September 18, 2012, Welcome to the future
I began blogging at this domain on 18 September 2001... eleven years ago today. More on that below.
First, it seems a federal Appeals Court judge here got the memo on the NDAA, and noted that when Congress and the President say we're a de jure dictatorship, by Jove, we're a de jure dictatorship, and if the Government feels like it, it can lock you up without recourse to, you know, law. This, of course, has been the law of the land for over eight years, ever since the Supreme Court refused to spring Jose Padilla. And hence, perversely, the federal appellate judge is right on this one: if the Constitution doesn't apply to Latino ex-gang-bangers like Padilla, it doesn't apply to upper-middle-class White journos like Chris Hedges and the other plaintiffs... I've been trying to tell you this for years.
In Fake Election News[TM], it seems that old Scrooge McDuck Romney told a "truth is no defense" political "truth" to his donor base, and Mother Jones got a secret video of it... He suggested that something like 47% of Americans are on government entitlements and "will vote for this President [Obama] no matter what." Or something. Vaguely reminiscent of Obama's "gotcha" four years ago, when he lamented that lower-middle-class White voters would "cling to their religion and guns." Like all pseudo-truths, there is an element of truth to what Romney said, except there really isn't. He, of course, meant "YOU KNOW, BLACK PEOPLE." The joke, of course, is that most of the government entitlement money goes to White people, mostly via Social Security and Medicare [and Defense contracts and corporate welfare]... of course, most food stamp money and even most Medicaid money, nationwide, probably does too... because there are still a lot more White people than non-White people in the USA. The other joke is the assumption that people actually vote on economic self-interest... that's not really true either, or Democrats would never really lose elections, given that most Americans actually aren't particularly well-off (and logically, wouldn't vote for "the party of the well-off."). At this point, both parties are in the thrall of the feudal lords in the upper strata-- "the 1% or higher." Knowing this, most Americans either don't vote at all (one of the few signs of a healthy society out there, along with our national distaste for soccer)... or else, they vote on "spleen" and nonsense issues... like, of course, "abortion, gay marriage and gun control"... or, code words aside, that is to say, which party they think will be meaner to Black people. [Impressively, the President, despite, you know, being Black, has been pretty mean to Black people himself, all things told.]
Meanwhile, as American interests in the Middle East are quite literally under attack, including the unfortunate recent killing of Christopher Stephens, U.S. Ambassador to Libya, the fifth sitting ambassador killed in U.S. history, it seems this is a well-followed story among Americans (who also view Mitt Romney's right-wing-talk-radio response to it quite negatively). The easy-to-understand story is "rage over an anti-Muslim video"... but of course, that video has been out for a while... the rage is about the failure of the Arab Spring to improve the lives of most Middle Easterners, and quite probably, because of stepped up American intervention in the region (perhaps designed to cause World War III to break out as a last-minute "rally 'round the flag" election tactic just in case "QE-3"-- the Federal Reserve goosing/juicing of the markets to boost Obama's reelection odds at a time when the equity markets are near all-time highs-- doesn't work... electorally.)
All of these things reflect a consolidation of central power... financially, or via outright brute force... that has been underway for a while. There is consensus among our political classes (if not our citizenry) on this point, that this kind of power consolidation is "good"-- it keeps the status quo power in place. The proposition of this blog is that this is unequivocally bad: IMHO, decentralization, autonomy, and local control... are always superior, pretty much regardless of context, be it of agriculture, or politics. Not to say rules, including the rule of law, consistently enforced, aren't good... Of course, as you know, laws in the USA anyway aren't consistently enforced... be it on [mostly] racial lines, or on socioeconomic lines, or just on an out-and-out raw power basis... and this is, you know, bad.
Reality is that the human condition, at least through recorded history, has mostly sucked for most people. We had a window throughout most of the latter half of the Twentieth Century where things were getting better-- at least politically and materially-- for more people than had ever happened before. Now, it seems, we are reverting to the norm (some kind of feudalism). I am saying this is unnecessary, and given the "environmental" in every sense (physical, biological, moral, etc.), I am suggesting that this too, is bad. Only it's more than bad: in the interest of propping up the power and status of the status quo, we run the risk of killing everything and everyone on this planet, be it from global warming, rampant use of chemical and GMOs in agriculture, nuclear waste, fracking, war, or any of the self-imposed pestilences that our current hierarchical based status quo and our ever more "me first... and only me" lifestyles are imposing on everyone else.
And so, once again, here we are. Poetically, just as my first post did eleven years ago, this blog anniversary falls around Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a time when the annual cycle of life can re-set... a time of celebration, yet of sober reflection, as in just over a week, comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the Jewish people's Deity, at least goes the theology, will finally seal our fate, and determine whether our year-to-year contract is finally up, or whether we get to make it another year. While, in my view, this is an extremely useful metaphor for individuals, it is also an extremely useful macro-metaphor. Somehow it has been lost in our "Me first" world [where our dominant philosopher has become Serial-Killer-Admirer Ayn Rand.] We can either acknowledge that our fantasy of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (he did not suggest it as a "good thing") is not an appropriate ordering mechanism of the universe, or we can go on not being nice to each other (micro and macro) and maybe give up having a chance at a future just to keep an unsustainable party for fewer and fewer people going. Eleven years on in this blogging endeavor, I cannot say that I'm optimistic about the direction we've chosen.
But the metaphor of the universal cycle-- and the possibility of renewal-- is always available to us, and this seems as appropriate a time as any to reconsider whether we are capable of actual renewal and genuine introspection. On that point, as my dear friend Candace always says, "Hope dies last."
September 11, 2012, 9-11 -- plus 11.0
And so we come to "that day"-- like "that day" eleven years ago here in The City [TM], a Tuesday, with weather almost as crystal clear.
I don't know what to say any more. Like that day, this morning, I will make my way to work, more or less 100 meters or so from the World Trade Center site. But unlike that day, my assumptions about the nature of the nation I live in are wholly different. Then, there were expectations of Constitutional limits to what our government could do to us. We had expectations of a more or less benevolent (if not utopian) future.
Those assumptions are gone, now. OBL and minions have gotten us to destroy ourselves, in the purported interests of "safety" and "security." In the sham election coming up in seven or eight weeks, neither of the "major party" (for now) candidates want to talk about these things-- the fact that "growth" is probably over, that the national security state is now permanent, that we have achieved "bipartisan consensus" on these things, and indeed, even "bipartisan consensus" to make sure that unimportant issues (in the sense of a President actually doing something about any of them, like abortion, gay marriage and/or "gun control") continue to be "areas of difference."
And so, later today, for the eleventh time, I suppose there will be a public reading of the names of those killed eleven years ago-- in a gesture torn between private grief and public catharsis-- just a symptom of a society where private selfishness equals public virtue (see Ryan, Paul and Rand, Ayn.) and our "national grief" justifies the slaughter of God knows how many of "the Other."
I was there that day, as you'all know. I'm tired of this day. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we put it behind us in our national consciousness, the better.
Just saying.
September 9, 2012, Sunday Sunday
We'll start this Sunday with this happy sorta op-ed by Nick Kristoff in the Grey Lady on... wait for it... organic dairy farming. Yup: good food makes us happier not to mention, the cows are happier. I say this all the time: our grandparents and great grandparents had many more stresses in their lives than we do-- but crappy, health-destroying pseudo-food produced in the most heinous industrial conditions and traveling thousands of miles to get to them wasn't one of them. Exhibit A as to why we spend one in six dollars of our GDP on "health care" (we almost certainly spend far less on "food" itself!) Healthy lifestyles and good food, are of course, infinitely less profitable to the corporate behemoth monsters who own Washington (you can see them clearly identify themselves by their advertisements on Sunday morning political talk shows), and hence, discouraged in the strongest terms by our establishment. Follow them down their (proverbial) garden path at your extreme peril.
The lead article (at least on the Grey Lady's web-site) is this cacophony of student loan collection stories, noting some staggering facts, like the fact that current defaults alone exceed all current tuition expenses. As our readers know, student loans, if not repaid, follow us to the grave, as they are not capable of discharge in bankruptcy. But this is something else our grandparents and great grandparents didn't have to deal with: if college proved unaffordable, they simply didn't go, and there were plenty of opportunities in the job market anyway. Further, if they did go, colleges were infinitely more affordable (I note that my entire Ivy League degree cost less than a single semester at the same institution some thirty years or so later, for example.) Also, they didn't have to deal with the plethora of heavily advertised enterprises like "the University of Phoenix," profit-making "educational institutions" that, in a rational and healthy society would, like "health insurance companies," be against the law. (For-profit institutions have higher default rates, of course.)
Nor, of course, did our grandparents and great-grandparents have to deal with implicit pronouncements of their "character issues" from "lack of grit" if they didn't complete college, more or less the substance of this Joe Nocera op-ed on education. Nocera tries to laud charter schools and educational innovators who are improving the performance of generally under-performing groups of students (code for "poor and dark-skinned"); starting out with laudable goals, however, he, alas, advances the prevailing narrative that somehow people are poor and unable to advance through the education maze for reasons they can control.
OK... what is all this? Well, Kristoff is looking forward-- back to the future, if you will-- when we all eat good, healthy local food again (perhaps which we were involved in growing)-- because it makes us happier (and because the infrastructure of how we presently eat is largely unsustainable). Meanwhile, back in the Matrix, people have to deal with the realities of a declining economy which has largely been deindustrialized as it is, with a rather insane set of incentives: go get an expensive degree that you probably can't pay for (with just about automatic ability to borrow whatever it costs, regardless of any prospect for ever paying it back) which will probably not be of much help to obtaining high paying work in an economy with less and less high-paying employment and more and more people with college degrees competing for them...
Doesn't the bucolic, happy dairy farm seem "nice"? Anyway-- that's the broader point... our "health" and "education" complexes are not doing their job of nourishing body and soul... before we move on to broader "reforms"... perhaps we should undertake a more "basic" assessment?
Just saying...
September 8, 2012, If only...
We give you an encore link to our friends at The Onion, for their hilarious parody of the President's convention speech ["Obama: Help us destroy Jesus and start a new age of liberal darkness"] (more because it's funny not so much because of the send-up of "the culture wars," but because of the implied proposition that Barack Obama actually feels that strongly about anything besides his own prospects for that corner office at Goldman or Morgan.)
September 6, 2012, Convention Highlights
Our friends at The Onion nail it as usual, and tell us about Bill Clinton's rather demonstrative speech, Michelle Obama's thoughts on her role in the campaign, Joe Biden's long road to Charlotte, a candid shot of a delegate, a discussion of DNC programming, a profile of keynote speaker Julian "Not Fidel" Castro, and, of course, news from the Romney/Ryan camp.
Finally, "America's Finest News Source" laments that this year's DNC just lacks the delusional magic that marked the '08 convention.
We are not worthy.
Anecdotally, there are still millions of people paying attention to this crap... for real. Good luck to you'all.
September 3, 2012, PR
Happy Labor Day.
"PR" in running circles means "personal record," in commerce it usually means "public relations"... and in politics these days, it could mean "Paul Ryan" (full name, Paul Davis Ryan, or "PDR" usually meaning "Physician's Desk Reference"). Since Familia TD was happily on vacation in an area with pretty much no electronic media (and right here in America... stick around, folks!), I missed much of the mirth and merriment of the GOP convention, such as Clint losing a debate with an empty chair, and, of course, Paul Ryan making up his best marathon time.
Like me, Paul Ryan ran his first marathon while in college, and like me, his time was over 4 hours... his was 4 hours and a minute and a half in Duluth, MN in 1990, mine 4 hours 22 minutes and 38 or 39 seconds in Charlotte, NC in 1982. Nonetheless, in lying speaking to friendly right-wing talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Ryan suggested that he was a bit faster... well, here's the excerpt:
HH: Are you still running?PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.
HH: But you did run marathons at some point?
PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.
HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?
PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
Sub-three marathon times are very, very good... the stuff of elite runners. And so, if Mr. Ryan were, even in his past, an elite runner, this would be very interesting indeed. And so, his need to casually lie about something that millions of runners take with the utmost degree of seriousness... is quite interesting. Perhaps it's the nature of being in the political bubble and surrounded by yes-persons and toadies (of which Ryan himself is one), and of being constantly told that you are [what passes for] a deep thinker and intellectual. Or perhaps it's something even more troubling.
I'm on record as saying there's no meaningful substantive difference among and between "the two parties," and indeed, "our" [presumptive] Vice Presidential candidate, Vice President Joe Biden, has his own history of confabulation (or at least plagiarism). But Biden's "thing," like most political confabulations, was politically self-serving; Ryan's was merely gratuitously ego-aggrandizing... more the stuff of [juvenile] mental health "issues," especially given the certainty it would be immediately debunked. Also, note how easily he just rolled into the huge, throbbing lie (when he could have said "I don't remember, Hugh... three, four hours... it was a while ago")... indeed, the campaign attributed the lie gaffe to a rounding error or some such lame-ass excuse. Obviously, that Ryan's "budget plans" would increase the deficit by trillions, rather than decrease it, could also be a simple "rounding error." Really, that this rather unserious person is taken for "deep" and "wonky" just shows how cartoonish the whole thing has become.
Barack Obama has been a disappointment; worse than that, actually, as he hasn't even tried to implement the agenda he campaigned on, and he has made no bones about demonstrating where his actual allegiances lie (that would be "to his donors, especially in the financial sector"). Obama has expanded the wars, tightened the national security state, stepped up the war on Black people drugs, doubled down on Dubya's "health care reform means throwing more taxpayer money at Big Pharma and Big Insurance" and refused to prosecute the most blatant crimes committed by Wall Street... and even extended the Bush tax cuts when he didn't have to... and while Dubya gave himself the right to throw citizens in the dungeon, Barack Obama has claimed the right to outright murder citizens (as long as the decision is made on Tuesday, apparently).
So don't tell me Mitt Romney (or Sarah Palin, or Paul Ryan, or Ron Paul, or Rand Paul, or any Republican) is going to be particularly worse in any meaningful, substantive way. The same? Absolutely. Because that's how sham democracies work: you have "a vote" (well, White people do, anyway)... but it's not exactly "meaningful," now, is it?
So then, why do some tall-tales told by Ayn-Randian sociopath Vice-Presidential candidates matter? Because it reflects a broader socio-systemic problem here: the political process, and much of American life, purports to behave as if reality doesn't matter... but, as Kuntsler reminds us... reality always wins. Just as actual sub-three hour marathoner Lance Armstrong recently found out.
August 21, 2012, Meta-kabuki
All hail the Grey Lady, for doing its part to keep the kabuki of a "political process" and "Presidential election" and "democracy" in this editorial lamenting the "extremist" Republican party platform agenda... hell, the first sentence even says:
Over the years, the major parties’ election-year platforms have been regarded as Kabuki theater scripts for convention week.
THAT is awesome: a piece advancing the political gestalt kabuki actually using the word kabuki. No...the only word is "awesome." The Times does its part to convince the few remaining "true believers" that "the eeeevil Republican extreeeemists" actually matter, because of their "extreeeeme" positions on... wait for it,,, abortion and gay marriage. Yes, it's a relatively easy play, given the mirth and merriment surrounding Congressman Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin [who decided not to hang it up in the Missouri senate race]. But, come on! Other than this year's exercise to stick Obama with control of the Senate (which he'd rather not have, as it imples some level of "accountability" he'd rather pretend he didn't have)... what, exactly, is different here? The previous Republican platforms have taken very similar positions... every Republican candidate since Reagan has espoused a "pro-life" agenda, and gay-bashing has been a mainstay for quite a while as well.
Still... there is some urgency now, as the game seems to be more apparent to more and more... Occupy! took a lot of the mask off "the process." Hence, the Grey Lady needs to tell us that there is a difference that warrants not only our attention but our extreme emotional (and maybe financial) commitment to "our side," as if "the two parties" weren't in full agreement on expanding the wars and the war machine, holding and torturing prisoners at Guantanamo and wherever else we want, gutting social welfare programs (except for the already affluent), maintaining public segregation through public school de-funding, the war on dark skinned people, especially young men drugs, permitting rampant environmental destruction, subsidizing extractive and poisoning industries and undercutting anything remotely healthy or sustainable, and allowing the financial sector to dominate the rest of society... tax cuts for the rich... and I could go on and on, of course.
But I won't. Hey... credit where credit is due to the Times... kudos, Grey Lady.
August 19, 2012, It's about the fundamentals
Item: Pakistani authorities arrest an eleven year old girl for the "blasphemy" of burning the pages of a Koran. Seems that the girl was not only a Christian, but also had Downs syndrome; the "blasphemy" thing sparks controversy Pakistan-way, some politicians calling for its repeal have been gunned down. This sort of thing makes us look at how children are treated in the United States, where we see children arrested for, inter alia, spraying perfume on themselves, burping, doodling or throwing paper airplanes.
Item: George Will tells us "why doom hasn't materialized." You have to hand it to George Will: he merrily cashes his Establishment checks without a jot of concern as to the potential damage he might be causing should anyone pay attention to him (which, thankfully, no one does). We might actually get some entertainment value out of watching him dismiss the fact that the last twelve months were the warmest ever recorded in the United States, along with extreme drought, insane wildfires and dust bowl conditions, because "the world hasn't fallen apart yet." You see, it's either full-flown consumer culture business as usual, or Mad Max... there's no in between (and frankly, I'm sure Mr. Will would have a cheery word or two for Mad Max himself, about the fact that he can still find petrol for his motorcycle, for example, and hence, everything is A.O.K.!.)
Item: WTF? The Grey Lady gives us the run-down on Senator Chuck Schumer's seeming propensity to encourage marriages among his own staff. Naturally, the wedding announcements will almost certainly appear in the Grey Lady's Sunday Styles pages' wedding announcements, along with nuptials of others in the cultural elite (straight and gay alike, btw)... maybe George WIll is right: we'll know Apocalypse has arrived when the Times treats us to the wedding announcement of a dry cleaner and an industrial worker.
Needless to say... we're not there yet.
August 12, 2012, Howell Scrooge '12
Here's the thing: Barack Obama may be my classmate, and nominally the candidate of the party in which I'm (nominally) registered, but I don't see how any self-respecting progressive (or for that matter, human being) can support a President-- ANY President-- who holds meetings every Tuesday to decide which human beings the United States government should murder. Sorry.
So... imagine my disappointment when the possibility of voting for the (not so paradoxically) more liberal Mitt Romney evaporated in a heartbeat today, as old Thurston Howell III Romney (Willard to his friends) picked Paul Ryan for his running mate, not a boring old White guy like Rob Portman or Tim Pawlenty, or a not-at-all-boring fat White guy like Chris Christie or Latino guy like Marco Rubio, or perhaps a woman (Condi? Nikki? Gov. Susana Martinez?)... but instead Willard went for the current darling-of-conservatives-precisely-because-he-is-willing-to-put-their- policies-of-sadistic- economic- cruelty- and- austerity- up- front- and- center, Paul Ebenezer Scrooge Ryan... who is popular among the hard-ass right-wing set because he is up front about wanting to terminate old people old people (he's a "serious intellectual" and "policy wonk", you know), all in the name of the super-rich paying even less in taxes in a country that is already lowest in taxes among major industrial countries (and third lowest overall in the OECD, with only the paradisical nations of Mexico and Chile taxing their citizens at a lower overall rate than we do.)
I'm still of the view that perhaps something more troubling than just his boring-ness got in the way of a Rob Portman selection... or, perhaps, its simpler than that, and as with 2008, the financial elite Republican Establishment decided it wanted Barack Obama to win because he could and would advance its interests better than any Republican it wanted to shore up the conservative base with a candidate guaranteed to polarize all but die-hard right-wingers a tea-party darling.
Don't know. Don't care. Won't vote for either [financial sector owned and operated] "major party," quite possibly ever again.
[Slight update: WaPo's Matt Miller has more on "the talented Mr. Ryan." After a day's thought, I acknowledge that maybe a shake-up is less crazy than I thought... Romney had been losing on making this an "election about Obama"... so instead, he's going to make it an election about Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Burns... let's see how that works out... this being America, i.e., land of the free lunch and home of the knave dumbass, it might just work out pretty well...]
August 7, 2012, Cue food riots
Brother Dmitry lays out the various current conditions (particularly, widespread drought and crop loss), and diagnoses conditions of general unpleasantness (including food riots) in many parts of the planet.
While the United States is by no means on top of "the vulnerable" list, it is certainly not on the bottom. Particularly critical is the 50-million strong food stamp population (whether his fault or not, in sheer numbers, my classmate Barack really is the food stamp president), the irony is that the cost for the "SNAP" program was a comedically low $76 billion-- a preposterously low figure to keep the rubes here from rioting when compared to other budgetary figures for, say, prisons or "health care" or "national security" (supposedly to protect us from "them," from somewhere else.)
Nonetheless, in the opera buffa called our political process, this bulwark-against-the-peasants-rioting... may be under threat (and as Brother Dmitry observes, it will unquestionably not keep up with food prices if they rise or even explode in dollar terms). As Kunstler observes, "Take away the pizza pockets and the Pepsi and anything can happen."
Don't expect the powerful (that would be Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, et als.) to take steps to ease things for the peasants, either... savvy investors might consider manufacturers of tear gas, riot shields and that sort of thing.
August 6, 2012, Men are from Mars...
I believe the joke was, "they can put a man on the moon... so why can't we send all of them there?" It IS cool to see that the "Curiosity Rover" has evidently landed on the surface of Mars without crashing and burning (assuming we accept the NASA propaganda that it didn't-- or that the project even exists).
Thing is, I'm delighted to see the government spend money on anything that isn't either homicide, or a gratuitous subsidy to rich people who bribed members of Congress... so, a cool science project like this that would make any high school robotics program proud... just warms the heart. Will we get any useful scientific data out of this? Hopefully. Will this help in the eventual mission to get men to Mars? Dream on. We're pretty much out of liquid fuel here as it is; fantasize all you want about "dilithium crystals" or crap like that... the only stars we're going to travel to are "Star Chambers"... and the United States has already arrived at that point.
Is this a nice development for mankind? Sure-- why not? But maybe we should start to appreciate more "elemental things," like, say, Usain Bolt's achievements.
Just saying.
August 5, 2012, Sick Schmuck Kills Six Sikhs
Another day, another psychotic bastard opens fire on innocent people in America, today, in Wisconsin, where six Sikh worshipers were killed at a temple near Milwaukee, the gunman later killed by a police officer who was wounded in the shootout.
Gun control, bla bla bla. We are so far past the point where gun control will do any good [outside the few pockets of sanity that already have it] that I'm almost disgusted to have to utter those two words. Of course, life as we know it in New York City would actually be impossible without our city's quite strict gun control-- that many millions of people simply cannot live in close quarters with any moron being able to legally get their hands on a gun.
See here's the thing: as a society, of course, we are scared shitless of Black males having a gun, for for that matter, walking the streets at all (hence, here in New York, we have our unbelievably unconstitutional-- as if that matters-- "stop and frisk" policy)... but by and large (at least, as I understand it), the crimes committed by Black males tend to involve the drug trade, or gang violence, or other crimes committed against members of minority communities, often with illegally obtained weapons... the sort of horror shows just witnessed in Wisconsin (or recently in Aurora, Colorado) invariably involve White males who got their hands on guns legally... and not just "guns"-- but high powered military style weapons capable of quickly killing large numbers of people.
And the ultimate irony is that the stated fantasy reason for the inviolate nature of the Second Amendment is that "having guns in individual [read "White male"] hands is a bulwark against tyranny." The reality is that massive gun ownership simply adds "individual psychotics" to the list of things that threaten us, along with actual tyranny, be it of, for example, the government itself, or by its corporate owners and overlords in concert with government (see, e.g., "the Monsanto is above the law" proviso in the recent farm bill, pretty much deregulating genetically modified "food").
Things is bad out there. People, at a visceral level, know that until, oh, Jon Corzine, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein and so many others of the current "above-the-law" financial class are held to account for their crimes (and make no mistake, crimes they are), and our nation-state itself stops committing mass murder itself in foreign locales... bad shit will keep happening. Indeed, in such craziness, it starts to seem normal to consider running amok with military assault weapons against one's fellow hapless schmucks.
Another day, another horror story. Like the crazy weather, the frequency of this sort of thing seems to be accelerating... don't get me wrong, it could well be closely related to the crazy weather (people do go crazy in prolonged heat). But this sort of thing-- in the present case, an apparent hate crime at that (Sikhs, after all, look different from the typical White male likely to commit a crime like this)... still has some shock value, but perilously, somehow seems more "normal" [here's an "interactive guide" to America's recent mass killings] in its own right.
America. Fuck yeah.
August 4, 2012, Suck it, losers
It seems London-based HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, helped launder, inter alia, Mexican drug lord money and... money for OBL and the 9-11 highjackers.
And while a bunch of largely innocent schmucks will presumably spend the rest of their rather unpleasant lives at Guantanamo or Bagram and untold thousands of Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Iraqis, Bahrainis, Syrians and God knows who else will be maimed, tortured, or killed by the American war machine, supposedly to "protect us from the terrorists"... that our largest financial institutions [and recipients of billions of taxpayer funded bailouts]... are funding... well, just another day in the banking sector.
HSBC will doubtless pay a large fine representing perhaps hours... maybe even days worth... of the profits obtained from the "mis-selling."
Frankly, though, on this, my college classmate Barack Obama's birthday, why not take his advice on this, and simply "look forward, and not backward"? In other words-- why even bother with the token fines? Keep the money for executive bonuses... the peasants and rubes... well, they can just suck it.
Losers.
August 4, 2012, The American Dream, in one
This, from Think Progress, nails it: private prisons spent just $45 million in bribes lobbying expenses, and netted over $5 billion just for detaining immigrants alone. Short answer to "what are WE all doing wrong?" is quite simple: playing by an outdated set of rules called "fairness" and what used to be known as "the rules" or "the law." Fuck that. Among the bribes lobbying are efforts to have legislatures pass harsher sentences to increase private prison profits. Ain't America grand?
America is now a simple game: unless you want to be left behind with the rubes and suckers of the 99%, you have to bribe the powerful and connected for your own advantage: "capitalism" that involves "competing" in "the market" is for suckers... capitalism that involves guaranteed profits by selling services that should only be done by government to government (at profit and mark-up)... is where it's at.
Yes, you are correct: this IS how banana republics operate.
And your point is?
July 24, 2012, Dog days of summer
Rest in peace, Dr. Sally Ride, America's first female astronaut, who died at 61 of pancreatic cancer. In 1983, Dr. Ride was aboard the space shuttle Challenger (which would blow up three years later, with two other women aboard), for her debut mission. At the time, Dr. Ride's mission [not to mention her whole career in the hard sciences] was quite groundbreaking (notwithstanding that the Soviets had sent women to space decades earlier...for all its flaws, the USSR had much less of a stick up its ass about things like that than we did... and do... note that there are, despite the vast majority of college graduates being women for some time now, there are only eighteen female CEOs in the Fortune 500... and that's 3.6%... way up from 2.4% in 2011!)
In Fake Election[TM] news, it seems neither of the "two candidates" wants to talk about gun control in the aftermath of the horrific gun-massacre in Columbine Aurora, Colorado. Let me get right to it: unless and until Goldman, Sachs and J.P. Morgan see it to their advantage to cut them off, we will be letting the rubes have guns and ammo and periodically shooting up a school, college, post office, shopping mall, restaurant, ordinary workplace or military base (but not, say, a well-heeled country club or corporate board room, of course, because that sort of thing would endanger people who matter)... "the Second Amendment" as interpreted by no-gun-regulation absolutists will remain "the law". As regular readers of this blog know, the Constitution is simply a construct for the interests of the powerful, which is why things like habeas corpus, or prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure are dispensed with, while guns remain inviolate. "It's the hierarchy, stupid." As Barack and Mitt are simply alternate flavors of the same ice cream, don't look for any difference on this "issue"... or on much else.
In the "oops" department, it seems that eight employees of Rupert Murdoch's media empire are going to be charged with conspiracy to intercept communications (that's a crime when private parties not connected with Goldman Sachs the Government do it... at least in the UK) in the ongoing hacking of communications scandal, including former Murdoch major domo Rebekah Brooks (a close friend of UK PM David "Spanky" Cameron) and Andy "Not Chuck" Coulson, former communications director for UK M David "Spanky" Cameron.
One of our cats is lying between my keyboard and screen and attacking my mouse (he is a cat, after all!), and so, I'll have to just rift on the rest of this post, without links... a huge iceberg has broken off a glacier in Greenland and over 60% of the USA is suffering an unbelievable drought (and before the massacre, Colorado was suffering its worst wildfires ever, including all over the Colorado Springs area, where I ran up and down Pikes Peak back in '07)... and yet, Big Oil and Big Finance still feel the need to fund their global warming denial propaganda... and Americans, being trained to be stupid and compliant by our dis-education system, are still not convinced of reality (though they do believe in UFO's, the rapture, angels, Santa Claus and that tax cuts for the rich will increase government revenue). After successfully replacing the pretty secular Qaddaffi (?) regime in Libya with chaos and Muslim extremists (see "Iraq"), we're trying to do much the same thing in Syria, complete with al Qaeda affiliated mercenaries of our employ... next stop, World War III... it's how we got out of the First Great Depression... don't think that will end well...
Enjoying a brief respite from man-made climate change here in NYC.. hope you'all are enjoying your summers as well. This has been... "Dog days of summer."
