GOVERNOR MORON

From the Houston Chronicle blog Texas Politics:

Perry says Texas can leave the union if it wants to

Speaking with reporters after a tea party rally in Austin today, Gov. Rick Perry said Texas can leave the union if it wants to.

"Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that," Perry said. "My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that."

And

Just FYI, on Perry's 1845 statement, Texas came into the union with the ability to divide into five states, not withdraw. After seceding during the Civil War, Texas was allowed to re-enter the union after ratifying the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment banned slavery in the United States and any territory subject to its jurisdiction.

UPDATED: Texas v White, a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 1869, said Texas cannot secede.

More here.

Not to mention the fact that the entire Civil War was about states not being able to secede.

Wow. This is pathetic. I'm all for cutting people some slack on a few details here and there as far as important history and civics issues are concerned, but this is extraordinarily basic stuff, third grade American history. Okay, to be fair, I didn't personally learn about my home state's unique ability to divide into five states at will until I was a college freshman, but the whole secession issue I've understood since 1975. When I was seven. How could Perry get it so wrong?

Well, my answer is that he's a moron, possibly stupider than Louisiana's current embarrassment-in-chief Bobby "Jesus" Jindal, but that's just my gut speaking: more likely, Perry, like many other right-wing Republicans, has learned to play fast and loose with facts, so "ability to split into five states" becomes "ability to secede." I guess that's close enough for the lunatic fringe. But for people who prefer reality, it's totally wrong, and when I say "people who prefer reality," I mean "everybody."

Call me old school, but shouldn't our leaders have a basic grasp of basic governmental issues? You know, a mastery equivalent to at least the third grade? I wonder how many elected officials throughout the land are as ignorant as Perry. This really is disturbing the more I think about it.

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STAR TREK
MUDD'S WOMEN

From Wikipedia:

"Mudd's Women" is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series first broadcast October 13, 1966 and repeated May 4, 1967. It is a first season episode #6, production #4, and was written by Stephen Kandel, based on a story by Gene Roddenberry and directed by Harvey Hart. The episode introduces the recurring character Harcourt Fenton Mudd.

Overview: The Enterprise picks up a galactic conman and his beautiful female "cargo".

More here.

Like last week's "The Corbomite Maneuver," this is not among my favorites. Really, several of these early episodes just don't feel like Star Trek. I mean, yeah sure, they're definitely Star Trek, but the pacing is a bit slower than later episodes, and the writers and actors still haven't quite figured out the characters and their relationships yet. On the other hand, what amazes me is how quickly the show caught its stride: about a third of the way into the first season, they had it all figured out; the show felt like Trek from that point on. Compare that to how the Simpsons didn't get it together until the third or fourth season, or how Seinfeld took at least a year to really get it going.

Don't get me wrong. Even though I greatly prefer the second season's sequel, which is much more fun, and much more Trek-like, I do indeed like "Mudd's Women." And just because I criticize early episodes doesn't mean there aren't some standouts: "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the second pilot posted here a couple of weeks ago, is as good as anything produced later.

Anyway, check it out. In spite of everything I've just said, it's a good watch:



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Homeland Security Report Warns Of Rising Right-Wing Extremism

From the Huffington Post:

In the report (a full copy of which is below), officials warn that right-wing extremists could use the bad state of the U.S. economy and the election of the country's first black president to recruit new members to their cause.

In the intelligence assessment issued to law enforcement last week, Homeland Security officials said there was no specific information about an attack from right-wing extremists in the works.

The agency warns that an extended economic downturn with real estate foreclosures, unemployment and an inability to obtain credit could foster an environment for extremists to recruit new members who may not have been supportive of these causes in the past.

In November, law enforcement officials were seeing more threats and unusual interest against then- President-elect Barack Obama than ever before.

More here.

9/11 rattled me for a week or two, for sure, but once a little time had passed I was thinking once again that homegrown terrorists, of the right-wing variety, continue to be the bigger threat. When you get right down to it, Islamic terrorists have succeeded here in the "homeland" only twice, and both times in the same place, the World Trade Center. Granted, their second attack was spectacular, with an instant death toll in the low thousands, but, as numerous reviews and studies of the attack have since shown, it could have, should have been prevented if the Bush administration hadn't been asleep at the switch.

Much trickier are American terrorists. They're already here. They don't need to obtain illegal documents like passports and drivers licenses. They speak English. They're white. Guns, ammo, and explosives are cheap, plentiful, and readily available thanks to the gun-nut lobby. And we have an extraordinarily well established historical tradition of enduring them.

I mean, the Ku Klux Klan is the original American Al Qaeda, violently conservative, paranoid, secretive. The far-right militia movement of the 1990s is the Klan's bastard son, and the militias' bastard son was Timothy McVeigh. But let's not forget the abortion clinic bombers; they're still out there, too. And who the fuck sent out those letters to Democrats and journalists immediately after 9/11 filled with anthrax grown by the US military? The FBI's main suspect, a scientist working for the Pentagon, is dead from an apparent suicide, but little is publicly known about his political views or contacts, and there are more than a few who have cast doubt on the government's theory that he was actually the guy. My bet is that this was yet another homegrown right-wing terrorist attack.

If you include Klan activity over the decades, American right-wing terrorism's murder toll utterly dwarfs the numbers put up by their Islamic rivals. Far-right terrorists are indeed a bigger threat. And shoe-screening in airports will do little to make us safer.

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WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THE SOUTH?

From the Daily Kos:

Poll: Americans love France, San Francisco, Europe, and NYC

All of them feature the same dynamic as San Francisco -- Republicans have solidly favorable ratings (as do every other demographic tested), but head down South, and it's a whole different world, dramatically out of step with the rest of America.

What's this mean? It means that all that France and Europe demonizing, and all that talk of "San Francisco liberals" and "San Francisco values", and all that New York bashing (like Rush leaving Manhattan), plays to a very small core of people, and specifically to the conservative's Southern base.

This is clear evidence that the GOP has become a rump regional party. Because everyone else in America is just scratching their head at all that hatred directed at these places.

Click here for the rest.

A couple of weeks ago I was checking out a bar here in Metairie. It was really late on a Wednesday night, so there were less than ten people or so there, a small enough crowd for me to take a bar stool and eavesdrop on the conversation: one guy, about my age, dressed in business attire, was going on loudly about how President Obama and the liberals are fucking up the country. He was a bit drunk, so his ranting didn't make much sense. Actually, the drunkenness may not have had anything to do with it; he wasn't terribly articulate, but his rhetoric, if you want to call it that, wasn't much different from what I hear the morons on FOX belching every night. Anyway, the point is that I hear this kind of shit all over the place out here.

The country, after enduring disastrous Republican rule from 1994 through 2008, may have now lurched back toward the center, but not the South. Down here, below the Mason-Dixon, people, white people that is, are pissed. And I just don't get it. I mean, President Obama isn't a Republican, but he's definitely got some conservative tendencies. He's really not too far, ideologically speaking, from President Clinton, who ruled the nation more conservatively than President Nixon, a conservative Republican. Really, in many ways, and in spite of the their recent electoral losses, conservatives have won a great deal over the last thirty years: they've pulled public discourse and the overall sense of American ideology well to the right of where we were back in the 70s. Obama, a center-right Democrat for all intents and purposes, is understood by many Americans to be "liberal." TV guys like Glen Beck and Sean Hannity, both far-right extremists, are seen as being simply "conservative."

The Conservative Movement has altered our political landscape as drastically as 60s radicalism did. So why the fuck are Southern white people so enraged?

Increasingly, since moving into the deep South, I'm coming to think that this all has something to do with slavery and its lasting cultural dynamic, which exists to this very day. That is, Southern culture, the sense of Southern identity as being distinct from the rest of the United States, was born as a reaction to Abolitionism in the North during the nineteenth century. So from the get-go, Southern culture was brimming with a sense of persecution by outsiders; likewise, Southern culture historically fears non-white insiders, specifically African-Americans, and with good reason given white oppression of them. And the traditional way of dealing with such persecution and fear here in the South is violence. Not discussion. Not negotiation. Violence. Fear spawned violence. Really, when you get right down to it, Southern pride, Southern heritage, whatever you want to call it, is far less about grandma and fried chicken than it is about sheer paranoia, enemies everywhere ready to rape your daughters and force you to listen to hip-hop.

I've really got to think this through some more, do some reading and research, but I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the Civil War never ended. It simply went political. And that means we've got a much bigger problem in these United States than I have ever imagined.

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Tea Parties Forever

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman finally takes a break from opining on the economic mess left behind by decades of neoliberalism to talk some politics:

But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

And

Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

More here.

I've been wondering for a couple of weeks if I ought to simply ignore these ridiculous "tea parties" put together by dead-ender Republicans. I mean, they're so obviously staged by right-wing insider organizations, shamelessly and relentlessly promoted by FOX News. This ain't "the people" protesting: this is just bad PR--it'll probably all go away in a few weeks like any other ineffective ad campaign. Besides, everybody knows conservatives don't protest in the streets. That's for hippies, communists, homosexuals, and Black people. Conservative "tea parties" are fake. Non-events.

But they're just so absurd, it's really difficult to keep my mouth shut about them.

My personal take is that "tea parties" are a sign of desperation. The right-wing is in total disarray, and conservatives know it. But they have no idea what to do about it. Consequently, they're becoming increasingly irrational. I mean, to some extent the Conservative Movement of the last twenty years or so, as opposed to more traditional American conservatism, has always been irrational, but this tea-bagging thing strikes me as being along the lines of how animals in weird psychological isolation experiments eat their own feces or pull out all their hair. That is, conservatives are literally going nuts. And that's pretty frightening, if only because they've all got guns.

On the other hand, Krugman rightly observes that the basic ideological content these tea-people are pushing doesn't really differ in any way from what they've been vomiting for years, and he seems a bit afraid that these views may come to dominate national politics again at some point in the near future. It's always a good idea to fear the right-wing nut fringe, but I'm not, myself, particularly afraid of the Conservative Movement gaining new momentum anytime soon. That is, the excesses of the Bush administration laid bare for all the world to see the inadequacies of the movement. No WMD in Iraq meant either gross incompetence or straight-up lies. "There is no insurgency in Iraq" contrasted starkly with daily reports of American soldiers being blown up with IEDs. Hurricane Katrina revealed that an ideology bent on dismantling government was also an ideology incapable of adequately running government. Tax cuts didn't create new jobs, nor did they prevent the financial meltdown. Deregulation didn't prevent the meltdown, either. Same with imported poison pet food and poison toys from China. In short, movement conservatism developed some severe problems with the real world, and everybody's noses have been rubbed in that fact.

We're all going to have to die off before conservatism starts to smell good again. I mean, too bad for the future, but for now, for the next two or three decades, conservatism, as we've understood it since the early 80s, is kaput. All that's left is theater. Bad theater. But if that means we don't have to put up with this Nazi shit for awhile, I'll take it.

I mean, it's not like Andrew Lloyd Webber or anything. "Tea parties" have some kitch value, at the very least.

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EASTER GREETINGS

Yeah, I know I link to this every Easter, but it's a message I think well worth repeating. From Real Art back in April of 2003:

Easter is sin and punishment. I am no longer able to conceptualize morality in such a black and white way. Furthermore, I believe that such thinking actually undermines morality. We ought to do good things because it is the right thing to do, because it eases suffering, because it makes us and others happy. Doing good things in order to avoid Hell and gain admittance to Heaven is ultimately self-centered and greedy. See the paradox? Selfishness and greed are widely acknowledged to be evils: the notion of Heaven and Hell necessarily maneuvers people into a very problematic philosophical position. It is difficult for me to accept that good can be motivated by evil.

Today, most of America celebrates Easter. This means that America also celebrates its dedication to rigid, absolute concepts of good and evil, reward and punishment. This is no overstatement: “tough on crime,” harshly condemned sex scandals, boot camps for youth, and numerous other American social and legal institutions are the rotten fruit of the diseased tree of Christian morality—the dangerous oversimplification of terrorism as performed by “evil doers” results from this morality. I cannot be happy on Easter Sunday; there is nothing to celebrate. In fact, the reverse is true. Because this wildly popular, yet utterly misguided point of view results in so much unneeded suffering and pain, Easter makes me sad.

More here.

Since I first managed to articulate my thoughts on Easter five years ago, it just becomes more and more clear. Easter is all about Hell. I mean, okay, it's ostensibly about Heaven, and God's "wonderful gift," the get-out-of-jail-free card known as "salvation," but really, when you take a no nonsense look at the overall philosophy surrounding the concept of salvation, you see that you simply cannot separate it from the notion of Hell, and the Christian point of view that we all deserve to go there. No matter what.

And the only way out of this "eternal suffering," which is cruel and inhumane at face value, is to embrace an ideology, or in Christian code-speak, "accepting Jesus into your heart," that is deeply immoral: in short, becoming a Christian is to endorse torture as right and good.

No thanks. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.

So, where I'm at today is believing that if the Biblical God Yahweh is, in fact, the creator of the universe, which he's not, but hypothetically speaking, I would still reject Him. I mean, He's the god of genocide, always commanding his chosen race to destroy utterly various tribes and ethnicities occupying land He promised to his children, or doing it Himself when the mood strikes him. He's the God of cruelty, commanding his prophets and other believers to sacrifice their children or stone sinners to death. He inflicts lightning quick death for the slightest transgression, up to and including calling a prophet an "old bald man."

You just can't get away from the fact that the great god Yahweh, if you take the Bible seriously, is crazy, or evil, or both. No fucking way I'm going to worship such a monster, much less claim its "morality" as my own. But today hundreds of millions throughout the world are doing exactly that, totally convinced that they are siding with "good." I wish I could simply play glib and say something like, "bunch of poor sots," but cruel inhuman Christian "morality" is omnipresent, at least in the US. And people pay the price for that.

When you get right down to it, Easter is sick and horrible. If you're serious about morality, serious about creating and promoting good in the world, Easter is a day of grief.



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Dash



Reine



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

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Blackmail: GOP Threatens To Filibuster
Nominees If Obama Releases Torture Memos

From the Daily Beast courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

More here.

And just a couple of years ago, Senate Republicans, when they were in the majority, were so outraged by the possibility of Democrats filibustering Bush's judicial nominees that the GOP was ready willing and able to use another version of "[going] nuclear," or as they called it then "the nuclear option," that is, using a simple majority vote to end the Senate rule allowing unlimited debate as a strategy for indefinitely forestalling unwanted legislation. My my, how times have changed. Well, Republican Senators' use of the word "nuclear" as a metaphor to describe politics surrounding the filibuster tactic hasn't changed. But their hatred of the filibuster certainly has. Now they love it.

Good thing for the Republicans that the Democrats backed down; if they hadn't, the GOP would have no weapon today for extorting the White House into essentially becoming an accomplice after the fact to Bush and Cheney's brutal torture regime.

Of course, this is a total outrage. Never mind the fact that the Republicans are so depraved and amoral that they would deny the executive branch key personnel over what is an essentially unrelated issue. What's so disgusting here is how the GOP so unashamedly wants the United States to join a club that includes the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the Spanish Inquisition, the Mafia, and various other third world dictatorships, despotic regimes, and evil organizations. Torture is immoral and evil. If America practices torture, America is immoral and evil. If we do not repent, if we do not bring the people who authorized and directed this torture regime to justice, our nation will continue to be immoral and evil. It is a total outrage that the Republicans just don't care.

I see two possible outcomes from this extortion scheme. The first, and most likely, is that the Democrats and President Obama back down, in the name of "bipartisanship" or "political expediency" or "pragmatism" or some other cowardly euphemistic bullshit. This would be awful, but unsurprising. The second possible outcome is that the Democrats in the Senate tell the "loyal opposition" to fuck off, and employ their own "nuclear option," using their majority status to change Senate rules and end the filibuster forever. This would be the most favorable outcome, effectively ending the choke hold Senate Republicans have placed on all manner of much needed legislation, but much more importantly, would also open floodgates of damning evidence against the Bush administration.

I'll jump and sing and dance if the Dems do the right thing.

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STAR TREK
THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER

From Wikipedia:

"The Corbomite Maneuver" is a first season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, first aired November 10, 1966, and repeated May 11, 1967. It is episode #10, production #3, the first regular episode of Star Trek produced after the two pilots, although it was aired later in the season. It was written by Jerry Sohl, directed by Joseph Sargent, and created and produced by Gene Roddenberry.

The episode features a very young Clint Howard, brother of actor-turned-director Ron Howard, who plays the alien "child" at the end (with an overdubbed, deep voice provided by Vic Perrin). This was also the first episode in which DeForest Kelley played Dr. Leonard McCoy, Nichelle Nichols played Lt. Uhura and Grace Lee Whitney played Yeoman Rand, although viewers saw them for the first time in "The Man Trap".

More here.

Not my favorite episode, but still pretty cool. Indeed, comic book writer John Byrne, who I greatly admire, once claimed "The Corbomite Maneuver" as his favorite episode when my old pal Brian asked him about it years ago at a book store signing--Byrne's fondness for the episode reportedly comes from the efficiency and fun with which Star Trek establishes its core themes and overall mythology.

Even if you don't like it, it's worth watching if only to see weird Clint Howard as a bizarre dubbed alien. Check it out:



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Obama: U.S. "Not A Christian Nation Or A Jewish Nation Or A Muslim Nation"

From the Huffington Post news wire:

At a press conference in Turkey, President Obama casually rebuked the old chestnut that the United States is a Judeo-Christian nation.

"One of the great strengths of the United States," the President said, "is ... we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Click here to see a quickie CNN debate on the President's statement.

Of course, I agree entirely with the President's assertion: the United States is a secular nation, ideologically driven by a commitment to democracy and freedom. But seeing as how some sectors within our great country, most notably the right-wing fundamentalist Christian koo-koo sector, see such a notion as "controversial," it's worth a couple of words.

This all depends on what one means by the phrase "Christian nation." I mean, sure, most Americans self-identify as Christian, and in that sense, even though the word "Christian" means many different things to many different people, it is fair to say that America is a "Christian nation." On the other hand, for the time being, and historically, most Americans are white. Does that make America a "white nation"? If you use the same reasoning, the answer has to be yes, but I'd hate to be told such a thing if I was an American of color. Actually, I'd hate it in any case.

But the real problem here is that the "Christian nation" people play fast and loose with these ideas. They think religious popularity means religious governance. Yes, America is Christian if you're looking at religious demographics, but in no way does that mean the Bible is an authoritative document in terms of running the country. I mean, setting aside the idea that there are as many interpretations of the Bible as there are Christians, and the practical impediment to democracy such multiple theologies-as-civics would present, the US Constitution, our actual authoritative document, mandates a clear distinction between government and religion.

That is, true American values, found in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other writings by our Founding Fathers, and the Enlightenment Era philosophers who inspired them, utterly reject the idea that a democracy ought to be religious at all.

Seems obvious to me. Why are these "Christian nation" people so fucking stupid?

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ECONOMIC POP PHILOSOPHY: COMING FULL CIRCLE

From New Perspectives Quarterly:

Nathan Gardels: You have outlived Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. And now your Keynesian ideas have also outlived his radical free-market ideology. Is economics back to where you started?

Paul Samuelson: You are right. I am old enough to have seen the cycle come full circle. My experience is more valuable now than it was even a year ago, since I first became actively engaged in economic policy on Jan. 2, 1932, at the rock bottom of the Great Depression, when I was an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington. In subsequent years, I was principal economic adviser to President-elect John F. Kennedy in 1960 and recruited the team for his Council of Economic Advisers.

I became a centrist early on. Of course, the central planning system of the socialist states we still contested with ideologically in those days was idiotic, but that didn't mean government doesn't play a critical role.

And today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself. We see how silly the Ronald Reagan slogan was that government is the problem, not the solution. This prevailing ideology of the last few decades has now been reversed.

Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government. The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

More here.

No real commentary about this tonight. I just wanted to assert an opinion on this from a Nobel Prize winning economist who isn't named Paul Krugman. And this isn't even to entirely invalidate Milton Friedman, either, just his more radical ideas that have taken root in the US political mainstream. That is, neoliberalism, as popularly understood, with its strong emphasis on government non-interference in the economy, is now shattered as a pop philosophy. I mean, certainly there are numerous areas of the economy, numerous individual instances, where government intervention is unwise. But the conventional wisdom that it is always better for the government to stay out of the economy is now obviously flat out wrong. Quite the reverse, in fact, as Samuelson observes, the government must involve itself in the economy. The only questions to be debated concern how that's going to happen, and why.

A related thought: politicians and the mainstream media continue to ignore that this philosophical shift has taken place. Right wingers like Congressional Republicans and FOX News have an obvious stake in doing this, but I'm genuinely perplexed by Democrats' refusal to put the debate in terms of Keynesian economics versus neoliberal economics. Doing so would head off many if not most of the Republican talking points on Obama's economic initiatives. My guess, and this is supported by how the White House seems to be controlled to some extent by the banking and financial sector, is that the Democrats aren't entirely ready, themselves, to admit that a new economic reality has dawned. That is, neoliberalism has been embraced by the Dems almost as thoroughly as by the GOP.

I just hope the Democrats can shake off their hangover soon. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and pussyfooting around while Rome burns isn't going to help things one bit.

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



...Lieutenant Uhura!!!

"You are away from your post, Mister."

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Iowa becomes 3rd state to legalize gay marriage

From the Washington Post via the Houston Chronicle:

Iowa became the third state in the country and the first from the rural heartland to legalize same-sex marriage when its Supreme Court Friday unanimously struck down the state's decade-long ban.

Gay advocacy groups hailed the decision as another example of same-sex marriage gaining traction in an increasing number of states, despite a ballot initiative in California last year that banned it there. They also said the emphatic ruling probably will sway other courts, including California's Supreme Court, which must decide by early June whether the November referendum is constitutional.

And

The Iowa Supreme Court decision upholds a lower court's ruling that a 1998 state law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

And

The only other recourse for overturning the decision is a state constitutional amendment, which would take at least two years to be adopted.

At least one group opposed to same-sex marriage, the Liberty Counsel, said it plans to advance a referendum to amend Iowa's Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions. "The Iowa Supreme Court has become a proselytizing engine of radical social change," said Mathew Staver, the group's founder. "Untying the knot that holds together traditional marriage will unravel the family, destabilize the culture and harm children."

More here.

You know, the conservative Christians always insist that gay nuptials will cause all manner of apocalyptic social destruction, but they never quite explain how that works. Will seeing gay married couples make heterosexuals want to get divorces? No, of course not, that's fucking stupid, but nobody in the so-called "liberal" media ever presses these fools on that point. The reality is that gay marriage is likely to affect society not at all, excepting maybe a little more equality for GLBT Americans, married and single alike, which only the morally crippled would oppose. But then, fundamentalist Christians are probably the most morally crippled among us, so I fully expect these buttloads of irrational outrage to do nothing but increase as the US slowly, state by state, becomes more gay-friendly.

What's particularly satisfying about this Iowa Supreme Court decision is that it was virtually predicted by famous homophobe and far right-wing US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent to the landmark SCOTUS ruling back in 2003 that legalized gay sodomy, Lawrence and Garner Versus Texas. That is, the equal protection clause of the US Constitution was one of the deciding factors in the case, and Scalia observed that granting homosexuals status as a protected social group under the Fourteenth Amendment meant that they must necessarily also be granted the right to wed one another. Of course, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled on its own state's equal protection clause, but the same reasoning applies.

So I guess Scalia can say "I told you so." Whatever.

On the whole, even though I have a few issues with gay marriage myself, this latest move of inclusion can only be seen as a good thing, and yet another step in the long forward march toward sexual freedom and right of association for all Americans. Man, Iowa. What's next? Texas? Alabama? I'd really love to see married gay people running around Alabama.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Frankie



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

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Angie Harmon: Republicans "Don't Point Fingers" And "Have Class"

From FOX News courtesy of the Huffington Post newswire:

Harmon also admitted that she’s probably (unknowingly) lost jobs over her political views, and is pretty disillusioned over why so many Americans are not open to freedom of opinion.

"It's not like anyone has come up to my face and been like ‘I'm not hiring you because you're a Republican!’ But the media is so liberal and I get it, but I’m just confused on where we lost the respect for our fellow Americans. Not all of us are supposed to believe the same things and think the same way," she added. "I think the difference between the parties is, with the Democrats you can sit down with them and have a 15 minute conversation and if you’re not believing everything they say and buying into what they’re selling you, it is like you’re some dumb hick who doesn't deserve to live here anymore. But with the Republicans, it is like okay I want to know what you know, you want to know what I know, okay great lets go have a beer after work, we're still friends. I’m just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone’s God-given right to think the way they think and that's fine. That's why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want."

More here.

This woman is rapidly becoming my favorite as heir apparent to Charlton Heston's Hollywood Republican legacy. I mean, nobody will ever outdo his infamous "from my cold dead hands" moment, but Harmon's "it is like you’re some dumb hick who doesn't deserve to live here anymore" packs its own subtle trailer park punch. And really, she's the perfect symbol for where the GOP is right now, confused, irrelevant, shallow, and with irrational feelings of persecution--Heston, strong and unflinching, was more appropriate for a bygone conservative era, the days of Reagan's "evil empire," the time of hippies fucking up your yard.

How old is this girl, anyway? Wikipedia tells me that she's only four years younger than me, but she talks like she just fell off the turnip truck. I mean really. The party that used dissent-is-treason as its bread and butter for eight years is the party that's open to diverse ideas? Only in Hollywood, I guess. I mean okay, like I wrote a couple of days ago, Ms. Harmon works and lives in the entertainment industry bubble, and Hollywood libs are as stupid as they are vicious. So I can understand some fair criticism as far as that field goes.

But she sounds as though she's talking more generally, about Democrats and Republicans from coast to coast. Can she really be that insulated? Does she really believe that most conservatives are open minded about abortion, gay marriage, taxing the rich, or "redistribution"? Apparently so. She ought to spend a few days out here with me in Metairie, where at least one resident openly declared at my restaurant the night Obama won, without a hint of irony, that "now it's going to be white slavery."

You know, I think I'm really starting to get a feel for celebrity bashing.


Sarah Palin's hotter than this.

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STAR TREK
Where No Man Has Gone Before

From Wikipedia:

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" is the second pilot episode of the television series Star Trek (later known as Star Trek: The Original Series). It was produced in 1965 after the first pilot, "The Cage", had been rejected by NBC. The episode was eventually broadcast third in sequence on September 22, 1966, and was re-aired on April 20, 1967.

Where No Man Has Gone Before was written by Samuel A. Peeples, directed by James Goldstone, and filmed in July 1965. It was the first episode of Star Trek to feature William Shatner as Captain James Kirk, and also introduced James Doohan ("Scotty") and George Takei (Sulu). In the episode, the Starship Enterprise journeys to the edge of the galaxy, where two crew members develop dangerous psychic powers. The episode's title was adopted as the final phrase in the opening credits' voice-over that famously characterizes the Star Trek series, and has entered popular American culture.

More here.

So I got a tip today from my old pal Brian via Facebook:

Star Trek on netflix? Pshaw - go to www.cbs.com, search for Star Trek and you can watch the whole series in HD or originally broadcast SD, all in full resolution flash.

They put that site up 2 weeks (I kid you not) after the WGA walked away from all online rights for shows prior to 1974 last fall. The HD versions are what was released on HD-DVD and will be out in blu ray next month.

The WGA, of course, is the Writer's Guild of America, which has been in all sorts of contractual hell with studios over internet royalties. Their loss is our gain, I suppose--I mean, I really do support their right to royalties, especially when there's so much money being made out there by the entertainment corporations...but...you know...I'm going to watch Star Trek for free over the internet, damn it; no picket line's going to stop me!

Uh, anyway, here's the the pilot episode, one of my favorites:



Heh. I'm sure you're realizing by now that I'm going to post all seventy eight episodes here at Real Art. I mean, not all at once, of course. And after that is Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks. Hahahahahahahahah!!!!! Who needs TV?

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MTV to Put a Bit More Music Back, in the A.M.

From the New York Times courtesy of the Huffington Post newswire:

MTV is adding more music videos to its schedule — at 3 a.m.

On Monday the network starts “AMTV,” a six-hour block for music and advertising experimentation. From 3 to 9 a.m. Monday through Thursday, it will show music videos, news, interviews and performances, harking back to the network’s origins as a 24-hour home for music videos.

Now, of course, the network is more synonymous with unrealistic reality shows like “The Hills” than with music. Over the years the network, a unit of Viacom, has relegated music videos to its less popular digital channels and intermissions between shows.

And

Critics of MTV say that its music brand is all but irrelevant now, since countless music videos and songs are only a click away on YouTube and other Web sites. The network canceled “TRL,” its long-running video countdown, last fall after years of sagging ratings. Mr. Friedman acknowledged that music had not always drawn “the level of viewership we hope for,” but nonetheless he said, “we know our audience wants more of it.”

More here.

Funny. I always thought TRL was canceled because it sucked. Silly me, guess I was wrong.

At any rate, I'm kind of looking forward to this. I mean, it could be awful, if they play like only five or six videos over and over, you know, like TRL did, but six hours is a long time by television standards, and I'm hoping for some oddball stuff to break through, especially during the wee hours. I'll never forget the day I started losing interest in MTV: I saw an episode of Remote Control and I didn't get it. I was still in their target demographic, a teenager, but I just didn't understand how Remote Control was supposed to be something I liked. And what the fuck did it have to do with music videos? Maybe I was old before my time, but the all video format was pretty fucking cool, and abandoning it alienated me as a viewer. Really, one of the appeals of Beavis and Butthead a decade after the format change started was getting to see cool music videos I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

So this is a welcome change. Maybe I'll start to care about pop music again. Weirder things have happened.

Here, check out some old school MTV promos:



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Angie Harmon: I'm Not Racist Because I Disagree With Obama

From FOX News courtesy of the Huffington Post newswire:

Angie Harmon is not afraid to come out and say she doesn’t like how President Obama is handling the job — but she’s sick of having to defend herself from being deemed a racist.

"Here's my problem with this, I'm just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Obama it's not because I'm a racist, it's because I don't like what he's doing as President and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against him you're called a racist," Harmon told Tarts at Thursday’s Los Angeles launch of the new eyelash-growing formula, Latisse. "But it has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what color he is. I’m just not crazy about what he's doing and I heard all about this, and he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … I'm still dressing for a recession over here buddy and we've got unemployment at an all-time high and that was his number one thing and that's the thing I really don't appreciate. If I'm going to disagree with my President, that doesn't make me a racist. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn't make me racist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous."

More astute observations here.

Hear, hear.

I wholeheartedly agree: one is not a racist simply because one disagrees with our African-American president. But then, this is weird to me. I criticize President Obama nearly every other day, and I have not yet been called a racist for doing so. At least, not to my face. So why does Ms. Harmon feel the need to state what seems so obvious? For that matter, who is this woman, anyway, and why should anybody give a fuck what she says one way or the other?

Apparently, she's some sort of Hollywood starlet, which probably explains my first question: bigtime entertainment insiders practice a sort of pack liberalism, and dissenters, I imagine, are attacked by wolf-like good-vibes stupid-shit celebrities such as Barbara Streisand and Alec Baldwin. On the other hand, as a bleeding heart liberal, I don't really carry the racial baggage that conservatives like Ms. Harmon do. So maybe I get a break because of my left-wing bona fides. Nixon going to China and all that.

But the TV bimbo definitely raises a good point. It's just that her assertion is much more applicable to the way that critics of Israel's government are branded anti-Semites by America's rabid Israel worshippers than it is to this most likely exaggerated notion that criticizing Obama is tantamount to racism.

Oh well. At least she's still got her money.

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COLLEGE

From AlterNet, left-leaning journalist and Master of Divinity Chris Hedges opines on the depressing social role higher learning plays in contemporary culture and politics:

Universities Are Turning into Corporate Drone Factories

Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.

Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view -- all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations -- all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."

This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno.

More here.

The way I see it, I got lucky.

I got my BFA in theater back in 1991. Scared shitless of the whole professional actor thing, I pursued the better part of valor: I went back to school to get another degree. People had been telling me for a couple of years that I would make a good director; figuring what had really inspired my interest in theater and acting over the years were the great movies and television programs I had grown up with, I enrolled in UT's Radio Television Film department. While finding the screen incredibly interesting, I ended up being horrified by the everyday functioning of the industry--I was particularly horrified by one particular longtime television producer who had retired to a post as a television production teacher, but that's another story. Disgusted by what I had discovered, I decided the film maker path was better less traveled. By me, anyway.

But surprise, surprise. I ended up gaining something wonderful that I didn't even realize existed.

The academic study of film and television is a fairly recent phenomenon compared to the study of literature or economics or biology. That is, when scholars started taking movies and TV seriously back in the 60s, there were no existing university departments in which to sequester their work. Consequently, the field was fair game for any academic who could justify chasing after it. English professors, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists, Marxists, feminists, philosophers, and various other scholars researched, analyzed, and made assertions about movies, television, their industries, how these cultural products are received, and what influence they have. Thus, film and television studies were interdisciplinary and critical from multiple perspectives at the very beginning. This hodge-podge approach was copied and expanded when universities began founding RTF and mass communications departments.

Some thirty years later, I found myself taking courses in all these areas as part of the requirements for my RTF Bachelor of Science. I came there to become a film director, but was blown away by the scholarship. That is, studying RTF made me discover, inadvertently, education's ostensible holy grail: critical thinking. After a few years of analyzing everything from the film Witness to Star Trek to shitty self-indulgent Brian Eno experimental ambient videos in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and on and on, I discovered that I had gained a knack for looking at art, culture, and politics from multiple angles, and for making value judgments about what I have observed--it's not enough to note that a movie is shitty or great; one must ask what it is about the system that created the movie, what it is about why people respond to it in the ways they do, and what it all means for the powerful and the powerless.

It is now relatively easy for me to expand this intellectual approach to...well...everything.

But like I said, I think I just got lucky. I mean, sure, I was on the debate team in high school, so I already had a feel for politics and economics, and I had only recently completed my study of theater, so I was on fire for "art," whatever that means, but really, I studied RTF more out of a desire to be a professional student than anything else. And it's not even film studies that are so great: I saw many of my fellow students' eyes glazing over during lectures while I felt my eyes opening up--it was particularly distressing to see the lessons from theory classes utterly ignored in production classes. I don't know. It just all came together for me at that point, but apparently not for others.

Anyway, the point here is that, these days, it is relatively easy to earn a Bachelor's Degree without discovering that holy grail called "critical thinking." Indeed, university studies in general are very much unlike what I got studying RTF. That is, during the twentieth century, especially after WWII, almost all American colleges and universities decided to adapt Henry Ford's industrial model to higher education, artificially creating specific "departments" for academic specialization, essentially driving a spike into the heart of the renaissance man who had previously been the desired outcome of university study. No longer would students have a broad grasp of multiple topics; instead, they would "specialize" in one field, and one field only. No longer would university graduates reflect on society and their role within it; instead, they would become "professionals" who pursue careers.

In my humble opinion, the worst thing that's happened to the concept of college is the popular notion that one must possess a degree in order to have a better job--thrown by the wayside is past conventional wisdom, now pie-in-the-sky foolishness, that university study exists to make better human beings, better citizens, better wisdom for guiding society in ever wiser directions. Throw degree-as-financial-investment together with today's hardcore specialization of university departments, and you don't simply get a bland and narrow-minded education: you get the "moral nihilism" Hedges mentions above. Knowledge without context. A recipe for confusion at best, and self-destruction at worst.

And that's pretty much where we are right now. This isn't some recent conspiracy, and in all probability not even a conspiracy at all. We've been headed in this direction for a long time. As industry, and its controlling corporate structures, have gained ever more influence over our most foundational institutions, we, America's college graduates, have all unthinkingly ended up eagerly serving their interests, believing that we are instead serving our own--I mean, we are serving our own interests, individual career interests, but individual interests and a healthy nation are two entirely different things. Today's "best and brightest" are, in fact, brilliant people, but brilliant in only very limited areas, brilliant but blind, unable to see or acknowledge how their work affects the entire tapestry known as society.

It drives me mad, but I have no idea what to do about it.



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Pat Boone Syndrome

From CounterPunch:

But Pat Boone Syndrome is not as simple as just covering another artist's song. Many, many artists have done great things with other people's music, giving new perspectives or new emotions, creating interpretations that add to what the song has to say. Pat Boone Syndrome has none of these endearing qualities. Artists that suffer from this ailment perform songs in a way that is safer than their original versions and less complicated, adding nothing to the content of the song.

More here.

It's late and after a very busy dinner shift at work, I'm tired, not much blogging energy tonight. But the above excerpted essay did catch my attention recently, and it's definitely worth a few words.

Any rock music fan who came of age in the 70s or 80s very probably has or once had a bias against so-called "cover" songs. You know, one artist doing a song originally popularized by another artist. The music industry's reassertion of creative control over its acts in recent years, and its accompanying sense of music-as-product, has very likely blunted such a bias for people under thirty or so, but, once upon a time, the only real rock bands out there were the ones who wrote and performed their own songs. Fuck you, Whitney Houston wailing out your shitty version of an only so-so Dolly Parton tune. Fuck you, early 90s piece-of-shit techno no-name band who covered 10cc's classic "I'm Not In Love." Fuck you boy bands. Fuck you shrill divas. Fuck all of you who aren't capable of writing songs, which is where the real creativity is.

Of course, my personal exploration of jazz over the years has made this attitude, for me, impossible to maintain. All the jazz greats were, and still are, into interpreting songs. "Duke's Place" done by Duke Ellington is great, and waaay different from the same tune, also great, performed by Louis Armstrong with Duke on piano, or even Duke's earlier version of the song, also great, called "C Jam Blues." All great, all unique statements of musical art, all the same song. The anti-cover bias simply cannot exist in jazz; it misses the point entirely.

Nonetheless, there are some rock covers that continue to be worthy of scorn and derision. Pat Boone's cover of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" is a case in point.

Here, check out the original:



Now check out what Pat Boone did with it:



But, like I was saying, it's not covering a song that's the bad idea here: rather, it's covering somebody else's song for all the wrong reasons; it's failing to interpret the song. When an artist plays somebody else's tune and succeeds, however, it's like magic.

Another case in point. The Rolling Stone's "Satisfaction." Check it out:



Contrasted with Devo's radical departure:



I'm still a bit disturbed, thirty years after first hearing it, by how far Devo takes it. But hey, that's fucking powerful. That's art.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine and Dash



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

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Board of Education evolves into sideshow

From the Houston Chronicle:

Ever seen a cat-dog? Of course not! That just proves it’s impossible for one species to evolve into another.

The human brain seems not to have changed since homo sapiens first appeared 150,000 years ago. That means evolution is false.

We don’t have every bone, so the fossil record undercuts the theory of evolution.

A few scientists have fudged proof of evolution, so that calls into question all the other evidence.

These are the brilliant observations and insinuations of a particularly dangerous right-wing fringe group: the seven-member social conservative bloc of the State Board of Education. (The cat-dog example, if you must know, is the brainchild of Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, who seems to be incapable of understanding that it takes millions, if not billions of years for so-called macro-evolution to occur.)

If the Legislature is the circus, the Board of Education is the sideshow. And this week, they’re back in town.

The event in Austin would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

The 15 board members hold in their hands the future of science curriculum in Texas public schools for the next decade. This week, after what promises to be another intense round of debate, they’ll cast final votes on how to teach evolution.

More here.

Increasingly, I'm having nothing but contempt for the creationists. They're fucking stupid. And, no, I'm not at all being narrow minded here. Creationists are total fucktards. I mean, okay, an individual can believe any stupid shit he wants, you know, like Santa Claus, or UFOs, or the Loch Ness Monster, or the Astros winning ninety games this season, anything. But the creationists want to force their loony tune bullshit on the whole fucking country, and damn the consequences.

These are fucking science classes we're talking about here. And creationism, intelligent design, whatever you want to call it, needless to say, just isn't science. You know, the government doesn't require evolution to be taught in Sunday school; why the fuck do the creationists insist their backward-ass bullshit be taught in public school?

Filthy fucking witch doctors. They should just go back to their grass huts, caves, and trailer parks. This world isn't for them.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the Houston Chronicle:

FBI says Conroe sergeant stole $28,000 from bank

A Conroe Police Department veteran accused of robbing a Montgomery County bank where he also worked as a security guard was released on $100,000 bail Wednesday, but with conditions.

And

Arrested on Tuesday, Tindall is accused of stealing more than $28,000 from the First Bank of Conroe last August, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is charged with one count of bank robbery. Tindall was off-duty when the bank was robbed, police said.

Investigators say co-workers from the bank and the Police Department recognized Tindall as the thief on surveillance videotapes that captured the robbery even though he wore gloves, a white helmet with a clear visor, aviator-style sunglasses, a dark-colored jacket or shirt, blue jeans and athletic shoes.

More here.

And Tindall didn't simply steal this money: he robbed it. The difference is important to note because robbery, compared to theft, involves violence or the threat of violence, making it a much worse crime. As if theft wasn't bad enough. At least he wasn't on duty when it happened; on the other hand, Tindall used his status as police officer to put himself in a position to get some inside info to help with his bank job plans.

This is so fucking trashy, like a scene from GoodFellas or something. Perfect for Conroe.

But then, this isn't really about trashiness or Conroe, either. We live in a country where cops rape women they've pulled over for speeding, snort coke they've ripped off from dealers on the dashboards of their squad cars, sell drugs, beat the fuck out of prisoners, arrest people for "driving while black," and on and on and on. Trashy cop-robbers in Conroe fit very nicely into this pattern.

Like I always say, this isn't another case of a bad apple gone wrong: we have a chronic, systemic problem with cops violating the law, constantly, all the time. There is something about being a cop, or at least something about being a cop in the way we understand the term in the US, that makes this kind of behavior so common. That is, American police culture is confrontational, hyper-masculine, authoritarian, self-aggrandizing, arrogant, and mired in us-versus-them attitudes that result in an above-the-law sensibility, and pressure good cops to keep their mouths shut when they see bad cops being bad.

This will not change until police culture changes. I don't expect this to happen anytime soon.

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LEARNING ABOUT THIS GREAT RECESSION
Democracy Now Interviews Paul Krugman

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman, what would a new system look like? What would you advocate?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I think, in the end, we’re going to have to go back to something that is kind of like the system that emerged from the New Deal, which was tightly regulated banks and financial institutions, limits on risk taking, fairly high taxes for high earners, which—it turns out that, you know, low tax rates create incentives, but the incentives are actually to play dangerous games with other people’s money. A lot of things need to be updated for the twenty-first century and information technology and so on, but basically, our grandfathers got this thing right. Our grandfathers understood that finance is useful but dangerous and needs to be very tightly hedged about with regulations.

Click here to watch, listen to, or read the rest.

Last night I was hanging out with my ex celebrating her birthday. (Happy birthday, Becky!) We were channel surfing the TV after a while, and lingered for a bit on Charlie Rose interviewing some economists about Obama's bank bailout plan. The conversation just went on and on. I turned to Becky and said, "you know, I feel like I've got a pretty decent layman's understanding of all this, and could explain it if you wanted, but it's so fucking complicated that it would take a while, and I'm sure that fifteen or twenty minutes into it you'd be regretting asking me about it."

"All I know is that it's terrible," said Becky. Indeed. Can't argue with that.

And that's essentially where most Americans are coming from on the banking crisis. They know it's terrible, which it is. They know it's all like some big rigged game, favoring the inside gamers, and fucking everybody else, which is also true. Beyond that, however, it's one big Gordian Knot. I've been trying to use this space to educate whoever happens to drop by, mostly friends and a few net-surfing strangers, but I fear that explaining even my limited understanding of events is as eye-glazing and off-putting as, say, memorizing the Periodic Table, or reading Joyce, or whatever else put you to sleep in high school.

It's a damned shame that we don't teach economics K-12. I mean, really, economics and politics are ultimately indistinguishable in terms of real power, and the educational establishment just doesn't give a shit. It's almost as though they want us to be ignorant so as to make us more controllable. But that's another story.

The bottom line is that there's some serious shit going down right now, and most people have virtually no understanding of it, which means they have no say in the matter. So I strongly urge you, dear reader, to educate yourself, if you haven't been doing so already. This interview with Krugman is a good start--he can get wonkish at times, but his forte as a public intellectual is putting complicated terminology and ideas into plain everyday language. But you should go beyond the talking heads. Read up on John Keynes, the economist behind FDR's New Deal, who is now extraordinarily important because the current economic crisis is very similar to what the nation was facing back in the 30s. But you should also read up on neoliberalism, the now failed economic paradigm that replaced Keynesianism in the 70s, and is now responsible for this Great Recession. Read liberals; read conservatives. Compare and contrast. Don't feel like you need to master it all, like you need to understand everything. You won't. It's just too much information. Even economists are admitting today that there's a lot they don't know about what's happening. Just try to get a handle on the discussion. Just get yourself to where you can follow along. Believe me, you'll be in a much better position than you were when cries of "deficit!" seemed like a reasonable objection to the stimulus bill.

And do yourself a favor. Limit your self-education to no more than thirty minutes a day. It will prevent information overload and the frustration which usually accompanies it. More importantly, it will keep you from wallowing for hours in depressing and frightening news the way I do--man, in some ways it's like watching 9/11 on TV over and over again, if you know what I mean.

This Matt Taibbi essay from Rolling Stone is really good, too: "AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror." Check it out.

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ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM

From the Houston Chronicle:

EPA: Toxic emissions in Texas drop in 2007

Texas industries released fewer toxic chemicals into the environment in 2007 than the year before, according to newly released federal data.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s latest statistics show that the state’s emissions dropped 7 percent, outpacing the reductions of the nation as a whole.

Still, Texas remained one of the biggest polluters among states, behind Alaska, Ohio and Indiana in the release of chemicals that cause cancer, neurological damage or other ills.

Harris County, meanwhile, continued to lead Texas — and ranked No. 11 among counties nationwide — with the release of 39 million pounds of toxic chemicals. The county, home to 321 chemical plants, factories and refineries, reported a 4 percent reduction from 2006 to 2007.

Brazoria County ranked second in the state with 31 million pounds, and Jefferson County was third with 21 million pounds.

The EPA’s annual Toxic Release Inventory tracks the emissions of 650 chemicals at 22,000 facilities nationwide. Although the inventory has become a widely used resource since it started in 1988, it has been criticized for relying on industry-reported estimates.

More here.

Well, misleading headlines aside, the opening paragraphs of the article tell you just about everything you need to know. Texas emissions are down, but on a sliding scale, Texas continues to have incredibly toxic air. That is, when you weigh four hundred pounds, losing twenty is nice, but barely scratches the surface. When you're at rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up.

Of course, the saddest part of this is that we don't even really know that Texas has cut toxic emissions by seven percent: this an industry figure, not something researched by the EPA; worse, it's an industry estimate--they don't even know, or at least, they don't want to reveal the actual numbers. For that matter, we don't even really know how bad Texas pollution actually is.

And the punchline to all this, for me anyway, is that I've spent most of my life in Harris County, the worst in Texas, and one of the worst in the nation. Maybe. If the industry reported figures are accurate, which I'm pretty certain are not. Even funnier, when I was teaching, I spent six years living in East Harris County, which is the worst in the county.

I'll be lucky if I don't end up with eye cancer or something equally rare and bizarre.

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