Barbarians In Oklahoma

From Esquire courtesy of BuzzFlash:

I am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night. It did so under the color of law, which makes every citizen of that benighted state complicit in the act of fucking barbarism. The governor of that state, a pink balloon named Mary Fallin, is a fucking barbarian. A state legislator named Mike Christian is a fucking barbarian, for reasons we will get to in a moment. Every politician in that benighted state belongs in a fucking cage this morning.

"Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday evening. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow. Officials later blamed a ruptured vein for the problems with the execution, which are likely to fuel more debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the U.S. Constitution's requirement they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment."

More here.

Putting this horrific event carried out by the government of Oklahoma aside for the moment, and it is horrific, to be sure, it is clearly an exception proving the rule: capital punishment is irredeemably evil, and we must end it right now.  

I mean, really.  Once we have a murderer behind bars, it is highly unlikely that he will commit murder again, especially when juries have been allowed to sentence convicts to life without parole.  So capital punishment doesn't protect society.  And it doesn't deter murderers, either.  So capital punishment doesn't prevent murders.  What's left, then?  Vengeance.  Blood lust.  Political points and expediency.  Stuff that doesn't really justify murder.  Because that's what capital punishment is.  It's murder.  You can dress it up with the law.  You can put bereaved widows and orphans on television crying.  You can watch Nancy Grace freaking out on television all day long.  But none of that changes the fact that capital punishment is murder.  Murder in my and your name.  Murder we think is righteous because we're murdering murderers.

How on earth does a heinous crime justify another heinous crime?  And, for that matter, how many exonerations do we need in order to show that a significant percentage of people sentenced to death were never guilty in the first place?  And why the hell do we grant the government the power to take away citizens' lives?  Talk about Big Government excesses.  Capital punishment is a vile filthy business.  It is a stain on our civilization. 

The only moral course of action is to end the death penalty immediately.

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Employee opens fire at FedEx sorting center

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A FedEx employee wearing ammunition draped across his chest "like Rambo" opened fire Tuesday at a package-sorting center outside Atlanta, wounding six people before committing suicide, police and witnesses said.

In addition to a shotgun, the gunman also had an undisclosed number of Molotov cocktails, but he did not use them in the attack, police said.

The suspect, identified by police as 19-year-old Geddy Kramer of Acworth, was found dead inside. He worked as a package handler at the sprawling facility, Cobb County police Sgt. Dana Pierce said.

Investigators have an idea of what his motive may have been, but they were not prepared to disclose it yet, Pierce said.

More here.

This happens so often now that I've totally lost track.  When was the last shooting spree before this one?  I have no idea.  Indeed, this isn't even a front page story.  I stumbled across it while I was digging through the national and international news section of the Houston Chronicle online, which means the mass media is getting used to this stuff, too.

Think about that for a moment.  We're getting used to freaked out postal dude shooting sprees.  They happen seemingly all the time, and we're getting used to it.  Just another man-bites-dog story out of hundreds.  Never mind the gun control debate, what is it about living in this country that makes this so seemingly inevitable?  I have some speculative answers to that question, but it is deeply disturbing to feel like I need to ask it at all.

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Save Net Neutrality

From CounterPunch:

These new rules shift the Internet from an open system where all data travels at the same rate to a pay-to-play system favoring preferential treatment for the giant content providers like Netflix or Google’s YouTube.  Apparently, the new rules will continue to prohibit blocking or discriminating against online content.  Had the new rules been adopted a decade ago, its anyone’s guess whether Netflix or YouTube would be viable companies today.

The FCC’s likely actions to end net neutrality is a result of a systemic campaign to privatization of the Internet and further the monopolistic efforts of the giant telecom and media companies.  Over this period, both Republican (e.g., Michael Powell) and Democratic (e.g., Julius Genachowski) commissioners of the FCC have been water-carriers for corporate interests; the one major exception was former commissioner Michael Copps.

Click here for the rest.

At the moment, this is the issue pissing me off the most.  And that's because it's so totally in-your-face, a PERFECT example of how corporations do almost ANYTHING THEY WANT in this country, and our elected representatives and leaders just let them do it.  Nobody wants this, I mean, nobody but a very small number of massive media corporations, and, it almost goes without saying, the politicians they own.  Everybody else, you, me, shitloads of small businesses, everybody, thinks this is just awful.  It's near monopolistic, anti-competitive, anti-business, anti-consumer, anti-everybody.  And it's going to happen. 

We're all going to pay more, and not simply for internet service, but for any and all services we get on the internet.  Companies doing business on the internet will now have to pay what will amount to a tax, albeit a tax levied by internet service providers, which will be passed down to consumers.  In addition to being really annoying, and infuriating, this will definitely stifle economic growth.  All because corporations own the government.  This is sick.  Twisted and sick.  Even more so when you consider the fact that the internet was researched, developed, and created using taxpayer dollars.  

We own the damned thing.  But we clearly don't control it.

And, oh yeah, this is Obama's FCC, and it seems he's not going to lift a finger to stop this bullshit.  I just love it when Democrats are down with the people.  It's a shame it hasn't been that way for twenty years. 

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Study: U.S. is oligarchy, not republic

From WorldNetDaily:

A recent study by professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page found that the U.S. now resembles more of an oligarchy than a democratic republic.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

The author of  a recent commentary about oligarchy in the 21st century, Matthew Continetti, of the Free Beacon, might even suggest that last phrase be repeated.

“Mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

“What we are in danger of losing because of the ‘extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information’ are the classical liberal values of negative freedom, of religious liberty, of equality before the law, of free markets,” he wrote.

More here.

I post stuff like this all the time.  I mean, for my money, it is THE biggest issue facing the United States today, the fact that what remains of our democratic republic is essentially the formal structures, but without any of the substance, that is, political theater and ritual void of meaning or impact.  In twenty first century America, the fabulously wealthy rule, not the people.  Indeed, I ran across this story in my left-wing reading only a couple of days ago, but decided not to say anything about it here because I'm talking about it all the time, anyway.  

Okay, so why am I posting this now when I had already decided against it?

WorldNetDaily, the site running the article, is an extreme far-right news and conspiracy site.  They put a conservative spin on it, of course, but it's more or less the same story I saw over at AlterNet or Talking Points Memo.  And I'm just tickled pink by that.  Because, really, the end of American democracy isn't a partisan issue.  It's not even an ideological issue.  It's an American issue, and it ought to be scaring the hell out of liberals and conservatives alike.  So to encounter an article like this coming down from the far right can only mean that the throw-money-at-the-rich concept, which has utterly captivated conservatives for three decades, is finally starting to collapse.  That is, the extremely wealthy have gone too far, so far that it's becoming obvious even to their supporters.

Or, at least, I hope that's what's happening.  And, to be sure, WND is a fringe site, out in right field even by the standards of, say, William Buckley's The National Review, which probably ISN'T running the article.  So we don't know what mainstream conservatives might be thinking about this.  Still though, this is definitely something, and it gives me great hope for some common ground in the near future shared by both the left and the right.

For the moment, things are looking up.

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Sammy on the Move

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From Baloon Juice, courtesy of Eschaton:

Never Saw This Coming

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy was quoted as saying to a group of supporters last Saturday. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
 
More here.

Crazy Nevada rancher-thief conservative cause celeb Cliven Bundy is also apparently a total racist. Funny how these radical libertarian types so often seem to have racist skeletons in the closet. And by "funny" I mean "horrifying."  No, seriously, Ron and Rand Paul both have racist presences rattling around in their peripheries, and this makes complete sense.  In the end, "libertarianism" isn't about freedom; instead, it's about property rights, especially property belonging to whites, who own most of the property, anyway.  It is no surprise, then, that so many straight-up racists are attracted to this "philosophy."  It allows them to be total racist dicks and say that it's not about race, but rather "freedom."

Entertaining this shit is just insulting to one's intelligence.  Fucking racist assholes.

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Despite Justice Sotomayor's Passionate Dissent, Right-wing Supreme Court Turns Another Blind Eye to Racism

From AlterNet:

In sum, Sotomayor said that the U.S. Constitution “does not guarantee minority groups guaranteed outcomes [or] victory in the political process,” but that “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to the process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently.”

Tragically, Sotomayor’s fair-minded view of race and participation is not the majority view on the Supreme Court. If anything, when we look at where the Court has decided to expand “access” to supposedly democratic public processes like elections, what we find is a persistent and ongoing institutional bias toward the wealthiest Americans—who overwhelmingly also are white.

More here.

Back in the early 2000s, I did a really close reading of Justice Scalia's dissent in Garner v Texas, the gay sodomy case.  My motivation was that I had heard how Scalia's writing is incredibly clear, which turned out to be true, but because he's what passes for the very best among conservative intellectuals, I also wanted to see some of that very best conservative intellectualism at play.  And I was disappointed.  What I found was some really clever reasoning based on some assumptions about reality that were so flawed as to be absurd.  I'm no lawyer, and I had to look up some terms and concepts in order to get the gist of some of what he was saying, but Scalia's famous clarity served to lay his ultimately faulty argumentation completely bare.  That is, you don't need to be a lawyer to see the false "facts" upon which the conservative jurist's arguments are based: when your facts are wrong, your arguments, as groovy and intelligent as they might seem, go absolutely nowhere.

So it was completely clear that Scalia had, and probably still has, absolutely no understanding of what gay people are about as human beings, and I mean that in terms of what contemporary psychology has been telling us about homosexuality for decades now.  He was completely divorced from reality in considering the question of whether consenting gay people should have the same privacy rights that straight people have.  Consequently, his conclusions were totally full of shit.  And you don't need a law degree to know that.

Flash forward to this recent ruling on a ballot initiative in Michigan banning affirmative action in university admissions.  While I haven't read the majority opinion, myself, I'm very inclined to believe Justice Sotomayor's assertion that the Court's conservative faction apparently has absolutely no understanding of the racial dynamic today in the United States.  And if that's true, then, as with Scalia's arguments in Garner v Texas, the entire majority opinion must necessarily be WRONG.  You just can't base a successful argument on faulty assumptions.  Such an argument is a failure from the very beginning.

For instance, have you ever noticed the tendency of black people to hang out with black people, and the tendency of white people to hang out with white people?  Right, it's obvious.  And there's been a lot of serious academic study about this.  Turns out, I mean, again, obviously, that people are more comfortable in the presence of people who are like them in terms of race and ethnicity.  Not racism, just people understanding better others who share a lot of their experiences.  But what happens during the interview process for people trying to get jobs?  That tendency is still there, but it's not about hanging out, it's about getting jobs, and, for most people, that tendency is not consciously understood: employers during interviews are, whether they want to be or not, more comfortable with potential employees of their own race and ethnicity, and that DEFINITELY affects the hiring process.  Now connect the dots.  This is still a white dominated nation, and that means whites are mostly in control of the hiring process overall.

And that means we have a MAJOR problem when it comes to equal opportunity, a problem unacknowledged by most whites because whites don't think about this kind of thing.  To date, affirmative action has been the ONLY plan for dealing with this kind of inadvertent discrimination.  It's the same thing with the university acceptance process, and I'd bet you credits to navy beans that the SCOTUS majority for this Michigan decision didn't consider these facts at all, which means that they necessarily arrived at a faulty conclusion.  The wrong conclusion.  One that allows systemic, chronic, gross denial of civil rights to huge populations within the US.

Oh, and let's not forget the recent study showing that desegregation in the public schools never fully happened, and that what desegregation did happen is now reversing itself.  Brown v the Board of Education ruled that separate cannot ever be equal, but separate is what we have.  For some reason the conservatives on the Supreme Court don't seem to acknowledge this gigantic turd in their color blind punch bowl, which, again, makes their notions of fairness and equality problematic, at best, and WRONG, at worst.

I mean, for god's sake, the whole Michigan ban on affirmative action is because it supposedly discriminates against whites!  That's just straight up fiction.  And the conservative Justices seem to believe the lie.

Actually, that's the most interesting question to me.  The Supreme Court's conservative wing appears to be totally out of touch with reality on various issues, which is why they get it wrong so often--it really does have nothing to do with interpreting the law; it's about understanding the reality in which we live.  But can it really be possible that such learned men are so freaking stupid?  Or, rather, are they simply offering pseudo-intellectual bullshit as cover for their preferred political outcomes?

I, for one, tend to never attribute to malevolence what can be better attributed to stupidity, and advanced degrees are in no way inoculation against stupidity.  But really.  How can these guys be so fucking stupid?  It strains the imagination.

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Group puts Confederate flag on Ga. specialty tag

From the AP via Yahoo:

Georgia officials have once again approved a specialty license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag, infuriating civil rights advocates and renewing a debate among those who believe the symbol honors Confederate heritage and those who see it as racially charged.

More here.

I think I should be allowed to have a license plate emblazoned with a Nazi swastika in order to honor my German heritage.* No, no, this has nothing to do with the death camps, antisemitism, homophobia, and slave labor. It's just about my German heritage, you know, apfelwein, Goethe, sausage, and the pragmatism and efficiency of German culture. When you tell me my swastika license plate is offensive, you're oppressing me.

 (* Actually, I have no German heritage. This is for satirical purposes only.)

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FUCK THE LIBERALS

From Paul Krugman's blog:

There Goes the Sun

What makes it even worse is that one (not the only) reason to like the solar revolution is that it helps fight climate change. So if you’re a card-carrying conservative, who believes that climate change is the biggest, most intricate, and most incredibly successful conspiracy in history — thousands of scientists around the world, and not one of them squealing! — you want to block solar even if it saves money.

More here.

To riff on what my favorite blogger Atrios said when he posted this over at Eschaton, the necessary conclusion that must come from realizing that hating liberals is very likely the most unifying philosophical principle among conservatives today is that there really is no unifying philosophical principle among conservatives.  

I mean, just consider Obamacare for a moment.  It was created by a right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, for the express purpose of being the conservative alternative to liberal health care reform.  That's why Mitt Romney got it passed when he was governor of Massachusetts; it uses a "market solution" to solve a social problem.  And that's why Obama endorsed it, too, in order to head off a great deal of anticipated conservative opposition to health care reform.  But when Obama, who is perceived by conservatives as a liberal, decided to make the health care scheme his signature piece of legislation, all the conservatism that had gone into creating it in the first place was automatically voided within the conservative hive mind.

That is, if a "liberal" likes it, then conservatives must necessarily hate it.  But hate isn't really an idea.  It's certainly not a philosophy.  Rather, it's an emotion.  And that's all the conservatives have left for them these days.  Emotion.  Bile.  Venom.  Anger.  Hate.  Nothing else.  All they've got is resentment and anger.  Certainly not any ideas about how to make the nation better.   

In short, conservatives, the 21st century kind, at least, stand for NOTHING.  Kind of like the nihilists in The Big Lebowski. 

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TOTAL UNAWARENESS OF SELF

From AlterNet:

Maddow Asks: 'Why Do We Overlook Right-Wing Violence and 
Refuse to Call it Terrorism?' Answer: Because They're White

Patterns of violence by white people, most notably mass shootings by white men, apparently tell us nothing about Whiteness or white masculinity. Patterns of behavior that should be the basis of a critical inquiry about white culture (a logic that when applied to black and brown people inevitably returns to questions of "pathology" and “bad genes”), is a question that cannot be asked by the mainstream media, or in "polite" circles, as it is considered impolitic.

More here.

It seems to me that white Americans have absolutely no discourse, with self or others, about what it means to be white.  Certainly not compared to, say, African-Americans or Latinos.  I mean, okay sure, this kind of makes sense: when your ethnicity is not the dominant ethnicity, you must necessarily try to figure out what your identity is relative to the dominant culture, and this is an ongoing thing--virtually every moment of your life, if you are in the minority, you are reminded that you are not in the majority.  So, you know, what's it all mean, then?  Minority Americans have been working on this for almost the entire history of the republic.  But not whites.  Whites have no idea who they are simply because they've never thought ethnic identity is something that pertains to them.

This utter lack of self-awareness on the part of whites sets them up, again and again, for confusion about important issues.  It also makes them easily manipulated by clever politicians, PR people, and advertisers.  Oh, and let's not forget the weird resentments many whites have when it comes to considering Black History Month, and other manifestations of ethnic pride and awareness.  But as this nation becomes ever more diverse, and the prospect of whites becoming simply another minority among multiple minorities, a large one, to be sure, but definitely a minority, becomes ever more a reality, we'd better get it in gear on this.

Otherwise, we're just going to be standing around drooling and shocked everytime another Trayvon Martin happens.  And that's not a good place to be.

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"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

Easter Sunday is an excellent time to read one of my signature posts from back in the day, one which I consider to be too-hot-for-facebook.  But you can read it all here, in its entirety, on Ishtar.  I mean, Easter.

Click here for EASTER GRINCH.

Hoppy Easter!


 
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FRANK ZAPPA FRIDAY AND 70S POP MONDAY ON SATURDAY

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Another special canine edition!

Lola

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Nevada rancher in tense standoff with federal government over cattle on rural public lands

From the New York Daily News:

A turf war has erupted in rural Nevada as a longtime rancher and hundreds of his supporters battle the federal government, which has moved to seize cattle that graze on thousands of acres of public land.

Cliven Bundy, 68, has been embroiled in a two-decade-long dustup with the federal Bureau of Land Management, which finally sent in men armed with large guns to surround Bundy's ranch in Bunkerville, west of the Arizona and Utah border, as contracted cowboys roundup the man’s 900 beef cattle during the next several days.

The beef has built up since 1993 when Bundy, whose family has long worked the land in Clark County some 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, refused to pay grazing fees on 600,000 acres of public land, dubbed Gold Butte, surrounding his 160-acre farm.

More here.

Crazy conservative cause celeb millionaire rancher nut in Nevada: a thief, of your tax dollars, who justifies not paying grazing fees for federally owned lands because of his "ancestral grazing rights." Whatever. A thief is a thief is a thief.

Also, creating an armed standoff with the feds, which is what happened with this last weekend, is a massive crime. It doesn't matter how much sympathy you have coming from Fox News. These are all criminals who should be in jail.  While I'm pleased that BLM agents did not take the bait on this, and withdrew, all these people need to be rounded up, the sooner the better.

That's what you do with criminals.  Round them up.

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5 Explosive Revelations Leaked from Senate Report Exposing CIA Torture

From AlterNet:

Based on CIA documents, senators on the powerful committee conducted a four-year long, $40 million inquiry into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which included torture tactics like the waterboarding of terrorism suspects, beatings and the smashing of suspects’ heads into walls. While the public may be aware of some of these practices due to past revelations, the information carries heavy weight because it is the Senate confirming many of those claims, which has oversight power over the agency.

The CIA’s torture program started soon after 9/11. The Bush administration signed off on what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but which clearly constituted torture, a crime under U.S. and international law.

More here.

Torture is deeply immoral.  Legal briefs don't change that.  The fact that official enemies of the US might use torture, too, doesn't change that.  That we, the United States, have tortured, again and again, in this misguided and destructive "War on Terror," has left blood all over our collective hands.  I mean, we already had bloody hands, from slavery, and then Jim Crow, and from the genocide of the Native Americans, and various other imperialistic atrocities.  But at least public discourse sort of acknowledges the existence of these grave sins.  

The American torture regime, in sharp contrast, hardly registers in the public consciousness.  The men who formulated plans for, and then ordered, these mass violations of human rights walk free.  The current administration, as well as the House and Senate, seem utterly unconcerned with justice, which makes them complicit in these high crimes against humanity.  America, like Iran, Baathist Iraq, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and countless others, is now one of those nations.  We torture, and then we put medals on the torturers.  This disgusts me.  And if you're an American with a conscience and a belief in justice and morality, you should be disgusted, too.

On the other hand, sweeping this all under the carpet the way we're doing is so very America-of-the-now.  From fraudulent and thieving bankers, to professional athletes using steroids, to parents harassing teachers and administrators until their C student babies get As, to blaming the poor for the actions of capitalists, and on and on and on: in the 21st century, we Americans don't take responsibility for ANYTHING.  

It's somebody else's problem.  Actually it's not even a problem.  There is no problem.  STFU, asshole.  You're killing my buzz.

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Florida artist smashes $1M vase in Miami museum

From the AP via the Tampa Tribune:

Maximo Caminero, 51, was charged with criminal mischief after Sunday’s incident at the Perez Art Museum Miami. According to a Miami Police Department arrest affidavit, a security guard told officers that Caminero picked up a colored vase by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. When told to put it down, the security guard said Caminero smashed it on the floor.

A police affidavit says Caminero told officers he broke the vase to protest the museum’s lack of local artist displays and because “the museum only displayed international artists’ art.”

More here.

Oh, I'm sure the guy has a point in there somewhere. It's just that I think that destroying art, for an artist, necessarily devalues art more generally, and therefore his role as an artist in society. I mean, postmodernism yadda yadda, it's a dumbshit protest, and conceptually counterproductive.

What a douche bag.

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NO, UNIONS ARE GOOD.

The only people in our society who have good reason to trash the concept of labor unions are management and capitalists, you know, real capitalists, the people who own and operate the nation. And really, it's not even good reason. It's just because they have an absurd notion that they should be able to exploit anything and anyone they want in order to make more and more money. But at least they have a motivation. Everyone else on the anti-union bandwagon are just fools. Total fools.

 As Noam Chomsky recently observed*:

"The whole system is being turned into something bought. It has very limited resemblance to democracy. It's plutocracy, and the only way to deal with this is by mass public organization to counter it, and, in fact, that requires associations. The major association that's always been in the lead on this is unions. So naturally during the neoliberal period, and, in fact, before, there's been a massive attack on unions to try to undermine and destroy them. That makes sense. They're the one major organization that allows working people, poor people, to come together to work out their programs, formulate their demands, defend their rights, to press for progressive developments elsewhere in society. So sure, they have to be wiped out. By now private sector unions are less than seven percent of the work force. So there has to be an attack on public unions because they've managed to survive, and you see that before your eyes. It's happening all over."
 
Yes, the evil bad teacher unions, among others. If you believe that, I've got some swamp land in Florida where I'm sure you'd love to build a nice retirement cottage.

*(I got this quote from a YouTube video saw back in February, and now it appears to no longer exist.  But I assure you, these are Chomsky's actual words!)

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Corporate Cash Hoarding Is Killing the Middle Class

From AlterNet, Florida representative Alan Grayson reads for us the writing on the wall:

As that finance newsletter proudly states, huge corporations don’t spend their money; they just sock it away. And the same thing is true of rich people, and banks, and multi-national corporations. The 400 individuals on the Forbes 400 list alone have accumulated more than $2 trillion in wealth, the great majority of which remains in their pockets year after year. We are ending up with enormous pools of cash that have been drained from the real economy, and are not reinvested in it. We have a national economy with a maximum possible economic output of $16 trillion each year, but much of it ends up in deep pockets with no holes, just sitting there. This creates a massive and chronic shortage in “aggregate demand,” a problem that John Maynard Keynes accurately described 75 years ago. If we allow demand to fall short, then unemployment explodes. Hence we paper over the evaporation of all that money from aggregate demand with federal deficits, “quantitative easing” and enormous personal debt.

More here.

As Marxist economist Richard Wolff has asserted endlessly, we don't have a massive debt/deficit problem due to reckless spending and a Big Government out of control.  Rather,we have a deficit/debt problem because, starting in the 1970s, we stopped taxing where the real wealth actually resides.  Adding insult to injury, a lot of that money, maybe most, which previously came into the federal government as tax revenue, is now loaned to us by the very same people we no longer tax.  Win/win for them.  Lose/lose for everybody else.  So the deficit is a bullshit "crisis" which, when you throw in militant and willfully ignorant Tea Party activists to the mix, now periodically threatens to upend the entire global economy, what with weird debt-ceiling posturing, and never-surrender budget negotiations.

But that's not even close to the end of the story.  As Grayson observes in his essay, this corporate cash-hoarding, when coupled with similar behavior from fabulously wealthy families and individuals, effectively renders inert as much as A QUARTER of the entire GDP.  That's because they just sit on this money--the old wives' tales about how throwing money at the rich stimulates the economy have been proven false by actual economic studies on multiple occasions.  So big business and the extraordinarily rich literally impede economic growth.  And when that happens, most of us suffer in countless ways.  Not them, of course, never them.

We really, as a civilization, need to get over this mindless worship of these masters of capital.  In the end, they're parasites on society, and we should squash them like the blood-sucking bugs they are.  Or tax the hell out of them.  One of those two.  Squash them or tax them.  I'm cool either way.

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FRANK ZAPPA FRIDAY AND 70S POP MONDAY ON SATURDAY

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy, Frankie, and Winkie, Living in Perfect Harmony

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6 Most Absurd Things Right-Wing Christians Have Blamed on Gays

From AlterNet:

“We have displeased the Lord and the earth is going to answer,” so-called prophet Cindy Jacobs warned in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act last summer. If this warning sounds familiar, it should: right wingers have a long history of blaming everything from earthquakes to recession to climate change on the advance of gay marriage, and they’re only getting more ridiculous.

More here.

Asserting that natural disasters and other bad things that have perfectly obvious causes based in material reality are, instead, manifestations of God's wrath is, at face value, utterly absurd.  But enough religious leaders continue to make such assertions, and one assumes that these leaders have constituencies here and there which more or less agree with them, that it seems reasonable to explain why, exactly, saying such things is so completely head-embedded-in-ass stupid.  And just to keep things on the up and up, let's assume for discussion's sake that the Bible is, in fact, the word of the Lord.

We do see God behaving this way in the Old Testament.  Indeed, we've got the "Creator" in this new Noah movie smiting most of humanity for their sinfulness.  There's also Sodom and Gomorrah.  So imagining that God might continue with this modus operandi even today isn't necessarily out of bounds.  There's definitely precedent.  Of course, on other occasions He commanded the Israelites themselves to commit genocide on His behalf, so it doesn't always have to be a natural disaster.  But I digress.  The point is that we have some reasonable basis for imagining Yahweh as angry, vengeful, and homicidal towards humans who offend Him--on the other hand, we don't see this so much in the New Testament, what with all its messages of forgiveness and love, but the Old Testament is a bigger book, so let's give some theological leeway to those who wish to embrace the understanding of God as Divine Homicidal Punisher of Mankind.

But there are a couple of real problems when it comes to saying this or that disaster or terrible event is God punishing this or that group for their sinful ways.

First, how do you know which disasters are God's wrath and which disasters are just disasters?  I mean, surely, some disasters are simply disasters.  You know, sometimes things blow up.  Sometimes hurricanes and earthquakes are simply byproducts of how physical reality functions.  Sometimes lots of people die in one fell swoop, saints and sinners alike.  Sure, you might be someone who believes that EVERY SINGLE EVENT AND PHENOMENON in the universe is personally orchestrated by God, which makes the concept of free will, and therefore sin, problematic, but guess what?  I'm not talking to you.  Your universe is so utterly alien to mine that I don't think we can really have a conversation about this.  I'm only talking to people who think that sometimes disasters are simply disasters.  And I'm asking these people how they can tell the difference between a God disaster and a normal disaster.

Second, what does it mean when the most obviously sinful cities AREN'T destroyed or heavily damaged by such disasters?  What happens when nothing happens at all to, say, extraordinarily gay San Francisco?  Or did God create the San Andreas fault only once it became clear how swishy the City on the Bay was going to be?  Another related question: what does it mean when cities that aren't sinful are hit with disaster?  What happens when God-fearing Kansas City gets hit with tornadoes?  What happens when bad things happen to good people?  If AIDS is punishment for sodomy, then why sweep up all the hemophiliacs?  And why did God's agent Katrina spare the French Quarter, the gayest neighborhood in all New Orleans?

Don't hand me any of that "mystery of God" crap on this, either.  You're on shaky ground from the get-go here because you have no real Scriptural support for this other than pointing to God's behavior four thousand years ago, which was then explained to mankind by prophets other writers directly inspired by God.  If you're going to push this stuff, then you need to have some good answers.  Otherwise, you're a snake oil salesman.

Or are you telling me that you're a prophet, too?

And that's really the crux here.  In order to say that specific disasters are manifestations of God's wrath, one must NECESSARILY claim to have knowledge of God's mind which has not been revealed in the Bible.  That is, anybody who makes such a claim is implicitly telling us that he has personal one-on-one conversations with the Almighty, that God reveals to him secret knowledge nobody else knows.  If you say Katrina was God's wrath, you are also telling us you are a prophet of God.

But no.  You're NOT a prophet of God.  You do not have personal one-on-one conversations in which God gives you information unknown to others.  Instead, you are a false prophet.  And I think that the Bible, in contrast to the issue of God's wrath and earthly disasters, is perfectly clear about what happens to false prophets.

Lake of fire and brimstone.  Death.  That's what you get.  So you'd best shut the hell up if you value your soul.  Clearly, being perceived as a sadistic asshole is not a disincentive.  Perhaps self-preservation is a better motivator.

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How the Corporate Takeover of Society Is Leaving Us Feeling Empty Inside

From the Guardian via AlterNet:

How do you engineer a bland, depoliticised world, a consensus built around consumption and endless growth, a dream world of materialism and debt and atomisation, in which all relations can be prefixed with a dollar sign, in which we cease to fight for change? You delegate your powers to companies whose profits depend on this model.

Power is shifting: to places in which we have no voice or vote. Domestic policies are forged by special advisers and spin doctors, by panels and advisory committees stuffed with lobbyists. The self-hating state withdraws its own authority to regulate and direct. Simultaneously, the democratic vacuum at the heart of global governance is being filled, without anything resembling consent, by international bureaucrats and corporate executives. The NGOs permitted – often as an afterthought – to join them intelligibly represent neither civil society nor electorates. (And please spare me that guff about consumer democracy or shareholder democracy: in both cases some people have more votes than others, and those with the most votes are the least inclined to press for change.)

More here.

As if it's not bad enough when we rent ourselves out for half the day, a.k.a. "go to work," and submit ourselves to their soft-touch bland authoritarianism.  No, they want to have it all.  Their mass media products have colonized our minds, continually feeding us concepts and ideas which serve ultimately to benefit them and only them, and it doesn't matter how twisted and warped our thoughts become as a result.  As long as they're making more and more and more money.  In addition to polluting our minds, they also ravage our precious ecology, treating the world as both an infinite resource, which it is not, as well as an infinite garbage can.  The planet's getting hotter, and there will be hell to pay for it, but we're the ones who will pay, who are already paying, not them, never them--they create carefully manged realities for themselves, gated communities with security guards who weed out undesirables like you and me.  They sell us dangerous chemicals and call it food and drink.  They squeeze our wages and make us beg for scraps from their corporate feasts.  Collectively, they are the Devil, but with really good PR.

And, of course, they've almost completely undermined any sense of democratic rule we once had.  That is, they've bought, and now own and operate, the government.  But that's old news.  The new news is that they continue to tighten their grip on the public sector: in recent years corporate forces have gone a long way towards crowding out what public discussion remains about how to best promote the general welfare through an artificially created social conceptualization of what constitutes good and bad for the people.

This shit's getting downright Orwellian.

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Millions of Americans forced to work part time

From CBS News courtesy of Eschaton:

"I've been hired by this restaurant I absolutely love, but it's a part-time position," Dublin says.
She makes $11 an hour, plus tips.

In March, of the 192,000 jobs created, 30,000 were in food services. Restaurants and bars have added 323,000 workers over the past year, but Dublin is earning a fraction of what she used to make.

And

In the Labor Department statistics, Dublin falls into the category of people "forced" to work part time. There are some 7.4 million of them in America.

More here, with video.

This is what conservative views on economics have created, an enormous under-class of Americans who must live hand to mouth, and that group just continues to grow.  Meanwhile, the middle class continues to evaporate; many of them have been forced by circumstances not of their making to join the precarious working class, taking whatever job, and in many cases multiple jobs, they can find simply to stay afloat, living in fear that the slightest family financial crisis will blow it all up.  And they just keep losing ground.  Don't even get me started about how members of the working class have dropped into straight up poverty.

Triumphant conservatism in the political sphere has brought us to this sad and embarrassing situation.  Capitalism, left to its own devices, seems in no way inclined to provide the American citizenry with ways to improve its lot in life, or even to live, for that matter.  And, really, when you get down to it, that's the gist of conservative economics: leave capitalism to its own devices.  We've been been consistently moving in that direction for many years now, and forcing millions to live their lives in fear and/or poverty is pretty much all we have to show for it.

The old conservative rhetoric on this is now revealed for the shrill and hollow bullshit it is.  "Stop being lazy; get a job," that's all just insulting these days.  "Go to college" and "major in the right field" is just about as insulting, now that we're seeing up to fifteen percent unemployment in some of the so-called STEM fields.  We're not going to educate ourselves out of this.  We're not going to grow our way out of this, either, because, get this, THE ECONOMY IS ACTUALLY GROWING.  The economy gets "better" but the economic prospects for Americans get worse.  If you really believe the right-wing mythology on how this all works, then you're a chump.  And if you run around pushing these myths, then you're a dick, whether you mean to be or not.  It's no longer about individual character.  No longer about how hard you work.  About the choices you make.  It's about a broken economic system that continues to dominate the political imagination because of perceived past glories.  To tell people who are genuinely oppressed that it's their fault is being a dick, no way around it.

It's well past time to force capitalism to serve the people, rather than forcing the people to serve the capitalism.

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SKYROCKET!

In jazz, they're called standards, and there is no shame at all in that world playing songs that were written by somebody else. Indeed, the sense is more along the lines of "let's see how well they do 'Cherokee' or 'A Night in Tunisia.'" In rock and roll, however, in stark contrast, everybody's supposed to be Bob Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, and screw you if you're in a pathetic cover band.

But what happens when that cover band is absolutely incredible? What happens when their performances of well known and much loved pop and rock tunes rival the originals? How could you possibly call such a thing pathetic?

Last night I finally got around to seeing a couple of old friends, Paul English and Benjamin Hotchkiss, perform with their 70s cover band SKYROCKET! It was one of the best rock and roll shows I've ever seen. And I've seen some great ones over the years. But this was something else, to be sure. It's not simply that they were, to pull a phrase from Ween studio chatter, tighter than Steely Dan's butthole. It's also that there was a lot of real intelligence involved with how they approach the material, in terms of song choices, as well as a sort of tongue-in-cheek visual aspect that allows the audience both to take seriously while at the same time laugh at the fact that everybody in the venue is grooving to old great but sometimes cheesy pop songs.

I mean, I've never swooned to Air Supply's "All Out of Love" the way I did last night. For that matter, the moment when one of their singers - actually, they're ALL singers, and multi-instrumentalists, too - while performing Nick Gilder's "Hot Child in the City," held his mike out to the audience allowing us to sing the title line together as a crowd, well, it instantly became one of the top 25 moments of my entire life. No, seriously. It was just incredible.

There's a serious graduate thesis to be written about what this band is out there doing.

Go see Skyrocket. Go see Skyrocket. Go see Skyrocket. You'll believe in rock music again.



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Bill Maher: John Roberts Is A 'Liar' Or Too 'Naive' To Be SCOTUS Chief Justice

From Talking Points Memo:

Bill Maher tore into the Supreme Court's decision invalidating aggregate campaign contribution limits on an individual during an election cycle.

"They say the Constitution was created by geniuses so idiots could run it," the comedian and liberal political commentator said Friday on his HBO show "Real Time With Bill Maher." "I need to amend that. I think the idiots have found a way to break it. I do. I think the idiots have finally won over the geniuses."

More here.

I've been trying to figure out what to say about this most recent Supreme Court decision pushing us, as ever, toward plutocracy and away from democracy, but the best I've been able to come up with is "ah crap, not again." Bill Maher, however, pretty much articulates the long and the short of it. The Court's conservative wing is either stupid or total liars. Either way, we're screwed.

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FRANK ZAPPA FRIDAY AND 70S POP MONDAY ON SATURDAY

Two of my facebook features exported to Real Art.





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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Stella Patrols the Front Yard

 
















Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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VOTER FRAUD? ALSO, HOW AND WHY I LIKE TO ARGUE.

A former student, conservative, and highly intelligent, private messaged me on facebook:

I see a lot of your posts and bite my tongue. You know we've always disagreed politically and I respect that. Just figured I'd share some of the right wing news. Does it make the slightest difference in your opinion?

http://m.nationalreview.com/corner/374882/nc-state-board-finds-more-35k-incidents-double-voting-2012-andrew-johnson

I replied:

You don't have to bite your tongue!  Just make a solid argument, which wouldn't necessarily persuade anyone, but it does let people know they just can't dismiss a strong opinion without some thought, which is the real payoff.

NR is a decades old conservative journal founded by William F. Buckley, who I disagree with on many issues, but I've always liked him.  Actually, he died a few years ago, but he always made arguments that liberals couldn't easily dismiss.  Lemme check this out, and I'll let you know what I think.

It probably won't make me change my mind about how the world works, but there's always the possibility that it might force me to alter an opinion here or there.  Or it might make me have to reformulate an argument or two.  There is great value in hearing what the other side has to think, if only because it forces one to think about his own views all the more.

And then I read the thing, and responded to that:

Okay, this is interesting, albeit not the sort of political debate in which I usually wish to wade.  That is, it's an argument about whether an assertion is factual or not.  I prefer to argue bedrock principles, foundational assumptions, and whether theory and ideas about the way the world works actually match those principles and assumptions, and whether such assumptions are flawed.  Yes, that does involve factual assertions, but usually I like to make sure the facts are unimpeachable. 

So, for instance, the notion that tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy, which is widely believed by conservatives, turns out to be a very flawed assumption because economists have been studying what the rich do with the money saved by tax cuts and it turns out that the rich generally don't invest it in ways that grow the economy.  That's a fun one, to be sure, because it's amusing and intellectually gratifying to shit in the punch bowl when nobody can do anything about it.

Contrast that with wading into the scientific details of global warming with a skeptic who believes he's "done the research" and knows better than 97% of all climatologists.  We're dealing with facts, of course, but the science is pretty dense and confusing to laymen.  I don't even try to understand it in the detail these armchair "scientist" skeptics claim to do themselves.  As with most science, I feel like it's enough to trust the prevailing consensus of scientists.  But these skeptics think they can argue the science with me.  Clearly, they have no idea what they're talking about because SO MANY scientists disagree with them, but there's absolutely no way I can even start to convince them.  I just try to keep out of those.

And this thing in North Carolina appears to fall into that category.  We're talking about facts, but it's dense number crunching stuff, sort of opaque to people who aren't statisticians.  So I can't say for sure one way or the other.  On the other hand, the reports I've been seeing for a few years now seem to show that voter fraud of this variety is exceedingly rare, less than one percent, not enough to sway any elections--this is not even to mention that fraud on this scale, thirty five thousand, would be amazing if actually pulled off without anybody squealing.  So I'm skeptical.

Of course, I'm not the only skeptic on this report.  Apparently, matching names and birth dates from other states like this isn't statistically weird at all.  That is, it's probable that it's mostly coincidence.  Combine that with data collection errors, and one can dismiss the entire report as erroneous:

http://electionlawblog.org/?p=59871

But I guess we'll see how this turns out.  If the NC election board's study is, in fact, correct, it would be MAJOR.  We should know pretty quickly if there's any fire associated with this smoke.

The conversation continued a bit, going into race issues, the GOP, and the whole concept of voter ID laws versus whether or not there's actually an issue about voter fraud.  We didn't end up agreeing on anything, but it was a good conversation, a decent exchange of ideas.

What's funny is that he and I, just a couple of Texas guys, are able to do something our leaders in Washington seem to be incapable of doing: talking to each other.  You know, it's really not so difficult.  What's their deal, anyway?

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AOL chief ignites firestorm over 401(k) cuts

From the Washington Post:

The strange turn of events began Tuesday, when employees began learning that AOL was switching its 401(k) match to an annual lump sum, rather than distributing the money throughout the year with every paycheck as it had done before. Only employees who remain at the company through Dec. 31 are eligible, meaning that anyone who leaves midyear won’t see any of the pay.

A number of companies, including Deutsche Bank and IBM, have been cutting their retirement benefits this way, saving millions of dollars just as more Americans are relying primarily on their 401(k)s because traditional pensions are being phased out.

The changes undercut a central virtue of the 401(k) system, which in theory should make it easier for employees to switch companies and take their savings with them. Instead, with people changing jobs more frequently during the course of their careers, the loss in matches can add up to thousands of dollars each time a worker switches employers.

More here.

Rising tides don't lift all the boats when management puts holes in everyone's but theirs. That is, throwing money at the capitalists, as we've done now for thirty years, doesn't help the man who works for a living. When will we figure this out?

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IS RAPID TRADING RIPPING OFF INVESTORS?

Or, more simply, is Wall Street honest?  Well, I'm sure you already know what I think.  An old friend of mine, who is in the finance industry, posted this from CNBC on facebook earlier today:

Katsuyama vs. O'Brien - who won the fight?

It was the fight that stopped trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—IEX's Brad Katsuyama vs. BATS Global Markets president William O'Brien on high-speed trading and 'rigged' markets.

"You want to do this? Let's do this," Katsuyama said in response to O'Brien's prodding.

"I really do," O'Brien said.

And off they went, for more than 20 minutes. Traders stood transfixed as the two argued over the very nature of the stock market and whether the average investor could even compete with the big guys.

More here, with video.

Here's the comment I left:

Keep in mind that I am a far left socialist, in the Bernie Sanders mold, and that I must necessarily be harboring some kind of bias. Having said that, I don't understand how the stock market, actually the entire finance industry, could be perceived by anybody at all as fair, or even, at this point, as good for the economy.

From the major ratings agencies designating toxic mortgage backed securities as triple A, to the entire financial press cheering the whole thing on, even while they had no idea what it was they were championing, to the fact that the industry has so much pull in Washington that none of the major players have been prosecuted, or will be prosecuted, really just the entire mess surrounding CDOs and the real estate bubble they created, to the Libor manipulations, to usurious credit cards with contract language so purposely obscure that it baffles even experts, to the oil commodities bubble of the late 90s, to the S&L and junk bond scandals of the late 80s, and on and on and on, it just seems to me that Wall Street, again and again and again, gets away with murder.

So when someone from the industry tells me that rapid mass computerized trading is not ripping off ordinary investors, he's got the burden of proof. He's going to have to explain to me why Wall Street isn't ripping me off. And he's got to do it in a way that I understand because these people shrugged off critics of the mortgage backed securities as just being stupid, which they weren't. That is, Wall Street insiders have already shown that they're totally willing to lie out their ass. And why shouldn't they? They always get away with it.

I'm lucky I've still got an IRA.

I hope that was nice.  I have very fond high school memories of the person who posted this.  And really, I have no idea what her politics are, but I assume, given her field, that she's conservative, at least on economics.  But I don't know.  We'll see how or if she responds.

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