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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OBAMA'S NEW BANK BAILOUT PLAN

The New York Times' resident Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the latest version of the bank bailout plan:

Financial Policy Despair

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

And

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

More here.

So what Obama is proposing is a public-risk/private-profit venture. If these unnamed investors picked by the government to buy up what economist and uber-blogger Atrios calls "Big Shitpile," that is, the mortgage-backed toxic assets, manage to make some money in the process, they get to keep it, if they lose money, however, they've lost taxpayer money, our money, not theirs.

How can this possibly be described as harnessing "the expertise of the market"? Market incentives simply do not apply in this situation. To these investors, it's Monopoly money, free money to wheel and deal, with no chance of loss. For them, anyway. To the American people, however, these probable losses are very real, indeed.

Look, the bottom line here is that most of the money lost in these toxic assets is gone forever, burned up by the bursting of the real estate bubble, and the only way out is for the government, the American taxpayer, to eat the loss. The only question is how we're going to eat it. What Obama and his Treasury team of Wall Street insiders want is to preserve, as much as possible, the banking and finance system that caused the mess in the first place, and to spread around to these people as much wealth as possible, greatly upping the ante on what capitalists call "moral hazard," or more simply, rewarding lunatic financial behavior with cold hard cash, thereby guaranteeing that lunatic financial behavior will continue.

There's gotta be a better way.

Krugman briefly spells out the time honored solution to such crises: the government guarantees much of this debt for solvent banks, while taking over and reorganizing insolvent banks. Historically, this works. Yes, taxpayers would take a huge loss, as we did during the S&L crisis of the late 80s, but the traditional route deals directly with the "moral hazard" problem, removing permanently the financial entities that caused the crisis, and does so much more efficiently, spending less taxpayer money, than the bizarre Monopoly money scheme Obama's banker pals are proposing.

If President Obama is really serious about this harebrained plan, I think it is now safe to say that in many ways he is little better than Herbert Hoover was during the opening years of the Great Depression. Or George W. Bush during the last eight years. Okay, in many ways Obama is actually better than Bush, who would have tried to tax cut us out of this Great Recession, but for this crisis, the financial and banking crisis, Obama is exactly the same as Bush. That is, like Bush, Obama is Wall Street's man.

And that's change I cannot believe in.

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AMERICAN VENGEANCE

From Hullabaloo courtesy of Eschaton, blogger Digby opines on one crusading reporter's reaction to former California Congressman Gary Condit's recent exoneration of his former intern and lover's 2001 murder:

The man is gulty of having an affair, which destroyed his life, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy. Gary Condit didn't even break any laws. But DePaulo still insists that he is some sort of sociopath --- and excuses her own disgusting behavior by comparing his "crime" to homicide saying he deserved the twisted obsession in which she and her cohorts drowned themselves that horrid summer. (But then that particular illness had been prevalent in Washington for some years at that point, hadn't it?)

I submit that she is the one with the problem, a big one. And it's a problem that renders her incapable of being a reliable journalist. If she cannot see that wrongly accusing someone of being a murderer requires a serious reevaluation of where she went wrong and a sincere apology for doing it, then she can't be trusted. She obviously has no ethical compass.

This horrible little screed is the most vivid example of everything that's wrong with American journalism I've seen in quite some time --- the adolescent shallowness, the shrill sanctimony, the arrogance with which they wield their power, the sheer immorality of wrongly accusing someone of a heinous crime and feeling absolutely no remorse.

More here.

Yes, well, arrogance and stupidity often walk hand in hand, especially for bigtime journalists, as comedian Jon Stewart continually observes. But what's really disturbing here is the corporate news media's tendency to pander to America's lust for vengeance. CNN's former prosecutor and professional cunt Nancy Grace is an obvious example, as was all the media cheerleading for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this shit is all over the journalistic landscape: cute little Ashleigh Banfield is currently advocating hard prison time for teens who send or forward naughty pics of themselves through cyberspace. Creepy.

Really, what's most disturbing of all, however, is that Americans are in love with revenge, and that sacrificial scapegoats sate this hunger well. I mean, this is a cultural strain that goes all the way back to the Salem witch trials. You'd think that a nation as sophisticated and advanced as ours would have long ago come to the realization that vengeance is utterly useless, counterproductive even. Revenge doesn't do anything good at all: it doesn't make the streets safer; it doesn't reduce crime; it doesn't reverse the effects of crime; it doesn't bring back murdered loved ones; it doesn't make anyone rest easier at night. It does nothing but perpetuate anger and hatred. Crime, too, for that matter.

So if vengeance is so counterproductive, why do we love it so much? Answer: "'Vengeance is mine,' thus sayeth the Lord." Christianity, which oozes from the pores of all Westerners, whether they're Christians or not, especially Americans, is all about revenge. The entire system of thought is based on revenge: indeed, Hell is the ultimate manifestation of God's vengeance. That's what the universe is about, avoiding or receiving God's vengeance. And such theology is deeply embedded in Western thought. Americans love seeing bad things happen to people we hate, and Americans hate lots of people.

I'd like to blame this on the fundamentalists, who are particularly bloodthirsty, but the notion of revenge is so widespread, so popular, it just wouldn't be fair--besides, some fundamentalists are starting too see writing on the wall that says their era is kaput, and I have no doubt that American Vengeance will be with us for many years to come. No, vengeance, as a philosophy of right and wrong, is extraordinarily secular at this point. And it's just awful.

As the Klingons say, "vengeance is a dish best served cold." Or not at all.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy in sleepy love



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

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U.S. births broke record in 2007; 40% were out of wedlock

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.

For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.

Even happy couples may be living together without getting married, experts say. And more women — especially those in their 30s and 40s — are choosing to have children despite their single status.

And

Meanwhile, U.S. abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have attributed the abortion decline to better use of contraceptives, but other experts have wondered if the rise in births might indicate a failure in proper use of contraceptives. Some earlier studies have shown declining availability of abortions.

Cultural attitudes may be a more likely explanation.

More here.

A few observations.

1. It's time for white racist assholes to shut the fuck up about the problem with black single mothers. This isn't a black problem, if it is indeed a problem at all; this is an American problem. But like I said, it may not even be a problem. If single women want to have children, they should be able to do so without shame or social stigma, and with a great deal of help from the government, you know, free day care, free health care for both mothers and children, for everybody really, steep increases in the minimum wage, which tend to drive up all wages, and on and on. We really need to craft a society that is family friendly. Damned shame that all those "family values" idiots are dead set against such a thing.

2. It's well past time to define the word "family" as being something that includes much more than groups of people consisting of a father, mother, and their children. Really, in practice, that's happened some time ago. It's only the corporate media and asshole politicians who haven't caught up yet. Unfortunately, that also means the law hasn't caught up with reality yet, either.

3. Regardless of whether we have the will or ability to make the US more family friendly, you know that some of these single mothers didn't want to be mothers at all, especially the teenagers: "abstinence based" sex education has got to go, got to be replaced by comprehensive sex ed, which teaches kids how to use condoms, and why they are so extraordinarily important, rather than ignoring them, or lying about birth control failure rates. Likewise, forty years of anti-abortion propaganda has to be reversed. There is no shame in having an abortion if you don't want to be pregnant. Society shouldn't guilt people into having children they don't want.

And if we can get everybody on the birth control bandwagon, abortion, as an issue, would be exceedingly rare in incidence. Why can't the "pro-life" people understand that?

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