republican party of course. In fact, he'd probably either be a Democrat or possibly something further left. It's fun to imagine him with David Boies, arguing Citizen's United against some Koch brothers mercenary. Of course, as Jesus wouldn't be allowed to preach in modern Christianity, Lincoln could never be admitted to the bar. Paul Tillich, the Existentialist Christian theologian and philosopher wrote in the introductory remarks to his most approachable work, The Dynamics of Faith, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the 50s that "Today, faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender…"

One reason that I admire Lincoln is simple – he personifies human compassion. Lincoln wasn't overtly religious publicly, but he was a man of deep spirituality and concern. Tillich contends that "Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The dymanics of faith are the dynamics of ultimate concern…" Lincoln's ultimate concern was justice which he saw as fairness, compassion, compromise and the acceptance of the other side's humanity. He was generally disappointed, but he strove to achieve that world by doing what he could to maintain the union based on that idea of justice – not because the Union was itself just, but because he saw the potential for justice as lying in the Union, depending on it, deriving it's future from it. And, in order to preserve it as source of ultimate good, he was willing to risk everything, including his soul and sanity and sense of self to preserve it. Had the South been victorious, would he have been treated like a hero by the North? He'd have been hung…he was risking his life, and the irony of his assassination lies in the reality that Wilkes egotistical madness created.

Today's political world is based largely on something that goes back to the beginning – between those who are ALWAYS RIGHT and those who suspect quietly that they could have made a mistake. I don't think Lincoln ever signed an execution order easily or without struggle; we know that George W. Bush had no such concerns, and that Rick Perry was almost gleeful about it at times. And, we know that the people who go to Republican debates cheer executions. Where would Lincoln have been on that? I suspect he'd have vomited…

I've been doing some reading about Afghanistan and our continued adventures there. Now, I have colleagues who are 9/11 Truthers, which I am not. I have colleagues who think Osama bin Laden was killed years ago and then dumped in the Ocean for a propaganda victory; I have colleagues that believe that Israel and the Mossad did 9/11 and got us into the various mid-eastern debacles. Well, if I were Israel I would probably have reacted to the news of 9/11 attacks with some restrained glee especially if I was concerned about the US cutting a separate deal that would be to Israel's disadvantage. Churchill confessed to a feeling of relief and happiness when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Do we really think Churchill planned Pearl Harbor? I know that the Israelis and their various lobbies in this country really want Iran to go away – and, they'd like us to do it. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued on Hardball on Friday we're facing a reality. There is nothing that makes sense about backing an attack on Iran for us; lots to make it a really bad idea; and, exactly what does Israel get out of the attack? NBC's chief "go get shot at" correspondent Richard Engle was in the same segment, and he indicated that the political leadership in Israel might be really excited by the possibility of an attack on Iran, but the actual soldiers and covert operators think it would be stupid, that their focus needs to be on Egypt and Jordan. Brzezinski argued that Iran may be crazy, but that particular empire in various incarnations has been around for 0ver 3000 years, and do we really think they're suicidal? He also points out to those who say "Israel can't live under the threat of nuclear attack" the degree of fatuous reasoning. We did it for over 40 years as did the Soviets and Western Europe. If Iran gets a bomb and uses it, do they expect to survive? Everybody in the neighborhood who counts, including Israel, has a credible nuclear deterrent, as well as delivery systems. The Iranians are depending in so far as they are on anything, on North Korean technology…what the hell. Let them spend themselves into oblivion, which was Reagan's strategy in the 80s. It works…unless you screw up and spend yourself into oblivion.

This is relevant to Afghanistan for a number of reasons. I know that the administration has agreed to stop combat operations sooner than later, but I'm really wondering why not now! It really helps to have some historical awareness, and the only tactic that has worked with Afghanistan is the punitive raid. Get in, fuck up the bad guys and anybody in the vicinity, threaten worse if they do it again, unass the AO. Invade and try to make it better, and you'll just make it a helluva lot worse, and you'll suffer for it. By April of 2002, the Taliban is gone from power although still there; al Queida was severely damaged there; Pakistan is/was/will be totally fucked up; and we're there because…we're going to turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy? As soon as the Taliban was defeated and Osama bin Laden et al were in Tora Bora, we should have declared victory, given them a check, possibly re-established the monarchy and gotten out. The Afghan people don't want western culture; they don't want women to have any rights; they don't want to not kill each other. It's that simple – we're trying to impose an improvement on people who see no reason to change and regard the "improvements" as evil. NATO and the US would be further ahead to fund emigration to some reasonable location – Barstow, California for example – for those who want to live under something other than Sharia law. That'll assuage some consciences. But whether we leave now or in five years or in ten years, it will be the same…only worse.

The piece from Susan Cain is very relevant here. We got into Iraq due to a rush to judgment and the influence of Ike's military industrial complex combined with green, hubris and myopia. It's interesting in comparing our Iraq-Afghanistan experience to the Soviet experience. Unlike the Soviets, we did have a reason for attacking within Afghanistan – they were harboring a threat, and we had a just reason for wanting to eliminate that threat. The Soviets had been dithering around with the Afghans for years and chose to invade because of the Brezhnev doctrine that once a Red Block Country always a Red Block combined with the belief that they could control matters. They sold themselves a bill of goods. The Soviet experience looks a lot like US experience in Vietnam – lots of people with good intentions and an absolute inability to see the consequences of their actions. I've been reading former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite's Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 with a degree of déjà vu combined with a strong sense of WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? Working from Russian sources and interviews, Braithwaite has a history of a cosmic comedy of errors that looks and smells a lot like Vietnam. Lousy policy, self-delusion, group-think run amuck, combined with inefficient tactics, lousy planning, and dumbfounding mismatches between outcomes, methods and resources. The good news for the Soviets was that Spetznaz was really well honed in Afghanistan. The bad news is that they failed to achieve any of their goals while turning the Red Block essentially into Cuba and North Korea. We achieved our initial goals, dithered and screwed around for the next 10 years and are still looking for a goal that we can achieve. Somebody in power needs to stop talking, listen to the record and the history and start focusing on ultimate concerns, desired outcomes – I define a desired outcome as something that can be achieved within the reasonable constraints of blood, time, treasure and lost opportunity. The most desirable outcome today is not to listen to the congressional storm or the media tumult but to listen to the inner voice of reason and make the sort of courageous decision that Lincoln made routinely. And, don't wait for elections or consensus. Do what's right, now…for Lincoln's sake.

Braithwaite begins the third portion of his book, the Long Goodbye with a poem by one the Russian Afghan veterans, Igor Morozov. It reads, in part –

Down from the heights we once commanded/ with burning feet we descend to the ground/ bombarded with calumny, slander and lies/ we're leaving, we're leaving, we're leaving.

Farewell you mountains you know best/ what prices paid while we were here/what foes unconquered still survive/what friends we had to leave behind…

 

I generally find Russian poems and song lyrics somewhat of a blend of overly didactic and overly romantic…peasant and soldier poetry. The Soviet Army and its soldiers deserved a better use; so did the British with Lord Elphinstone in 1820. The Soviets in many ways repeated the British experience. We repeat the Soviety experience…if history repeats itself with the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, what exactly is our experience going to be? Tragical farce? We deserve better, and if someone listens not to the crowd but to the inner voices or reason, creativity and common sense, we may get it. I remain pessimistically hopeful…

 

 

 

 

 

                                    

This is a Commie-Music and Food Blog you know...with some slacker and anarchist overtones

One of the loose collective of my friends -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. 

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American

Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

 

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here's some other garage-type stuff from my youth...For example, the Knickerbochers.  Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah...Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs...

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia...and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being "brilliant" some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey... I also think this was lip synching. Here's the   Original with Beck --and, I don't hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here's one their first lead guitarist, What's his name, Dick Crampton or something...I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah...sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group -- kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice...since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame -- she's dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way. 

Syndicate of Sound -- A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge's before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs...despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them.  She's About a Mover  was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though...\ Then, of course, there's that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn't say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym...who wouldn't like that, again?...

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

 

Umm, about that whole Zionist-Baal thing...They don’t want you to see. Congress doesn’t know, governors don’t know, Red Cross, ACLU, National Geographic. Nobody knows, man.

Hardison: Oh, no. All this construction is goin’ on underground. Under, beneath the eyes. The eyes of the world, man. They don’t want you to see. Congress doesn’t know, governors don’t know, Red Cross, ACLU, National Geographic. Nobody knows, man. Nobody, man. They’re puttin’ terrorists in your backyard. Terrorists under your backyard. “Hey, little Billy, go outside. Dig in the sandbox. Ooh, klang. What’d ya find, little Billy? What’d ya find? It’s a terrorist. It’s a bunker full of terrorists, man.” Bunker, man.

Monica: What other sources do you have besides tin foil hat over here?

Hardison: Hey, hey, hey, man. Bein’ a tin foil hat, that’s better than bein’ a lap dog for the four corporations that control the global media, man.

Leverage--Three Days of the Hunter Job

  I get emails. I get comments. At times that the Tin Hat Brigade of both left and right wing nuts and assorted loonies are out to amuse me. There's really no other way for an adult to respond to some of this stuff. There is no answer sufficient, no proof adequate. The best response, the most telling one I've seen that illustrates this paranoid function in America -- and anywhere else -- was a comment to the effect that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forgeries by the Czarist Secret Police doesn't matter, because if the elders had written down their protocols, this would be what they'd say... So getting this email in one of my professional accounts was interesting, amusing and kinda, sorta sad. It sums up in some ways the very nature of our debate today -- between ideology, superstition, and ignorance fighting for the main tent in the three ring circus of the downfall of western Culture and the United States as we know it. (And, don't get me started on the right...heh, heh.)

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Subject: WOE TO THE WORLD! Rothschild N.W.O Illuminati EXPOSED!!! > Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:44:44 -0500 > > N.W.O. EXPOSED! > > WOE TO THE ROTHSCHILDS! WOE TO THE FREEMASONS/ ILLUMINATI! WOE TO LUCIFER! > > PLEASE RESEARCH THE ILLUMINATI/FREEMASON BOHEMIAN GROVE CONNECTION! > > THE THIRD JEWISH TMEPLE TO BE BUILT SOON! > > http://www.squidoo.com/templejerusalem > > THE ANTI-CHRIST IS NEAR! REPENT AND KNOW ALL WILL BOW BEFORE THE LAMB OF GOD JESUS CHRIST. > > WATCH, LEARN, PRAY & PASS ON PLEASE! > > Rothschilds/Illuminati/Bohemian Grove Exposed!: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2E_HP97Rzc > > http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bloodlines/index.htm > > http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bloodlines/rothschild.htm > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icKIWW1EcuY > > Bible: > Revelatinos Chapter 11 > > The Two Witnesses > 1. I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, “Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, with its worshipers. > > 2. But exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months. > > 3. And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” > > 4. They are “the two olive trees” and the two lampstands, and “they stand before the Lord of the earth.”[a] 5 If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die > > 6. They have power to shut up the heavens so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want. > > 7. Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them > > 8. Their bodies will lie in the public square of the great city—which is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt—where also their Lord was crucified. > > 9. For three and a half days some from every people, tribe, language and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. > > 10. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth. > > 11. But after the three and a half days the breath[b] of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. > > 12. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here.” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on. > > 13. At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. > > 14. The second woe has passed; the third woe is coming soon.... > > Galatians 1:8 written in 50 A.D. > "But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!" > > 33rd Degree Freemason Oath: > Albert Pike- > "That which we must say to the crowd is:* 'We worship a god, but it is the god one adores without superstition.' > * To you, Sovereign Grand Instructors General [a 33rd Degree Mason], we say this ... you may repeat it to the > Brethren of the 32nd, 31st, and 30th Degrees ... The Masonic religion should be, by all of the initiates of the high > degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine ... Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also > God ... the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy; and the true and pure philosophic religion is the belief in Lucifer, the > equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light, God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of > Darkness and Evil." [Lady Queenborough, Occult Theocracy, p. 220-221, quoting a letter from Albert Pike to the > 23 Supreme Councils of the World on July 14, 1889]... > > THE LAMB OF GOD JESUS CHRIST WINS THE BATTLE OF ARMAGEDDON! > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2E_HP97Rzc

Reply: > Date: Mon 19 Sep 2011 0925-0926

Ok, well err...good luck with that. Whatever I can do to help you out with this one...

Mike

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Now, I remain unconvinced that Israel had anything to do with 9/11. I'm willing to be convinced; I'd like to see the actual surveillance tapes from the Pentagon, for example. The failure of the government to release everything they can is just stupid.  Into that vacuum oddities arise. However, that aside, there is an important difference between not being convinced that the world is about to end in some Jewish-Freemason-Illuminati-Bohemian Grove rhapsody and being able to look at evidence that should make you wonder. Thomas Friedman is not one of my favorite thinkers. In general, he falls into the category of establishment-moderate twits who has to keep his credentials polished. Maureen Dowd mentioned once on The Daily Show that someone had said that the issue for the Times Op-Ed was going to be the contest between Friedman and Safire for the soul of Maureen Dowd. Well, I think her soul has stayed pretty much her own, Safire is gone but  occasionally Friedman gets something very right. It's simple -- Israel is not primarily our friend -- in fact, there is some question in my mind as to whether or not Israel is its own friend.  In his Sunday column, Friedman writes:

The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation....O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy?...Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation...Unfortunately, Israel today does not have a leader or a cabinet for such subtle diplomacy. One can only hope that the Israeli people will recognize this before this government plunges Israel into deeper global isolation and drags America along with it.

Which leads me to another thought...Bibi Netanyahu bears a striking resemblance to the John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in his ability to get the United States down rabbit holes and dark allies we really shouldn't be going down. While it's great to see Obama acting a bit like Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, going out to call down the psycho bullies intent on ruining the polity and civil society we kinda, sorta have in this country most of the time, one realizes that there is no John Wayne character off in the alley, waiting for the guns to go off to cover his rifle shot taking out the evil and enshrining the good. Far from it...Obama is in this one alone. Not unlike the Stewart character, Obama has truth, justice, law, common sense, economics and the laws of mathematics behind him; the Lee Marvin stand-ins -Johnny-Mitch-Eric-BoehnerMcConnellCantor III have a majority in the house, the cloture rule in the Senate, and a gleeful allegiance to chaos and disorder to maintain their self-interest.

Lonesome Rhodes: This whole country's just like my flock of sheep! Marcia Jeffries: Sheep? Lonesome Rhodes: Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me!

A Face in the Crowd

To a large extent, this sort of statesmanship goes a long way toward explaining the Tea Party -- America's Likud -- and the capture of the Republican Congressional Delegation by it. Now, most of the people in the caucus are not certifiable wing nuts. Hell, most of them are mid-level functionaries in the Military-Industrial-Financial Complex. The theory was that with Boehner as Speaker, the Rs would make a lot of noise but not do anything to hurt the country or at least it's economic interests. Well, hah ha, hah ha, hah ha. Fooled us. Then, there's the slate of candidates vying for the nomination. Dear God -- in order to stay in the race and yet appear sane -- remain electable -- the adults in the room, Huntsman and Romney, have had to stake out positions so far to the right of the flat earth that they've embraced that they're hanging on by their fingertips. Huntsman has at least taken the principled and courageous position of endorsing science...now, as a child of the 60s, I remember when the Left was anti-technocracy, science and math. One of the criteria to be a long-haired hippy commie freak was to not be good at math or, if you were, to be mildly ashamed of it. The Science and Math and Computer types were kind of oblivious to politics, but if they did deign to look at it, they were interested in the Republicans as the party most likely to endorse research into Science, Math and Computers. Well, isn't today a turn around...

I have to wonder how Newt Gingrich, freaking Phd, can walk into the faculty club of any respectable college campus without blushing or hiding behind a raincoat based on his performance in the Iowa debate alone. Romney is an android whore, and so his anti-science positions are kind of in keeping with the rest of his character. His greatest accomplishment in Massachusetts -- health care reform -- is something he runs from, while he babbles about job creation when the historical record is pretty clear -- as a capitalist, he created jobs in the Third World at the expense of American workers; in Massachusetts, he didn't have a respectable competitive record on job creation. So, the logical thing is to run away from your strengths. Rick-a-Dick Perry went to the pre-eminent Technology School in Texas, and admits that four semesters of Organic Chemistry made a pilot out of him. Well, it made pilots, teachers, lawyers and a variety of other things out of other people -- there's no shame in bumping into the wall between Med or Vet School that is Organic and Inorganic Chemistry. But, he appears to have gotten a D in meat...compared to Bush's Gentleman's Cs, this is kind of scary. More to the point, he's packed the State Board of Education with right-wing, anti-science, anti-research and anti-history lunatics who would embarrass the PTA in Incest Springs Arkansas. Texas depends on technology, engineering and geology to a tremendous extent -- how do you develop new and safer approaches to drilling for oil by ignoring science in Geology?

As for Bachmann-Palin overdrive, wow. WOW. While I'm going to pass on Mikki the Monkey right now, they're both worth considering. Batshit crazy, of course, if the bat is a fox. Occasionally, they both get off some good lines -- I'd like to think that Palin's line about polls being for strippers as a witty use of satire and homonym to take a pun and bitch slap it out of the park. (How's that for mixing up the old metaphor salad?) However, I'm pretty sure she doesn't get the subtlety there, and didn't intend it. When Keith Olbermann jokes about "Lonesome Rhodes Beck" referencing the dark study of celebrity "A Face in the Crowd," he really is talking more about Palin. We forget at our peril that she really wanted to be an entertainer, a sportscaster. Had the WNBA been around in her Sarah Barracuda days, she's have been trying to get on the court to be her generation's version of Sue Bird, without the talent, but with all the crazed desire possible. I hope she gets into this -- the media will eat her up, and she'll totally screw up whatever the R's look like, act like and try to think like. Like Journey or Paul Revere and the Raiders, she'll keep doing her revival tours on the rubber chicken circuit so long as she can. A number of years ago, I was in my least favorite city -- Las Vegas -- and in the hotel hosting the conference I was being bored at, Englebert Humperdink was appearing. I thought he was dead...but, this wasn't the Hard Rock or Bellagio, and I guess the slot machine crowd there was demographically correct. In a few years, Palin will be doing shows in Branson and Knotts Berry Farm. She might get a gig at Dollywood, except that Dolly is a pretty smart woman, and recognizes fraud and stupidity far away. Sarah can't see it when it's in the mirror.  

Now, the hatchet job that my fellow alum Joe McGinnis did on Palin requires comment. The revelations in the book appear to be pretty trite -- Palin was the Alaska version of a scene-whore and the Wassilla version of a Yuppie. She has a lot of kids, a long-suffering spouse, and a trail of silly, trite and nutty behavior that isn't worth anyone's attention. In a better time for the Republican party, she'd be a fringe candidate at worst; I suspect the adulation she found on the campaign trail with McCain made her crazy for attention, for the perks, for the love and adoration that she seems to seek. Let's remember, she wanted to be a sportscaster, and failed at it. She's found a way of getting the attention, and the money and will do whatever it takes to do that. Ride into the Republican convention on a White Snow Machine so she can save the day, again? Sure, why not... Now, McGinnis has an interesting career, chronicling cheats, liars, criminals and so on beginning with Nixon and Roger Ailes in 1999's The Selling of the President. 1968. He could have done an interesting take on the Palin phenomenon, building on President by comparing how the media and political operatives had morphed into something as powerful while incompetent as to propel Palin onto the national stage. Instead, he made the story about himself and the venal silliness of the Palin family. I think he missed the point. Frankly, the only one in that saga who seems to come off well is Todd -- he seems to defend his family and be pretty much a regular guy thrust into something he didn't want. McGinnis wrote a book 30 some years ago about spending a year wandering around in Alaska called Going to Extremes. I think he should have remembered that book and the people there...and possibly, re-read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail...he'd have done a better and more interesting job. Now, he's the Kitty Kelly of Holy Cross alumni, and comes off not as chronicler but scold. The Palin tale deserves a Mencken with a bit of Budd Schulberg ( after all, Schulberg wrote A Face in the Crowd) and McGinnis, for better or worse, produced a piece worthy of Penthouse, only without the vanity shots.  

Truth...and I don't mean to bore ya but there's no such thing as auras!

Tim Minchin is a Australian, a madman, and a poet. We used to have a post up that I mistakenly labeled in such a way as to attract the google monster when abused by pederasts and weasels. While it was popular with these guys, it made me squeamish, and I decided this morning to delete the post and all those strange comments...And while looking for the thing to post it as something else, I discovered that the first Minchin piece I ever listened to has been made into a cartoon...and, here it is!

Everything that is fun is bad for you...and we can make it worse!

The news that there is a link between oral sex and tonsil cancer is really intriguing...since somebody decided that those vestigal organs that primarily act as sacks to hold dormant infections like strep should be nutured instead of removed at the first opportunity, we now have this threat. Tonsilectomies are safe, quick to recover from and have the side effect of not being a place where you can have cancer if you don't have the place. Also, and more to the point, another reason to have women vaccinated against human pampolona virus. Maybe the sexist twits in Texas who opposed it because not worrying about cervical cancer would make their teenage daughters more sexually promiscuous will get in line with reality since they now have some self-interest here.

Not sure about alternatives -- tongue condoms?

Skating away, on the thin ice of the same damn day...

While I have a number of things on my mind, like how I appear to have metaphorically adopted these twits commenting on the blog these days and how some Chicken Hawk can refer to Sal Gunta as representing the feminization of the Medal of Honor because he won the award trying to rescue his brothers and not destroying the enemy per se, I'm going to hold off in favor of this. At the same time that the flat earthers now running the Virginia State Government are trying to prove that climate change and global warming is a fraud, Norfolk is in danger of sinking.

Now, one of the reasons for the unpleasantness of Election Day for liberals, progressives and people with a modicum of awareness and common sense is the old faith-based community versus the reality based community conundrum. This is a great example -- the fucking coast is sinking in Purple Virginia at the same time the homophobic-tea party AG is trying to sue to turn back time. We don't need to worry about global warming -- carbon dioxide will make the plants grow. In 2008, they lost to hope and change; nobody said anything about blood, sweat, tears and time. So the Palins and the Boehners and the Paultardian knuckle-dragging troglydytes just kept on beliving and yelling, and nobody yelled back. Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Weiner and a few others did but lots of folks just acted like rational ladies and gentlemen.

Silly them. (I was going to say us, but will steal a line from Robert Shaw in Swashbuckler...I'm neither fool nor gentleman, I'm an Irishman.) Frankly, without resorting to 2nd Amendment Remedies, we need leaders who will resort to First Amendment Remedies and speak truth. Hey, the Republican Agenda doesn't have to succeed. Unless these clowns, dreamers and fools want it to...

Politically, of course, if you can tie the on-coming tidal wave to John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Michelle Bachmann, the left of idiocy might see a political benefit, but at what cost to the nation? This is the time to raise hell about these clowns, and the President and his party need to develop some of that old testicular fortitude. Because Washington isn't that far up the Chesapeake...and it would be a shame if the tidal basin were to flood the Mall and the lower lying graves at Arlington before we get some dykes built. Will McCain's damn wall keep out the tide?

Before the dimwits riot and they pile the brush around the stake...

It's a silly thought, but why hasn't Stephen Hawking been burned to death at the stake for heresy, witchcraft and general weirdness? Oh, yeah -- he lives in Cambridge which is radically more rational and civilized than Arizona, Georgia, or Wassila. Still, the latest piece due out on the 7th of September is probably going to bother people. Hawking once again makes a point made by lots of other cosmologists, including Terry Pratchett in Small Gods... a god may or may not exist, but it exists only because of the believers. God is largely irrelevant. This is the true intelligent design argument seen through a contemporary deist lens -- the universe has rules and they make sense but they don't depend on god to exist or to make sense.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.