Fvck the Fvckin’ Yankees, For The Win. Not that I know from baseball, but somewhere Steve Gilliard is smiling tonight.
Here is a thread where we can celebrate as coarsely as we like, within the limits of the technology.
And this is the weirdest thing said technology has shown me recently:
I don’t know if any of you feel the same way, but I find that observing our political and economic system the past few years has pushed me much farther to the left than I ever was before. I used to say stuff along the lines of “3.9% unemployment bitches” to my social democrat friends when they criticized Clintons for being a good Republican. I really believed that Bob Rubin had some neoliberal magic that kept the economy humming during the Clinton years. Now I think a lot of it was luck.
I used to see things like gentrification as win-win for everybody. Now I feel that pricing non-wealthy people out of their towns and neighborhoods has a a real cost.
I was a strong supporter of TARP at the time. I thought the economy would collapse without it and the government should more or less do whatever Paulson said. I still think something along the lines of TARP may have been necessary but that, at some level, the AIG bail-out was close to outright theft from the tax payers.
I used to even think that “civil discourse” with “reasonable conservatives” would be a good thing, that we’re all well-meaning people and all that bullshit.
The breaking point for me is all the going Galt stuff. It used to be there was an idea that if less wealthy people were shat on too much, that would lead to unrest and the collapse of some crucial part of our society. Now, we are told over and over again that we need to keep the successful happy so that they keep blessing us with their productivity.
I’m not big on wanking about my political philosophy. I mean, who cares? But I wonder if many of you have gone through a similar transformation over the past couple years or if you all were hip to the ways of the world much earlier than I was.
Update. To be clear, I don’t mean the Bush years pushed me more to the left. They didn’t. Quite the opposite, they made me more and more of a member of the cult of competence. The last 20 months have made me realize that’s not enough, or, maybe more accurately, that’s a mirage.
I think it’s the name of the sub that makes this story particularly delightful:
LONDON — The Royal Navy hastened to assemble an official inquiry Friday evening to explore why Britain’s newest nuclear submarine, H.M.S. Astute, ran aground while undergoing sea trials off the coast of northwest Scotland on Friday morning and remained stuck on a bank of sand and shingle for nearly 10 hours before a tug pulled it free at nightfall. A spokesman for the Royal Navy said divers would be deployed to check concerns that the submarine’s rudder had been damaged.
The episode was particularly embarrassing for the navy because the vessel, one of the most technologically advanced submarines in the world, is designed for maximum stealth and use in such delicate operations as delivering special forces troops secretly and eavesdropping off the coasts of hostile nations. Its design features and propulsion mechanisms are considered top secret, naval experts said, but both were on display during the grounding…
Residents along the shore of Broadford Bay — close to the spot on the mainland where Prince Charles Edward Stuart, a k a Bonnie Prince Charlie, set sail for Skye after the collapse of his 1745 rebellion against the British monarchy — said the Astute had gone aground well inside red buoys that mark the navigation channel on the approaches to the Skye Bridge….
Critics noted that another British submarine, H.M.S. Trafalgar, ran aground off Skye in 2002. At that time, an inquiry found that a crewman had placed opaque tracing paper over a navigation chart to protect it, leading to the submarine’s running onto well-charted rocks.
This made me laugh, from a WaPo chat (h/t reader J):
Q. I don’t see how anyone approaching that polling station would NOT be intimidated by that man with the billy club/baseball bat. He was dressed in “traditional” Black Panther garb, slapping the stick into his palm and, although I could never make it out, speaking to the prospective voters. He would certainly frighten me. For the Justice Department to NOT pursue this case is unconscionable, IMO. What do you folks think?
A. I spent a day interviewing voters in this ward and people told me they didn’t think that the men were “too exciting” and generally were not afraid. One of the members of the New Black Panther Party, Jerry Jackson, lives in the neighborhood and had been at the polling place on other occassions. Still, a call did apparently did go out from someone at the location reporting the presence of the panthers.
Sometimes things are so dumb that I can’t process them right away. Reading this over, it finally hit me: this entire “scandal” is about two guys dressed in “traditional Black Panther garb” standing near a polling place.
I was too busy writing 20 posts about Juan Williams and another 10 about my snarling hatred of the rich to keep up with reader blogs as well as usual, so this week, instead, I’m going to do a post consisting of reader comments that I liked (some of these are old but stuck in my head).
What would Belfast look like should Obama pass the Wingnut Repatriation Act? I think Stuckey’s and Shoney’s would improve Northern Ireland’s cuisine, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
Next ride she’ll come across one of “them” holding a dogged-earred copy of Atlas Shrugged who tells her how desperate he is for school choice and abolition of the estate tax.
Very, very dirty vodka MARTINI. Imagine, if you will, that you stole money from the Salvation Army person outside the department store, then took that money and used it to buy hookers, heroin, scratch off tickets and a copy of Going Rogue at full price.
THAT’S how fuckin’ dirty I enjoy my vodka MARTINI.
Also too, for some reason the phrase “Every day the bucket go to the well, one day the bottom will drop out” has been rattling in my brain a lot recently.
Because he was bashing Muslims:
I’m still not quite over the most disgusting part of the Juan Williams spectacle yesterday: watching the very same people (on the Right and in the media) who remained silent about or vocally cheered on the viewpoint-based firings of Octavia Nasr, Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Eason Jordan, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill, Chas Freeman, Van Jones and so many others, spend all day yesterday wrapping themselves in the flag of “free expression” and screeching about the perils and evils of firing journalists for expressing certain viewpoints. Even for someone who expects huge doses of principle-free hypocrisy—as I do—that behavior is really something to behold. And anyone doubting that there is a double standard when it comes to anti-Muslim speech should just compare the wailing backlash from most quarters over Williams’ firing to the muted acquiescence or widespread approval of those other firings.
And if that Fox thing doesn’t work out, there is always the New Republic. Hell, Williams probably already has done enough for the cause to deserve a Harvard honorarium.
Tim Heffernan, at Esquire, interviews C.J. Chivers about Chivers’ new history of the AK-47, The Gun:
TIM HEFFERNAN: Would you call the AK-47 a great invention?
C. J. CHIVERS: Without question the AK-47 was a remarkable invention, and not just because it works so well, or because it changed how wars are fought, or because it proved to be one of the most important products of the 20th century. The very circumstances of its creation were fascinating. The rifle is essentially a conceptual knock-off of a German weapon that had been developed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the 1930s and 1940s, and it came together through not only the climate of paranoia and urgency in Stalin’s USSR, but also via the ability of the Soviet intelligence and Red Army to grasp the significance of an enemy’s weapon and willingness to replicate it through a large investment of the state’s manpower, money and time. It was a characteristically Soviet process, and an example where centralized decision-making and the planned economy actually combined to design and churn out an eminently well-designed product. We spend a lot of time denigrating the centralized economy, for good reason. But it just so happened that what the centralized economy of a police state really wanted, it got. It couldn’t make a decent elevator, toilet, refrigerator, or pair of boots. But the guns? Another story altogether.
[...]
TH: Is it the signature weapon of the 20th century? The 21st? Will the AK still be killing in 2110?
CJC: The Kalashnikov was the most important firearm of the last 60-plus years, so much so that there really is no second place. It is not going to be unseated from its place any time soon, certainly not in our lives.
TH: What’s memorable about being shot at by AKs — what makes it different from, say, being shot at by a sniper? What does an AK bullet sound like when it goes past your ear? When it hits the wall you’re crouched behind?
CJC: Actually, in a lot of circumstances, the Kalashnikov is poorly used by people who are not especially good shots, or who are outright bad shots. In these cases, the rifle’s weaknesses emerge. As far as accuracy goes, the Kalashnikov is stubbornly mediocre, and the ease with which it can be fired on automatic means that many people fire it on automatic when they would be better served firing a single, aimed shot. These factors combine in a phenomenon many people who have been shot at by Kalashnikovs have come to be grateful for — a burst of bullets cracking by high overhead. There have been many times when we have shaken our heads in relief and gratitude that the nitwits with Kalashnikovs on the other side of a field don’t quite know how to use the weapon in their hands. Getting shot at by a sniper is a much different experience, and far more frightening. But either experience is, to borrow your word, memorable. These memories are pretty much all bad.
Neither hardware nor military history are in my wheelhouse, but this sounds more like the tongue-in-cheek definition of economics: “It’s the study of who eats… and who gets eaten.” I’m going to look for this issue of Esquire when it hits the newstands, and I may have to buy the book, although goddess knows I don’t need any more additions to the unread stacks.
There’s a small town called Aurora about 75 minutes from where I live that I like to visit sometimes on the weekend, because it’s near some of my favorite local wineries (King’s Ferry and Hearts and Hands), has a little store where I can buy weird local stuff like squash seed oil that I can’t find anywhere else, and because the town is very pretty. The buildings in the center of town, in particular the Aurora Inn, are in beautiful shape, strangely so for the area—upstate New York tends to be comfortably run down outside of a few wealthy areas like Cooperstown. It turns out that this is because a wealthy alum, Pleasant Rowland, of the town’s main employer, Wells College, entered into some partisanship with the university to take over a lot of downtown and “beautify” it. This made some local residents very angry. I had a bit of a hard time understanding why and when I first tried to write about it, I found myself sounding like a condescending prick. Then I spoke to someone who lived there and he explained: the old sub-and-pizza place and bar had been replaced by stuff a little more formal and upscale, traditional access to the lake had been blocked, and there was a feeling that the whole town was now ruled by a multi-millionaire who might pack up her tent and leave at any moment.
Now, I think that the economic future of the Finger Lakes may depend to a large extent on fru-fru agrotourism, and having fancy hotels in nice-looking towns helps with that. But I can also see why locals resent having their town taken over.
I thought of this when I read about Megan McArdle’s adventures in gentrification (Alicublog via atrios):
Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, “You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.” He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. “Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!”
Now there’s nothing wrong with the McArdle-Suderman family using their hard-earned Bradley-Koch dollars to buy a place in DC instead of living in a suburban McMansion like real Americans. But, sheesh, trolling the bus for people who say they are ashamed of what “we” (whatever that means here) did to the neighborhood.
Does everything always have to revolve around making non-wealthy Americans eat shit? It’s not enough to just thank your Galtian overlords for paying their taxes, it’s not enough to let wealthier people buy up your town or neighborhood and turn it into a place you can’t afford or don’t feel welcome in, now non-wealthy Americans have to express shame for turning their towns and neighborhoods into shit holes.
Where does it end? Blue collar workers have to accept that even though free trade may cost them their jobs, it’s all for the best for our society, so shut up and smile and find a new job. Middle-class people who paid into Social Security need to accept that we need entitlement reform, i.e. not giving them their Social Security benefits. And it serves them all right for not being sufficiently successful.
Someone better get up early tomorrow for Ginni’s phone call:
For nearly two decades, Lillian McEwen has been silent—a part of history, yet absent from it.When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his explosive 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Thomas vehemently denied the allegations and his handlers cited his steady relationship with another woman in an effort to deflect Hill’s allegations.
Lillian McEwen was that woman.
***Given that history, she said Hill’s long-ago description of Thomas’s behavior resonated with her.
“He was obsessed with porn,” she said of Thomas, who is now 63. “He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.”
McEwen added that she had no problem with Thomas’s interests, although she found pornography to be “boring.”
According to McEwen, Thomas would also tell her about women he encountered at work. He was partial to women with large breasts, she said. In an instance at work, Thomas was so impressed that he asked one woman her bra size, McEwen recalled him telling her.
And it goes on and on like that. I’m not sure how many women have to come forward with the SAME EXACT story about Clarence Thomas before the lunatics on the right admit Clarence might have been a bit of a perv and serial sexual harasser, but we’re at around a half dozen now. The final quote from McEwen was priceless:
“I have no hostility toward him,” McEwen said. “It is just that he has manufactured a different reality over time. That’s the problem that he has.”
That is pretty much the modern GOP in a nutshell, manufacturing their own reality every day of the week.
As an aside- can you imagine asking a co-worker her breast size? If someone tried that shit with my sister, she would KICK HIS ASS. Girl runs tri-athlons and has guns.
So Obama makes an “It Gets Better” video, and the reaction among our progressive betters is to debate whether or not he is history’s greatest monster.
Really, read the comments to this D-Day post. These people deserve a Republican House and Senate.
Here’s a helpful list of Tea Party candidates.
We’ve already discussed Tea Party candidate Rich Iott. He’s the person who likes to dress up as a Nazi, and is currently lying to voters by claiming military service.
But there are many, many more Tea party candidates. The House candidates don’t get nearly as much attention as the Senate candidates, which is a shame, and possibly illegal.
I don’t want conservative House candidates or spokespeople to feel sad or ignored or “left out” (or “fired”) because that’s a violation of their First Amendment rights, so I’ve been listening to them.
Tea Party-backed candidate, Tom Ganley, is interesting. Note that both Ganley and his accuser are Tea party members.
The Cleveland woman who last week filed a sexual assault lawsuit against Brecksville auto dealer Tom Ganley filed an amended complaint today which claims the GOP congressional candidate wouldn’t give her a job because she refused his sexual advances.
The 39-year-old mother of four claims she met Ganley at a July 2009 Tea Party rally in downtown Cleveland, admired his anti-abortion political views and sought to volunteer for a U.S. Senate campaign he was waging before he decided to run against Sutton. She also asked him about lowering the interest rate on a Chevrolet Venture van she’d bought from his dealership. The lawsuit says that when she brought the van in for repairs and went to Ganley’s office to discuss a job he offered her, Ganley made unwanted sexual advances.
“He told her he would fix her car for free, provide her with a paying job, and reduce the interest rate on the financing of her Chevy Van in return for her acting basically as a prostitute and becoming sexually submissive to him,” the lawsuit says. “Plaintiff was greatly offended and was in fear of the deranged Defendant Ganley at that time, and was trapped in his office while her van was being repaired.”
Republican congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not produce a change in leadership. In a rambling exchange during a TV interview, Broden, a South Dallas pastor, said a violent uprising “is not the first option,” but it is “on the table.” That drew a quick denunciation from the head of the Dallas County GOP, who called the remarks “inappropriate.”
It’s a long list. I’m sure there are more conservative candidates who are entitled to a forum. We don’t want them silenced.
Off to pick some friends from undergrad up at the airport. I’ll check in from time to time, but you are basically on your own.
You kids behave.Whatever you want to say about Juan Williams, and much of it was said yesterday on this blog, it’s pretty obvious that NPR management just can’t handle opinionated political journalism. They’re so piss-pants scared of being called “liberal” that they have to instruct their staff to stay away from the Stewart/Colbert rally while off-duty, and they bobbled that so badly that their ombudsman needs to go into full explanation and defense mode. For editors like that, having Juan Williams on the payroll is as gut-wrenching as driving around with a trunk full of plutonium.
Only management paralysis caused by fear can explain why the NPR politics roster has been the same for years. When Williams started, he, like E.J. Dionne, David Brooks and Mara Liasson, was one of the most innocuous voices around. As Juan began his journey to FOX, editors clearly didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing, the default choice of all chickenshit managers. It’s only when he crossed some line far beyond the stated NPR ethics guidelines that their hand was finally forced, and they came up looking like chumps.
If Williams were an isolated case, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Unfortunately for NPR, high-end DC pundits are under constant pressure to appear on FOX or MSNBC spouting ever more tendentious bullshit. Even if NPR replaces Williams with a sane, conservative Casper Milquetoast, the cash involved in extremist punditry will ultimately drive that replacement to views that are too extreme for the network to tolerate.
There’s just not enough Immodium and Priolsec in the world to deal with the agida that pundits will cause NPR editors in the next few years, so they should get the fuck out of that business now. If they must do political analysis, it should be as non-ideological as possible, something like Ken Rudin’s approach. But the best thing they could do is just to devote more resources to good old-fashioned reporting. They’re still going to be called “liberal” no matter what they do, but they may be able to avoid shitstorms like the current Williams debacle.
First, for all of us who remember that astonishing grade-school moment when we discovered that other people could read words off the blackboard even from the back of the classroom, or see trees as a collection of individual leaves, the Guardian has a (somewhat premature) gift: “Short-sightedness gene discovery could consign glasses to history“:
... Shortsightedness is a relatively new but growing phenomena and as urbanisation and intensive education levels increase it is reaching epidemic proportions in some parts of the world.
Around a third of people in Britain are short-sighted, but in the Far East it is an even bigger problem, possibly because use of technology at an early age is more prevalent there. In Japan, two thirds of teenagers are already myopic and in Singapore, 80 per cent of 18-year-old male army recruits are short sighted, compared with 25 per cent just 30 years ago…
Eighty percent? I can remember, back in the late 1960s, when the idea that myopia might be genetic and/or influenced by starting to read at an early age was considered nutty fringe talk from Hindu caste-defenders and American DFHs.
***********I have tried, and failed, to come up with a succinct explanation of why this NYTimes article, “2 Brothers Await Broad Use of Medical E-Records”, bothers me so much.
The argument seems to be that the Doerrs’ technology package will be consistently profitable because it will save a lot of individuals time & money, and that will help bend the arc of nationwide medical spending in the right direction. But it’s only “steady business” money, not mad casino lottery-win money, so who cares? And if that’s the argument that will determine whether or not HCR… or the American medical system in general… succeeds or fails, then how truly fvcked are we?
***********
Paul de Kruif’s biography of Dr. Banting was among the first “grown-up” stories I can remember reading, so I was fascinated by the NYTimes’ coverage of an exhibition on “Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug“.
***********
And in the “Excellent Links” department, Martin Robbins, The Guardian’s Lay Scientist, satirizes “This is a news website article about a scientific paper“. (“In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?”). Another link for my Read-Regularly bookmarks!
I’m finally moving my banking away from a big corporate bank. I’m not normally a boycotter, but over the years not only has that bank tried to ruin the rest of the country, they’ve also made a noble effort to screw me, personally, so there are macro and micro reasons to go through the pain of moving accounts.
I looked at the local credit unions and locally-owned banks, but finally decided to move to USAA. USAA started as an auto and property insurance program for military officers, but it has expanded over the years into a full-service financial services company. You need to meet eligibility requirements to buy auto and property insurance from them (and if you do, check out their rates), but their bank is open to everyone.
As with all their other services, the bank has been a pleasure to deal with, both over the phone and via the Internet. Somehow, even though they have no shareholders and redistribute profit to members, which means that they should be withholding their productivity, they manage to do a better job than corporate banks.
