Saturday, November 16, 2013
Warped Kubrick
I don't know what to think about this story that I recently discovered in my "To Post, Misc" file. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is one long metaphor for the slaughter of Native Americans? Or it's a confession that Kubrick helped fake the moon landing? Completely silly and completely fascinating at the same time! Here is the first 12 minutes...
Dear Mr. Watterson
Take, for example, the Garfield comic strip: it was in a lot of papers, but there was really nothing to it. Yet they have sold millions of stuffed Garfields, and they even made a movie out of a lousy three-panel comic strip that was about about a cat that eats lasagna. Strips like Bloom County and Dilbert were higher quality and were frequently about something, but they also went the merchandising route, cashing in on plush Opuses and Dogberts. The Simpsons is a merchandising monolith.
In such a world it's hard to imagine someone who would turn down all that cold hard cash to maintain artistic integrity. Yet there is such a man. He and his creation are the topic of a documentary called Dear Mr. Watterson. The director was recently interviewed on NPR.
The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, written and drawn by Bill Watterson, was a classic. It's about Calvin, a boy who thinks his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, is real. Calvin is constantly ambushed by Hobbes, and Calvin talks about this imaginary playmate as if he's a real tiger. His friends think he's nuts, but he has amazing adventures with dinosaurs and spaceships and film noir detectives, even though the world around him is disappointingly mundane.
People still love Calvin and Hobbes: it was smart, funny, philosophical, touching, poignant and sometimes mean and crude. It ran for 10 years, and when Watterson had said everything he wanted to say, he stopped writing the strip. That was almost 20 years ago. In a world where pointless comics like Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, M.D., soldier on for decades, penned by faceless corporate shills, Watterson voluntarily ended one of the best comic strips ever written.
Bill Watterson never sold out, even though the strip has the most obvious merchandising gimmick you can imagine. One of the titular characters is a stuffed animal. But you can't get an officially licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger.
It's not like Watterson is a pauper and needs to sell out: Calvin and Hobbes was tremendously successful during its run, and book-length collections of the strips are still doing a brisk business. The strip is syndicated in reruns and you can see it on the web. So Watterson has no financial need to sell out: he's got a steady income and has maintained the artistic integrity of his creation.
But that doesn't stop the vast majority of successful artists and writers from cashing in. Most, given the opportunity, decide to merchandise their creations even though they're already doing quite well.
Now, I'm not saying that selling out is always a bad thing. But most Americans seem to take it as an article of faith that more is better, as so eloquently stated in the immortal words of The Tick, spoken to his disciples in the Mystic Order of Arachnid Vigilance (from The Tick #9, "Road Trip", 1991):
Always ... always remember: Less is less. More is more. More is better, and twice as much is good too... Not enough is bad, and too much is never enough except when it's just about right.This attitude, which almost caused the collapse of our entire economic system in 2008, was presaged in the pages of The Tick. To finance their organization the M.O.A.V. planned to "buy real estate for no-money down and sell it at huge profits!" The author was a seer!
The Tick is a satirical superhero comic created by Ben Edlund, who has "sold out" several times with licensed merchandise and animated and live-action television versions of The Tick. He's also done a lot of work in Hollywood (well, mostly Canada) on shows such as Firefly, Angel, Supernatural and Revolution.
So, yeah, he's a sellout. But if Edlund had never sold out I wouldn't have found the original black and white Tick comics. The shows he's worked on, and the specific episodes and characters he's created are self-aware, self-critical and self-deprecating. They never take themselves too seriously.
It warms my heart that Bill Watterson can keep the memory of Calvin and Hobbes pristine (at least until his money-grubbing heirs get their mitts on it). But I also like that Edlund went on to do a lot of new and entertaining work that was made possible by him selling out.
The most important thing is these men got to choose: they had control over their creations and could choose whether to license them. This is unlike many artists and writers who've been shafted by giant corporations, like Siegel and Shuster of Superman fame.
If there's anything that should be changed in our intellectual property laws it's the idea that the creator of a work of art can sign away the rights to their creations. It should be illegal, like selling your own children.
To decide whether something is a sell-out or not, you have to ask whether the merchandising is a betrayal of the original artistic concept. Star Wars action figures? Not a sellout. Superman Halloween costume? Not a sellout. Tick live-action TV series? A lousy failure, but not a sellout.
But the core of Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin's antics and the living, breathing Hobbes are products of his vivid imagination. Calvin can take any mundane object and through the power of his mind transform it into a grand adventure.
A licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger that replaces a child's imagination with a product manufactured by people whose childhood dreams ended in a sweatshop making slave wages? Definitely a sellout.
A Little Low?
12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country.
That number is actually lower than I expected!
That number is actually lower than I expected!
Hilarious!
I don't know why but I've been on a real photo kick lately. It truly is a medium that has exploded thanks to social media. But it also has an eye to the past and that's why I completely adored this site. What a fantastic idea! Check it out!
Friday, November 15, 2013
He's Right
Michael Tomasky is absolutely right when the says that the Democrats need to to stop freaking out and take charge. They tend to get sucked in to the news cycle panic of the moment and forget about the the long term picture. In the final analysis, this is where we are at.
The current situation is serious. But I remember a lot of other times when it was supposedly curtains for Obama, too, because inside the Beltway, the more disciplined Republicans, who after all are in the luxurious position of just sitting back and firing away, have an easier time winning news cycles. But out beyond the Beltway, the party that shut down the government for three weeks and killed immigration reform and wants to decimate food stamps and can’t even pass its own spending bills doesn’t look very appealing to most people. The fate of Obamacare can be changed. The DNA of the GOP cannot.
How To Admit Fault
I challenge any conservative to show me a Republican that is this reflective and honest.
The Barack Obama they hate simply doesn't exist.
The Barack Obama they hate simply doesn't exist.
The Magic Bullet Was Ordinary After All
With the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination coming up, NOVA ran an episode called "Cold Case JFK" that may interest conspiracy theorists.
Using the slim evidence left over from the botched investigations in 1963 and experiments with a rifle identical to the one Lee Harvey Oswald bought mail order, ballistics experts Luke and Mike Haag and other forensics experts put together a pretty convincing case that Oswald fired all three shots: The first one missed. The second one hit Kennedy in the back, exited at the neck, passed through Governor John Connally, passed through his wrist and then lodged in his leg. The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head, causing a small entry wound and a large explosion of brain and blood at the exit point in the forehead.
The bullet in question was a 6.5x52mm Carcano cartridge, similar to the one shown on the right. A 6.5 mm Carcano model 91/38 carbine was found in the Texas Schoolbook Depository with Oswald's handprint on it. The key thing about this bullet is the long, cylindrical shape of the slug (the part of the cartridge that's fired from the rifle). Most rifle bullets are like the 30.06 slug below on the the right: more conical than cylindrical.
The cylindrical shape of the Carcano slug means that it has more contact with the riflings inside the rifle barrel than a 30.06 slug does, which gives it more spin and therefore makes it fly truer through the air.
However, once it passes through something -- say, a head or ballistics gel -- it begins to "yaw" or tumble. The bullet had started to tumble when it struck Connally, and hit him sideways instead of straight on.
The Haags' experiments in the NOVA program bear all this out.
The Carcano slug was also copper-jacketed, which means it would deform less than a naked lead slug. And the slug that was found on Connally's gurney was deformed -- the rear end was pinched in, just as you would expect if it hit Connally sideways, as shown in the third photo.
The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head and caused a massive shockwave through the skull, causing the forehead to explode. The pattern of cracks in the skull is consistent with a rear entry wound, ruling out a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The backward jerking of Kennedy's body evident in the Zapruder film was due to a spasm that caused all Kennedy's muscles to contract, but since back muscles are stronger than abdominals, his head jerked back.
Other incidentals such as people hearing more than three shots are due to echoes and the supersonic speed of the Carcano slug.
From all this it seems that Oswald really was the lone gunman. Which means Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission actually got something right with the single-bullet theory.
Oswald, an avowed Marxist, apparently tried to assassinate Edwin Walker, a retired general who Oswald called a Fascist (Walker had tried to stop desegregation in Mississippi). So it's plausible that Oswald was a nut and was just moving on to higher things by assassinating Kennedy, with no orders from Cuba or Moscow or Vegas or the Teamsters. Oswald may also have had an accomplice in the Walker assassination attempt, which means... Well, you get the picture.
However, the fact that Oswald shot Kennedy single-handedly doesn't mean there was no conspiracy. Jack Ruby's shocking murder of Oswald on live TV is incomprehensible. Why would a strip club owner with mob connections sacrifice his own life to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of testifying in the trial of the century?
Unfortunately, forensics and ballistics will never provide the answers for the machinations that led up to Ruby's silencing of Oswald.
Using the slim evidence left over from the botched investigations in 1963 and experiments with a rifle identical to the one Lee Harvey Oswald bought mail order, ballistics experts Luke and Mike Haag and other forensics experts put together a pretty convincing case that Oswald fired all three shots: The first one missed. The second one hit Kennedy in the back, exited at the neck, passed through Governor John Connally, passed through his wrist and then lodged in his leg. The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head, causing a small entry wound and a large explosion of brain and blood at the exit point in the forehead.
 | ||||
| Carcano 6.5 mm cartridge |
 |
| 30.06 cartridge |
 |
| Rear View of Magic Bullet |
The cylindrical shape of the Carcano slug means that it has more contact with the riflings inside the rifle barrel than a 30.06 slug does, which gives it more spin and therefore makes it fly truer through the air.
However, once it passes through something -- say, a head or ballistics gel -- it begins to "yaw" or tumble. The bullet had started to tumble when it struck Connally, and hit him sideways instead of straight on.
The Haags' experiments in the NOVA program bear all this out.
The Carcano slug was also copper-jacketed, which means it would deform less than a naked lead slug. And the slug that was found on Connally's gurney was deformed -- the rear end was pinched in, just as you would expect if it hit Connally sideways, as shown in the third photo.
The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head and caused a massive shockwave through the skull, causing the forehead to explode. The pattern of cracks in the skull is consistent with a rear entry wound, ruling out a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The backward jerking of Kennedy's body evident in the Zapruder film was due to a spasm that caused all Kennedy's muscles to contract, but since back muscles are stronger than abdominals, his head jerked back.
Other incidentals such as people hearing more than three shots are due to echoes and the supersonic speed of the Carcano slug.
From all this it seems that Oswald really was the lone gunman. Which means Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission actually got something right with the single-bullet theory.
Oswald, an avowed Marxist, apparently tried to assassinate Edwin Walker, a retired general who Oswald called a Fascist (Walker had tried to stop desegregation in Mississippi). So it's plausible that Oswald was a nut and was just moving on to higher things by assassinating Kennedy, with no orders from Cuba or Moscow or Vegas or the Teamsters. Oswald may also have had an accomplice in the Walker assassination attempt, which means... Well, you get the picture.
However, the fact that Oswald shot Kennedy single-handedly doesn't mean there was no conspiracy. Jack Ruby's shocking murder of Oswald on live TV is incomprehensible. Why would a strip club owner with mob connections sacrifice his own life to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of testifying in the trial of the century?
Unfortunately, forensics and ballistics will never provide the answers for the machinations that led up to Ruby's silencing of Oswald.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Hating Pope Frank
I've been laughing my socks right off of my feet as the Right reacts to Pope Francis and his vision that primarily involves Christians actually (gasp!) doing the work of Jesus. You know, feeding the poor...taking care of the sick and less fortunate...as opposed to judging others and being maniacally obsessed with sex. None have been more shocked than Sarah "I'm on a book tour so it's time for me to say dumb shit" Palin.
OMG, Sarah!! Jesus was, in fact, a liberal:)
OMG, Sarah!! Jesus was, in fact, a liberal:)
Welfare Myths
I'm pretty sick and tired of all the myths being spread out there regarding people on welfare. Thankfully, this piece torpedoes nine of them quite well. Here are three that stand out.
Myth: “People on welfare are lazy and sit at home collecting it while the rest of us work to support them.”
Fact: The welfare reform law that was signed by President Clinton in 1996 largely turned control over welfare benefits to the states, but the federal government provides some of the funding for state welfare programs through a program called Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF). TANF grants to states require that all welfare recipients must find work within two years of first receiving benefits. This includes single parents, who are required to work at least 30 hours per week. Two-parent families are required to work 35 to 50 hours per week. Failure to obtain work could result in loss of benefits. It is also worth noting that, thanks to the pay offerings of companies such as Walmart, many who work at low wage jobs qualify for public assistance, even though they work full-time.
Right. People that get assistance are already working. Their jobs simply don't pay enough. And bitch all you want about federal spending on food stamps but the states are the ones that largely control aid to the poor.
Myth: “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. … She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000″ – Ronald Reagan
Fact: Ah, the “welfare queen.” Ronny loved to tell his stories, and his welfare queen story is one of the most popular. The only problem is, the woman he talked about didn’t exist. There is some evidence that elements of this story may have been based on facts, but the descriptions of abuse by an actual woman were wildly exaggerated by Reagan.
The Right loves to make shit up (see: lie). This would be a great example.
Myth: “Most welfare recipients are minorities and illegal immigrants.”
Fact: TANF benefits were paid out to roughly the same percentage of white and black recipients in 2010, according to the HHS report. In fact, the percentage of black families receiving welfare benefits has declined by almost 7 percent since 2000. Regarding illegal immigrants: those who are in the United States illegally are ineligible for benefits other than emergency Medicaid.
Many of those white folks are rural poor in deep red states. If they could only realize that the people they support are essentially lying to them with religion and are actively trying to fuck them, every state would basically be blue.
Welfare falsehoods really piss me off. Spread this post and the included links around and don't let the Right continue their lying.
Myth: “People on welfare are lazy and sit at home collecting it while the rest of us work to support them.”
Fact: The welfare reform law that was signed by President Clinton in 1996 largely turned control over welfare benefits to the states, but the federal government provides some of the funding for state welfare programs through a program called Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF). TANF grants to states require that all welfare recipients must find work within two years of first receiving benefits. This includes single parents, who are required to work at least 30 hours per week. Two-parent families are required to work 35 to 50 hours per week. Failure to obtain work could result in loss of benefits. It is also worth noting that, thanks to the pay offerings of companies such as Walmart, many who work at low wage jobs qualify for public assistance, even though they work full-time.
Right. People that get assistance are already working. Their jobs simply don't pay enough. And bitch all you want about federal spending on food stamps but the states are the ones that largely control aid to the poor.
Myth: “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. … She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000″ – Ronald Reagan
Fact: Ah, the “welfare queen.” Ronny loved to tell his stories, and his welfare queen story is one of the most popular. The only problem is, the woman he talked about didn’t exist. There is some evidence that elements of this story may have been based on facts, but the descriptions of abuse by an actual woman were wildly exaggerated by Reagan.
The Right loves to make shit up (see: lie). This would be a great example.
Myth: “Most welfare recipients are minorities and illegal immigrants.”
Fact: TANF benefits were paid out to roughly the same percentage of white and black recipients in 2010, according to the HHS report. In fact, the percentage of black families receiving welfare benefits has declined by almost 7 percent since 2000. Regarding illegal immigrants: those who are in the United States illegally are ineligible for benefits other than emergency Medicaid.
Many of those white folks are rural poor in deep red states. If they could only realize that the people they support are essentially lying to them with religion and are actively trying to fuck them, every state would basically be blue.
Welfare falsehoods really piss me off. Spread this post and the included links around and don't let the Right continue their lying.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Finally
Apocalypticism.
They, along with the Tea Party and many other conservatives, think the End Times are nigh. And guess what? It's all the fault of the liberals.
There are so many great lines in this piece I don't know where to start. Let's see if I can limit myself to just three and then urge y'all to go and read the rest.
They believe America teeters on the brink of destruction, and hold as an article of faith that liberals, gays, Democrats, atheists and the United Nations are to blame. This “end-times” world-view is a foundational precept of the evangelical movement, from which many of the so-called Tea Party favorites spring.Of course, the Tea Party is not just composed of members of the Christian right. Many are genuine libertarians. Some nurse an unreconstructed Confederate grudge, while others harbor a thinly disguised racism. However, the real energy, the animating force for the movement comes from evangelicals, of whom Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are the most strident. These are the modern-day ”apocalyptic prophets.”
See, you don't have to be a Christian to believe in the apocalypse. Kevin Baker isn't a Christian. Neither is juris. Yet there is something in their libertarianism that helps them along to end times thinking. McLean does a good job of explaining the history of end times thinking. But how does that fit in to today?
For these apocalyptic prophets, the issues aren’t even political anymore; they’re existential, with Obamacare serving as the avatar for all evil. In this construct, any compromise whatsoever leads to damnation, and therefore the righteous ends justify any means. Now if you are battling the forces of evil for the very survival of the nation, there can be no retreat, no compromise, and no deals. Like the Jewish zealots at Masada, it’s better to commit glorious suicide than make peace with the devil. There can be no truce with the Tea Party because its apocalyptic zealots can never take “yes” for an answer.
Compromise as damnation...yep. McLean also notes what I have been stating previously. The GOP establishment and business wing of the party is fighting back. The coming civil war in the Republican party is going to be bloody. But how will it all end? McLean says either the pragmatists win or the hardliners revolt and leave. Either way, a center right party emerges that will enjoy support.
Not surprisingly, these moderates have both liberal and conservative views. 64% support gay marriage, 63% support abortion in the first trimester, 52% support legalizing marijuana, and they support a strong social safety net by wide margins. But 81% support offshore drilling, 90% support the death penalty and 57% are against affirmative action. So a new moderate coalition might well attract significant support from the moderate middle, establishment Republicans, Independents and centrist Democrats too.
Whatever way you cut it, my three commenters, along with the Tea Party and the right wing blogsphere, aren't going to get what they want. Oh well. At least they'll have plenty to complain about. Hey, maybe we could help them set up their own community with all the rest of the doomsayers. They could walk around all day preaching apocalypse to each other and leave the rest of us sane people out of it.
Shades of Gray Willfully Ignored
It always stuns me when conservatives and, in particular, the gun community, make truly thoughtless statements. One such statement popped in comments a while back which can be essentially summed up as this: if someone is too mentally ill to handle a gun, they are too mentally ill to be out in society.
Setting aside the complete lack of intelligence in terms of mental health issues, how people are institutionalized and...well...that the world is shades of gray (not so black and white), statements like this show just how religious these folks are about guns. It's not about the 2nd amendment anymore. It's about proselytizing. Worse, it really illustrates just how ignorant these folks are regarding human nature and how they completely misunderstand, either by free choice or pure ignorance, the fact that low levels of responsibility are the norm, not the exception, in this country. It's this simple fact that will eventually bite them hard in the ass.
These thoughts really crystallized for me a couple of days ago when two separate events occurred. The first one was a story my wife told me about a fellow parent at my son's school. She was having a conversation with another mom that turned to video games. My wife was pretty shocked to learn that this mom let her son play whatever games he wanted (like Call of Duty) even though he has had mental health problems. Compounding this waiting disaster was the mom's admission that she and her husband were going to get their conceal and carry permits and how they were going to start taking their 11 year old son (the one with the mental health problems and love of Call of Duty) to the range on a regular basis to "turn him into a man." It's nice to know the next Adam Lanza will be just a few short blocks away.
Later that day, I went and played tennis with a younger guy who was clearly on the autism spectrum. He was very picky and jumpy throughout the match, admonishing me for not handing him the balls in the right way on the changeover. A couple of times he just wigged out because he thought he saw a ball flying onto the court from another court and in reality, there was nothing. He apologized after the match, noting his mental health issues, and asked me to give him a break. We never talked about guns but it occurred to me that, while this guy was just fine to be out in public, he would decidedly not be fine given a firearm.
There are many people in this country that are not dangerous in and of themselves. But you start adding in elements to the mix of a perfect cocktail and you can very easily have an explosion of violence. It's not as black and white as the commenter assured me (shocking). Everyone is different and each mental issue is complex with each individual. To say that they should all be institutionalized simply because they can't be trusted with a gun is completely myopic.
And I am real tired of the annual culling that goes on from gun violence as a result of this ignorance.
Setting aside the complete lack of intelligence in terms of mental health issues, how people are institutionalized and...well...that the world is shades of gray (not so black and white), statements like this show just how religious these folks are about guns. It's not about the 2nd amendment anymore. It's about proselytizing. Worse, it really illustrates just how ignorant these folks are regarding human nature and how they completely misunderstand, either by free choice or pure ignorance, the fact that low levels of responsibility are the norm, not the exception, in this country. It's this simple fact that will eventually bite them hard in the ass.
These thoughts really crystallized for me a couple of days ago when two separate events occurred. The first one was a story my wife told me about a fellow parent at my son's school. She was having a conversation with another mom that turned to video games. My wife was pretty shocked to learn that this mom let her son play whatever games he wanted (like Call of Duty) even though he has had mental health problems. Compounding this waiting disaster was the mom's admission that she and her husband were going to get their conceal and carry permits and how they were going to start taking their 11 year old son (the one with the mental health problems and love of Call of Duty) to the range on a regular basis to "turn him into a man." It's nice to know the next Adam Lanza will be just a few short blocks away.
Later that day, I went and played tennis with a younger guy who was clearly on the autism spectrum. He was very picky and jumpy throughout the match, admonishing me for not handing him the balls in the right way on the changeover. A couple of times he just wigged out because he thought he saw a ball flying onto the court from another court and in reality, there was nothing. He apologized after the match, noting his mental health issues, and asked me to give him a break. We never talked about guns but it occurred to me that, while this guy was just fine to be out in public, he would decidedly not be fine given a firearm.
There are many people in this country that are not dangerous in and of themselves. But you start adding in elements to the mix of a perfect cocktail and you can very easily have an explosion of violence. It's not as black and white as the commenter assured me (shocking). Everyone is different and each mental issue is complex with each individual. To say that they should all be institutionalized simply because they can't be trusted with a gun is completely myopic.
And I am real tired of the annual culling that goes on from gun violence as a result of this ignorance.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Huh?
Linguists have found the first universal word, a word that is in every language spoken on earth.
Huh?
Yes, it's the word "huh?" The authors of the study published in PLOS One call it an "other-initiated repair," an element of language
But still, the pronunciation of huh? is amazingly consistent: a single syllable, nasal, low front to middle vowel, never ending in a consonant. The intonation is rising in all languages except those having a falling interrogative prosody (to keep it consistent with other question sentences).
Some people might argue that huh? isn't even a word. I might have agreed until a few years ago, when my sister suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and lost her ability to speak. She can now form words only with extreme difficulty, and after many successive repetitions, when the signals finally get from her brain to her throat, tongue and lips. And still it sounds like a rusted gate opening, clumsy and nothing like her original voice. She knows exactly what she's trying to say, but her injured brain simply cannot force the sounds out. Even with words as simple as yes and no.
But when she says huh? she sounds exactly like her old self, no hesitation or mispronunciation. That implies that huh? is part of a lower-level universal vocabulary.
This makes me wonder if there are other utterances that are part of this ur-vocabulary. After trying unsuccessfully to form a sentence, my sister sighs with frustration, just like anyone else might. Is the sigh of frustration universal? Laughter seems to be universal, though individual laugh "accents" differ greatly. How widely understood are "uh-uh" or "mm-mm" for no, and "uh-huh" or "mm-hmm" for yes?
In any case, this means that when someone blurts at you in a foreign language, responding with "huh?" will get the message across loud and clear.
Huh?
Yes, it's the word "huh?" The authors of the study published in PLOS One call it an "other-initiated repair," an element of language
in which one participant produces a turn at talk, the other then signals some trouble with this turn, and finally the first produces a next turn which aims to solve the trouble, usually by means of repetition and/or modification. In some languages the interjection, or an item similar to it, was also found in other sequential environments, for instance to mark surprise or to pursue a response.The exact pronunciation of huh? varies somewhat from one language to another, much like the word "dog" might be pronounced "dawg" or "dowg" or "dahg" or "doug" or "doh-oog" in different parts of the world.
But still, the pronunciation of huh? is amazingly consistent: a single syllable, nasal, low front to middle vowel, never ending in a consonant. The intonation is rising in all languages except those having a falling interrogative prosody (to keep it consistent with other question sentences).
Some people might argue that huh? isn't even a word. I might have agreed until a few years ago, when my sister suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and lost her ability to speak. She can now form words only with extreme difficulty, and after many successive repetitions, when the signals finally get from her brain to her throat, tongue and lips. And still it sounds like a rusted gate opening, clumsy and nothing like her original voice. She knows exactly what she's trying to say, but her injured brain simply cannot force the sounds out. Even with words as simple as yes and no.
But when she says huh? she sounds exactly like her old self, no hesitation or mispronunciation. That implies that huh? is part of a lower-level universal vocabulary.
This makes me wonder if there are other utterances that are part of this ur-vocabulary. After trying unsuccessfully to form a sentence, my sister sighs with frustration, just like anyone else might. Is the sigh of frustration universal? Laughter seems to be universal, though individual laugh "accents" differ greatly. How widely understood are "uh-uh" or "mm-mm" for no, and "uh-huh" or "mm-hmm" for yes?
In any case, this means that when someone blurts at you in a foreign language, responding with "huh?" will get the message across loud and clear.
Simply Wrong
For the most part, I think it's best to not use comparisons to slavery in this day and age. But if you are Sarah Palin and want to get attention, then I guess it's OK!
Ignoring the obvious offensiveness of the statement, it's simply wrong as I have demonstrated just recently. Our debt is not entirely owned by the Chinese. For the most part, it's money we owe ourselves and it isn't that big of a problem.
Conservatives like to talk about how it's all "simple math" yet they completely ignore our assets as a country (hundreds of trillions of dollars), our economy ($17 trillion and growing), and our very steady revenue stream (just south of $6 trillion a year). Their irrational screeds about spending sound more and more like sermons and proselytizing and less like actual facts. Of course, Sarah Palin can best be summed up like this...
Ignoring the obvious offensiveness of the statement, it's simply wrong as I have demonstrated just recently. Our debt is not entirely owned by the Chinese. For the most part, it's money we owe ourselves and it isn't that big of a problem.
Conservatives like to talk about how it's all "simple math" yet they completely ignore our assets as a country (hundreds of trillions of dollars), our economy ($17 trillion and growing), and our very steady revenue stream (just south of $6 trillion a year). Their irrational screeds about spending sound more and more like sermons and proselytizing and less like actual facts. Of course, Sarah Palin can best be summed up like this...
When You Hear Their Answers...
As I have said many times, the biggest impediment to progress in this country is the conservative movement as it stands today (see: apocalyptic cult). While we are seeing signs of them moving away from psychosis, they seem unable to grasp that our country has one direction: forward. Yet, it is not simply the conservative that are holding us back. Another big impediment are the liberals themselves.
Liberals are, by their very nature, diplomatic and reflective. So when conservatives say things like climate change is a hoax perpetuated by people want to control us or that having universal background checks means a national registry, we pause and wonder if what they are saying might be true. That's where the first mistake is made. We take their assertions at face value. The second mistake is then the movement toward the playing field that they want to play on (i.e. where they can "win"). By even considering that climate change legislation is going to lead to internment camps or that a national registry is really, really bad, we feed into their paranoia and, sadly, embolden their argument.
So, the lesson is quite simple. Refuse to allow them to set the table. Ignore the impulse to be diplomatic and fair minded when they say something ridiculous. Instead, ask questions. Why is a national registry bad? What happens after that? Who are those people whose backgrounds are not checked now? What should we do with them instead? What should we do about climate change?
When you hear their answers, it will become obvious very quickly that these people should not be in charge of anything.
Liberals are, by their very nature, diplomatic and reflective. So when conservatives say things like climate change is a hoax perpetuated by people want to control us or that having universal background checks means a national registry, we pause and wonder if what they are saying might be true. That's where the first mistake is made. We take their assertions at face value. The second mistake is then the movement toward the playing field that they want to play on (i.e. where they can "win"). By even considering that climate change legislation is going to lead to internment camps or that a national registry is really, really bad, we feed into their paranoia and, sadly, embolden their argument.
So, the lesson is quite simple. Refuse to allow them to set the table. Ignore the impulse to be diplomatic and fair minded when they say something ridiculous. Instead, ask questions. Why is a national registry bad? What happens after that? Who are those people whose backgrounds are not checked now? What should we do with them instead? What should we do about climate change?
When you hear their answers, it will become obvious very quickly that these people should not be in charge of anything.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Veteran's Day Thoughts
When most Americans think of veterans, they imagine an older man in a baseball cap with United States flag on it. Certainly, there are plenty of veterans out there who fit that description. If you see one today, walk up to them, touch them on the shoulder and thank them for their service.
Yet there are plenty of young veterans as we can see in the photo below from USATODAY.
These are the faces of an entire new generation of veterans that very much need to be recognized for their service in the last decade. Two, three, four and even five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have weighed heavily on the minds of young veterans and turned the spotlight onto the issue of mental health and PTSC (post traumatic stress disorder). Two people very close to me have struggled with mental illness after their service in Afghanistan. One was a marine who served three tours in that country and has struggled enormously with the guilt of surviving where so many of his brothers...close friends in his unity...have died.
They need our support and it can be something as little as just spending time with them and checking in regularly to make sure they are OK. Monetary donations are always nice but your time is much more valuable. Show them how grateful we all are!
Yet there are plenty of young veterans as we can see in the photo below from USATODAY.
These are the faces of an entire new generation of veterans that very much need to be recognized for their service in the last decade. Two, three, four and even five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have weighed heavily on the minds of young veterans and turned the spotlight onto the issue of mental health and PTSC (post traumatic stress disorder). Two people very close to me have struggled with mental illness after their service in Afghanistan. One was a marine who served three tours in that country and has struggled enormously with the guilt of surviving where so many of his brothers...close friends in his unity...have died.
They need our support and it can be something as little as just spending time with them and checking in regularly to make sure they are OK. Monetary donations are always nice but your time is much more valuable. Show them how grateful we all are!
Sunday, November 10, 2013
True Geography
As someone who occasionally teaches geography, it's important to remember this lesson.
World News Roundup
Turing to world news, the biggest story of the last few day is the massive destruction in the Philippines caused by what may very well be the biggest storm the world has ever seen. The images we have been seeing for the past couple of days have been positively heartbreaking. According to the BBC, Up to 10,000 are said to have died in Tacloban city and hundreds elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands are displaced.
The typhoon flattened homes, schools and an airport in Tacloban. Relief workers are yet to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm. In many areas there is no clean water, no electricity and very little food. There were repors of nearly 300mph winds felt across the islands in the area. One has to wonder if this was simply a fluke event or something that will be more commonplace due to our changing climate. We won't know for certain as this is simply an isolated weather event but if we see more events like this, then it will be the trend climate scientists have been predicting.
---
Heartbreaking but in an entirely different way is the situation in the Central African Republic. The Seleka coalition of armed rebels ousted President Francois Bozize earlier this year. Since then the rebels have committed human rights violations on an "unprecedented scale," according to Reuters and Amnesty. The image in the link shows houses that have been burned in just one town.
Usually stories of violence in African nations are so common that people simply blow them off as just how things are there. They don't have to be, of course, and many of the solutions to the problems African nations face are rooted in structural flaws left behind by the exodus of European nations post imperialism. Direct aid helps but not as much as the nations of the Global North going into these countries and helping them create sustainable economies.
---
The United States and Iran have failed to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear program. Shocking, I know. What began as more hope then we have seen in years, ended abruptly when faced with hardliners political capital on all sides of the talks. In some ways, I agree with the hardliners like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran has to do much more than elect a new president who says nice things. Granted, President Rouhani has to deal with his own hardliners but with protests in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities that are deeply anti-American, his government is going to have to take significant action if they want movement on an end to the sanctions that are crippling his country.
---
Finally, it seems there is one country in the world that would like to give up their guns: Yemen. It seems that the citizens of Yemen would happily hand in their guns if their government provided better security.
Like most Yemeni men, Mahmoud Shahra owns a gun and has known how to use it since childhood, although the 25-year-old activist used to leave his weapons at home. But since the politically motivated kidnapping of one of his close friends earlier this year, Shahra has carried a gun at nearly all times. He seems at ease with his AK-47, but his demeanor hides internal disquiet. “Even if I feel safer and more confident, I feel like I’m betraying my values when I carry a gun,” he says. “Still, the current security environment has forced me to do so.”
Values? Hmm...
The typhoon flattened homes, schools and an airport in Tacloban. Relief workers are yet to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm. In many areas there is no clean water, no electricity and very little food. There were repors of nearly 300mph winds felt across the islands in the area. One has to wonder if this was simply a fluke event or something that will be more commonplace due to our changing climate. We won't know for certain as this is simply an isolated weather event but if we see more events like this, then it will be the trend climate scientists have been predicting.
---
Heartbreaking but in an entirely different way is the situation in the Central African Republic. The Seleka coalition of armed rebels ousted President Francois Bozize earlier this year. Since then the rebels have committed human rights violations on an "unprecedented scale," according to Reuters and Amnesty. The image in the link shows houses that have been burned in just one town.
Usually stories of violence in African nations are so common that people simply blow them off as just how things are there. They don't have to be, of course, and many of the solutions to the problems African nations face are rooted in structural flaws left behind by the exodus of European nations post imperialism. Direct aid helps but not as much as the nations of the Global North going into these countries and helping them create sustainable economies.
---
The United States and Iran have failed to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear program. Shocking, I know. What began as more hope then we have seen in years, ended abruptly when faced with hardliners political capital on all sides of the talks. In some ways, I agree with the hardliners like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran has to do much more than elect a new president who says nice things. Granted, President Rouhani has to deal with his own hardliners but with protests in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities that are deeply anti-American, his government is going to have to take significant action if they want movement on an end to the sanctions that are crippling his country.
---
Finally, it seems there is one country in the world that would like to give up their guns: Yemen. It seems that the citizens of Yemen would happily hand in their guns if their government provided better security.
Like most Yemeni men, Mahmoud Shahra owns a gun and has known how to use it since childhood, although the 25-year-old activist used to leave his weapons at home. But since the politically motivated kidnapping of one of his close friends earlier this year, Shahra has carried a gun at nearly all times. He seems at ease with his AK-47, but his demeanor hides internal disquiet. “Even if I feel safer and more confident, I feel like I’m betraying my values when I carry a gun,” he says. “Still, the current security environment has forced me to do so.”
Values? Hmm...
What Happens When We Die?
An answer to to this question would change the course of human history. For the believers of many religions, the soul moves on to the next life. For non-believers, death is the end and there is nothing else. Issue #307 of Fortean Times (one of my two favorite magazines, the other being the Christian Science Monitor) has a piece on page 16 that discusses exactly what happens after we die. The part that jumped out at me was this.
If all brain activity has ceased, where and how are the memories recalled by surviving cardiac patients being laid down? This was the point aptly raised by Dr Shushant Meshram, a neurophysiologist and sleep researcher from India who was speaking at the conference on precognition in dreams. His own suggested hypothesis is that our brains contain a non-physical component, which is involved with both NDE and other psi experiences. Certainly, there is much scope for further research here.
A non-physical component found through research? Think of it...scientific evidence of the soul. Consider for a moment the rapid and exponential rate at which technology is exploding into the world. Given that new understandings are coming more quickly these days, I think we are indeed going to get a more scientific explanation for the human soul.
And our lives are going to change forever.
If all brain activity has ceased, where and how are the memories recalled by surviving cardiac patients being laid down? This was the point aptly raised by Dr Shushant Meshram, a neurophysiologist and sleep researcher from India who was speaking at the conference on precognition in dreams. His own suggested hypothesis is that our brains contain a non-physical component, which is involved with both NDE and other psi experiences. Certainly, there is much scope for further research here.
A non-physical component found through research? Think of it...scientific evidence of the soul. Consider for a moment the rapid and exponential rate at which technology is exploding into the world. Given that new understandings are coming more quickly these days, I think we are indeed going to get a more scientific explanation for the human soul.
And our lives are going to change forever.
Saturday, November 09, 2013
Questions
Amia Srinivasan has many questions for free market moralists that deserve answers. Indeed, her entire piece deserves careful study as at eloquently illustrates the dichotomy of welfare liberalism and laisse-faire liberalism. Here are the four questions.
1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?
2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?
3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?
4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?
Her answer show free market fundamentalism for the sham that it is. Like those on the left who preach of socialist utopias, libertarian utopias have just as
1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?
2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?
3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?
4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?
Her answer show free market fundamentalism for the sham that it is. Like those on the left who preach of socialist utopias, libertarian utopias have just as
Good Words
There’s a certain type of political journalism that so exists in the moment that numerous such moments have been declared to be disasters for Obama, going back to Jeremiah Wright. This kind of hyperventilating approach always turns out to be wrong and overheated. It turned out that all those things were pretty bad, but it also turned out that Obama survived them. And he’ll survive this, too. Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast.
The whole piece is fantastic and exactly why I continue to laugh at the hyperventilating:)
The whole piece is fantastic and exactly why I continue to laugh at the hyperventilating:)
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
A few days ago I wrote about democracy and the Catholic Church. Lo and behold, my prayers were answered: they're going to poll their congregations about social issues. They're not exactly taking a vote, but it shows the Vatican might be paying attention to reality:
The usual argument against gay marriage is that it goes against "natural law." What most people don't know is that the Catholic catechism teaches that divorce is wrong because it goes against "the natural law":
The natural law argument against gay marriage can somewhat reasonably be made because of reproductive biology (but see below). You can also argue that polygamy is not natural because males and females are born in equal numbers. Allowing one man to have many wives would inevitably cause inbreeding when his closely related descendants unwittingly married. There are serious issues of child support involved with polygamy. And what do poor men do when rich men hog all the women?
Although lifelong commitment to a single mate may be a Christian ideal, it is not the natural order of things: nothing about humans is permanent or universal. Lifelong monogamy is certainly not the case in the Bible: the Old Testament is riddled with men who had dozens and even hundreds of wives and concubines, and stories of men who steal other men's wives. It's certainly not the case in nature, in which many species are polygynous, polyandrous or promiscuous. Lifelong monogamy is merely a social practice in certain human cultures. It is common, but by no means universal. It can't be classified it as "natural" in the same sense that heterosexuality is natural, because it is required at some level for reproduction. (A weak case for lifelong monogamy can be made under natural law on the grounds that it reduces the chances of inbreeding.)
And then there's the question of "natural life expectancy." Is it reasonable to expect people to stay married for 50 or 60 years, considering that is double or triple the life expectancy when these dogmas were cast in stone? Life expectancy has ranged from 20 in the Neolithic to almost 80 in some countries today, though historically if you survived to marry your life expectancy would be 45 or 50. Unless, of course, you were a woman, in which case death in childbirth was appallingly common.
The real problem with the natural law argument is that it cuts both ways: it could eventually be used to justify gay marriage. There's a great deal of evidence that links biology to sexual orientation, the "born that way" hypothesis. If your brain structure makes you gay, and promiscuity is bad, isn't gay marriage inevitable under natural law?
That future Vatican III Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could well take everything we know about nature into account when they make their decisions, rather than limit their understanding of nature and science to beliefs held by theologians born millennia before the invention of the internal combustion engine.
[...] Pope Francis, who has already shaken up the Vatican, is asking the world’s one billion Catholics for their opinions on a questionnaire covering social issues like same-sex marriage, cohabitation by unwed couples, contraception, and the place of divorced and remarried people in the church.That last part is interesting. Under canon law, you cannot receive communion if you remarry without receiving a Decree of Nullity. But, like birth control, millions of remarried Catholics regularly ignore Church dogma and receive communion.
The usual argument against gay marriage is that it goes against "natural law." What most people don't know is that the Catholic catechism teaches that divorce is wrong because it goes against "the natural law":
2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:
This entire argument boils down to "no backsies." If two people freely consenting to enter a contract is acceptable under natural law, why isn't freely consenting to cancel that same contract acceptable under natural law? Clearly, most Protestant churches think it's fine, and clearly, so does the Catholic Church because they have an entirely unnatural process to dance around it: they just want the Church to call all the shots when they issue a Decree of Nullity.If a husband, separated from his wife, approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has drawn another's husband to herself.
The natural law argument against gay marriage can somewhat reasonably be made because of reproductive biology (but see below). You can also argue that polygamy is not natural because males and females are born in equal numbers. Allowing one man to have many wives would inevitably cause inbreeding when his closely related descendants unwittingly married. There are serious issues of child support involved with polygamy. And what do poor men do when rich men hog all the women?
Although lifelong commitment to a single mate may be a Christian ideal, it is not the natural order of things: nothing about humans is permanent or universal. Lifelong monogamy is certainly not the case in the Bible: the Old Testament is riddled with men who had dozens and even hundreds of wives and concubines, and stories of men who steal other men's wives. It's certainly not the case in nature, in which many species are polygynous, polyandrous or promiscuous. Lifelong monogamy is merely a social practice in certain human cultures. It is common, but by no means universal. It can't be classified it as "natural" in the same sense that heterosexuality is natural, because it is required at some level for reproduction. (A weak case for lifelong monogamy can be made under natural law on the grounds that it reduces the chances of inbreeding.)
And then there's the question of "natural life expectancy." Is it reasonable to expect people to stay married for 50 or 60 years, considering that is double or triple the life expectancy when these dogmas were cast in stone? Life expectancy has ranged from 20 in the Neolithic to almost 80 in some countries today, though historically if you survived to marry your life expectancy would be 45 or 50. Unless, of course, you were a woman, in which case death in childbirth was appallingly common.
The real problem with the natural law argument is that it cuts both ways: it could eventually be used to justify gay marriage. There's a great deal of evidence that links biology to sexual orientation, the "born that way" hypothesis. If your brain structure makes you gay, and promiscuity is bad, isn't gay marriage inevitable under natural law?
That future Vatican III Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could well take everything we know about nature into account when they make their decisions, rather than limit their understanding of nature and science to beliefs held by theologians born millennia before the invention of the internal combustion engine.
WTF?
Running a blog is weird sometimes. This week a post from 2011 is getting beaucoup traffic. I wonder why? The photo? It was nice to revisit it, though:)
Getting Better
The National Center For Education Statistics released its 2013 report card and much to the dismay of right wing bloggers everywhere, it shows improved reading and math scores for both 4th and 8th graders. Granted, the improvement is small and there still is an obvious achievement gap issue (which, in the bubble, means "Who gives a fuck? They are all lazy") but it clearly shows that we are geed in the right direction.
For those of you who have trouble with the English language, that means not collapsing:)
For those of you who have trouble with the English language, that means not collapsing:)
Energy News A Go Go
There is quite a bit to talk about in energy news so let's get to it!
First up is a call for nuclear power that I have been waiting for a long time. Check out the source!
Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change.
Environmentalists have the same problem with emotions and instransigence as the Right does in terms of their views on...well...just about everything:) Nuclear power is clean and much safer than the worry warts will have you believe. The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Speaking of climate change, a report on the effect of climate change on world food supplies has been leaked and the news is not good.
The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply.
The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants.
For a closer look at this problem and all the data, click here.
Will this be enough to convince people? I think when you start messing around with the food that Americans eat, they tend to react!
Finally, for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd, it looks like we have a way around the northern section of Keystone.
Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.
Rail..uh oh! Republicans hate choo choos! Speaking of oil, why is the price of it so low right now? Because the dollar is stronger. How can that be? I thought we were heading for apocalypse! Also...
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said it expects demand for its crude oil to fall to 29.2 million barrels a day in 2018 from 30.3 million barrels a year this year. OPEC said rising supplies from other sources, such as Canadian oil sands, crude from Latin America and the increased use of biofuels would contribute to the fall in demand for its own output.
Demand has fallen? Wait...I thought demand had nothing to do with price. And increased biofuels? What pinko nonsense!!
First up is a call for nuclear power that I have been waiting for a long time. Check out the source!
Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change.
Environmentalists have the same problem with emotions and instransigence as the Right does in terms of their views on...well...just about everything:) Nuclear power is clean and much safer than the worry warts will have you believe. The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Speaking of climate change, a report on the effect of climate change on world food supplies has been leaked and the news is not good.
The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply.
The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants.
For a closer look at this problem and all the data, click here.
Will this be enough to convince people? I think when you start messing around with the food that Americans eat, they tend to react!
Finally, for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd, it looks like we have a way around the northern section of Keystone.
Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.
Rail..uh oh! Republicans hate choo choos! Speaking of oil, why is the price of it so low right now? Because the dollar is stronger. How can that be? I thought we were heading for apocalypse! Also...
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said it expects demand for its crude oil to fall to 29.2 million barrels a day in 2018 from 30.3 million barrels a year this year. OPEC said rising supplies from other sources, such as Canadian oil sands, crude from Latin America and the increased use of biofuels would contribute to the fall in demand for its own output.
Demand has fallen? Wait...I thought demand had nothing to do with price. And increased biofuels? What pinko nonsense!!
Friday, November 08, 2013
Good (?) Words
I put up a link to the Guns and Ammo story on my FB page and got some very interesting responses. One of my friends posted the following comment.
I own a gun as well, and I can discuss the merits of a shotgun versus a handgun for home defense all day because It is a subject that interests me. I also play my share of FPS video games, and consider Splinter Cell to be the greatest video game series to date. However, I consider myself a gun owner and that's about it.
People like the ones I was referring to are zealots who refuse to even consider ways we can modify our pervasive gun culture and put a dent in the annual culling of over 11,000 of our fellow citizens. It is a mentality that makes no sense to me at all, from a logic standpoint. Their behavior these days looks less and less like people working to protect a Constitutionally guaranteed freedom and more like religious fervor and proselytizing.
Culling...religious fervor...proselytizing...check, check, and check.
When I told him of my prediction (a shooting at a gun show or some other place frequented by the gun community), he didn't agree and was surprisingly cynical.
They'll do what every one else does whenever a horrible crime makes the news: they'll ignore how their culture has contributed to the crime, then write it off as the 'actions of a sick individual', and go on about their lives, blinders intact. Some will even defend and apologize for, the individual in question. If so-called "responsible" adults can do this with crimes like rape, they can do it with spree shootings.
Sadly, he might be right.
I own a gun as well, and I can discuss the merits of a shotgun versus a handgun for home defense all day because It is a subject that interests me. I also play my share of FPS video games, and consider Splinter Cell to be the greatest video game series to date. However, I consider myself a gun owner and that's about it.
People like the ones I was referring to are zealots who refuse to even consider ways we can modify our pervasive gun culture and put a dent in the annual culling of over 11,000 of our fellow citizens. It is a mentality that makes no sense to me at all, from a logic standpoint. Their behavior these days looks less and less like people working to protect a Constitutionally guaranteed freedom and more like religious fervor and proselytizing.
Culling...religious fervor...proselytizing...check, check, and check.
When I told him of my prediction (a shooting at a gun show or some other place frequented by the gun community), he didn't agree and was surprisingly cynical.
They'll do what every one else does whenever a horrible crime makes the news: they'll ignore how their culture has contributed to the crime, then write it off as the 'actions of a sick individual', and go on about their lives, blinders intact. Some will even defend and apologize for, the individual in question. If so-called "responsible" adults can do this with crimes like rape, they can do it with spree shootings.
Sadly, he might be right.
Business Wins
Tuesday's election saw GOP establishment candidate Bradley Byrne beat Tea Party fave Dean Young in Alabama's 1st Congressional District. In what clearly is a sign for the ugly war that will be waged over the next year in the GOP, the business community has clearly had enough of the psychosis and adolescent behavior of the Tea Party and like minded people.
CNN has another story on this as does Politico. This would be why I'm not too worried about the mistakes made by the president and the Democrats in terms of the ACA. We don't have to beat the conservatives. They are beating themselves.
CNN has another story on this as does Politico. This would be why I'm not too worried about the mistakes made by the president and the Democrats in terms of the ACA. We don't have to beat the conservatives. They are beating themselves.
Yep
From Paul Krugman
As some of us have tried to explain, debt, while it can pose problems, doesn’t make the nation poorer, because it’s money we owe to ourselves. Anyone who talks about how we’re borrowing from our children just hasn’t done the math.
True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt.
If only those "debt scolds" could leave their emotions and pride out of the equation, we'd have a better economy. My only disagreement with Krugman here is that he, like the people he criticizes, are far too pessimistic. Despite the idiocy of austerity, our economy is doing better as I noted earlier today.
As some of us have tried to explain, debt, while it can pose problems, doesn’t make the nation poorer, because it’s money we owe to ourselves. Anyone who talks about how we’re borrowing from our children just hasn’t done the math.
True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt.
If only those "debt scolds" could leave their emotions and pride out of the equation, we'd have a better economy. My only disagreement with Krugman here is that he, like the people he criticizes, are far too pessimistic. Despite the idiocy of austerity, our economy is doing better as I noted earlier today.
Mea Culpa Is Just Fine
The president apologized yesterday for his mistake in saying, "If you like your insurance, you get to keep it," several times during his campaign to pass the ACA. This is quite illustrative of the type of man he is: someone willing to admit mistakes and work to fix them. And that's just what he is going to do. Notice as well that he is taking the high ground and not blaming the insurance companies which he would be well within his purview to do as it is the truth.
This is quite a bit more than his opponents would do. They never admit error (see: Apocalypse), always blame others, and are actively working to destroy the structures of this country because they are essentially babies who can't accept defeat and any sort of authority in their lives. At election time next year, the problems with the ACA will be fixed (the real ones and not the fake ones made up in bubbleland) and the benefits are going to vastly outweigh the costs.
More importantly, we have seen an improving economy this week. GDP was 2.8 percent for the 3rd quarter and hiring in October exceeded expectations, clocking in over 200k jobs. Revisions were made for August and September, adding in an extra 60K jobs. Imagine how much stronger these numbers would have been had there not been a shutdown. The economy is what really matters to voters in elections and it's pretty clear which party is working to improve it and which one is rooting for it to fail.
This is quite a bit more than his opponents would do. They never admit error (see: Apocalypse), always blame others, and are actively working to destroy the structures of this country because they are essentially babies who can't accept defeat and any sort of authority in their lives. At election time next year, the problems with the ACA will be fixed (the real ones and not the fake ones made up in bubbleland) and the benefits are going to vastly outweigh the costs.
More importantly, we have seen an improving economy this week. GDP was 2.8 percent for the 3rd quarter and hiring in October exceeded expectations, clocking in over 200k jobs. Revisions were made for August and September, adding in an extra 60K jobs. Imagine how much stronger these numbers would have been had there not been a shutdown. The economy is what really matters to voters in elections and it's pretty clear which party is working to improve it and which one is rooting for it to fail.
Intellectually Bankrupt Indeed
I can't think of a better example of just how intellectually bankrupt and adolescent Ayn Rand followers (see: right wing blogsphere) are than the recent admission of plagiarism from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The words "Rand" and "plagiarize" do seem to fit together in some sort of perfect way, don't they? Being a Randian isn't really all that deep nor intelligent (obviously, if they cut and paste from Wikipedia) and essentially can be summed up in one sentence.
It's OK to be a douchebag.
Update: Apparently, it's OK to plagiarize as well. Breitbart.com has just hired Rand Paul.
It's OK to be a douchebag.
Update: Apparently, it's OK to plagiarize as well. Breitbart.com has just hired Rand Paul.
Thursday, November 07, 2013
Here We Go Again
I guess we have to be reminded every few years just how fucking psycho the gun community is in this country. Good Lord...
There will be no wavering!! There will be only vigilance!!! Any sort of thinking or wavering that is against our vill...sorry...will calls for immediate retribution. Anyone who writes this...
I don’t think requiring 16 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry permit is infringement But that’s just me.
Or this...
The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.
Or this...
I’ve seen too many examples of unsafe behavior on too many shooting ranges to believe otherwise. And we’ve all read too many accounts of legally armed individuals dealing with the consequences of not being properly trained or prepared when confronted with a bad situation.
is a fucking pinko commie faggot who needs to be liquidated. Robert Farago summed it up best.
Anyone who says ‘I believe in the Second Amendment but—’ does not believe in the Second Amendment. They are not friends, they are not frenemies, they are enemies of The People of the Gun.
The People of the Gun, huh? Yeah, I''m quaking in my boots (see: there will be no revolution as long as men have titties) Here's Wonkette's take.
Translation: You fuckers scare even us, but we still want your money, so fuck “a healthy exchange of ideas”: Metcalf is history. Please keep buying our magazine, please? Not that the fondlers are satisfied — now many are calling for Bequette to resign for having allowed the piece to run in the first place.
Update: And as of this afternoon, Guns & Ammo editor Jim Bequette has resigned as well. Business Insider reports that while the magazine had been due to get a new editor January 1, Bequette “announced he would expedite the process and resign immediately.” Because of an editorial suggesting the utterly unthinkable, tyranny-promoting notion that people who own guns should be trained to use them safely. Welcome to America in 2013.
I don't share her fear of the gun people. Honestly, they are a bunch of cowards. The first people to squirt in their pants and hand over their guns to some sort of authority will be them. The reason why they bitch so much about authority is because they themselves are authoritarians who want a return to the aristocracy of the Antebellum South and are obviously self-loathing.
As I have said many times, when an incident occurs that will affect them personally due to their complete ignorance of how irresponsible people are in this country, then they will change. In the meantime, I do find it heartening that they continue to alienate more and more people who are on their side.
There will be no wavering!! There will be only vigilance!!! Any sort of thinking or wavering that is against our vill...sorry...will calls for immediate retribution. Anyone who writes this...
I don’t think requiring 16 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry permit is infringement But that’s just me.
Or this...
The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.
Or this...
I’ve seen too many examples of unsafe behavior on too many shooting ranges to believe otherwise. And we’ve all read too many accounts of legally armed individuals dealing with the consequences of not being properly trained or prepared when confronted with a bad situation.
is a fucking pinko commie faggot who needs to be liquidated. Robert Farago summed it up best.
Anyone who says ‘I believe in the Second Amendment but—’ does not believe in the Second Amendment. They are not friends, they are not frenemies, they are enemies of The People of the Gun.
The People of the Gun, huh? Yeah, I''m quaking in my boots (see: there will be no revolution as long as men have titties) Here's Wonkette's take.
Translation: You fuckers scare even us, but we still want your money, so fuck “a healthy exchange of ideas”: Metcalf is history. Please keep buying our magazine, please? Not that the fondlers are satisfied — now many are calling for Bequette to resign for having allowed the piece to run in the first place.
Update: And as of this afternoon, Guns & Ammo editor Jim Bequette has resigned as well. Business Insider reports that while the magazine had been due to get a new editor January 1, Bequette “announced he would expedite the process and resign immediately.” Because of an editorial suggesting the utterly unthinkable, tyranny-promoting notion that people who own guns should be trained to use them safely. Welcome to America in 2013.
I don't share her fear of the gun people. Honestly, they are a bunch of cowards. The first people to squirt in their pants and hand over their guns to some sort of authority will be them. The reason why they bitch so much about authority is because they themselves are authoritarians who want a return to the aristocracy of the Antebellum South and are obviously self-loathing.
As I have said many times, when an incident occurs that will affect them personally due to their complete ignorance of how irresponsible people are in this country, then they will change. In the meantime, I do find it heartening that they continue to alienate more and more people who are on their side.
Democracy and the Catholic Church
The Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been having its own sex scandal, in which various priests were caught soliciting boys in bookstores, storing child porn on their computers, having sex with underage parishioners, and so on, with the church hierarchy keeping it all covered up and paying off the perpetrators with extra cash. Several church officials have now resigned.
This was all revealed when a canon lawyer, a brave woman named Jennifer Haselberger, told Minnesota Public Radio when she found evidence of a priest who apparently possessed child porn and internal memos discussing whether police should be notified. Archbishop John Nienstedt explained in a memo to the Vatican why he decided not to tell the cops: he was afraid of getting sued and going to jail.
Now some wealthy donors are going to hit the archdiocese where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The archdiocese is launching a $160 million capital campaign, and some wealthy Catholic donors have said they will not contribute unless Nienstedt resigns. One quote in particular from a Nienstedt defender caught my attention:
And Catholics have been voting with the feet for centuries. That's how the Protestant Churches, and the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Churches, and all the other sects of the Christian Church were formed. It's called schism, and it often happens because of basic disagreements on doctrine and accusations of heresy. But it happens for political and social reasons as well.
Many Catholics are unhappy with the Church hierarchy. They view the bishops as arrogant and disconnected from the realities of everyday life, more concerned with covering up scandals than preventing them in the first place. The bishops yap dogmatically about birth control and abortion when they have no idea how hard it is to raise a family.
The ranks of the priesthood are being decimated, in large part because of the ban on married priests. Celibacy is not a scriptural requirement; priests could marry for a thousand years, and even today married Anglican priests joining the Catholic Church remain married. Celibacy is an antiquated relic of the Middle Ages enacted to prevent clergy from using Church money to create their own hereditary fiefdoms. Though the most public church sex scandals involve children, removing the marriage ban would also prevent many smaller-scale scandals involving priests who've simply fallen in love with consenting adult women.
Priests are also voting with their feet, and leaving their priesthood to marry. The priest who officiated at my wedding had to quit when he married a nun. A local political activist in my city did the same.
Why, many wonder, should priests be banned from the Church's most basic holy sacrament, the union of a man and a woman? In their arguments against gay marriage the archbishops claim that union to be the bedrock of society, yet they have no personal knowledge of it.
Women are tired of the way nuns are treated, and many resent the fact that women are not allowed to be priests. Many Christian churches allow women pastors these days, in particular the Anglican Church, which split off because of a political tiff when the Vatican was slow to grant Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was too old to give him the son he desperately desired. Ironically, the son he strove so hard for died at age 15, and Henry was ultimately succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth, who ruled for more than 40 years: she and Queen Victoria were arguably the two best monarchs to rule England. The fact that Pope Benedict cleared the way for married Anglican priests to join the Church shows how close the two Churches really are.
Many straight Catholics are unhappy with the way the Church treats gays: Nienstedt spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of Church money to amend the Minnesota constitution to ban gay marriage, an attempt that failed in 2012. Considering how many priests are gay (estimates run as high as 60%), and how the marriage ban discourages straight priests, it is evident that the Church's dogmas are seriously out of balance with reality.
Francis, the new pope, has said many things that give people hope (he even had a girlfriend before he entered the priesthood). The Church often takes decades and even centuries to change, but just one ex cathedra pronouncement could completely alter the Church's trajectory. The ban on women priests is a dogma, but the marriage ban is a regulation and therefore subject to papal decree.
If straight Catholics opt out of the priesthood in large numbers, gays may quietly assume control of archdioceses around the world. Is it only a matter of time before the majority of the Roman curia is gay?
A Third Vatican Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could decide pretty much anything: the Catholic Church isn't a democracy, after all.
This was all revealed when a canon lawyer, a brave woman named Jennifer Haselberger, told Minnesota Public Radio when she found evidence of a priest who apparently possessed child porn and internal memos discussing whether police should be notified. Archbishop John Nienstedt explained in a memo to the Vatican why he decided not to tell the cops: he was afraid of getting sued and going to jail.
It is unclear whether civil criminal action remains a possibility. The independent investigator hired to look into this matter concluded that 'many of the homosexual pornographic images viewed by this investigator and the computer analyst could be considered borderline illegal, because of the youthful looking images', but the decision of my predecessor was not to report the discovery of the images or the images themselves to law enforcement. My staff has expressed concern that the fact the CD-ROMs containing the images remain in the cleric's personnel file could expose the Archdiocese, as well as myself, to criminal prosecution. These factors also suggest that a penal trial, conducted in this Archdiocese or elsewhere in the United States, is to be avoided.This doesn't sound like a shepherd ministering to the souls in his congregation. It sounds like the CEO of an oil company shifting blame to his predecessor and staging a coverup after a massive oil spill. Many Minnesota Catholics are justifiably upset and have called for Nienstedt's resignation.
Now some wealthy donors are going to hit the archdiocese where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The archdiocese is launching a $160 million capital campaign, and some wealthy Catholic donors have said they will not contribute unless Nienstedt resigns. One quote in particular from a Nienstedt defender caught my attention:
To those calling for Nienstedt to be tossed out, Derus warned: “The Catholic Church is not a democracy. We don’t get to vote on this or that.”It's true that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. But lay Catholics do get a vote: they vote with their dollars. And with their feet.
And Catholics have been voting with the feet for centuries. That's how the Protestant Churches, and the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Churches, and all the other sects of the Christian Church were formed. It's called schism, and it often happens because of basic disagreements on doctrine and accusations of heresy. But it happens for political and social reasons as well.
Many Catholics are unhappy with the Church hierarchy. They view the bishops as arrogant and disconnected from the realities of everyday life, more concerned with covering up scandals than preventing them in the first place. The bishops yap dogmatically about birth control and abortion when they have no idea how hard it is to raise a family.
The ranks of the priesthood are being decimated, in large part because of the ban on married priests. Celibacy is not a scriptural requirement; priests could marry for a thousand years, and even today married Anglican priests joining the Catholic Church remain married. Celibacy is an antiquated relic of the Middle Ages enacted to prevent clergy from using Church money to create their own hereditary fiefdoms. Though the most public church sex scandals involve children, removing the marriage ban would also prevent many smaller-scale scandals involving priests who've simply fallen in love with consenting adult women.
Priests are also voting with their feet, and leaving their priesthood to marry. The priest who officiated at my wedding had to quit when he married a nun. A local political activist in my city did the same.
Why, many wonder, should priests be banned from the Church's most basic holy sacrament, the union of a man and a woman? In their arguments against gay marriage the archbishops claim that union to be the bedrock of society, yet they have no personal knowledge of it.
Women are tired of the way nuns are treated, and many resent the fact that women are not allowed to be priests. Many Christian churches allow women pastors these days, in particular the Anglican Church, which split off because of a political tiff when the Vatican was slow to grant Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was too old to give him the son he desperately desired. Ironically, the son he strove so hard for died at age 15, and Henry was ultimately succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth, who ruled for more than 40 years: she and Queen Victoria were arguably the two best monarchs to rule England. The fact that Pope Benedict cleared the way for married Anglican priests to join the Church shows how close the two Churches really are.
Many straight Catholics are unhappy with the way the Church treats gays: Nienstedt spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of Church money to amend the Minnesota constitution to ban gay marriage, an attempt that failed in 2012. Considering how many priests are gay (estimates run as high as 60%), and how the marriage ban discourages straight priests, it is evident that the Church's dogmas are seriously out of balance with reality.
Francis, the new pope, has said many things that give people hope (he even had a girlfriend before he entered the priesthood). The Church often takes decades and even centuries to change, but just one ex cathedra pronouncement could completely alter the Church's trajectory. The ban on women priests is a dogma, but the marriage ban is a regulation and therefore subject to papal decree.
If straight Catholics opt out of the priesthood in large numbers, gays may quietly assume control of archdioceses around the world. Is it only a matter of time before the majority of the Roman curia is gay?
A Third Vatican Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could decide pretty much anything: the Catholic Church isn't a democracy, after all.
Mailbag!
I haven't done a mailbag in a while so here a few emails I had recently
Candace from Missouri writes
What happened to all those world news stories you promised? I would like to see more of them. As a long time reader of your site, I miss the days when the majority of your posts talked about international politics.
Point taken. It has been too long since I talked about other countries. I will endeavor to do so more often!
Bryan from Idaho writes
I'd like to comment but don't want to go through the trouble or give up my privacy to register a name under google or open id. Is there anyone I can still comment openly? The people you have commenting now are real dicks and need to be taken down a notch.
Sorry, Bryan, but I got spammed too much and set up the requirement to register to comment. I'm not going to change that even though it means I have lost some liberal commenters as a result. And you are wasting your time with the individuals of whom you speak. They thrive on attention, adolescent insults and "battle" in comments sections. I allow open comments which means I have picked up some trolls. Oh well. You should take comfort in the fact that their writings do a great job of illustrating my points for me:) Speaking of my commenters...
Izzie from Illinois writes...
I don't want to engage him in comments as my mother told me to never talk to crazy people but do you suppose Not My Name is sitting in some facility somewhere? I think he uses his free time on the computer to post here.
Actually, Izzie, I think NMN is two people. One is an ultra religious fellow and the other is Unix Jedi from TSM which is why he might seem like he has a split personality. Even if that's not true, you have to remember that any mental problems he might have are likely a result of childhood problems and possibly bullying in school so try to have a little sympathy. People who are abused often abuse others because that's what they know. Their desire for constant attention (through adolescent taunts) is pretty apparent.
In fact, I think that's a great explanation for the behavior of many on the Right as I have said previously. They clearly have had trouble with their parents in their lives and were likely ostracized in school. Years of emotional abuse invariably ends in social disabilities and comments sections of blogs.
Geoff from Kansas writes...
Nikto is a better writer than you and I enjoy his posts more than yours.
No doubt, Nikto is a great writer but better? Maybe. I will say that his posts get more hits than mine and his piece on sleep and football was the most popular one in October.
That's it for this mailbag. Keep those emails coming, folks!!
Candace from Missouri writes
What happened to all those world news stories you promised? I would like to see more of them. As a long time reader of your site, I miss the days when the majority of your posts talked about international politics.
Point taken. It has been too long since I talked about other countries. I will endeavor to do so more often!
Bryan from Idaho writes
I'd like to comment but don't want to go through the trouble or give up my privacy to register a name under google or open id. Is there anyone I can still comment openly? The people you have commenting now are real dicks and need to be taken down a notch.
Sorry, Bryan, but I got spammed too much and set up the requirement to register to comment. I'm not going to change that even though it means I have lost some liberal commenters as a result. And you are wasting your time with the individuals of whom you speak. They thrive on attention, adolescent insults and "battle" in comments sections. I allow open comments which means I have picked up some trolls. Oh well. You should take comfort in the fact that their writings do a great job of illustrating my points for me:) Speaking of my commenters...
Izzie from Illinois writes...
I don't want to engage him in comments as my mother told me to never talk to crazy people but do you suppose Not My Name is sitting in some facility somewhere? I think he uses his free time on the computer to post here.
Actually, Izzie, I think NMN is two people. One is an ultra religious fellow and the other is Unix Jedi from TSM which is why he might seem like he has a split personality. Even if that's not true, you have to remember that any mental problems he might have are likely a result of childhood problems and possibly bullying in school so try to have a little sympathy. People who are abused often abuse others because that's what they know. Their desire for constant attention (through adolescent taunts) is pretty apparent.
In fact, I think that's a great explanation for the behavior of many on the Right as I have said previously. They clearly have had trouble with their parents in their lives and were likely ostracized in school. Years of emotional abuse invariably ends in social disabilities and comments sections of blogs.
Geoff from Kansas writes...
Nikto is a better writer than you and I enjoy his posts more than yours.
No doubt, Nikto is a great writer but better? Maybe. I will say that his posts get more hits than mine and his piece on sleep and football was the most popular one in October.
That's it for this mailbag. Keep those emails coming, folks!!
Randian Family Values
Mark's quote from Elementary about Ayn Rand seemed apropos after I stumbled across an article from a couple of years back about how Objectivism ruined one woman's childhood. In it Alyssa Bereznak describes how Ayn Rand turned her father into a heartless monster.
Discussion of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism always centers around titans of industry and brilliant self-made composers and scientists. But it completely ignores the realities of everyday life; in particular, marriage and children.
If altruism is fundamentally fatal and unutterably evil, marriage is out of the question. First, the vows: love someone as you love yourself? Impossible. A betrayal of logic and reason and the basic principles of Objectivism.
From the other point of view, who would marry someone whose only goal in life is to satisfy themselves? Who would marry a person who views you only as a means for their own pleasure, a maid and employee? Answer: only another objectivist who had something to gain from the association, or a drooling fool blinded by your brilliance and willing to become your slave. Really, only a person beneath contempt, who had no real initiative of their own, would be content to merely bask in the glory of a great objectivist demigod, instead of striking out on their own path to greatness.
Since there can be no love -- I mean, foolish romantic sentimentality -- why get married at all? Just form a corporation and avoid the inevitable legal morass of divorce when the spouse can no longer one's sexual needs. (This sexual satire from about Rand the New Yorker is hilarious.)
And children? What fool would ever have children? Rand once dismissed a classmate as meaningless because the girl thought her mother was the important thing in her life (which is undeniably true for most children).
Children are a terribly inefficient investment: it takes a decade a two before you can get any useful work out of them. And then there's no guarantee they'll ever actually do anything for you after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their upbringing: if they've been paying attention to your objectivist rants, their only goal in life should be to get you to kick off as soon as possible so they can inherit your vast industrial empire so they can use it to springboard to an even vaster industrial empire. That means there's the very tangible risk of them hurrying you along to your grave...
Rand understood the worthlessness of children and the mortal danger of allowing someone to be your heir -- she had no kids. But mysteriously she remained married to the same man for fifty years, until his death. Of course, she went after for him only for his looks, though she apparently came to love him in her fashion (they had an open marriage). She had a long-standing extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden, who with his wife operated an institute to promote Objectivism.
Realistically, this kind of amoral and licentious behavior is the only rational outcome of the Objectivist philosophy. Love and loyalty are useless, self-destructive sentiments. Yet this woman is practically deified by the likes of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul.
The most disgusting part of Bereznak's story was when her father asked Alyssa -- then a sophomore in high school -- to petition to be emancipated so that he could stop paying child support. He would then hire her at his law office and charge her rent.
Great family values.
Discussion of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism always centers around titans of industry and brilliant self-made composers and scientists. But it completely ignores the realities of everyday life; in particular, marriage and children.
If altruism is fundamentally fatal and unutterably evil, marriage is out of the question. First, the vows: love someone as you love yourself? Impossible. A betrayal of logic and reason and the basic principles of Objectivism.
From the other point of view, who would marry someone whose only goal in life is to satisfy themselves? Who would marry a person who views you only as a means for their own pleasure, a maid and employee? Answer: only another objectivist who had something to gain from the association, or a drooling fool blinded by your brilliance and willing to become your slave. Really, only a person beneath contempt, who had no real initiative of their own, would be content to merely bask in the glory of a great objectivist demigod, instead of striking out on their own path to greatness.
Since there can be no love -- I mean, foolish romantic sentimentality -- why get married at all? Just form a corporation and avoid the inevitable legal morass of divorce when the spouse can no longer one's sexual needs. (This sexual satire from about Rand the New Yorker is hilarious.)
And children? What fool would ever have children? Rand once dismissed a classmate as meaningless because the girl thought her mother was the important thing in her life (which is undeniably true for most children).
Children are a terribly inefficient investment: it takes a decade a two before you can get any useful work out of them. And then there's no guarantee they'll ever actually do anything for you after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their upbringing: if they've been paying attention to your objectivist rants, their only goal in life should be to get you to kick off as soon as possible so they can inherit your vast industrial empire so they can use it to springboard to an even vaster industrial empire. That means there's the very tangible risk of them hurrying you along to your grave...
Rand understood the worthlessness of children and the mortal danger of allowing someone to be your heir -- she had no kids. But mysteriously she remained married to the same man for fifty years, until his death. Of course, she went after for him only for his looks, though she apparently came to love him in her fashion (they had an open marriage). She had a long-standing extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden, who with his wife operated an institute to promote Objectivism.
Realistically, this kind of amoral and licentious behavior is the only rational outcome of the Objectivist philosophy. Love and loyalty are useless, self-destructive sentiments. Yet this woman is practically deified by the likes of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul.
The most disgusting part of Bereznak's story was when her father asked Alyssa -- then a sophomore in high school -- to petition to be emancipated so that he could stop paying child support. He would then hire her at his law office and charge her rent.
Great family values.
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
The Real Gateway Drugs
Rob Ford, the conservative mayor of Toronto, has been making news for months now as reports of a video showing him smoking crack have circulated. Now he has admitted it's true.
“You asked me a question back in May and you can repeat that question,” Mr. Ford told a crush of journalists, photographers and camera operators. “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. But no, do I, am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.”What's astonishing is how casually this man -- who echoes conservative American talking points as he rails against the government gravy train, AIDS prevention and bike lanes -- admits to "drunken stupors." This is par for the course in North American society, where we have draconian laws against cocaine and heroin, but think nothing of how millions of Americans and Canadians drink enough on a daily basis to cause brain damage.
People use "I was drunk" as an excuse for everything, as a sort of badge of honor. Getting totally trashed by drinking 21 shots on your 21st birthday is a rite of passage. But that's often enough alcohol to kill you. There are 900 cases of alcohol poisoning in the US each week, mostly in the college-age population. And they're still coming up with newer, faster ways to get drunk, from stylish vaportinis to disgusting butt-chugging.
But being drunk is not a mitigating factor. You're responsible for anything you do while drunk if you voluntarily drank yourself stupid. And stupid is the right word.
Two-thirds of violent crimes against intimates are under the influence of alcohol, and 40% of all violent crimes are committed under the influence. Fifty percent of acquaintance rapes involve alcohol. Millions of families are destroyed by alcohol abuse. In 2005, 75,000 people died from alcohol, mostly from car accidents and diseases like cirrhosis and cancer. According to the CDC, alcohol use costs America $223.5 billion a year.
I don't drink, and I've never done drugs. I think alcohol and recreational drugs are a scourge on society, along with gambling, football, NASCAR and pro wrestling. In my less charitable moments I dismiss people who use booze and drugs as mopes and dopes. But I also think the war on drugs is a total waste of money: prohibition failed in the 1930s, and today's illicit drug prohibition is an abject failure. The swillers of scotch and chuggers of beer who keep fighting to keep marijuana illegal are complete hypocrites.
The knock against marijuana is that it's the "gateway drug" that leads to cocaine, heroin and certain death. But as Rob Ford's case shows, alcohol is the real gateway drug: it's easily accessible and its consumption is widely and wildly encouraged -- it's a $400 billion industry. And it's not the only gateway drug: we have dozens now.
Parents are feeding mind-altering drugs like ritalin to their kids under the guise of helping them with attention deficit disorder, but often they just don't like dealing with rambunctious kids. Ritalin is chemically similar to cocaine (it's been considered as "methadone for cocaine addiction"), and in sufficiently high doses is just as addictive. People are becoming addicted to opioid painkillers like oxycodone by the millions, and when doctors cut them off many turn to heroin. Rush Limbaugh circumvented banking regulations to get cash to pay for his oxycodone addiction, which may have cost him his hearing.
Some states have legalized marijuana, but the federal government is still wasting billions of dollars fighting a war against a drug that for all practical purposes is impossible to overdose on. One college kid died from drinking 24 shots in two hours: but Amanda Bynes reportedly smoked 10 joints an hour (surely not a world record) before getting tossed in jail after she tossed a bong out her window. But that's nowhere near the toxicity of alcohol: a deadly dose of THC requires smoking 15,000 joints in 20 minutes. Nicotine is far more toxic: Igor Stravinsky almost died of nicotine poisoning while working on Petrushka; the nicotine in two cigarettes could kill an adult if directly absorbed.
I'm not saying we should hand out drugs like candy. Cocaine should be controlled because of the risks of heart attack, stroke, and high blood pressure. Heroin is extremely addictive (and causes constipation!), but it's an opioid just like Vicodin and Oxycontin which are legal and handed out liberally by doctors for the most minor complaints. Most of the problems with heroin abuse (hepatitis and HIV from needle sharing, poisoning from street drugs cut with crap, etc.) are due to the unsanitary practices of broke and strung-out addicts and its illegality. Crystal meth is bad news all around, but because it's so easy to make and it's illegal, it means quick cash and a top TV series. If better drugs were available, no one would risk using meth and getting meth mouth.
But there's still resistance to decriminalization and legalization because politicians are afraid of looking soft on drugs. House Republicans, always fond of the drug war because it funnels so much money into the pockets of for-profit prison corporations who contribute millions to Republican candidates, are desperate to balance the budget. (They also apparently like to drink on the House floor.)
To show their budgetary desperation and determination House Republicans voted to cut $40 billion in food stamps over the next 10 years. But the federal government spends $15 billion every year on the war on drugs, much of that to stop marijuana. States spend an additional $25 billion. We spend hundreds of billions on prisons, which are mostly filled with minor drug offenders.
If we legalized marijuana and decriminalized drug use, we could save tens of billions of dollars in enforcement efforts annually, clear out our prisons, and reduce the number of burglaries and muggings committed by addicts desperate for the cash to buy their next fix. We could cut the legs off the drug cartels in Latin America, which would eliminate the thousands of murderous criminals Joe Arpaio says are bringing drugs north and taking guns south across the border every day.
People use illicit drugs for all kinds of reasons, but the underlying factor is that drugs fill some void in their brain chemistry. We have tacitly acknowledged this biological fact with our wholesale adoption of drugs like ritalin, Cymbalta, Abilify, Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and so on, to treat the tiniest symptoms of inattention, depression and social anxiety. And we have alcohol ever-present to give us the liquid courage to beat our wives and rape our dates.
In a country where giant pharmaceutical companies push dope during the nightly news and beer companies glorify drunken behavior during football games, it is preposterous that the DEA is still raiding legal medical marijuana dispensaries for cancer patients.
My solution? Most drugs and alcohol should be legal, though discouraged -- glamorous advertising should be banned. They should be treated like the dirty little industry they are. They should be taxed according to how much their damage costs society. That should be enough to discourage casual use but not enough to encourage criminal activity to circumvent those taxes. Distribution of drugs that cause direct mental or physical damage (incapacitatingly addictive, very high toxicity, damaging to DNA, etc.) should remain illegal, but usage should not be criminal: the users are the victims, not the perpetrators.
So, let us take the first of twelve steps. Repeat after me:
My name is America and I am an alcoholic. And a drug addict. And denying reality.
In The Black
Perhaps I was too hasty in poo-pooing comparisons of our nation's economy to an individual's economy. Certainly, there are plenty of differences that are largely ignored by the Right but there are some similarities that were illustrated quite well over at The Pragmatic Capitalist. The first piece, "The US Government is not $16 Trillion dollars in the hole," points out the obvious.
The IER estimates that total fossil fuel resources owned by the Federal government are valued at over $150 trillion alone. These assets alone are FIFTY FIVE times the amount stated in the CNBC report. But that only scratches the surface. I haven’t even looked into the huge amount of federally owned land and buildings that would surely amount into the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. There’s also the gold resources. And there’s the trillions of dollars in its own liabilities that it owns via the Fed and Social Security funds.
Just like an ordinary person who owns land, oil, a profitable business and other assets like gold, the US government also has a gigantic pile of assets that make us far into the black. And that's with all the future Social Security and Medicare liabilities (around $60-7$0 trillion). As PragCap show us, we are not going bankrupt and the people who claim this are simply lying because of their pathological hatred of the US government and their inability to admit fault. Their obsession with spending is essentially holding us back from economic growth and one was to wonder if this is the whole point. They want our country to fail so they can win the argument.
Of course there are still differences which the second link illustrates quite well.
The constraint for the government is different from that of a household or business who can really “run out of money”. The US government’s constraint is not that it will run out of funds, but that it could supply too much liquidity to the private sector thereby causing inflation. So the US government’s real constraint is inflation and not solvency. This is a vastly different issue than the one the US media usually harps on with regards to the budget deficit and the US government’s ability to “afford” its spending.
The USA has an institutional arrangement in which it is a contingent currency issuer. That is, while the Treasury is an operational currency user (meaning it must always have funds in its account at the Fed before it can spend those funds) it has the extraordinary power to tax and issue risk free bonds that the public will always desire to hold so long as inflation is not extraordinarily high. In addition, even in a worst case scenario, the US Treasury can always rely on the Federal Reserve to supply the funds necessary to fund its spending. Therefore, the US government can be thought of as a contingent currency issuer who can issue the funds to spend. This makes it very different from a household.
The US Treasury is a currency user, but the government as a whole can be seen as a contingent currency issuer by institutional design because of this implicit funding guarantee. So the key here is that there’s no solvency constraint as in, “running out of money”. Greece doesn’t have this arrangement. In fact, since the ECB is essentially a foreign central bank there is a real solvency constraint. So banks and private investors have become hesitant to buy Greek bonds because of this flawed institutional arrangement and the lack of an implicit guarantee. It’s apples and oranges compared to the USA.
Once again, not like Greece. Not going bankrupt. Not overspending. Not running out of money. Plenty of assets.
IN THE BLACK.
The IER estimates that total fossil fuel resources owned by the Federal government are valued at over $150 trillion alone. These assets alone are FIFTY FIVE times the amount stated in the CNBC report. But that only scratches the surface. I haven’t even looked into the huge amount of federally owned land and buildings that would surely amount into the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. There’s also the gold resources. And there’s the trillions of dollars in its own liabilities that it owns via the Fed and Social Security funds.
Just like an ordinary person who owns land, oil, a profitable business and other assets like gold, the US government also has a gigantic pile of assets that make us far into the black. And that's with all the future Social Security and Medicare liabilities (around $60-7$0 trillion). As PragCap show us, we are not going bankrupt and the people who claim this are simply lying because of their pathological hatred of the US government and their inability to admit fault. Their obsession with spending is essentially holding us back from economic growth and one was to wonder if this is the whole point. They want our country to fail so they can win the argument.
Of course there are still differences which the second link illustrates quite well.
The constraint for the government is different from that of a household or business who can really “run out of money”. The US government’s constraint is not that it will run out of funds, but that it could supply too much liquidity to the private sector thereby causing inflation. So the US government’s real constraint is inflation and not solvency. This is a vastly different issue than the one the US media usually harps on with regards to the budget deficit and the US government’s ability to “afford” its spending.
The USA has an institutional arrangement in which it is a contingent currency issuer. That is, while the Treasury is an operational currency user (meaning it must always have funds in its account at the Fed before it can spend those funds) it has the extraordinary power to tax and issue risk free bonds that the public will always desire to hold so long as inflation is not extraordinarily high. In addition, even in a worst case scenario, the US Treasury can always rely on the Federal Reserve to supply the funds necessary to fund its spending. Therefore, the US government can be thought of as a contingent currency issuer who can issue the funds to spend. This makes it very different from a household.
The US Treasury is a currency user, but the government as a whole can be seen as a contingent currency issuer by institutional design because of this implicit funding guarantee. So the key here is that there’s no solvency constraint as in, “running out of money”. Greece doesn’t have this arrangement. In fact, since the ECB is essentially a foreign central bank there is a real solvency constraint. So banks and private investors have become hesitant to buy Greek bonds because of this flawed institutional arrangement and the lack of an implicit guarantee. It’s apples and oranges compared to the USA.
Once again, not like Greece. Not going bankrupt. Not overspending. Not running out of money. Plenty of assets.
IN THE BLACK.
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