Let's Get Meta

If you think of "sin" as a sidewalk peppered with bird droppings, it becomes clear that:

• You can try to avoid stepping in it, but sooner or later you will;
• You will look funny while you are contorting yourself trying to avoid the droppings;
• While it is natural and organic and fertilizing and not deliberate on the part of the bird, excrement still stinks up your shoes.

Happy New Year. Time to crash.

A Look at Libertarian Utopia

R. J. Eskow at AlterNet on "What America Would Look Like If Libertarians Got Their Way."  With examples.

It's not just about legalizing drugs.

From the "What Did I Tell You?" File

Voting restriction bills have racial causes.  From Talking Points Memo (TPM)

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics -- Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O'Brien, an associate professor of Political Science -- recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled "Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies," the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

[…]

What about the great Republican specter of voter fraud?

"If you want to be extraordinarily generous, you could say allegations of voter fraud may have been a very, very small contributing factor," Bentele said, speaking more generally about voter restriction efforts. "But in general, these partisan and racial effects seem to be really, really strongly associated with this outcome."

Abstract of the paper.

Have I mentioned that I'm reading Albion's Seed?  Because *gobsmack city*.

Chicken. Yes, Chicken.

Drug-resistant bacteria on chickens.  What, where, why.

(No, food poisoning is not a new way to get high.  Au contraire.  But if you enjoy vomiting and diarrhea and you can't afford booze or catching the flu, here's a way to get really sick.)

In Memoriam

• Joan Fontaine, actress
• Tom Laughlin, actor/writer/director

(Also, the last post was 2301.  I just can't keep up.  And Zandar is taking a break.)

Breakfast Links

Procrastination, mostly.  Shall we begin?

• Spocko on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Getting his Perot on for a good cause.
• Apparently conservatives gave in to their urge to exhibit their tushes on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's death:  Republic of T has examples.  Especially when misapprehending normal behavior.   Jesse Curtis riffs off Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on the uses of violence and non-violence.
• And by the way, racism is not "over."
• As for Santa and Jesus…let me see…St. Nicholas was an Anatolian Greek; not too many blond blue-eyed guys in that group; someone posted a possible reconstruction of the saint's face, and I will post the link later. here we go. He would have been "dark for purposes of whiteness," as Avedon used to say.  Jesus, of course, was Jewish, and Jews have only been considered "white" since the middle of the last century.  Ms. Kelly probably also went to Casablanca for the waters.  (Depictions of Santa have tended to pink him up; depictions of Jesus tend to both lighten his skin and hair.  Depictions are not accurate.  Got that?)

In Memoriam

Peter O'Toole, actor.





(has it really been a week and a half?)

In Memoriam

 Nelson Mandela.  Statesman.  Prisoner, liberator, president of South Africa, worker for peace and justice.  In a nutshell, one of the Great Ones.

And More Again

It's a Love song.

• World News Connection to be shut down New Year's Eve.  Via Mercury Rising, which also said:

   "Open source news/intel, like open source computer code, is far less susceptible to manipulation and corruption. Guess that’s why the Open Source Center has to be done away with."

  Uh-huh.
  

• Just three stitches cost $2,229.11? Sealing a wound with skin glue, for $1,696? This is a national disgrace. In all of the haranguing about healthcare, little attention has been paid to the actual cost of simple procedures like this. When Republicans go on TV and tell everyone that we do have universal healthcare — at emergency rooms — and you see hospitals turning their ERs into “profit centers,” you’ve gotta wonder what the hell is going on. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: where there’s shit there’s always flies.

  Southern Beale. Yes, it is now cheaper to check into the Ritz and have the doctor come to you.
• Mills River Progressive links to a .pdf of how corporate espionage, um, interacts with non-profits, activists, and an AlterNet summary of tactics used.  And tracking "authentication" has still not been derailed.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid flushes Peggy Noonan and remarks:

  A president who stakes his entire reputation on a complex scheme gone awry? And who never rides herd on the people who were supposed to make sure it went right?
  
  Hmmm, let me think....
  
  That 8-year selective amnesia about the guy before Obama is a funny thing.

• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan deconstructs a conservative's inability to understand choice and society (no, I shouldn't say that.  They understand choice if it's what they think everyone should choose, and they understand society as something where they make the rules.  They also seem to think [I use the term "think* advisedly] that tax money is supposed to support private schools, apparently having missed the word "private.").
  
  Why do I think that none of the conservatives who write that kind of swill have ever been in the armed forces or even served on a jury?

Wooooooooooooo-Hoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

 Chip's a Grand Master!  Chip's a Grand Master!!

Oh, By the Way...

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, at the one-or-is-it-two-month mark, seems to be working. Via Republic of T.

As in California, Obamacare is working in Kentucky for precisely the people it was intended to help. In places like Breathitt County, with a per-capita income of about $15,000 per year, it’s working for Americans who were unable to afford private health insurance and were previously ineligible for Medicaid.

Health care reform is working as envisioned in Kentucky for two reasons. The state opted to set up its own health insurance exchange, and Gov. Steve Beshear (D) stood alone among Southern governors when he signed on to the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. Kentuckians who apply for health insurance under the new law simply have to choose from a wide array of plans available either through the state’s exchange or its expanded Medicaid program.

If, as Republicans continue to claim, Obamacare “doesn’t work,” then it shouldn’t work anywhere. If it can work in states as different as California [and Kentucky], then it can work anywhere.

Apparently the Republican reaction in California is to run a fake website.  They still got nuthin'.

Dinner with the Family. Not.

Via skippy:  A Walmart Thanksgiving, by Charles Dickens.  Because apparently that bunch (the Walmart Execs, and yes, that's a lousy name for a band) missed the message the first time.  (Crooks and Liars is a terrific resource.)

I understand there is a Walmart somewhere in the region.  I will not be going there.

Death Wish

"How the GOP Is Literally Killing Its Voters," Alex Henderson, AlterNet.  Because you only have to fall through the net once.

Older news, but as teabaggers have been studiously ignoring it (probably because they think they'll benefit.  They're wrong):  The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the reasons to oppose it.  Jim Hightower, AlterNet.

Mass Hysteria

Well, no, more like temper tantrums.

Charles II at Mercury Rising links to and excerpts Ed Pilkington's article in the Guardian, adding his own coda:

These people are evil. There is no other word to describe the attempt to deny health care to people who are uninsurable because they are sick or poor. 40,000 American die every year because of their past efforts. To continue to cause people to die needlessly in the face of having lost the argument and two national elections is, very simply, murder.

Not pro-life, despite the rhetoric. But you knew that.

ALEC does not support legislation in people's best interests.  Remember that.

Working

Driftglass on the employment situation in these United States.

And yes, his headline is deliberate.

ETA:  Jurassicpork concurs.

Four For Texas

• Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance.  I am linking to the article at Transgriot by Monica Roberts, found via Red Light Politics, as part of my remembrance.  No one should be murdered for their gender presentation, their jobs, or their sexuality.  Ever.
• You know, one of the things that apparently needs to be taught in kindergarten is "Never sell or buy drugs from an undercover cop."  Really.  It's been fairly obvious for years now is that the crime is not the buying (or selling) of drugs, but the buying of drugs from undercover cops.  Read any article about someone busted for illegal pharmaceuticals.  If a search of premises is not involved, somewhere the words "undercover police" are guaranteed to appear.  Rep. Trey Radel (Republican, of Florida, of course) is merely the latest slow learner.
• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast talks about her sister and their relationship over the years, and then weighs in in strong terms on Liz Cheney's dismissal of her sister Mary's marriage.  Frankly, I hope Liz Cheney's ears are hotter than jalapeños.  No decency and no shame.
• Greg Prince shakes hands with Dwight Gooden.  (And writes about meaning.)

Early Sorrow

• In memoriam:  Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning author.
• Batocchio (Vagabond Scholar) on war and human stupidity around war.  A taste because otherwise I'd just quote the whole thing (it's that good):

  Tragically, it's easier to start a war than to end one. And it's easier, in national "debates" on war, for the wiser voices to be drowned out by the foolish, the vain, the frightened, the posturing, the political ambitious, and the greedy.
  
  […]
  
  And here's the thing. The national discourse will never be lacking in Richard Cohens and Megan McArdles eager to sacrifice other people's lives because they feel scared. It will never be lacking Tom Friedmans hungry to have others fight in a war to prove their own toughness. It will never lack Ann Coulters filled with rage and driven to prove their dominance, or George Bushes and Bill Kristols enthusiastic to taunt their political foes and live out macho fantasies. It will never lack highly pedigreed but foolish pundits such as Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, who try to sell (to themselves and others) blithe imperialism as sober-minded realism. That leaves it to the rest of us to oppose these fuckers and build mechanisms so they can't start more unnecessary wars, not so easily. And that will be the work of sustained effort over many years. [Emphasis added.]

  The old-fashioned term is "vainglory." 
• [ETA: This morning over at Comrade Misfit's place, I saw a post announcing that one of the blogs that had been silent for a year was so because the blogger, Jeff Huber, had died, so I ankled on over and I'm still reading, but this post supports what I've been thinking about war for a while now. A sample:

  Every place we have bombed, boarded, bludgeoned, beheaded and bloodied, from Iraq to the Bananastans to Libya to Somalia to Yemen, looks like a big-city zoo ten minutes after the force-ten earthquake hit it.
  
  Our generals and the sycophant politicians who grovel at their spit-polished feet would have us believe that we now have to dedicate the next 80 years or so into rounding up all the critters we let loose and putting them back in their cages. Well guess what, folks. All them loose critters are making new critters faster than we can give Dick Cheney's pals no-bid contracts to build new cages to put them all in. You cannot win un-winnable wars. The longer you pursue them, the longer it takes to lose them.

  By the way, he has a lovely line in euphemism. "Unrefined used horse lunch," indeed.
  

AlterNet Is Totally On Fire Today

Who's got the marshmallows?

• Why you should be concerned about that global warming climate changing stuff.
• "Anarchist" as substitute for "commie" in the scare-monger arsenal.
• Capitalism's discouragements.
• People who lack empathy--nature or nurture?
• Breaking bad, er, habits.

Weekend…The Long Version

Thank you, Don Pardo.

• It turns out that the head of CBS News is a former Faux News honcho, and that there's a wee bit of possible conflict of interest with the eyewitness who wasn't.  (News Corpse, via Mercury Rising.)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates (Atlantic) and Abi Sutherland (Making Light) dissect Richard Cohen's unconsciously revealing column in the Washington Post; Mr. Coates calls it what it is, and Ms. Sutherland makes of the offending paragraph a pantoum.*  [ETA:  Lance Mannion has another take on that column.][EFTA, 11/24: Chris Clarke, who is probably not the Chris Clarke in my elementary Russian class in college, damnit, composed a pointed parody.  Courtesy of in medias res at Making Light.]

* "pantoum |panˈto͞om|(also pantun )

nouna Malay verse form, imitated in French and English, consisting of quotations with anabab rhyme scheme linked by repeated lines."

It Seems...

that one of the witnesses to the Benghazi attack…wasn't there.

"Careful With That Axe, Eugene"

Still meditating on that generosity thing.  And pondering what it meant that Mom left all that luggage in front of the seat on the train and then disappeared (another dream, more weirdness).  In any case, all these tabs have got to go.

• Via Echidne of the Snakes, another conservative misapprehension.

  For note that a good economy, a safety net which encourages entrepreneurship (and stops the vortex that results in extreme poverty), fair wages and retirement systems would NOT create "a permanent majority demanding government hand-outs." Because the majority of people would be paying federal income taxes and sharing in the expenses of our shared concerns.

• Republic of T on the peculiar things conservatives believe about the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.  With videos.  Bonus:  "Speaker Boehner, Job Discrimination Is Not "Frivolous."  With examples and personal testimony.
• Good news!  Illinois voted to allow same-sex marriages!  (OK, so this is a day or so old.)
• Mills River Progressive on restraining the NSA and on the Farm Bill.
• Fancy that:  Obamacare gaining positive attention in the polls.  Gee.  And in spite of all that negative attention, too.  Gosh!
• Music!  Music!  Music!

We Fight On

Pvt. Chelsea Manning's ongoing struggle to live as a woman (and the obstacles in the way).

The military has said it does not provide treatment for gender dysphoria. Pentagon policy dictates that transgender soldiers are not allowed to serve, but Manning can't be discharged until she's released from prison and exhausts appeals of her criminal convictions. The Army Medical Command has said prisoners cannot receive hormone treatment at Fort Leavenworth, though Manning is apparently the first to request it. Prison officials have said Manning won't be allowed to dress as a woman.

The case may have to go to court.

Oh, And...

Happy Halloween.

Food Stamps

• Republic of T:  "47 Million Americans Are Going Over the 'Hunger Cliff.'"

  The truth is that sometimes those who work still can’t eat. Many food stamp recipients have jobs. They are the working poor, whose wages are not enough to lift them out of poverty. They are low-wage workers for highly profitable companies that refuse to pay living wages. They rely on food stamps to stave off hunger. Some employers, like McDonald’s tell workers to apply for food stamps if their wages aren’t enough to put food on the table.
  These are the people who will be going over the “Hunger Cliff” while members of Congress negotiate even more cuts to food stamps.

• Welcome Back to Pottersville:  "McHammered."

  This cruel brand of wingnuttery (check out the barely literate comments at the end of the article) would drive me crazy even if I wasn't on SNAP myself. Ozimek seems perfectly comfortable with the federal government bailing out bottomlessly avaricious corporations like McDonald's who long ago found a way to game the system and get the American taxpayer to assume much of the burden of their overhead expenses such as payroll and health care. He seems to have not the slightest problem with a person such as Nancy Salgado making minimum wage after a full decade with the company and that company telling her, "Rather than pay you even a penny more an hour, go on public relief."

Five billion dollars funding the SNAP/food stamp program are scheduled to expire at the end of the day. No legislator will miss a meal. Just saying.

Via skippy, Lance Mannion on Edward R. Murrow and the news biz.  There were giants in those days.  There were non-giants, too.

There’s a hint in the movie that TV journalism---all journalism---was what it is today, superficial, process and narrative obsessed, prone to the worship of power and success and the celebrification of the rich and powerful, including and especially Washington politicians, fetishizing “balance” and “objectivity”. Chuck Todd would have been as at home then as he is now, although he might have thought twice before blithely announcing it’s not his job to sort out fact from fiction or determine who’s lying and who’s telling the truth out of fear of what Ed Murrow would think of him. But part of why McCarthy was able to get away with things he did---“I hold in my hand a list…” was that the national press corps practiced the same He Said-She Said journalism that lets Republicans today claim climate change is a hoax, tax cuts pay for themselves, government spending doesn’t create jobs, Obamacare will establish death panels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... I learned in a history of journalism course back in college that after the Senate finally censured McCarthy and he crawled all the way into the bottle---one thing is clear in the clips interspersed throughout Good Night, and Good Luck: McCarthy was almost continually drunk---there was some collective soul-searching among journalists and editors that concluded with the self-indictment that “balance” was another name for institutional timidity and for some time after, up to and through the Vietnam War and Watergate, news organizations practiced a more aggressive and investigative brand of reporting. That ended with the election of Ronald Reagan and the realization that there was a large conservative audience waiting to be exploited as a market for advertising.

At the daily howler, Mr. Somerby in commenting on a speech by Malala Yousafzai mentions the oppositional tendency of current journalists.

George Takei speaks at the National Press Club (YouTube video -- speech begins 8 minutes in).

Higher Ground

• Falsehoods about Obamacare, take n + 1:

  This year the campaign to recast a program that makes health insurance accessible to millions of Americans as a plague of locusts has risen to fever pitch. The Republican Party and conservative media has pulled out all the stops in a strategy aimed at scaring people from signing up with the hope that low enrollment will collapse the system.

  Mark Howard at AlterNet, folks.
• The 300,000 Floridians; the Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO corrects the record.  Via Zandar Versus The Stupid. 
• Driftglass is conducting a fundraiser.  Sample post.
• Bob Somerby wonders why baseball games take so long now and invokes the '63 Series and Koufax and Drysdale.

In Memoriam

Lou Reed, musician (Velvet Underground).

Influential, OK.  Pioneer, no.

Hot Fun in the Autumn-time

Well, no; fall is Serious Business.  Winter is coming, and those acorns don't get buried by themselves.

• In memoriam:  Anthony Caro, abstract sculptor.
• Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, on "The Coercive Power of Capitalism."  Because it's not benign.

  And this might put the “failure of capitalism” theme in context. If you have a system that requires that people sell their labor as a condition of survival, yet fails to provide enough opportunities to sell labor to go around, you have conditions for revolt. Hungry, desperate people having nothing to lose. That, and not charity, is the root of the welfare state, to provide a buffer for when the capitalist system chokes up and presumably on a short-term basis, fails to provide enough jobs (that and to provide for people who are infirm, handicapped, or otherwise cannot work, which communities in England did in the early modern era).
  
  So you can see the obvious tension: the capitalist classes in America, to increase their riches further, have been squeezing workers harder by not hiring as they did in the past. We’ve never had a “recovery” in the post-WWII era with so little of GDP growth going to labor (meaning both hiring and wage increases). In the past, the average was over 60% and the lowest was 55%. I haven’t seen a recent update, but the last figures I saw was that the level for this “recovery” was under 30%. Yet simultaneously, theres’s a full-bore effort on to gut the remaining safety nets. If this isn’t a prescription for social and political instability, I don’t know what is.

  Read the rest; it'll straighten your hair.
• I had thought I'd pointed people at Margaret and Helen's latest.  Apparently not.  Ableist language.  Also, I think it is time for Texas women to rise in revolt.  (See note.)

Obamacare Makes a Difference; That's Why the Fear

• Republic of T on how the Affordable Care Act is already working.  (I've seen blustering by Republicans that they'd do the whole thing differently and better.  Which of course is why it took how many years? for this version of health care to come about.  Pull the other leg, it has bells.)
• That number, again, if you can't reach the ACA website:  

  1-800-318-2596

• Fibromyalgia cause.  (Washington Times article.)

  Now it has been discovered when the AV [arterio-venous] shunt is defective in function and interferes with capillary function, muscle and skin tissue cannot get proper nutrition or waste drawn away. Additionally, temperature regulation becomes an issue affecting nerve fibers.

• Now to go and enjoy some oldies.  Motown oldies.

Just Listenin' to George Carlin

"The planet isn't going anywhere.  We are."  -- G. Carlin

Last year, I linked to Sara Robinson's articles at Orcinus analyzing Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.  She wrote essays on three of the four folkways, but she never got around to the fourth one, at least not where I could find it (I searched).  [ETA:  This post links to those articles.]

This gap has been filled (not by Mrs. Robinson, alas) by Geenius at Wrok, who has a long piece at (I'm sorry) Daily Kos:  "E Pluribus Contentio:  The Origins (and Dangers) of the Tea Party Shutdown"

One paragraph:

It ought to be, more than anything else, the concept of pluralism itself -- the idea that people with different traits and different values can and should live together under one system that respects the dignity and rights of all of them and gives every one of them a voice. That's what our Founders envisioned, to the extent that the logic of their times would allow. That's what lured generations of immigrants away from repressive monarchies. That's what inspired dissidents living behind the Iron Curtain and enticed many of them to defect. That's what African Americans marched and often died for during the Civil Rights Era. That's what still draws political refugees seeking asylum. If we can't reestablish a consensus behind pluralism now, America as we know it, understand it and revere it is, for all intents and purposes, over.

I think this is either the first or second time I've actually cited the Great Orange Satan. Thanks to supergee on Dreamwidth for the link.

And Then the Creature Invaded My Dreams

• 1-800-318-2596

  is the number to call to register by phone if you're having problems with the Affordable Care Act website.  Spreading the word from Mercury Rising.  
• The Pacific Ocean has dead zones.  Do not touch anything at the top of the page; if you do, at the moment you can get it back by passing over Front Page.
• Tomorrow the Red Sox and the Cardinals start throwing down for the World Championship.  (I'd had hope that the ancient Boston Braves and St. Louis Browns had met back in the distant past, but no, the Browns lost the one Series they were in in '44, and the Braves, who won in 1914, lost in '48.)  We shall see.

But I'm Not Vegan!

Chicken.  Yes, chicken.  Sick-making.

ETA:  And Safeway continued to sell contaminated chicken known to be contaminated.  (Spocko's Brain.  He got firsthand experience.)

Yes, I do prepare chicken correctly.  Nevertheless.

Conservatives Hope You Get Sick

• Wired interview with the Director of U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  

  [TRF:] [...] For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare.
  
  ‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
  Every day in this country, there are births and deaths and hospitalizations and surgical procedures and emergency department visits and infections, and HIV and TB, and people who get sick from contaminated foods. For every day that goes by, there’s a less intensive investigation, less effective prevention of situations like this. If I had to use one phrase to describe what’s happening: This is a self-inflicted wound.

• Aedes aegypti found in California (vector for yellow fever, dengue fever and West Nile virus).
• Antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
• And 

  Two Colorado cantaloupe farmers plan to plead guilty under a deal with federal prosecutors in connection with the 2011 listeria outbreak that killed 33 people in the nation's deadliest case of foodborne illness in a quarter century.
  
  Eric and Ryan Jensen were charged last month with introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce.

  Because of course that would never happen.

But apparently the CDC was not essential.

Infection control has a liberal bias.

Maybe It Was Written in COBOL...

Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones on the glitchy health care registration website:

In the meantime, Obamacare is fodder for debate about the merits of government vs. private industry. My own sense of the general issue is that government does some things well, and private industry does other things well. Government does more things well, and private industry more things badly, in my observation, than the strictest libertarian arguments allow for. When I was young, “small government” people had “government shouldn’t legislate morality” arguments for why the free market would do a much better job at ending discrimination than anti-discrimination laws would, but, from where I sit, anti-discrimination laws worked much better for this purpose. Similarly, government does better than private industry at addressing certain externalities like pollution, and providing certain public services where both leaving people uncovered and allowing people to be free riders pose problems (for some things, like fire departments, we can all agree to this, even if we disagree vehemently over how far health care fits this model). On the other hand, I think we pretty much agree that government does less well at central planning than some still hoped it would, when I was young.

Large institutional websites take a while to work after launch.  Other factors do not help.

Republicans can say all they want that they are doing what’s best for the country. It feels a lot like revenge, and polls show that Americans are not fooled by Republicans saying otherwise.

Republic of T, calling out some liars.

Psychological Reasoning

Humans have a talent for finding enemies, and if they can't find a real one, they'll turn on the nearest innocent bystander not-friend and mock up a monster.  Jesse Curtis pegs it:

The far right in American politics is always looking for an enemy that's not there. So they make one up. Having done so, the money flows in, the emotional catharsis is achieved, and they can feel secure in their status as the heirs of 1776.

I bear in mind that the "center" and the "right" are in some ways not as far apart as they might look.  (As are the "center" and the "left."  I am of the "left" because I find the "right" morally, personally, psychologically, and intellectually repellent.)

Hard Truth

Arthur Silber:

[M]ost people do not object to power itself. Most people are enormously comfortable with power, and they are more than happy to obey the dictates of those in positions of authority. Their only requirement is that power be exercised by those they approve and view favorably. It should not be necessary to state explicitly a logically compelled further point. But, since the minds of so many "dissenters" and "radicals" seem to be on extended vacation, it is advisable to set it out: You cannot successfully challenge an enemy by adopting his methods. When you adopt the enemy's methods, you no longer challenge him: you become him. [Emphasis in original.]

The essay is about Mr. Greenwald and the Snowden secrets, but that paragraph applies to everyone.

Bit of a Jeremiad

Via Mills River Progressive, Chris Hedges at Truthdig:

In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.

It's one and one-third pages long.

I could pick at stuff, but this is prime wailing.  The comments are the usual swamp.

Because Nobody Gets Stalked On Line. Uh-Uh.

Tell me again just how concerned they are about privacy.

(PS:  If you ever run across a Facebook account that alleges to be mine, it is fake; I refuse to have a Facebook account.)

In Memoriam

• Scott Carpenter, astronaut (Mercury 7)
• Stanley Kauffmann, movie critic
• Andy Pafko, Brooklyn Dodger

Conservatives and Republicans So Love the Troops...

Open letter from a veteran on food stamps.

I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America. I certainly didn’t risk it so *I* could come back and go hungry.

Anyone who genuinely supports cutting food stamps is not an intellectual or an ideologue – they’re a bully.

And nobody likes a bully. Except other bullies.

By the way, I found this link on a porn site.

"Saruman the White Has Ever Been Our Friend and Ally"

Thank you, Grima.

More Wormtonguery:

• April Short at AlterNet asks an obvious question:  If the Drug Enforcement Administration is not particularly effective, why wasn't it shut down? 
• Two things:
• A suggestion to let the Red States secede from Obamacare (David Morris, AlterNet).
• Ta-Nehisi Coates is not in favor of that.
• Missouri governor about to make anesthesia more expensive.
• And sturgeonslawyer (Dreamwidth and LiveJournal) posts a eulogy for the Republican Party.

In Memoriam

Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast's husband, Mr. Brilliant.

Presenting

Video by Senator Bernie Sanders discussing the shutdown.  (No transcript, unfortunately.)  Six minutes.

It Stood Out

Driftglass:

By now, the life cycle of every GOP crisis --

• Fling the country into the middle of a manufactured nation-threatening cataclysm for craven, political reasons;
• Publicly shit the bed so hard trying to extricate themselves from their own clever scheme, the sheer force of it lifts them into orbit;
• Frantically scramble around trying to hang the blame for failing to defuse the bomb they built on the same people who [tried] to stop them from building the bomb in the first place

-- is such a baseline element of modern American political life that anyone who is actually surprised by any of this, or who continues to drop automatically into a "Both Sides Do It" crouch every time the Penguin figures out some new way [to] threaten Gotham City, should seriously consider having themselves put into a medically induced coma until the Second Coming. [Typo corrections mine.]

Because we don't get enough Batman references in our political discourse.

Here, Have Some Class War

Via Zandar Versus the Stupid, Aimai at No More Mister Nice Blog gets to the core of what the Republicans really want, by way of analogy to the Fine Dining Experience, citing a restaurant owner who ran a service-charge, no-tips restaurant.  (Read that whole series of articles if you have the time; it's an amazing peek into a world that everyone [except the people working in it] believes they know about and actually have no clue.)

I'd even argue that Reince Priebus's absurd "offer" to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government's attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the "do you know who I am?" principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

Zandar summarizes it all for you:

So no, the Republicans don't care about furloughed federal workers and their families, because the entire shutdown scenario is nothing more than collective punishment against all the people who voted for Obama. Shutting down the government was the plan all along, as this NY Times article points out.

[...]

Make no mistake, this shutdown and the threat of default is collective punishment against those of us who dared to opposed the Way Things Ought To Be. The shutdown is there and the price of that shutdown is the end of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans will destroy our country at this point, and cause trillions in damage and suffering for tens of millions of us in order to get their way.

[...]

We're ten days out from a economic and constitutional crisis, and there's no indication that it will be averted. You, me, and the rest of The Help must be punished, and the Republicans are going to wreck the country in order to do so, then say "We will continue to destroy your family and your economy until you realize that you are beneath us." [Emphasis in original.]

By the way, are you reading Avedon's Sideshow?  You should be reading Avedon's Sideshow.  Go right now and read Avedon's Sideshow.  You can thank me later.

ETA:  At NMMNB, I fell across something called Reading is for Snobs, which has an interesting quote from Marc Thiessen, Republican speechwriter, excerpted from a Washington Post column.

Lest We Have Forgotten

The NSA is still out there.  How they attacked Tor.  (Not the publisher; software for a network enabling on-line anonymity. Originally The Onion Router.)

See? See?

I've been saying for years that conservatives think "Dickensian" is a term of approbation.

Evidence that we are indeed moving toward "Dickensian."

Cries and Whispers

No, not really.

• In memoriam:  Vo Nguyen Giap, general.
• Yes, that is "Radar Love" in the background.
• There's a reason for that elastic cord on your masks:  Zandar of Zandar Versus The Stupid caught an exchange between his Senators on strategy on live microphone.

  What the Wonder Twins here don't understand is the vast majority of Americans are against the idea of shutting down the government over Obamacare. They think that America is going to blame the Democrats for this for refusing to scrap a law that passed in 2010, was upheld by SCOTUS in 2012, and topped by President Obama's re-election 11 months ago.
  
  Like Team Romney a year ago, these idiots think they've already won. They're completely baffled as to how anyone could side with Obama over this. They think Obama will cave any minute now.
  
  The one person these two morons don't care about? You.
  
  Keep that in mind.

• Texas is preventing old ladies from voting.  Mmm-hmmmmmmmmmm.  Via skippy.
• The playoffs are under way.  Oooh, the suspense.  (The Cincinnati Reds have already fired Dusty Baker.)
• Redbone (the band) is Chicano/Native American.  Never knew that.

Mostly Current Events

Remember "Current Events," usually discussed in History classes?  Does that even happen in school anymore?

• Your Congresscreatures are still getting paid.  (Carla Marinucci at SFGate.com, and yes, I noticed that she seems to point more at Democrats than Republicans.)  
• Comprehensive piece from Terrance Heath, Republic of T, on the details and effects of the shutdown.

  Calling the GOP’s antics childish is an insult to children. [...]
  
  With two kids, sharing and taking turns is mandatory in our house. But it’s not always easy. When there’s trouble, it often involves the television. After playing outside, eating dinner, and finishing homework we let our boys watch some television before bedtime. Since children’s shows are usually half an hour long, every 30 minutes they take turns choosing what to watch.
  
  [...]
  
  Once, our oldest was inconsolable over losing a bit of his television time. I asked him in exasperation ,”Well, what would make you happy?” He responded, “A thousand turns!”
  
  I thought about that exchange when House Republicans sent the Senate a continuing resolution tying government funding to delaying or defunding the Affordable Care Act. It came to mind again when GOP concocted an even more ludicrous list of demands for raising the debt ceiling. The difference is that our son stopped his grumbling and pouting, because he knew that he was demanding what he’d never get.[Emphasis added]

• Margaret and Helen.  With a history lesson.
• Comrade Misfit calls excrement on the Tea Party and conservatives.

  Providing a national version of Romneycare is, according to them, the clearest and presentist danger to the Republic that has ever existed.*
  
  Yet when clear evidence is presented to them of Federal government intrusion: Tracking what people do online, who they talk to on their phones and what they talk about, what they purchase with their credit/debit cards and where they are, well, all you hear from the Right is silence.

  You know why, of course.

Why I Love Margaret and Helen, Part n

If brains were leather, Cruz wouldn’t have enough to saddle a junebug.

There is, of course, more.

In Memoriam

Robert Barnard, mystery writer.

Malign or Banana Peels Revisited

I might believe the part about mixing codeine, alcohol, and iodine, but the gasoline is over the top.

Two Things

1. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are contending for the National League Wild Card.  (St. Louis gets the Central Division title.)
2. Tampa Bay and Cleveland are tied for the AL Wild Card.  Texas might still sneak!

I Missed Bruce Springsteen's Birthday

So have some human interest stuff (that is, interesting if you study humans.  Less so if you are a human.    Mildly offensive to fans of the restoration of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs):

• Comrade Misfit notes that Senator Feinstein, who used to be against oversight of the NSA, is now in favor of some, and makes some suggestions toward reform, with a warning:

  The intelligence community is also ignoring history by their repeated assurances that they can be trusted not to abuse their powers. History teaches us that power corrupts, period. Power, both large and small, can be counted on to be abused by the person holding the power. The only way to stop such corruption is to have watchdogs, both inside and outside the government.
  
  The "outside the government" watchdogs are supposed to be our free press. They have fallen down woefully on the job.

• Via Zandar:  the governor of Kentucky champions Obamacare.  (Extensive quote from the New York Times, in case you've used up the 10 articles.)  [ETA:   And maybe someone should talk to neighboring Tennessee...]
• Interesting article at Walk On, referring to an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Yes, they both need to be read.  Also, see this video of James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley in 1965.

In Memoriam

Michael Ward, survivor of the Move (or MOVE) bombing in Philadelphia (alluded to here).

The Season Winds Down

Well, we're still waiting on the Wild Card results, but the division champions are mostly established:  Boston, Detroit, Oakland (AL); Atlanta, Los Angeles (NL).  St. Louis and Pittsburgh will be in the playoffs one way or another, and Cincinnati is one of the four wild card teams. (Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Pittsburgh at the moment, with Texas probably still hoping to sneak in.)

I wonder how much Divisional Championship sweatshirts are going for this year.

"Noh" Theater

With all of this going on it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that what Ted Cruz’s theater is all about is denying people access to affordable private, for-profit health insurance. [Emphasis added]

Southern Beale cuts to the chase.

It's Jello-Smearing Time

Driftglass has a simple post:  "Bill Cosby Explains What goes on in the conservative brain when you say 'Obamacare'."

With video audio.

Loose Items

• The True History of Libertarianism in America (NSFWCORP via AlterNet)  I have, I hope, made it crystal-clear that I am not a libertarian.  Right?
• The Dodgers have clinched the NL Western Division title.  The Red Sox are assured a playoff berth, and will probably clinch AL Eastern Division today or tomorrow.  The Orioles and Arizona have moved into the eliminated column.  Tampa Bay, Texas, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati are holding on in Wild Card standings.  The suspense...
• One of the reasons I love Echidne of the Snakes:

  Third, this is absolutely hilarious, given that conservatives reallyreally want to insert probes (transvaginal ultrasound) in women's vaginas as a precondition for getting an abortion, and those probes are not medically required. Women are not supposed to mind that but they *are* supposed to mind a large puppet ogling their birth canals.

Missing the 19th Century

...which may have been too modern for them...

• GOP in dwindling demographic niche and why outreach hasn't been working for them.

  Instead of asking “Why don’t more blacks, Latinos, women, etc., join us?”, Republicans should ask “How are we failing to address the concerns of blacks, Latinos, women, etc., so that more of them will want to join us?” That’s a question that Republicans can’t ask, because answering would mean changing their tone and their policies. Republicans can’t do that without having the very same rage they encouraged in their base turned against them.

  Republic of T, of course.
• Someone who tweeted foolish things about women's suffrage and individual freedom being incompatible, probably because assuming "women" not equal to "individual." There are times when I can understand the desire of some women to have as little to do with men as humanly possible.  Noli Irritare Leones.  (With all this misogyny, shouldn't monasteries be thriving?)
• [ETA] Someone ignorant who believes women should homeschool children and not waste time working.  This is one of the reasons I couldn't care less about his stance on drugs.

Catching Up

I've been distracted.

• In the American League:  The Yankees (hee!), the Blue Jays, the Twins, the White Sox, the Angels, the Mariners, and Houston (I'm still not used to that) are looking at an early winter, although there are still Wild Card possibilities.
• In the National League:  Phillies, Mets, Dolphins Marlins, Brewers, Cubs, Padres, Giants, and Rockies are out of contention.  They also have Wild Card possibilities.

(I don't see how making baseball more like hockey improves the sport, but I'm a fuddy duddy and you need to get off my lawn.)

PS  It's Talk Like A Pirate Day, matey.  Shiver your own timbers.

The Antagonists

Why we're in trouble:

• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast on the enmity between (large numbers of) Republicans and (an awful lot of) Americans.
• Yves Smith at naked capitalism features a brief video segment on the failure of Occupy to become a mass political movement.
• Also from Yves Smith:  Banks are above rules.  In certain matters, anyway.
• ETA:  Dave Neiwert at Orcinus on "secessionist" movements and some more America-hating.  A taste, because he's not kidding:

  This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently and most of all who think differently from them.
  They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.
  
  Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain, "This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter suppression by conservative Republicans.
  
  And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to drop out.

It turns out, by the way, that I know someone who voted for Romney. (We all got rather too enthusiastically anti-conservative.)  Oh, well.

Moral Hazard, My Aspidistra

Subsidy-glomming reps want to cut food stamps.  Via Republic of T.

The absolutely hilarious part is that some of the biggest recipients of farm subsidies voted to cut food stamps and voted to keep giving subsidies to rich farmers — like themselves. Fourteen Republicans — with a total net worth of $124.5 million, including $7.2 million in farm subsidies — not only voted take food from the mouths of millions of the poor, the working poor, the unemployed, children, the elderly, and the disabled, but voted to continue putting money in their own pockets.
[...]
And these people want to preach to the rest of us about morality?

"I Was Struck by Lightning, Walking Down the Street"

Leave your body at the door.

• One of the ripples from the Snowden revelations:  Brazil steering away from U.S.-centred Internet.

  While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians' Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.
  
  The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet's open, interconnected structure.

• How your brain works, or doesn't.

  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

It's a dead man's party.

Revival

I keep putting off posting that Orcinus is back.

• On Russia's gay-bashing.
• On reasons to support Orcinus' work.
• Fundraising.
• On disagreeing about Ron Paul.
• On "patriot" communities.
• Why Mr. Neiwert is reviving Orcinus.

Straight-up exposure of the fascist octopus attempts at respectability.

Atque Vale

Jurassicpork on Boston's farewell to Mariano Rivera.

Is That Tiger On Holiday?

The relationship of unions and racial equality.  (Not that this is a perfect relationship.)  With graphs.

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

110 Stories

"110 Stories," by John M. Ford.

Note to self

God always has enough.

(L'shana tova for those who celebrate.)

In Memoriam

Frederik Pohl.

His last and penultimate post.

I used to run into him frequently twenty or so years back.  He will be greatly missed.

Leak at Fukushima

You can ignore the truth but the truth won’t ignore you.

--Iori Mochizuki

Yes, I Went There

Via skippy:  5 complaints of the "Christian" Right, and who is really getting hurt.  (Warning:  Amanda Marcotte)

Y'know, I've never been able to sit through Elmer Gantry.

Also, this is a review of the movie about One Direction in which the obvious comparison does not appear, probably because One Direction:  This Is Us would look even worse.  (I was not impressed by One Direction.  One, the abbreviation is one-dimensional.  Two, I get the appeal of young male singers who prance on stage, but does none of them play an instrument?  Three, get off my lawn.)


"It's been a hard day's night..."

In Memoriam

• Lotfi Mansouri, S. F. Opera director
• Seamus Heaney, poet
• Sathima Bea Benjamin, jazz singer/activist
• Red Burns, "Godmother of Silicon Alley"

Wishing Now I'd Requested Overnight Delivery of That Shipment of Words

The projected gutting of the New York Public Library, as reported by Lambert Strether at naked capitalism.  Specifically, the main branch at 42nd and 5th.

...the real fight here is for public purpose, as opposed to the civic vandalism of rentiers[.]...

Putting in an Order for a Shipment of Words...

...to the outlet at Poughkeepsie.

• Cornel West (via Raw Story) on materialism and virtue (video), because I have been mumbling for years about how commodifying everything including things and values that should not be commodified is destructive to "society" and "values."  Except I've not quite got the words right.  I have figured that insisting that "everything has a price" leads to libertarianism as opposed to liberty, and I have noticed "civic virtue"seems to be a forgotten quality (and besides, both Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer are running for office in New York City, so what is civic virtue anyway?), and anyone can see that the politicians bleating the loudest about "values" don't seem to have any.
  
  In other words, Dr. West, it's not only civil rights leaders. Also, Volpone is satire.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

  Like Du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. There has never been any other such moment in American history. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that this these people have a point. His biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don't know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion.

  Of course that was only one part of the speech. I will point out that W.E.B. Du Bois was not the first person to make the suggestion and Barack Obama will not be the last; the "black people are the agents of their own doom" meme pops up periodically because it's visible, superficial, and easy even if one knows the underlying causes.

Pass the Salt, Please

• Via skippy, the Texas Department of Transportation, faced with roads damaged by truck volume due to the oil boom, are planning to convert some of those roads to gravel and lower the speed limit.  No, really.

  “This is a safety issue,” Underwood said. “It’s not ‘our roads are bad and we’re not going to keep them up.’ It’s ‘our roads are bad and we’re trying to protect the driving public.’”

  Other states have weight limits and speed limits and enforcement.  But their roads are bad and they're not going to keep them up.
• Walk On presents a video of John Lewis speaking at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and discusses how right wingers claim a moral authority that they do not in fact possess.

  All of these outlets [listed in previous paragraph; Fox news, et al.] are opposed to the civil rights movement, opposed to what King stood for, opposed to one of the only living moral giants of American history, John Lewis.

• ETA:  Terrance Heath meditates on the journey between 1963 and the present.  With statistics.

In the Annals of the Real World Trumping Satire, It Is Impossible to be More Absurd Than Reality

Or why The Onion has been misfiring lately.  Apparently only the details are fiction.

Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks, writes:

As for me personally, I am getting scared to make fun of this stuff. The craziest nonsense I write is starting to come true.

I think I made the same point a few years ago and so did Aristophanes, probably.

In Memoriam

•  Albert Murray, scholar
• Marian McPartland, jazz pianist and radio host
• Sid Bernstein, impresario (I was one of those who had a ticket to the first Shea concert, though not Carnegie Hall)

*Headdesk* Department

• In the Odd How That Works section, a Texas megachurch previously in the antivax camp is urging the congregation to immunize (or stay quarantined) after a measles outbreak (all 11 cases in the county) is traced to them.  

  Pearsons did her best on Sunday to try to put a biblical spin on why the church had flip-flopped on its vaccination stance.
  
  “There are a lot of people that think the Bible — we talk about walking by faith — it leaves out things such as, I don’t know, people just get strange,” she said. “But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law.”
  
  “Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to disinfect, told them there was something contagious,” Pearsons continued. “And the interesting thing of it, it wasn’t a medical doctor per se who took care of those things, it was the priesthood. It was the ministers, it was those who knew how to take the promises of God as well as the commandments of God to take care of things like disinfection and so forth.”

  Give viruses and bacteria a shelter and they will turn on you. 
• Things that make me glad that conspirators of this sort aren't very bright:  Police foil far-rightists' plan.

From Raw Story.

A Thing of Beauty and a Joy for Today

Via Iron Tongue at Midnight:  Today's Google Doodle.

*Ahem*

That last post was number 2222.

We Have Stories, and Our Stories Reflect Moral Complexity. They Have Doctrine.

• Sophie's Choice, The Americanization of Emily, and Bradley Manning:  The process of hard choices (and torture).  Arthur Silber, making purveyors of "morality" look like buzzy-voiced unthinking jackals.  
• Via three different sources, one young woman rescued by food stamps (and kindnesses).  Comments unkind to jackals the politicians causing this quandary.

In Memoriam

Elmore Leonard, writer.

I only read one of his books (and it was not one of the ones made into a movie), but whooooo.

This Just In

The CIA admits to its role in Iranian coup in 1953.

Why yes, that did come back to bite them.  The '53 Iranian coup gets aired out every so often, particularly after bouts of saber-rattling.  Now with more documentation.

(Still 'meh.')

Meh.

Meh.  Maybe tomorrow.

I Wish It Would Rain

• Real reason for the fear hatred of Obamacare.  (Yes, it's Daily Kos.  You'll live.)
• Because in real life, Sisyphus is not a myth:  John Lewis on refighting the battles of civil rights.
• Economist Feud (with bonus round).  Krugman in the house!  (Article by Bill Black.)
• Yves Smith writes:
  

  An army of lawyers enabled this activity. We’ve had a lot of complaints about the failure to prosecute bank employees and executives, but perhaps the better question is why have virtually no foreclosure mill attorney been disbarred? Even when the firms like David Stern or Stephen Baum are targeted, the key attorneys often reconstitute elsewhere.
  
  [...]
  
  The state AG wanted to go after the foreclosure mills. The state bar association barred that action and has proceeded to clear the attorneys. If in a state like Florida they’ve looked at 149 cases and found nothing wrong, they are going to find nothing wrong.

  Virtually no lawyers disbarred.
  
• Republic of T reports on gay-bashing around the world.  Warning:  Graphic imagery, verbal and video.

Relatively Unrelated Relativity

Or Rossum's Universal Robots.  Your call.

• Long essay at Shakesville from Melissa McEwan, encapsulated in the first two lines and given detail and specifics thereafter.  Coda here.
• "Amazing amounts of money get looted in the normal operation of American health care."  Mr. Somerby at the Daily Howler on the lack of reporting on health care pricing.
• Why you don't want municipal services privatized.  Southern Beale with two examples, one local, one in Oklahoma.
• "Stop and frisk:"
• Pecunium's take;
• Zandar's take;
• Comrade Misfit's take.
• [It turns out I got this item from a locked post, so.] 
• [Warning for ableist language, specifically the word "madness" when what is meant is "irrational and self-destructive patterns of behavior or belief."]  Reprinted at AlterNet, Henry A. Giroux's article in CounterPunch on trends in the United States that appear to be irrational and self-destructive.

  ...[R]esponses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of marginalized groups as disposable populations. All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the technologies and mechanisms of disposability. One consequence is the spread of a culture of cruelty in which human suffering is not only tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural order of things.
  
  Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. We also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves.

Going Up to the Bell Tower...

• Somebody (I lost track of whom) linked to Stephen Fry's tumblr, wherein he horsewhips a British fish-wrapper and its owner and provides historical context.  A minor example:

  The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything - large and small - from Picasso to equal pay for women. Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.

  The Open Letter he refers to is here.
  
• Mills River Progressive points to the definition of fascism and some current examples.  (And yes, the term was misused and overused by the "left" for many years; between Godwin and "fascist octopi," the word and the concept were leached of rightful horror and power.  And humans tend to forget history.  And those with the visceral loathing of fascism born of exposure to it are dying out.)
• 1936.  That is all.

They Do Things Differently There

• Echidne of the Snakes excerpts Katha Pollitt on reproductive decisions in Europe and adds her own opinion.
• Jim Steranko on Twitter (hint:  Multi-episodic!).

Almost Had It, There

• The Daily Howler on the coverage of one of the candidates in the New York City mayoral election (hint:  Not Weiner) by a prominent columnist at the New York Times (hint:  Not Brooks),  with a quote from a commenter (not me) on the article:  "When did the Times editorial page become Tiger Beat?"  And here, America, is your handbasket; step carefully and be sure to strap in, the destination can be a bit rough...

• Now, Republicans are making another attempt to literally take food from the mouths of millions of working families, children, elderly and disabled Americans.

  From Republic of T., crying out for justice.
  I begin to wonder whether these Republicans have ever read the Gospels.  For people professing to be Christians, they display a remarkable ignorance about what Jesus of Nazareth preached.  Remember Jesus?  Christianity is centered around Jesus.  Not around capitalism or power.
  
• Secret accusers and information sources.  Where have I heard that before?  Sounds a little like the latter stages of the Dreyfus case or rumors about the Inquisition or Stalinist justice or something.

Brief Update

The San Diego County Clerk who had filed suit to stop same-sex marriages has withdrawn his petition.

In Moskva, Email Reads You

Yes.  Ancient Boris Badenov-type joke.

Via Mercury Rising, transcript of PBS's NewsHour aired August 1, 2013. Small and unrepresentative sample of the conversation:

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what does that say, Russell Tice, about what the government -- you're saying -- your understanding is of what the government does once these conversations take place, is it your understanding they're recorded and kept?

RUSSELL TICE: Yes, digitized and recorded and archived in a facility that is now online. And they're kind of fibbing about that as well, because Bluffdale is online right now.

And that's where the information is going. Now, as far as being able to have an analyst look at all that, that's impossible, of course. [...]

Let's just say that the official reassurances of the NSA sound a bit hollow.

Two Incidents

I'm not going to say it.  I don't need to say it.

1. Student movie with fake guns draws cops with drawn guns.

   One of the actors immediately let go of his fake assault rifle. But another held onto his replica handgun, forcing officers to make a life-or-death choice. An officer knocked the gun from the actor's hand and handcuffed him, drawing a peaceful climax to what could have been something far worse.

2. Police chief stopped and frisked.

   Now maybe I’m just being totally optimistic here, but maybe this incident will be the final catalyst necessary to get Bloomberg and his clown show of a police department to drop this nonsense before somebody gets the idea that Chief Zeigler might have a federal civil rights complaint on his hands. Maybe the ridiculousness of having one of their own bagged by the ["Stop and Frisk"] program (and this happened in early May 2008, we’re just now hearing about it some five years later) will embarrass the NYPD enough that they start to reconsider this odious practice.

    (Via Zandar Versus The Stupid from the New York Daily News.)

They Really Hate You in Ohio

Republicans take out ads to encourage uninsured people not to sign up for Obamacare.

Well, y'see, it seems that it works.  And they can't have that.

(Via Zandar Versus The Stupid.)

In Memoriam

• The blogger known as Doghouse Riley, né Douglas Case.  News via skippy this morning.  Doghouse Riley was the proprietor of Bats Left/Throws Right, which had a particular emphasis on Midwestern political shenanigans and not very much baseball, so I would only pop over there when I remembered his way with a phrase.  He could be quite scathing and pungent.  I linked to his articles a few times and I might have commented once or twice (Blogger does not aggregate comments or I would know).  May he rest in peace.  ETA:  Roy Edroso at alicublog remembers Doghouse Riley well (also via skippy).
• Eileen Brennan, actress
• Emile Griffith, boxer (I remember hearing about the death of Benny "Kid" Paret in my preadolescent years)
• Virginia Johnson, researcher (other half of Masters & Johnson)
• George Scott, on the '67 Red Sox team
• Page Morton Black, "Chock Full o' Nuts is that heavenly coffee, Better coffee a millionaire's money can't buy" jingle singer
• Carline Ray, jazz instrumentalist
• J. J. Cale, musician/songwriter
• Lindy Boggs, Congresswoman and champion of women's rights
• William Scranton, former governor (and well-known in the '60s)
• ETA, via a comment by wild-rises at dreamwidth:  Willie Reed (aka Willie Louis; see obit), person of courage.

And I've exceeded the limit of the New York Times.

Hey, Hey, My, My

Project S.H.A.M.E. profiles Radley Balko.  I suspect that some of what he's quoted as saying is sarcasm, but there's enough conservative/libertarian dogma to give one pause.  Supplemental:  An excerpted piece from NSFWCORP (original is temporarily unlocked until ~10 am PDT tomorrow) on Mr. Balko's odd stance about the Trayvon Martin case.  A little bit of the NSFWCORP story giving history:

After Balko graduated from Indiana University in 1997 with degrees in journalism and political science, he found work with Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute as its “Campus Journalism Coordinator.”

The Leadership Institute is a Republican Party recruitment organization that describes itself as “the premier training ground for tomorrow’s conservative leaders,” whose goal is “to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative public policy leaders” through its numerous “journalism seminars.” The Leadership Institute’s alumni include Karl Rove, Rove’s fake White House press pool “reporter” Jeff Gannon, convicted criminal James O’Keefe, and major GOP figures including Grover Norquist, Christian Right leader Ralph Reed, and Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Anyway, putting out the salt shaker in case I run across an article by him.

Verdict in Manning Case

Bradley Manning found not guilty of aiding or giving intelligence to the enemy, but convicted on 5 counts of espionage and other charges.

It Must Be Monday--There Are Seagulls and Flying Monkeys Up There

Or alternately, A Farrago of Foolishness.

• giandujakiss on Dreamwidth linked to an article on American economic security and followed up with a brief paragraph on policy choices.  Yes, those folks making these policies are really out to get you.
• At last!  Scorekeeping for sex scandals!  For when you've run out of sports statistics but the bar is still open!  (Katie Halper article originally at Salon, reprinted by AlterNet.)
• How marijuana got to be illegal.
• Noam Chomsky (AlterNet) video on the security state.
• Scholar has to explain to Fox Newsie how scholarship works (he's Muslim and wrote a book about Jesus Christ with, y'know, research and footnotes.  That's the same video at both links, in case one is inaccessible).  Maybe the anchors at Fox aren't required to take college courses outside of the communications curriculum in order to get jobs there, but I would have thought that a broader selection of courses, some of which involve research, was needed to graduate.
• Conservatives and unenforceable "sodomy" laws, and why they want to bring those laws back.

  Reinstating and enforcing old, unconstitutional sodomy laws won’t turn back time to the 1950s or beyond. But that’s essentially why conservatives think they need them — to hold back the tide of history.

  Terrance Heath also throws in a little history lesson.

I should probably go to the ballgame on Wednesday