Language and Life

• La langue:
• Via languagehat:  French reform spelling.  Somewhat.
• ForgottenNY discovers the Clay Sanskrit Library.
• La vie:
• The Rude One:

  Let's be honest here about the presidency of either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter which one is "pragmatic" or "progressive" or "progressive progressive" or "pragmatically progressive." It matters about as much as a flea fart in a tornado. Because, see, neither of them is getting shit past a Congress that has at least one house controlled by Republicans. Hillary Clinton ain't gonna wiggle her nose and cause the obstructionist fucknuts to all of a sudden "want to get things done." Bernie Sanders ain't gonna wave a magic staff and cause "revolution" to overtake the hearts of the very assholes who have done everything in their power to halt the moderate-left agenda of President Obama. The Republicans ain't gonna compromise with any Democrat in the White House. It ain't in their nature.

  Unfortunately, I can't vote for "just the good parts" and I won't be expending enthusiasm on this race until absolutely necessary; besides, I'd like to get Jill Stein into the mix.
  
• Lance Mannion remembers what this election is really about:

  The owner class. What they want, he told Rennie, was cheap domestic labor. Servants. To maintain a pool of workers desperate enough to bow and scrape and tug their forelocks for practically nothing the owners needed that there be little or no attractive alternatives. Whatever other work was out there had to pay worse and humiliate and degrade you more. So it was in the owners’ interests to keep wages down everywhere and in every industry and line of work and to make sure that what jobs there were, even at low pay and with sorry conditions, were few and far between. This would make sure the servants would be grateful to have their jobs and desperate to keep them.
  
  That’s one of the reasons the owners hate unions, said Old Man Rennie. Unions get workers good pay, safe working conditions, and respect. But it’s also why they hate government spending that alleviates poverty and creates jobs: it gives the servant class an alternative to being servants, because why would anyone plow a mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day if there was any better choice?

• Crumbling Empire on the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership):

  The so-called "economic recovery" has essentially been a jobless one; the jobs that have been "created" are lower in wages, and include part-time jobs and temporary positions. Pensions have gone the way of the Dodo bird. But with the TPP, the job losses would exceed the job losses from NAFTA. And Congress will be cutting 700 million out of Medicare to pay for job "re-training." Retraining? To work where? As what, burger flippers at McDonalds? Somehow I don't see Corporate America suddenly going on a domestic hiring binge! Especially when they can outsource their work to the third world, and not have to deal with those pesky safety and environmental standards.

• ETA: Lambert Strether of naked capitalism on the Democratic debate.

  I can’t break out my Magic Markers™ for the Sanders v. Clinton debate last Thursday because there’s not enough time in the world. So I want to look at three seemingly distinct topics: corruption, health care, and what the smart people who ride the Acela call “theories of change.” For each topic, I will compare and contrast Sanders and Clinton; and I’ll weave the three topics together at the end.

  I should have seen that earlier.

Color Me B.A.D.

Celebrating Blogroll Amnesty Day a bit late (so Blogroll Amnesty Weekend, OK?), in which I link to other blogs and welcome new readers and again thank skippy the bush kangaroo and Batocchio (Vagabond Scholar) for keeping the memory of Jon Swift green and sending me readers!

This year.  Well.  I will be adding Crumbling Empire (the successor to Mills River Progressive) and  the Daily Irritant; I already added Future Imperfect and Goblinbooks.  The Rectification of Names has been popping up lately, and I have liked it, so I just might slot it in.  I entered the witness protection program a period of lassitude in 2014 which is clearing slowly, and I have stopped being stabbity about the political scene for the moment.

Comments are accepted for about ten days; afterward they go into moderation.  I poke at the moderation queue about twice daily.  Spam goes to the porcelain goddess.

Have a decent day.

In Memoriam

• Edgar D. Mitchell, astronaut who walked on the Moon.
• ETA:  Dan Hicks, musician and influence on musical San Francisco of the '60s.

In Memoriam

Maurice White, Earth, Wind & Fire co-founder/singer.

Mixed Bag

The Union of Satirists and Surrealists would like to protest the following:

• Mike the Mad Biologist on "the Flint, MI mass poisoning" and the educational effects of lead poisoning.

  Snyder needs to be impeached* and federal** [footnotes in original] and state dollars need to get to Flint, not just for the short term but the long-term (that’s the problem with brain damage). Less obviously, the state-appointed dictator who controlled Flint (aka ’emergency manager’) while the mass poisoning occurred also needs to be removed from his new job of…running Detroit’s public schools.
  
  And the next time, a subset of technobrat pundits complain about there being too much democracy at the local level [cough Yglesias cough], the one word response is “Flint”.

• Eric Lander and Big Science.
• Funding neo-Nazis in Ukraine.  And why that is a bad idea.

  The reason the Pentagon is playing such a dirty game with Congress on funding the neo-fascist elements in Ukraine is not hard to deduce. Neo-Nazi militias, like the Azov Battalion, are the most dedicated and fierce killers, driven by racial bloodlust and unmoored to civilized thinking or conduct. Azov and their comrades are anxious to get into the fight and spill blood whereas many other Ukrainians are doing everything they can to avoid the war in the east.
  
  What the Obama Administration will soon learn, as the government in Kiev knows now, is that the rabid dog you release on your enemy can just as easily bite your own hand. Empowering the neo-fascist militias today may lay the groundwork for another coup tomorrow.

  Let's not even mention the mujaheddin and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the '80s.  Mmmmmkay?
  
• Speaking as a surrealist, the proper response to these people would be shaving cream pies with a touch of butyl mercaptan.  Speaking as a normal person, the proper response is shunning.  And becoming more like Denmark.  [Addendum:  The event was cancelled, and Anonymous is on the case.]

We Don't Need No Education Revolution

• Milt Shook:

  Does a nation that stands in line for a new smartphone when it comes out sound like a country that is aching for a revolution? When you walk down the street, for every person who’s handing out fliers calling for people to rise up against injustice, there are 100 who don’t see them because they’re staring at their smartphone and listening to Justin Bieber on their way home to turn on the TV to find out what happened to the Kardashians today.
  
  Bernie people, especially the PUBs and pro lefties, who dream of “revolution” because they’ve talked themselves into being pissed off about things they don’t even understand, are doing far more to hold back the progressive movement than to move it forward. If you want things to change, wishing for it will never work. It never has worked and it can’t work. Moving this country to the left is amazingly easy, but you’re doing it wrong. Giving people hope and asking them to vote is how you move a society and a nation forward, not by trying to piss people off and hoping that more people will react. It’s been more than 40 years; how much longer will you continue to do this type of thing before you figure out that change doesn’t happen that way?
  
  Create a political will and we can have anything we want.

• Paging Mulder, Scully, Fort, and Lovecraft!  Mulder, Scully, Fort, and Lovecraft to the white courtesy phone, please.  Florida strikes again.
• Drafting women?  Oh, the pearl-clutching will be epic; I intend to rent out one strand of freshwater non-cultured nacreous beads to be wept over and wrung (gently!) at $50/day.
• Update on Flint, MI.
• He didn't get permission.  Maybe I should write that paper.

MMMMMMMmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Just a couple of items:

• Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks, on the logical conclusion of Outsiders are Better syndrome.
• Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars:  In the tradition of tin-pot (and cast-iron pot, because this stuff is last century) would-be dictators, tomato-phobia begets planned response.  (Yes, that sounds like a cryptic crossword clue.)  

  We are seriously entering territory here where we should not go. When a leading candidate for his party's nomination starts calling for the crowd to "knock the crap" out of someone, well, I think you get the idea.

  Guess who.
• ETA: Jesse Curtis, walk on, dovetailing with Driftglass:

  Many conservative pundits and politicians are acting as though they are not complicit in Trump's rise. But the party has been playing with fire for years. Look at the last two presidential election cycles. The jovial ignorance of Herman Cain. The routinized lying of Michele Bachmann. The cultural resentment and white identity politics of Sarah Palin. All of these unqualified figures were beloved by evangelicals in their moment, and tolerated by party elites. Trump launches a campaign of their greatest hits, and now the party suddenly realizes the downside?
  
  [...]
  
  I believe Trump's demagoguery will pass and there will be a better and more responsible conservatism in the nation's future. But that might not begin until we face the fact that Trump is not a weed in the garden of contemporary conservatism. He is its fruit.

  Drifty:

  My point being, it was all there from the very beginning. The eliminationist rhetoric and loathing of uppity women (and minorities.) The unswerving certainty that nearly-omnipotent Damn Dirty Hippie Commies were tirelessly plotting to enslave and destroy us all. Faith in a potato bug named Frank Luntz. Eternal hostility to the idea of moderation and compromise. Unshakable, dogmatic belief in an Imaginary Librul Media Conspiracy. Absolute conviction that every word they heard vomiting out of Hate Radio was the unvarnished truth.

• In memoriam:  Signe Toly Anderson, singer (Jefferson Airplane, died on the same day as Paul Kantner.  See Marty Balin's quote).

In Memoriam

In which NYTimes obits are finally used.

• David Stoliar, survivor.
• Yvonne Chouteau, ballerina
• Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence expert

"Read Me, Doctor Memory!"

• Christian political values?  Jesse Curtis (walk on) talks about them:

  I have three simple thoughts that it seems to me ought to help inform our vote. You might come up with a different list, but I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which our political system runs on the values of self-interest, nationalism, and incumbent wealth. I emphasize these three factors not for their comprehensiveness, but for the dearth of attention paid to them. Because these issues cut across partisan boundaries and structure the very terms of political debate, they are often overlooked. Too often, we rush into partisan debate without realizing that the mainstream positions of both parties are troubling.

• Mainline churches decaying?  Chris Hedges, reposted at AlterNet:

  The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from radicalism. Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for women’s suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel—which included a huge effort to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners—and were engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian minister.
  
  These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital and prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.

• Department of One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Paper Tiger:

  "Look, Barack Obama has done incredible damage to the United States over the last seven years," young Marco said.
  
  Which damage is that, exactly?
  
  Would it be the "damage" that got nearly 18 million more Americans access to health insurance?
  
  Or is it the "damage" inflicted while the President ended two unnecessary wars?
  
  It's awful how much "damage" has been wrought by bringing down the unemployment rate to 5 percent instead of Mitt Romney's projected 6 percent. Cluck, cluck.
  
  Oh, I know! Perhaps he meant the "damage" caused as a result of Wall Street's greed and subsequent meltdown. Oh, wait. That happened under President Bush's watch, and was attributable to Republican policies passed while President Bill Clinton was in office. While they impeached, they stole.

"Bring Me My Pearls, My Fainting Couch, and My Smelling Salts..."

Arch-conservatives Talk About Trump.

18 of 'em, quoted.  #13:

13. He’s re-enforcing (the correct) stereotypes of conservatives.

“Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right. According to conventional caricature, conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful… Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.”

—Michael Medved, national radio show host

(I have to assume the parenthetical remark above is editorial comment.)

Those in the path of the blizzard, stay safe.  And warm, if you can.

Another Broken Commandment

• Legendarily, there was one rule that Republicans actually followed when on the hustings; it had the unofficial name of the Eleventh Commandment:
  

  "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."

  (There was no such guideline on the Democratic side, not that it would have mattered.)
  
  Apparently the Republican "united front" has ceased to be.  (There are other samples scattered about, but this link was there today.)
• *Ahem*.
• Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
  
  One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?

• DeVega on Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Reparations for harms done to a people because of their race, ethnicity, religion or other markers of difference are not bizarre or unusual justice claims. They have firm standing under international law as has been seen with survivors of the Holocaust, in some limited cases with First Nations peoples in the United States and other countries, Japanese Americans during World War II, and victims of political violence in Latin America, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere,
  
  While public opinion research is clear that white Americans are extremely hostile to reparations for slavery in the case of African-Americans, many white Americans actually support the idea of reparations in the abstract.

• Michigan.  Michigan.  Michigan. [ETA:  Michigan.]  Notice anything?  Hint:  It goes back at least as far as Gerald Ford.  Let me be blunt:  Would this have happened in Grosse Pointe?  Or Hamtramck?

Ah-Huhh!

"Contraception and the Class Divide."  Scratches the surface shallowly, but at least scratches it.

On This Day

Vagabond Scholar posted a video of the "I Have a Dream" speech, and Shakesville reposted "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Too many allegedly functional adults don't seem to know their history.

For Astute Readers Only

Apparently I didn't squeal with joy or make ALL-CAPS ANNOUNCEMENTS at the time, but:  SARA ROBINSON IS BACK BLOGGING ON HER OWN SITE.

Currently the most recent article up is "A Well-Regulated Militia," which should annoy everyone interested in firearms.

I've missed her so much.

An Incident

From Crooks and Liars (about the incident in Iranian waters):

• This episode has been way overblown by right-wing media, and here's why: We have a political party, the GOP, and its mouthpiece, Fox 'News,' who are rooting for any example of failure or embarrassment to our own country simply because they are not the current political party in charge. Therefore, any slight anomaly that occurs, no matter how small, will be blown completely out of proportion. You'd think these self-professed patriots would know how to at least appear to be good citizens, but we know their modus operandi. Their thinking resembles a middle school child, upset at losing, who won't let anyone play because he's taking his ball and going home.

• Notice anything missing from this rant? Like gladness and relief that our sailors were released unharmed? Where’s that love for our men and women in uniform that [Sean] Hannity flaunts when it's convenient?
  
  I’ll tell you where it is, subsumed by Hannity's lust for war with Iran. From a guy who never spent one minute putting his own flabby fanny on the line for this country.  [Emphasis added.]
  
  Meanwhile, the Great Chickenhawk attacked the Obama administration’s diplomacy – as if safe and sound sailors were some kind of bad outcome.
  
  Hannity should be ashamed of himself.

Because diplomacy doesn't produce enough bar fights.

They can have their war with Iran provided they all enlist first.  Yes, that is moving the goal posts somewhat, but wouldn't Ann Coulter look fetching in camouflage?

In Memoriam

Alan Rickman, actor.

Could invest reading the phone book with emotional resonance.

In Memoriam

Monte Irvin, Hall of Fame ballplayer.

He has a park in Orange, New Jersey named after him.

This is one sad month already.

ETA:  Giants' tribute video.  (Continues with other videos, so.)

Just Now Catching Up with Me

Mr. Trump bothered by Ted Cruz's citizenship all of a sudden.

(Via Buzzfeed.)

In Memoriam

David Bowie.

Not news you want to be clobbered with first thing at 6:00 AM.

All the music this morning is David Bowie.

Indomitable has an essay about the breadth and depth of his appeal.

David Bowie.

• Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast (*sob*) officially hangs up her keyboard.

  Everyone tells me they don't know how I'm still standing. I'd love to believe that I'm stronger than most people, but the truth is that I'm no different from anyone else. When life keeps hitting you, you bounce back because you don't have a choice. If you don't think you could, it's because you haven't been hit hard enough yet.
  
  I'm lucky. I've been able to keep my job and work remotely. A year ago I received a promotion and transfer to a new group where my manager is in Germany, where they don't believe in working 80 hour weeks. So my work/life balance has been somewhat better, and now will be even better because I won't be sitting in northern NJ traffic every day. My two little boy kitties, Eli and Sam, were great in the car and have adjusted beautifully to their new home. My sister has welcomed me into her circle and I am signing up for Meetup groups. It is the fresh start that just could not have happened in New Jersey, in a house too full of memories, too many of them about sadness and depression. Mr. B is now free of the emotional burdens that plagued him here and it is time for a young family to move into that house, now dressed up all pretty with a new kitchen, a nice deck, and a completely remodeled upstairs, and make better memories there.
  
  My weekdays will be spent in my home office that gets the morning sun through the trees in my front yard. When the weather gets nice, I can sit and drink iced tea on my screened porch, or take my laptop outside onto the patio. I am about 20 minutes or less from anything I might want to do. My neighbors are friendly, and I have no doubts that I'll be happy here.

   
• Lying liars who lie.
• More lying liars who lie.
• Toy wars.  Because we're all going to need a lot of comic relief this year,

In Memoriam

New York Times obituaries.

• Natalie Cole, unforgettable singer
• Wayne Rogers, actor (M*A*S*H)

Hope in the Bottom of the Box

This year's Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up.

New Year Strikes at Midnight

Driftglass.

Hullabaloo.

Indomitable.

That blasted bell is tolling.

Happy New Year.

Boxing Day Lutefisk Cider with Pickled Herring

• Down With Tyranny dissects the Democrats.

  Jack Fitzpatrick lays out a scenario which-- if we had a remotely competent DCCC that wasn't utterly crippled with conservative notions and self-serving corruption-- would be considered a reasonable case for the Democrats winning back the House. There's no chance anything like that can happen while the recruiting and messaging precepts put in place by Wall Street puppets Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel dictate everything the DCCC does.

• Politifact prevarication poll:  Who lies the most.  (Slideshow/gallery.  Featuring two non-candidates and the current and former President, who cannot run for that office again.  Via sfgate.com.)
• Understanding markets, their history, values, and flaws.  (Prof. Richard D. Wolff, guest-posting at naked capitalism.)  A taste:

  Markets were and are just one mechanism for distributing resources and products among people and enterprises. In markets, prices allocate scarce commodities to the highest bidders for them, to those who can pay the most. Markets differ from many other, non-market mechanisms that human beings, past and present, have used for those distributions. Religious authorities, community elders, local or regional state authorities, democratically composed collectives, kinship and gift-based organizations developed different, non-market, price mechanisms for distribution. Because recent history exalted markets hysterically, it is time to expose their mixed and often horrific results.

  There are matters, values, and things that cannot be priced; assigning a monetary value to some things paradoxically cheapens them.
• Has anyone done "A Christmas Carol:  30 Years Later?"  Because that might explain things...

Merry Mary, Marry Murray

Christmas if  you celebrate; Festivus, Yule, Solstice, Kwanzaa, Boxing, any I've missed if you don't.

(Hogmanay is next week.)

Pre-Road Downs

• From the Mary Sue, via Shakesville:  Japanese women want to keep their original names post-wedlock.  At last!
• Hullabaloo is loading so slowly that the graphics give up.  Seriously.
• Trump.
• Guns.
• Combatting terrorism.
• Litmus testing.
• Cracked.com is a time sink.
• ETA:  It turns out that Dr. Grumpy in the House has been active all year but the blogroll entry refuses to update.  Have the gift guide to Star Wars merchandise that gives one pause.

"I Thought the Woo-Woo Crew Came Out at the Full Moon!"

Some of the local bus drivers used to say that they observed strange behavior and were extra cautious during the full moon--and the two weeks on each side.

• Myself, I'd get boots and a sou'wester.  Talk of Republican convention alternatives.
• "Terrible Ideas" from the Daily Irritant, with bonus:

  You know, if Ronald Reagan couldn't make Reaganomics work, what the hell chance do you think you have?

Not an Onion Headline

"Nazi Party Leader:  Trump's Anti-Muslim plan is ill-conceived."

It's at SFGate.com as of this morning.  (Full email communiqué at Buzzfeed.)

No, really.  (The rest of said chairman's statement is "right-wing" jargon that would embarrass the crew at a Tea Party website.)

I'm trying to be an adult, so I'm not going to snark on said chairman's name.

Thrust, Parry, Riposte

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had Foot Sandwich the other day (Crooks and Liars).  Andy Borowitz (The New Yorker) serves up horseradish, no chaser.

Ever notice that all of Ronald Reagan's "gifts" tend to include rattlesnakes?

Cannot Brain. I Have the Numb

• No, this is not supposed to be a weekly.  
• Now that it is slightly more seemly (Iowa caucuses now being a month away rather than six months out) to yammer about the primary season, have Jill Stein's campaign page.  The Green Party has also posted an article by Maggie Lee from Creative Loafing, which has interesting (at least for now) comments.  If I have to read about the Republican candidates (and my brain has been holding its nose almost to the point of asphyxia) and the Democratic candidates (who are annoying me on a different axis), then I'd like to read someone who is at least not shouting at me.  (You don't want to see my email inbox.  Cue Joel Grey and Liza Minelli singing "Money" on repeat at maximum volume.)
• So this is midpoint of three consecutive days of tragedies:  Yesterday was the anniversary of the murders at École Polytechnique, today we remember Pearl Harbor, and tomorrow we commemorate the death of John Lennon.  Yeah, OK, not a nice guy, but he didn't deserve that.
• We are expecting rain in a couple of days, in time for an appointment.  Of course.  Northwestern England apparently got a cloudbuster sufficient to restore a waterfall.  (Via legionseagle on Dreamwidth.)
• Well!  Back to work!