Retribution for a World Lost in Screens

From TruthDig via AlterNet, my favorite journalist with a Master of Divinity from Harvard, Chris Hedges, lets loose on our decadent culture of illusion:

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.

Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

More here.

This might as well be part three for me. On Monday, I wrote about how the American Empire is well into its final days, even though belief in that empire lags decades behind the depressing reality. On Tuesday, I wrote about how the Republicans, all in lockstep, deny the well established reality of global warming, and ended the post by connecting this phenomenon with an overall non-partisan American denial of reality in general, fueled by the seductive and all encompassing media-created "reality" of illusion, in which we are all drowning.

And today, I've stumbled upon this really nice Chris Hedges essay that really fleshes out what's going on with this heads-in-the-ground mass behavior: in short, television, and other media, are destroying us, and there is very likely no way to prevent it.

I've become increasingly depressed over the last sixteen years since I earned my bachelor's degree in the study of radio, television, and film, and for the longest time I wasn't sure why. In the last few years it's all been sort of crystallizing for me. Because of my study of RTF, I can see the puppet strings, the Great Oz behind the curtain working his arcane machinery in order to create his big green and frightening face, the capitalist systems of exploitation deeply embedded in the consumer products known as music, TV, movies, sports, and news. I can see how the actual functioning of the media, the technology itself, the motives of owners and operators, affect the people to whom these media products are exposed, how these seemingly ambiguous morality tales affect our priorities and thinking.

For many years I could only feel it, just an unpleasant nagging at the back of my neck. Now I see it. Mass media is a horrifying wrong turn for our culture. It has become a narcotic. And we're all hooked. It manages and controls how we think. It gives us good vibes all the time. It makes us ignore the physical reality that is now starting to nibble at our feet. Soon physical reality will swallow us whole.

This is especially sad for me. I mean, it's just awful that mass media have essentially replaced genuine culture and intellectual life in this country, but long ago I chose mass media as a career. Movies and television made me want to be an actor, made me want to study and understand these media. Well, now I'm an actor, but I'm disgusted by what the media does with actors. I understand movies and television, pop music, too, better than I could have ever imagined when I was twenty one. And I'm horrified.

So instead, I wait tables and think every now and then about getting serious with auditioning. But why bother? It's the same thing with voting and participating in civic life. Why bother? It's all so meaningless. Actually, it's worse than meaningless. When an actor is successful in film and television, he's heavily contributing to this eradication of civilization. When you vote and participate in civic life, you're blessing an unjust and irrational system of governance.

Who would have imagined that being an American would turn out to be so grey and dismal?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

How Did an Entire Political Party Decide to Reject Climate Change Science?

From the Washington Monthly via AlterNet:

And in case this isn’t clear, unanimous Republican opposition to any meaningful efforts to combat global warming makes any kind of coordinated international effort impossible.

What’s more, as the climate crisis intensifies, and the need for swift action becomes even more painfully obvious, the GOP line is getting worse, not better. How many Republican U.S. Senate candidates on the ballot this year support efforts to address global warming? None.

I realize that part of the problem here is that Republicans reject the science because they oppose the solutions. If they acknowledged reality, GOP officials would no doubt have a harder time explaining why they don’t want to deal with a climate crisis that has the potential to wreak havoc on the planet in dramatically dangerous ways.

But the result is the same. The combination of deliberate Republican ignorance and the Republican scheme to break the United States Senate makes the crisis even more serious, with little hope on the horizon.

More here.

Actually, I'd assert that the entire problem is that Republicans reject the science because they oppose the solutions. There is no persuasive argument they can make opposing anti-global warming legislation, if the science is right, because there aren't any. And the science is right. That's why Republicans have to keep their hands over their eyes and ears: accepting the reality of global warming means throwing out all their "market" bullshit, or, at least, profoundly reevaluating it.

I remember back in the mid 90s a brief conversation I had with an old friend's new girlfriend. She, like me at the time, was a mainstream Democrat, and smart, too, working at the LBJ Presidential Library back in Austin. I had asserted something to the effect of how I really loved talking politics, tearing down ideas I thought were wrong, building up the ideas I liked. Nice girl, but she gave me this kind of condescending response: "You mean you like talking about opinions." To her, politics was all opinion.

"Global warming is not an opinion," I shot back.

For some reason that I don't recall, the conversation ended there, and we never got back to it. But even then, fifteen years ago, it was becoming increasingly clear that we could no longer view political discourse as consisting of reasonable disagreements based on a shared understanding of reality. Now reality itself is up for debate. And we're all much worse off for that.

In the end, reality-denial as a debating tactic, I think, has more to do with this era of mass communications and public relations in which we live than it has to do with any one particular issue. Global warming was the first instance of reality-denial simply because the right wing saw, and continues to see, the stakes, potentially abandoning their cherished neoliberal economic model, as being so extraordinarily high. But even if global warming weren't happening, it would have been something else. We did, after all, invade and devastate Iraq, an utterly defenseless nation that was absolutely no threat to the United States, because of weapons of mass destruction that were intellectual constructs.

I wrote yesterday about how the American Empire is obviously in a state of heavy decline, mentioned a few examples, and blamed it all on neoliberalism, which is, in itself, a kind of reality-denial. But that just kind of scratches the surface: we live in a media-created "reality" of illusion, informed by action-blockbuster movies, cop dramas, badass gangsta rappers, irrationally pro-American corporate "news," and the rags-to-riches morality tales of Oprah and her ilk. It's not that the banks went to Vegas with our retirement savings; it's that the government taxes and spends too much. It's not that poverty is a complicated and chronic social problem; it's that the poor are lazy and refuse to work. It's not that drug addiction is a disease which is criminally exploited by forces on both sides of the law; it's that we don't lock up enough illegal aliens.

It is no wonder at all that this is the end of the American Empire: its people are no longer connected to physical reality, and now it's coming back to bite us on the ass, as reality always does when it is ignored.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Collapsing empire watch

From Glenn Greenwald:

It's easy to say and easy to document, but quite difficult to really internalize, that the United States is in the process of imperial collapse. Every now and then, however, one encounters certain facts which compellingly and viscerally highlight how real that is. Here's the latest such fact, from a new study in Health Affairs by Columbia Health Policy Professors Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied (h/t):

In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world. As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.

More here.

Very well put: "easy to say...but quite difficult to really internalize."

I mean, of course, Greenwald is right to assert that the American Empire is in heavy decline, but I've been raised to believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Except that it's not. It's just really difficult for me to get my hands around the concept. Indeed, it is so difficult for some people, even, to hear spoken what is so obviously true, that our glory days are well behind us, that they just get pissed off at the bearer of bad tidings.

"What do you mean America's not the greatest country in the world? Fuck you, asshole. Why don't you just go back to Iraq, you fucking communist terrorist piece of shit!"

Well, I guess people can believe what they want, but you can't deny the fact that not only are we no longer great, we're actually sort of treading water around the underside of mediocre, relative to other nations in the industrialized world. Our infrastructure, built between fifty and a hundred years ago, is falling apart, and "the market" doesn't seem inclined to fix it. Add that to the offshoring of most of our manufacturing base, and it becomes extraordinarily clear that we are no longer a nation of builders--we are now a nation of users. The mighty middle class that makes American democracy actually mean something is on the way out. Indeed, democracy is all but a romantic notion these days: the corporations call the shots now. Politics, which once mattered, is just a sport now, albeit less popular than football. War's a sport, too, also less popular than football, but heavily supported by its remarkable fan base, which includes our corporate leadership.

Sure, we've had enormous problems in the past, but we overcame many of them: this is something altogether different; it's like we woke up one day to find that the country we thought we lived in was just a dream. The dream was really nice, but the reality of the waking world is just kind of lame. No, we're not great, and haven't been for at least a couple of decades.

And you can probably guess why I think we've gone off the rails so badly: somewhere along the line, everybody decided that instead of making the economy serve us, we ought to serve the economy, instead. And in this case "the economy" is defined as whatever the rich want. This is all true. But in my heart, I still want to believe that America is the greatest country in the world. If I can't embrace the new reality, when I know damned good and well that it really is reality, how difficult is it to convince people who don't know that our Golden Age ended long ago?

We're doomed to further decline. When we finally hit bottom, it's going to hurt. Bad.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
Fake field goal, last-second TD help LSU send Florida to second straight loss

From ESPN:

Jarrett Lee tossed a 3-yard touchdown pass to Terrence Toliver with 6 seconds left after LSU kept its final drive alive with a successful fake field goal, and the Tigers pulled out a 33-29 against the 14th-ranked Gators on Saturday night.

Ripped for nearly blowing last week's game against Tennessee because of clock management issues, Miles made all the right calls in this one.

"How about that one, huh?" Miles said. "These games are becoming more routine."

With 35 seconds remaining, LSU (6-0, 4-0 Southeastern Conference) lined up for a game-tying, 52-yard field goal, but holder Derek Helton threw a no-look pitch over his head to placekicker Josh Jasper. The ball bounced, Jasper scooped it up on a hop and ran for the first down.

More here.

Wow. This was one fucking great game. And it turned out the way I wanted. And LSU looked good. None of the bullshit I've been railing on for two and a half seasons now. I mean, the end of this game was almost the opposite of how the Tennessee game ended. That is, clock management was just flawless, none of that horrifying bumble-stumble shit. Really, much of LSU's performance against the Gators was flawless. Sure, there were some fuck ups here and there, but absolutely none of that amateur hour crap that's doomed them to failure for the last couple of years. And they've finally figured out the quarterback puzzle: who would have figured that using both of their underachieving quarterbacks would do the trick?

I've gotta face the facts here. If Saturday's game, a road contest against a very very good SEC powerhouse rival, was no fluke, and I don't think it was, the Tigers have gotten their shit together. They're a real football team now. I have no idea what Les Miles did to make it all come together, but he sure did do something. And now that division rival Alabama has been toppled from its number one spot, undefeated LSU is in sole possession of the SEC West. Dare I hope for a national championship this year? Well, no, not yet, anyway. But winning the SEC now appears to be a very distinct possibility.

And I'll definitely settle for that.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

GOOD GUY ECONOMISTS FORCED INTO THIRTY YEAR ORWELLIAN UNDERGROUND

From his blog, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on how neoliberalism's dominance in his field has for many years forced non-Kool-Aid drinkers to write their papers and essays very carefully:

But fundamentally Meyer is right. And it has been going on a long time. By the early 1980s it was already common knowledge among people I hung out with that the only way to get non-crazy macroeconomics published was to wrap sensible assumptions about output and employment in something else, something that involved rational expectations and intertemporal stuff and made the paper respectable. And yes, that was conscious knowledge, which shaped the kinds of papers we wrote. So you could do exchange rate models that actually had realistic assumptions about prices and employment, but put the focus on rational expectations in the currency market, so that people really didn’t notice. Or you could model optimal investment choices, with the underlying framework fairly Keynesian, but hidden in the background. And so on.

More here.

A week ago, I wrote this:

This new documentary, Inside Job, apparently makes a very compelling argument that such groupthink comes from the top down: when the most prominent academics in a given field are in lockstep on a particular idea or ideas, the very careers of pretty much everybody else who is less prominent in that field depend on getting in line with the elite. I mean, in the humanities. As scientific as economics might seem, with its charts and graphs, and wonky vocabulary, economics is one of the liberal arts, a "social science," not one of the actual sciences--if, say, the top chemists in academia started believing that sodium and chlorine combined in a particular way do not make table salt, they'd no longer be the top chemists; indeed, they'd be out of a job. Not so in the humanities. Reality is much more mushy there.

I went on to observe how intimidating it is essentially to take on an extraordinarily well established and powerful institution as the study of economics. I mean, "you're not an economist," is probably the first thing that springs to mind when somebody as loud-mouthed and opinionated as me starts badmouthing the experts. But that's exactly the point: being a rank-and-file economist is probably the worst place from which to criticize the field of economics. Krugman gets a pass because he's at this point such a titan in the field--who's going to fire a Nobel Prize winner? The sad thing about that, however, is that Krugman's numerous criticisms of economics, as it is practiced, will in all probability not have much effect on that practice. Neoliberal true believers both play in and officiate the game; you don't score touchdowns unless you play by their rules. That is, you won't get very far in your career as an economist if you don't spout the party line.

Anyway, I felt this was a topic well worth revisiting. Economics is one of the key fields when it comes to contemplating public policy, and it appears to have become intellectually compromised. That ought to be screamed from the rooftops. Krugman fills in some of the details of how this intellectual corruption actually functions: not all economists agree with neoliberalism's grand ideal, but they do feel enough pressure to do so that they feel it necessary to give lip service, which means that, in addition to being intellectually compromised, the study of economics is also ethically compromised.

It is truly sad to observe that, given the stakes, a small group of academics struggling with their intellectual integrity is the least of casualties suffering from the dominance of neoliberalism. That is, people starve and die because of this shit. At least dissident economists have a roof over their heads.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi



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

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

STAR TREK
Is There in Truth No Beauty?

From Wikipedia:

"Is There in Truth No Beauty?" is a third season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast October 18, 1968. It is episode #60, production #62, written by Jean Lisette Aroeste, and directed by Ralph Senensky.

Overview: The Enterprise travels with an alien ambassador whose appearance causes insanity.

More here.

Watch it here.

Notes and pics:

* Nice quick and weird set-up. An alien who drives you insane if you see him. I'm assuming his race does not call themselves "Medusan." Why on earth would the diplomacy obsessed Federation give such a nasty name to these people? Ah well. It doesn't really mar the episode if you don't think about it too much.

* Wow! Doesn't Spock look f'ing weird with his visor?



* Actress Diana Muldaur is even more beautiful in this episode than she was in the second season's "Return to Tomorrow."



* So looking directly at a Medusan may very well cause insanity, but the process of doing so is also very trippy. Here, check out this sequence:













* Miranda is one cold bitch.

* Kirk is quite good in the reception scene, presiding over the snarky comments Marvick makes to Miranda, and that Miranda makes to Spock, moving it all along, and defusing the tension.

* Is it just me, or has Scotty's dress kilt gone way over the top for the third season?



* First appearance of the Vulcan IDIC symbol. To the best of my knowledge, it only appears this one time in the original series, but it eventually becomes as important an aspect of Vulcan culture as logic and telepathy. I dig the IDIC.



* Miranda: "Someone near is thinking of murder." This is a very Agatha Christie moment. Nice.



* Marvick is already crazy when he beams up, albeit the more run-of-the-mill stalker dude variety.



* Marvick looking at the Medusan is a fan-fucking-tastic moment.



* Oh yeah! Now Marvick is totally insane! I love space madness.

* Quick and cool no-dialogue scene sequence where they try to find the now mad Enterprise designer.

* Very funny and very disturbing cut from Spock saying "Dangerous insanity..."



* ...to a smiling Scotty in engineering telling Marvick "The controls are all yours!"



* Great psycho fight with wild psychedelic keyboard musical accompaniment.



* A shot of the bridge from an angle we've never seen.



* I always love it when Spock checks under the hood.



* For the third time in the show's run, the Enterprise once again hits the galactic barrier. Nice.



* Marvick: "Liar! Liar!" I fucking love this guy.



* McCoy: "He's dead, Jim." Sometimes cliches work well.



* This one is quite cerebral, and I love it. Really, I couldn't follow the plot for years, until I was a teenager. It's hard to make sense here if you're only six or seven.

* Miranda's deep cynicism makes Kirk's standard awkward seduction scene more interesting.

* Weird. Her stalker/lover hasn't been dead a half hour, and the Captain's moving in for some nooky.



* Miranda's offstage scream, followed by her cold reentry is very Greek.

* More trippy visuals as Spock mind melds with the Medusan.

* Trippy Spock/Medusan joint personage. He's really good here, quoting Shakespeare and Byron, expressing emotion, smiling...



* ...and now Spock's insane, too! Right on.



* Very groovy mind meld between Spock and Miranda. It rivals the one from "Spectre of the Gun."



* Four stars. Not brilliant, but with several moments of greatness. It's a tight and quickly paced narrative with all kinds of candy and treats, from just straight up LSD inspired trippiness, to always welcome space insanity, to lots of cool Spock stuff.

Hey, after "Spock's Brain" last week, that's two four star episodes in a row. Looks like we've got a little run going here. How long can they keep it going on the third season's limited budget? I guess we'll see...

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Kirk and Spock!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THE END OF GLENN BECK?

From Media Matters for America:

An October 3 New York magazine report on the cable news networks contains an interesting passage regarding internal divisions within Fox News network. New York magazine reports that, according to a Fox News source, "[p]eople are uncomfortable with Beck...He's not a popular guy within Fox." In particular, Sean "Hannity's not really happy with Beck. Beck is a hired gun who is benefiting from Fox News."

More here, including a link to the original article.

Heh. FOX insiders don't like Glenn Beck. That's really funny. Well, that's what they get.

Longtime Real Art readers know well how much I hate Beck's FOX colleague Bill O'Reilly. I have no idea how many times I've bashed the guy on this blog, but I get the feeling that a site specific search will come up with at least twenty posts focusing on the Big Butthole. Probably more. But I've only written about Beck a relative few times, even though I'm pretty sure he's currently got the biggest audience at FOX. It hasn't really been a conscious decision to go easy on the conservative network's crying lunatic dude; for some reason I just haven't been as emotionally compelled to go after Beck in the way I've gone after O'Reilly.

But the above excerpted little gem has got me thinking: I leave Beck alone, for the most part, because I don't take him seriously.

Sure sure. He's big with the Tea Party people. He's very clearly inspired some political violence. He's got a few million people listening to his wacked out bullshit every day. But he's just not the kind of threat O'Reilly is. I mean, I disagree with almost every word that comes out of Butthole Bill's mouth, but his rhetoric kind of makes sense in that, if you don't analyze it too much, it sounds like some reasonable argumentation. You know, personal responsibility, big government, taxes, yadda yadda. But Beck, on the other hand, with his Ross Perot charts, bizarre conspiracy theories, strange rewritings of German and Russian history, and countless other examples of loony tunes hallucinations-as-political-analysis, makes the late night UFO oriented radio talk show Coast to Coast look like a science textbook.

In other words, Beck's a nut who will never achieve a density of influence that stands any chance of altering the American political dynamic. His fans may as well be vampire aficionados or Cabbage Patch Kids collectors for all the impact they'll have on the country in the long run. So I just leave him alone mostly. Besides, where do you start arguing with a guy who doesn't seem to understand that the terms "Nazi" and "socialist" are mutually exclusive?

But this internal animosity toward him at FOX is just too enjoyable. It's almost as though they're starting to realize that there is an upward limit to the whole "fair and balanced" marketing gag: if Beck becomes synonymous with the network, the game is over; nobody with any sense at all will take FOX seriously.

Actually, that's already the case, but I'm sure you get my drift.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

RIGHT-WING LIBERTARIAN WET DREAM!

From AlterNet:

Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee

Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” -- and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets -- we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. It’s a picture of a society in which “rugged individualism” run amok means every man for himself.

Call it Ayn Rand’s stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, Cranick “said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.”

The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Pressed by the local NBC news team for an explanation, Mayor David Crocker said, “if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.”

More here.

So I never got around to writing about the Republican US Senate nominee from Tennessee Rand Paul, who comes from a heavy Libertarian background, and his big gaffe asserting that it violates white racist restaurant owners' property rights when the federal government forces them to serve African-Americans. The take my buddy Matt, a moderate who understands what Libertarians are all about, offered at the time via email was that Paul simply articulated his view extraordinarily badly, and that's an interpretation with which I'm inclined to agree.

I mean, Paul's a smart guy, and well aware of long-lasting Southern racism in the part of the country where's he's seeking office, so it is also entirely possible that he was nudging and winking at such white trash in order to court their votes at the same time he was waxing philosophic about Libertarianism. It's complicated. But the point is that, from the Libertarian worldview, with its near absolute stance on property rights, denying a service to anybody, for any reason, is the sacred right of the property owner who provides that service. To the Libertarian, it isn't about kicking black people out of restaurants: it's about an individual doing whatever he wants with his property, and keeping at bay the tyranny of a government that would force him to do otherwise--barring black people from a racist's restaurant is an unfortunate consequence of the sacred rights of property.

See? Paul's no racist; it's just that freedom, Libertarian "freedom," means freedom to be a big dick, freedom to use your property to oppress others, freedom to fuck over people who have nothing because they aren't the heirs to centuries of a social system that rewards you based on the color of your skin. See? Libertarians, neoliberals, whatever you want to call them, aren't racists. They champion "freedom."

That's Rand Paul's point, albeit filtered through a left-wing lens. Here's mine.

Such a society, the one envisioned by anti-government Tea Partiers, Libertarians, supply-siders, Republicans, conservatives, and the rest of the fucktard circus of misinformed and willfully ignorant reactionary assholes, may not be philosophically motivated by racism, or classism, or any other kind of hate, at least, not at face value, but racism, class warfare, and good old fashioned social oppression are necessarily the net result. That is, a truly Libertarian society, one where the government is small, and allows property owners to do literally anything they want with their property, is also an extraordinarily mean-spirited society, one where it's every man for himself, one where it doesn't matter if the guy next door has a heart attack because it's not your problem, you know, the kind of society toward which we are rapidly devolving right now.

Think it through. If you really look at the philosophical principles embedded within the false big/small government dichotomy, and factor in how people actually behave in the real world, you simply cannot escape the conclusion that Libertarian philosophy would literally destroy society. I mean, you can call the smoldering husk of civilization left behind by such "philosophy" a society if you want, but I, for one, wouldn't want to live in it. For most Americans, life would be reduced to nothing more than an exercise in survival.

Yeah, I know the above linked story is about the action, or to be more precise, inaction, of a government entity. But it's a damned good snapshot of how the private sector would rule if it got the chance. Your house is on fire? Pay up, buddy. Your mother is dying? Too fucking bad, not my problem. Restaurant won't let you in because you're black? Well, that's their right. This is the America conservatives want.

And it makes me sick to my stomach.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

TEXAS LOSES SECOND IN A ROW; LSU GOES TO 5-0

From the AP via ESPN:

DeMarco Murray runs for two scores as Oklahoma hands Texas second straight loss

Knocked flat on his back, Landry Jones took a swipe at the ball he'd just fumbled and did his best to keep it -- and the Red River Rivalry -- from getting away.

Linebacker Jared Norton came rushing in with a chance to put No. 21 Texas in prime position for a tying touchdown, only to see the ball roll out of bounds. In control from the beginning, No. 8 Oklahoma was just happy to survive with a 28-20 win over its main rival Saturday.

"It was pretty lucky on our part to get that ball out of bounds and not have a big turnover right there," said Jones, who threw for 236 yards and two touchdowns.

In a game in which they benefited from one untimely Texas mistake after another, the Sooners (5-0, 1-0 Big 12) caught another break two plays later when Aaron Williams muffed a punt that would have given the Longhorns (3-2, 1-1) one last chance for a tying drive in the final 62 seconds.

More here.

And again from the AP via ESPN:

LSU stays unbeaten after Tennessee's penalty gives Tigers second chance to score

LSU made the types of mistakes that lose games and drive fans nuts. Then one critical lapse by Tennessee in the frantic final seconds let the 12th-ranked Tigers off the hook.

LSU remained unbeaten with a 16-14 victory Saturday after a Volunteers penalty for too many players on the field rescued the Tigers from a botched play as time ran out. Stevan Ridley then bulled his way into the end zone from a yard out, and fans who only moments earlier had begun to file out of Tiger Stadium in disgust were suddenly jumping for joy in the aisles.

Click here for the rest.

I don't get it. Texas plays like LSU, sloppy with lots of screw-ups, and loses. Okay, that part makes sense. Play badly against a good team and you lose. The part I don't get is that LSU, being LSU, plays the same way, game after game, and continues to win. They're fucking unbeaten nearly halfway through the season. It's like they're drunk driving through the SEC with a blood alcohol content well above the legal limit, but they somehow manage to keep the yellow lines on the left and the white lines on the right.

The final seconds against the Volunteers were a horrific scene. I was flipping back and forth between Texas and LSU and saw the now usual bizarre clusterfuck as the clock was winding down to zero. I saw the snap go over Jefferson's head while time ran out and changed the channel. Back to Texas which wasn't doing much better, but at least it wasn't quite as embarrassing. A few minutes later, I flipped back to LSU and saw Les Miles' inexplicably smiling face chatting it up in a post-game interview. WTF?!? They did it again. Like a little pyromaniac drenched in gasoline playing with matches who never quite seems to burst into the flaming agony he deserves.

Meanwhile, West of the Sabine, Texas just can't catch a break no matter how much they seem to deserve it.

This is, like I keep saying, a rebuilding year. I saw a bunch of shit against OU on Saturday, but I also saw some stuff I like--I mean, they were in position to tie it up at the last minute, in spite of everything, after all. The Longhorn mistakes, which are nowadays a defining characteristic of Les Miles' LSU Tigers, will eventually go away, and Texas will be all the better for dealing with humiliating defeat. Mac Brown will fix it.

But I'm becoming increasingly curious how long the Tigers can play like this and continue to win. Luck is a poor substitute for discipline.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

"...the financial industry has corrupted the study of economics itself."

From NPR:

A Searing Look At Wall Street In 'Inside Job'

BLOCK: You make some claims toward the end of the film that have to do with academia, with people at institutions of higher learning. And your claim is that the financial industry has corrupted the study of economics itself. What do you mean by that?

Mr. FERGUSON: What you find is that very prominent professors of economics, often people who have also held high government posts, are paid to testify in Congress. They are paid to be expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. They're often paid to write papers that praise the financial services industry and argue on behalf of deregulation of the industry. They make millions, in some cases tens of millions, of dollars doing this. And this is usually not disclosed. And in fact, university regulations do not require disclosure of these payments.

BLOCK: You include an exchange that gets increasingly angry with Glenn Hubbard, he was the chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, he's now dean of Columbia Business School. And you're asking him about this outside income that you're talking about, the income he gets from being on the boards of companies in the financial services industry. And it leads up to this. Let me play you this bit of tape.

(Soundbite of film, "Inside Job")

Mr. FERGUSON: Do they include other financial services firms?

Mr. GLENN HUBBARD (Dean, Columbia Business School): Possibly.

Mr. FERGUSON: You don't remember?

Mr. HUBBARD: This isn't a deposition, sir. I was polite enough to give you time, foolishly I now see. But you have three more minutes. Give it your best shot.

Read or listen to the rest here.

I think I've done a pretty decent job over the years of explaining how public discourse on the economy very often parts ways with the actual study of economics. For instance, all Republicans, and a very large percentage of Democrats, speak and vote as though tax cuts are the best and most acceptable way to stimulate the economy, even though the actual economic data suggest that most people, especially the rich, simply put their tax savings in the bank, instead of spending it, which hardly stimulates the economy at all. But perhaps more importantly, I think I've also, with a lot of help from Paul Krugman, done a nice job revealing how economists themselves get caught up in a neoliberal herd mentality, ignore data and evidence, and make unfounded assumptions about human behavior, all of which leads them to make dubious conclusions about the state of the economy and what to do about it.

This new documentary, Inside Job, apparently makes a very compelling argument that such groupthink comes from the top down: when the most prominent academics in a given field are in lockstep on a particular idea or ideas, the very careers of pretty much everybody else who is less prominent in that field depend on getting in line with the elite. I mean, in the humanities. As scientific as economics might seem, with its charts and graphs, and wonky vocabulary, economics is one of the liberal arts, a "social science," not one of the actual sciences--if, say, the top chemists in academia started believing that sodium and chlorine combined in a particular way do not make table salt, they'd no longer be the top chemists; indeed, they'd be out of a job. Not so in the humanities. Reality is much more mushy there.

It's a bit intimidating to criticize a field with as much respect and influence as economics has, but, like I said, it ain't rocket science. I mean, economics can get extraordinarily complicated in terms of its reasoning and number crunching, but when economists' conclusions don't reflect what's happening in reality, you don't really even have to have a high school diploma to make the observation. This shit was not brought down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai, after all.

Nonetheless, economics is treated as though it were as certain as chemistry: the notion that the best and brightest of economists are tailoring their views according to the desires of Wall Street, rather than economic reality, is frightening, indeed. It means the people who run the country are living in a total fantasy land.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Sammy



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

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

STAR TREK
"Spock's Brain"

From Wikipedia:

"Spock's Brain" is the first episode of the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast September 20, 1968. It was the first episode to air after NBC moved the show from 8:30 P.M. to 10 P.M. on Friday nights. It was repeated July 8, 1969. It is episode #56, production #61, written by Gene L. Coon (under the pseudonym Lee Cronin) and directed by Marc Daniels.

Overview: An alien female beams aboard the ship and, after incapacitating the rest of the crew, surgically removes Spock's brain. Kirk and the crew have just hours to locate and replace it before Spock's body dies.

And

The episode is seen by fans and those who took part in its production, as one of the worst episodes ever. In his memoir Star Trek: Memories, William Shatner called this one of the series' worst episodes. Leonard Nimoy, in his 1995 book I am Spock, writes that "frankly during the entire shooting of that [ie. "Spock's Brain"] episode, I was embarrassed—a feeling that overcame me many times during the final season of Star Trek."

More here.

Worst ever? Come now, I covered the worst ever original series Star Trek episode last week, and this one doesn't even come close. But see for yourself.

Watch it here.

Notes and pics:

* Nice no-dialogue bridge procedure opening sequence



* Not your run-of-the-mill villain: a creepy smiling Stepford Wife alien.



* Nurse Chapel has the best fall when Stepford Wife uses her superior technology to incapacitate the crew.

* Pretty good dramatic scene in sickbay where McCoy explains that Spock's brain has been stolen.



* They say "Spock's brain" quite a bit for this one--"Spock's Brain" is an episode where you never forget the title.

* Nice astronomy lecture. Really, this is very 1950s as far as science fiction narrative devices go. Good to see.



* Worst episode ever? Actually, this is pretty good so far.

* Uhura, always sensible, asks a very sensible question: "What would they want with his brain?"



* Okay, now we start to see why so many people hate this episode. Enter the goofy cave men who call themselves Morg.



* Okay, I love the Morg attack, lots of projectiles, and it goes on forever!



* Bizarre conversation about gender when Kirk realizes that the Morg have no women. The dialogue starts to get silly, very Tarzan and Jane.

* The Morg describes his group's oppressors, the Eymorg, which is apparently his race's word for "women," who he appropriately describes as "givers of pain and delight." We used to laugh a lot about that line back in college.



* McCoy beams down with Spock's brainless body hooked up to a remote control. This is fucking bizarre, and I love it!



* Chekov: "We may as well be comfortable." I always love it when they phaser a rock to provide heat.



* Sure, it's getting weirder and sillier, but it's pretty good so far. Good mystery and pursuit story, nicely paced.

* Another Stepford Wife: "You are not Morg or Eymorg." McCoy: "Hers is the mind of a child."



* Very cool: communicating with Spock's disembodied brain.



* This is all very Flash Gordon, the mix of primitive with super advanced.

* Stepford Wife: "Ah yes, 'brain.' What is 'brain'?"



* Okay, the dialogue ramps up the goofiness here astronomically. Stepford Wife: "Brain and brain! What is brain?!?" Scotty: "Aye, there's no sun, but there's light." Kirk: "Spock's brain controls." Very silly stuff.

* Oh god, what's with Kirk's white man talking to Injun "great leader" bullshit about? And it fails almost immediately when Stepford Wife doesn't buy it.



* The preceding scene was so silly that you almost enjoy the three of them writhing in pain on the floor. That's what they get for being fucktards.



* McCoy on the technologically inflicted suffering they've just endured: "I wouldn't belive the human organism would take such pain."

* Cool. With Spock and Scotty planetside with Kirk, Sulu's in charge back on the bridge!

* Another silly line. Scotty: "How does Spock's brain fit into all of this?" By now, this is all extraordinarily funny, in a sort of surrealistic way. Just go with it.

* Good fight with the Morg guards. In the end, because Scotty and McCoy aren't badasses, Kirk has to take them all out by himself.

* Really, this is so weird that it's very much like a comic book.

* Kirk struggling against the Eymorg pain device in order to get Spock's remote control is really fucking funny! And really fucking great!



* The "teacher" device reminds me of the Krell brain device in Forbidden Planet.



* Spock and McCoy bicker even when Spock is just a brain.

* Talking brains are very sci-fi.

* McCoy becomes a mad scientist.



* The operation to restore Spock's brain is very Frankenstein, right down to the German expressionistic film lighting on McCoy's face. And how can you not love hooking up Spock's speech center first, so the science officer can talk the doctor through the rest of the operation? Fabulous!



* Spock's excited post-op lecture is weird, but it sets up well McCoy's quip: "I never should have reconnected his mouth."



* Four stars. Look, I know just how utterly goofy this one gets about a third of the way into it, but it's all very funny, in that classic unintentional comedy way that often seizes the show, when it is not straight up absurdist, which, to me, gives the entire endeavor a flavor of literary seriousness. And it's also something of a fanboy feast, with science fiction images and ideas that come from all eras of the genre up to the point it was produced. But most importantly, the story is engaging. You want to know what's going to happen next.

I hadn't watched "Spock's Brain" in some years. I remembered it being funny, but I had no idea that I would enjoy it as much as I did last night. This one may not be for everybody, but if you don't like it, it's because you don't get it.

I love it, myself.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

White America Has Lost Its Mind

From the Village Voice courtesy of This Modern World:

Anyway, as boomers age, they get more politically active. That's just human nature, and their 40-million-strong AARP is the nation's biggest lobbyist. But as they try to wield that power, they're running into the growing, and less white, younger generations.

"Like tectonic plates, these slow-moving but irreversible forces may generate enormous turbulence as they grind against each other in the years ahead," writes Brownstein.

At some point, when tectonic plates build up enough tension, that destructive energy gets unleashed in a major earthquake, which is a pretty good metaphor for what happened on November 4, 2008. A black man got elected president, and suddenly every aging white boomer in this country turned into Carole King—they sure as hell felt the earth moving under their feet.

Meanwhile, the brother moving into the White House inherited the kind of mortgage that even Wall Street executives might hesitate to call "subprime."

A devastated economy. Two wars, neither being fought with clear goals. Housing markets that resembled war zones. A health system crippled with costs. An auto industry cratering.

But surely, in a time of crisis, the country could pull together to fix this mess, right?

Can you help a brother on health care? No.

The economy? No.

Financial regulatory reform? No.

National security? No.

Now, some black folks can be forgiven for thinking, as they watched the political drama in Washington unfold over the past two years, that this was just another form of the same old thing they'd put up with in one way or another in this conflicted multiracial country.

But there is another explanation.

White people have simply gone sheer fucking insane.

More here.

Great essay. It doesn't really say much that's particularly new, but it does put it all together into a very nice overall contextualization of the insanity of our era: the fact that gradual demographic shifting will soon result in minority status for white Americans coupled with electing a black president has driven many, many white Americans over the edge into total irrationality. And the essay names names. Like I said, not new names, but it's good to get them all into one article.

Go check it out.

I would add one idea to the essay's main thesis. A great deal of the white insanity we're enduring today has been inevitable for a very long time. Indeed, the conservative hysteria of the 90s, seemingly driven by electing draft-dodging, wife-trading, pot-smoking, baby-boomer Bill Clinton to the Oval Office was very clearly a fear based reaction to the political upheaval of the 60s, a large component of which was the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, you couldn't have the rise of modern conservatism if the GOP didn't have a handy target to beat up on in the South, the post Jim Crow African-American.

In so many ways, it appears that we've never stopped fighting the Civil War. I mean, the fighting between armies ended, of course, in 1865, but the segment of American culture that arose in the antebellum South in order to justify the barbaric "peculiar institution" known as slavery never went away. Sure, it's evolved, rolling with the changes as it were, but many of the base line assumptions of pro-slavery Southern culture exist to this day, and have expanded well outside the original slave states. American means white. Property rights are absolute. Labor is owned by capital, and therefore has no rights. Guns are not simply a necessity, they are glorious. All that government does is take away private property. You could almost write a Tea Party manifesto or a GOP campaign platform using these ideas. Really, what the American left ought to do is work its ass off to identify today's politics in terms of an unfinished Civil War.

And then finish it.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

MORE OF THIS PLEASE

From Media Matters via AlterNet:

Obama: Fox News Destructive for Country

We’ve been saying it for years: Fox News is not a news organization, it is a political outlet. It seems that the President agrees. In the latest Rolling Stone, President Obama is quoted as saying Fox News is “part of the tradition” of media outlets who, like William Randolph Hearst, report with “a very clear, undeniable point of view.” He added, “It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

More here.

Okay, we're nearly two years into the Obama presidency, and look where unity and bipartisanship have gotten us: nowhere. Sure, the President's gotten some major legislation passed, albeit watered-down and tailor-made so as not to offend powerful oppositional interests, but without any support at all from those powerful interests. It remains to be seen if health care reform really will have much of an impact. It remains to be seen if BP really will clean up its mess in the Gulf. It remains to be seen if Wall Street will use the trillions in bail-out money it's received for the good of the nation. And odds are that the corporations will win out in the end. Meanwhile Obama has been subjected to at least as many attacks from the right-wing noise machine as was his Democratic predecessor, President Clinton. Actually, it's probably been worse, what with Nazi, Communist, Nigerian anti-colonialist, not-really-an-American, and straight-up racist labels being stuck on his forehead.

In short, the Democratic presidency and majorities in Congress are a wasteland battlefield, pocked with craters and dead bodies. And the Republicans, who, as a political party, continue to poll very badly, are poised to take back at least the House of Representatives. Obama's easy going, let's all get along game plan is a total failure.

This was an obvious eventuality to any and all honest political observers before the President was even elected. I was saying that he needed to roll up his sleeves and start punching out Republicans and corporatists back in 2008, that it was the only way to proceed given the current political reality. I was saying it after he was elected. I was saying it during the health care battle. I'm saying it now.

The President needs to name names. He needs to call people fucking stupid. He needs to be a total bastard. This is the only way. Obama has to understand that all the right wing wants to do is destroy him. I mean, they've been perfectly clear about it, but he doesn't seem to take them seriously, which has allowed his opponents to, well, destroy him.

I'm really glad that he's calling out FOX for what it is. But he needs to do this all the time, and with much harsher language. This country's not ready to play nice. We have to fight.

Or we're fucked.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$