I found these three posts interesting, and rather than fill up the news section, I decided to put them here:

The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History [Read more]

Since the Civil War, the American South has mostly been a one-party region.  However, by the turn of the 21st century, its political affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans.  Here’s how it happened.

It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War.  For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.

Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds.  Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor.  This was the philosophy that bound together the new  Republican Party.

Noted liar-for-Christ David Barton has been making the media rounds lately, pushing another book of blatant history revisionism. Having been a blogger for quite some time, I consider myself a leading expert on just about everything, especially Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. Thus I feel it is vital for me to set the record straight and show to the world that Barton is a daft poppy-head (apologies for the technical historical lingo). [Read more]

In 1975, the Catholic Church of Ireland sent Father Sean Brady to interview two teenage boys who had been abused by their priest, Brendan Smyth. Brady recorded their harrowing testimony and submitted it to his superiors, who transferred Smyth to a different parish, again and again. Twenty years later, Smyth was finally imprisoned after being convicted on 153 counts of child abuse in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Father Sean Brady moved up the Church hierarchy. He is now Cardinal Sean Brady.

After the BBC recently reported his role in Smyth's investigation, Brady publicly expressed regret. He regrets that his superiors dealt inappropriately with Smyth. He regrets that the Church had no "guidelines" for handling pedophilia by priests. He regrets that he and others did not understand the "full impact of abuse" on the lives of children.

But for his own role in abetting child abuse, Cardinal Brady's regret is rather meager. He explained that he was nothing more than a note-taker without any authority to act. As to why he remained silent when his superiors transferred Smyth, he reluctantly conceded, "I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society, and the Church."

 [Read more]

Matt Yglesias has described three popular contemporary political approaches to the challenge of maintaining our national commitment to “providing health care services to the elderly, the disabled, and the poor and also to bolstering the general incomes of elderly people.”  One is Congressman Paul Ryan’s approach of reducing the level of the future commitment in order to bring it in line with “historic norms about the level of taxation.”  The second is the liberal approach of preserving our existing level of commitment into the future, even if that means raising taxes in the aggregate.  The third is “the hazy Obama/Simpson-Bowlesish center that wants to raise taxes and cut programs.”

Perhaps this short list characterizes the main political answers reasonably well, if the main political question is how to tame the budget, and shrink or control the deficit.  But I would like to point out that all three answers have something in common:  Not a single one of these approaches, as usually presented, contains any call for the national government to engage seriously in what one might call “investing in our future”.  All three of them reflect the defeatist mindsets of different camps of worn out oldsters, each promoting a different way of giving up, making do, or just hanging on.  They are all pathologies of the dismal “No, we can’t!” era in which we now live. [Read more]

So, on Monday, the conservative journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, who specializes in attacking academics, wrote a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post which she titled: [Read more]

Aside from camels, scientists also created tiny lions so rich people could play with them.

SWITZERLAND – A group of scientists – working from a huge grant by the Koch Brothers – have created a camel small enough to fit through the eye of a needle, sources say. [Read more]

Okay, so maybe Hell can freeze over. If someone had told me yesterday that I’d be sitting here defending Tavis Smiley and Cornel West today I would have assured them that such a thing would only happen the day after Adolph went snowboarding through the pits of Hell.

But one must learn to prioritize one’s demons. While Tavis and West constitute a bitter threat to the poor, middle class, and Black communities in their effort to enrich themselves through yet another tour featuring self-service, demagoguery, and disinformation, it seems that the Washington Examiner has found themselves another grinnin’ young deludetant in the person of Ms. Star Parker, so we thought we'd nip this distraction in the bud. [Read more]

At the pool, you often see people swimming a very relaxed style of breaststroke—head out of the water, breathing freely, legs frog-kicking deep down—but swum properly, modern breaststroke is as physically grueling and technically demanding as butterfly, itself an evolution of breaststroke. One would expect a world breaststroke champion to be in fantastic physical condition. Norway's Alexander Dale Oen was 26, almost 27. In Beijing, he had won the Silver medal in 100m Breast behind Kitajima Kosuke, and was in training for the London Olympics.

Champion Swimmer Found Dead in Arizona [Read more]

a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
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I had an epiphany last night.

I mean there was a star in the east and I looked at it like the vision was being presented to me for the first time!

Usually I find a truth (in the gut sense anyway) after running into a convergence of scenes, a convergence of characters, a convergence of reported truths.

Here is how I came to my epiphany. [Read more]

In the early days of my 725-day army career, I spent some time at Ft. Hood, Texas. Luck of the draw, I guess. I had been sent there out of AIT along with about a billion other bald-headed idiots to be fodder in the new Americal Division that was being formed. We were about to surge, and we hadn't even heard the term, but look out, Charlie, here we come. Yeeee ha! Somehow, though, they filled it before they got to me. That was my luckiest number draw to that point, the lottery not yet being in place. And, since everybody has to be somewhere, someone decided to assign troop number U.S. 5 444 ---8 to a short timers unit. [Read more]

A couple years ago, it became a bit of an issue of personal hypocrisy when talk show host Rush Limbaugh was found to have been an active OxyContin user and addict. The drug messed up his health, giving him heart attacks and blindness. Limbaugh had actively mocked and degraded drug addicts, despite being one himself.

Well, perhaps OxyContin should be considered as a political issue once again, only in a much more brutal manner than the personal lifestyle of a talk show host:

Disturbing new research says the number of U.S. babies born with signs of opiate drug withdrawal has tripled in a decade because of a surge in pregnant women’s use of legal and illegal narcotics, including Vicodin, OxyContin, and heroin, researchers say. It is the first national study of the problem. [Read more]

Today is May First, or May Day.  It's the day when workers around the world traditionally rally to show solidarity and support for one another.  It's the real Labor Day. While our own Labor Day has become a holiday, a day of picnics and celebration, May Day is and always will be an international day of protest--a reminder of worker rights and worker dignity in a world gone mad with greed.

Labor in America is under siege, like nothing we've seen in this country since the 1930s.  Whatever wage scales and rights and protections had been fought for and won over the years have slowly eroded away in this new bizarre and reckless version of take-over capitalism. 
 [Read more]

I think it is past time we admitted the obvious, shucked off our mantles of denial and shame, and own the truth. We can shout it out or sing it in harmony, as we confess the all too obvious…..

It’s our fault that our form of democracy is failing.

Oh, don’t even try to pretend you didn’t know it. 

But we can fix it!  Really!  For sure!  Yes, we can!  But, will we?  How?

I know what I’m about to propose is radical and most likely will create all kinds of outrage, no doubt including accusations complete with cheeky labels like anarchist, commie (channeling Allen West), turncoat, even twit and bloody prat.  

Oh, if you are wondering about the usage of British slang, it’s paying homage to Winston Churchill who best stated the motivation for this post when he declared:

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." [Read more]

As Floyd Mayweather prepares for his fight next week with Miguel Cotto, commentators are quick to point out that he will soon be serving time in jail [Read more]

"Is Our Adults Learning?" asks David Brooks in The New York Times today (the paper where columnists don't appear to be edited much.)  In this column, Brooks talks about the fight between stimulus supporters and austerity supporters.  He concludes that both sides relied on grand theories but that three years and $800 billion later, we are none the wiser as to which policy choice was better: [Read more]

The public reputation of nuclear power plummeted after the Fukushima meltdowns, but many in the energy sector still see nuclear fission as the only way to keep the lights on and stave off climate change. No private entities, and vanishingly few governments, though, want to spend billions to build new plants, so at least one manufacturer is offering smaller pre-packaged units. Will, The Stars Align for Small Nuclear Reactors? [Read more]

The Westinghouse Electric Company has lined up Ameren, a St. Louis-based electric company, as a partner for its small modular reactor project. Getting a strong indication of commercial interest is critical because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can review only a few of the many proposed reactor designs and gives priority in the licensing process to those with a stronger chance of getting built.

Some utility analysts have argued that small reactors would be good “drop-in replacements” for 1950s and 1960s-era coal plants that are now being retired, given that that their generating capacity would be about the same.

[Note: there is *NO* real source for claims about this law in Egypt - be careful with spreading - likely highly exaggerated urban myth]

With Egyptian politicians considering a 6-hour window on necrophilia, and lowering the marriage age to 14, we're left considering whether they were better off with Mubarak.

Ok, they haven't passed the law yet, and to their credit, many (including seemingly most women) oppose the changes, but it exemplifies issues of authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy in places (like the US?) where the populace as a whole seems to be veering off into insanity or cruelty or just backwardsness.

Mubarak's wife Suzanne helped push through changes in divorce law, which once took 10-15 years for a woman to obtain (but now comes much quicker if she gives up financial rights).

40% of marriages end in divorce, and there's a push to return to the old system. As if the causes for divorce weren't the issue more than the results.  [Read more]

The Unites States government operates a fiat currency system.  The government is therefore the monopoly supplier of the final means of payment in our dollar-based economy, and is ultimately responsible, in one way or another, for any net increase in dollar-denominated financial assets in the private sector.

And yet, we continue to hear bipartisan expressions of fear and angst about the budget deficit and the national debt.  Both major parties seemingly agree that we are “out of money”.   They wrangle over various competing approaches to shrinking the gap between tax revenues and government spending.  They appoint commissions to study the government budget and recommend some combination of slashed spending and higher taxes in order to close that budgetary gap.   They warn us that we will transform ourselves into banana republic status if we do not urgently address our public debt problems.

This situation should be perplexing.  Why does a government that is the issuer of the national currency have to borrow that currency back from the public to which the currency is issued?   And how could such a government ever experience the kinds of budgetary squeezes and debt burdens that can pose severe problems for households and businesses?

I wish to make a radical suggestion:  Public borrowing is an outdated practice, and we could dispense with it entirely. [Read more]

About a month ago, former GM vice-honcho Bob Lutz gave up on rational argument with Limbaugh, Hannity and the like:

I Give Up On Correcting The Wrong-Headed Right Over The Volt [Read more]

I am, sadly, coming to the conclusion that all the icons of conservatism are (shock, horror!) deliberately not telling the truth!

This saddens me, because, to this writer, conservatism IS fundamental truth. It only damages its inherent credibility with momentarily convenient fiction.

So, Mr. Krauthammer joins the list of right-wing pundits I no longer take seriously. After all, how do I know they’re telling the truth when the subject is one I’m not as familiar with as the Volt?

Almost exactly two years ago, corporate whistleblower Sam Antar told me this:

“With all the stimulus money going out, the Republicans will eventually find some corruption charge (on Obama) they think will stick,” said Antar. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Here’s what Rep. Darrell Issa (R) – the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform – had to say just recently: [Read more]