civilization

The Right-Wing Death Machine

jacob2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to do several posts: one on the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, one on the disturbing rhetoric of violence and death that so obsesses the neocons, and an article in the National Review that spews hate even while it’s preaching tolerance.

A post on Dawg’s Blawg made me realize these things aren’t separate issues at all. They’re all tied together into one horrible cult of death. Forget the right-wing noise machine: they’re not just noise. They haven’t been since they got their bloody hands all over the federal government.

Dr. Dawg puts it in stark terms:

Far too many on the Right (with a few honourable exceptions) are pathologically obsessed with death, with hurting and killing other people. Whether it’s capital punishment, endless wars, waterboarding,
easy access to handguns, knee-jerk defences of police brutality and sadistic, racist southern sheriffs, or shooting abortion doctors, they lap it up and howl for more. And in the US they take it that extra mile: they would literally rather have their opponents tortured and/or killed than discuss the issues.

The leading lights of the liberal movement call for cooperation, toleration, and positive solutions to problems. They reach for science, reason, and diplomacy. The right reaches for weapons.

Listen to the rhetoric of their heroes:

This evening we learn from the Knoxville News that officers entering the home of murder Jim Adkisson “found Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by talk show host Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor, by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.”

The presence of somebody’s books in a mentally disturbed person’s home does not make them accessories to a killing. But right-wing rhetoric toward liberals and humanists like those who attended the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has been exceptionally violent for years. Liberal groups are often called “Nazi” or “Nazi-like” by O’Reilly (he even said that about our own Arianna Huffington). Savage says he’d “hang every lawyer” who tried to establish constitutional rights for Guantanamo prisoners, describes Obama as an “Afro-Leninist,” and said the folks at Media Matters were “brownshirts.” He describes Rep. Wexler as a “Nazi” and calls Nancy Pelosi a “Mussolini.”

As for Hannity, he said that “there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ’em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t become the speaker (of the House).” Think about it: “worth fighting and dying for.”

And that’s just a sampler.

Ann Coulter says liberals should be beaten with baseball bats and tried for treason (she’s not clear about the order in which these events are to take place.) Dick Morris says they’re “traitors” who should be decapitated.


You don’t hear that from the left. There may be a few isolated instances, but it’s not our heroes, not our talk show hosts and writers and opinion-makers, certainly not our political leaders, who call for the deaths anyone and everyone who has the audacity to hold a contrary opinion. When have you heard of a Democratic presidential candidate singing about bombing Iran? Bet you a dollar you can’t name an instance.

It fascinates and horrifies me, this fixation on violence from the very same people who claim the upper hand on morality. They bitch about violence in movies and video games, wring their sweaty hands and try to pass legislation “to protect the children,” and yet their political speech is filled with more vivid violence than you’ll ever find in Grand Theft Auto. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

They bleat endlessly about the sanctity of human life, then murder abortion doctors, leave unwanted children to languish in abuse, filth, and poverty, and urge the death penalty on the retarded and the young. This tells me that their concern for fetuses has nothing at all to do with human life, and everything to do with controlling women. Everything they do is about control. And if a control freak can’t manipulate people with superior arguments and persuasion, well, violence controls too, right?

So they resort to fear. They call for the deaths of their opponents because they can’t defeat the living. They want power and authority. There’s no greater power and authority than that which comes from holding a person’s life in your hands. Just ask any serial killer.

Even when their hearts are superficially in the right place, the disturbing fixation on violence and death is manifestly present. Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars found a right-winger who wants to do away with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and on the surface it seems like this is a person with his head screwed on straight:

Here’s a shock: Deroy Murdock, a contributing editor to the National Review Online, has come out strongly in favor of allowing gays to serve openly in the military. It’s quite a powerful essay, in fact. He contrasts the fact that the Pentagon is continually lowering standards and granting exceptions to get people with violent felony convictions on their record into the military while throwing out gay soldiers with impeccable service records and badly needed skills:

Between 2006 and 2007, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recently revealed, convicted felons accepted by the Marine Corps rose 68 percent, from 208 to 350. Equivalent Army admissions rocketed 105 percent, from 249 to 511. Between 2003 and 2006, U.C. Santa Barbara’s Michael D. Palm Center calculates, “106,76
8 individuals with serious criminal histories were admitted” to the armed forces.

Last year, the Army gave moral waivers to 106 applicants convicted of burglary, 15 of felonious break-ins, 11 of grand-theft-auto, and eight of arson. It also admitted five rape/sexual-assault convicts, two felony child molesters, two manslaughter convicts, and two felons condemned for “terrorist threats including bomb threats.”

“The Army seems to be lowering standards in training to accommodate lower-quality recruits,” RAND Corporation researcher Beth Asch observed at a May 12 Heritage Foundation defense-policy seminar in Colorado Springs.

Conversely, expelled military personnel include Arabic linguists and intelligence specialists who help crush America’s foes in the War on Terror. “Don’t Ask” has ousted at least 58 soldiers who speak Arabic, 50 Korean, 42 Russian, 20 Chinese, nine Farsi, and eight Serbo-Croatian — all trained at the prestigious Defense Language Institute. Al-Qaeda intercepts need translation, and Uncle Sam may need people who can walk around Tehran with open ears. Yet these dedicated gay citizens now are ex-GIs.


Ye gods, that almost sounds sane, and he’s talking about teh gays!!11!!1! Aside from that little “crush America’s foes in the War on Terror” screed, we could be talking to an ordinary, rational, reasonable human being.

By now you’re asking, “What’s the catch?” So glad you asked. It doesn’t take long before his true conservative colors seep through like bloodstains:

“Don’t Ask” should yield to equality: Sexual orientation should be irrelevant while inappropriate sexual conduct — gay, straight, or otherwise — should be punished. Our enemies are Islamofascists who murder Americans, not gay patriots who unravel terrorist plots and introduce jihadists to Allah.


Uh-huh. There it is, the real reason for this call for “equality.” He wants teh gays to go after “those murdering Islamofascists” and kill them. As long as they’re killing Mooslims and not having sex (you noticed that little “inappropriate sexual conduct” caveat, I trust, and realized that applies to any sort of sex a gay person might engage in), gays are okay by him.

We’re right back to the death machine again.

Let’s sum up the right-wing philosophy: Anyone who disagrees with their politics is a traitor and should suffer and die. Anyone with an alternative lifestyle is a moral leper and should suffer and die, unless that person happens to be useful to the military, in which case they can live as long as they’re killing America’s enemies. America shouldn’t negotiate with other countries: other countries should do what we say or die. Religious dissenters should suffer and die. People who mistreat a communion wafer should suffer and die. And on and on.

But they won’t do the killing and torturing themselves. Oh, no. They have people for that. After all, why get your hands dirty with blood and gore when it’s so much cleaner to get others to do it for you?

Fuckwits this obsessed with killing absolutely anyone and everyone they don’t like shouldn’t be in the mainstream. They shouldn’t be a part of our politics, government, or media. They shouldn’t be in any position where they can encourage or order others to carry out their fantasies of death and mayhem. They truly should be on the lunatic fringe, not front-and-center. Why the fuck have we tolerated these assholes? Why have we allowed dangerous infants to play with the adults?

It’s time we shoved them out of power. Time we isolate and contain them.

But I won’t use their rhetoric. I’m old enough and wise enough to know that death is not the answer.

Ridicule is. Shame is. Information is.

Show people how ridiculous these lackwits are.

Show those who admire and respect them realize that they should actually be ashamed.

And never, ever relent on the facts. We can start with the fact that it’s not McCain and Bush’s policies of belligerence, so enthusiastically cheered by the bloodthirsty right, that work to keep America safe. If they were enough, Bush & Cronies wouldn’t be dashing to embrace Obama’s policies of direct talks and troop withdrawls.

Let’s shut the right-wing death machine down before they get us all killed.

The Right-Wing Death Machine
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Sapere Aude!

jacob7 Comments
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.

– Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”

The Enlightenment. Those two words send a cascade of awe and delight down my spine. They set synapses to firing like chains of fireworks. Names and ideas erupt from the sparks: Newton, Spinoza and Leibniz released science and mathematics from their classical and medieval cages and advanced them by light years in a virtual instant. Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau struck through chains and risked their lives to set human minds free. Locke, Smith and Montesquieu set forth major components of political and economic philosophy that led to democracy and capitalism. Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton created a whole new kind of nation from scratch. Beethoven, Mozart, and Goethe elevated music and literature to heights they had never known before.

Men, and not a few women, dared to know, and changed the world.

There had been hints of an awakening for centuries. A few flames burned dimly in the Middle Ages. A few flames flared up brilliantly during the Renaissance. But the Enlightenment was a conflagration, a wildfire beside a candelabra. In less than two centuries, the scientific method arose and began advancing knowledge at an incredible pace; the foundations of democracy and liberalism were laid and thriving nations built on them; education was no longer a prerogative of the fortunate few, but a practical gift offered to a broad swath of the population. The entire Western way of thinking changed virtually beyond recognition. All of those ideas we take for granted – freedom of religion, equality, political and civil rights, and countless more – emerged because of men and women who refused to remain ignorant.

Look at the lives and work of any group of Enlightenment thinkers, and you’ll see similarities. They were desperate to know and understand. They were determined to use rational thought to overcome superstition. They believed in man’s ability to understand the world. They didn’t believe religion had all the answers, or even most. They weren’t afraid to challenge established authority; indeed, they often risked their lives to do so. They found ways to make end-runs around the censors, evaded every attempt to silence them, and believed beyond doubt that what they were doing was right, necessary, and valuable.

They argued with absolutely everyone, each other included. They accepted no limits to their curiosity. There was nowhere to them that Man was forbidden to go.

All is not lost when one puts the people in a condition to see it has intelligence. On the contrary, all is lost when you treat it like a herd of cattle, for sooner or later it will gore you with its horns.

-Voltaire

In the salons of Paris, the coffee houses and Gresham College in London, in the dining rooms and halls of power all throughout Europe, intellect raged. Pamphlets, books, magazines, scientific papers all poured into the streets and captured the imaginations of men and women who then used those ideas to create new governments, societies, and values. Knowledge was passed into the hands of ordinary people, and those ordinary people did extraordinary things with it.

The two revolutions of the 18th century, the American and the French, get all of the attention, but neither would have been possible without the revolution in ideas that preceded them. Never before in the history of Western civilization had common people been entrusted to govern. Even Greece, that thriving original democracy, was more of an aristocracy than anything else. But the Enlightenment thinkers believed that all regular people lacked was education and the freedom to use their native intelligence. Given those things, a peasant could rise to rule. Peasants eventually did.

It wasn’t just the aristocracy and absolute monarchy that the Enlightenment thinkers overthrew. They broke the stranglehold religion had over the populace. Religion didn’t escape their scrutiny. The sacred got subjected to the same empirical analysis as the natural world, and where it was found wanting, it suffered the same scathing criticism unleashed on politics, pseudoscience, and ignorance. Some of them treated Christianity with respect and reverence, but they were in a minority. Most Enlightenment thinkers had no use for a Church that sought to keep people in ignorance and servitude, a faith that led to intolerance and claimed miracles it couldn’t prove, and religions rotten with hypocrisy.

“Let’s eat some Jesuit,” Voltaire wrote in Candide. Baron d’Holbach proselytized for atheism, churning out a flood of books and pamphlets proclaiming that there is no God, only nature, and that only a society of atheists has any hope of being truly moral. He often had to publish his books under innocuous titles to evade the censors. But other philosophes left nothing to doubt with theirs: among the books on offer was Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious. Pretty revolutionary for a world in which religion still ruled.

Other books might have seemed innocent enough until they were opened. Woolston’s Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Savior proclaimed the Resurrection of Christ “the most notorious and monstrous Imposture, that was ever put upon mankind.” Voltaire, when completing the Philosophical Dictionary, wrote, “Theology amuses me. There we find man’s insanity in all its plenitude.” Jefferson removed all of the miracles from the Bible, a decision which Hume would have applauded.

The only sacred thing was the pursuit of knowledge. Rational thinking, empiricism, science, and intellect reigned supreme. The next world meant very little to them, if anything at all. People had to make a difference in this one. And that was exactly what they set out to do, and succeeded. They brought us the modern age.

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

-James Madison

The Enlightenment never truly ended: its results permeate every aspect of our lives. But there hasn’t been another time quite like it since. The passion for knowledge has been eclipsed. We’ve entered an age in which ignorance rather than intelligence is celebrated. As Kant said, it’s easier to be immature, to let others do the thinking. We become habituated to the yoke: we become afraid of freedom. “The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult,” Kant wrote. “Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.”

He could have been describing our age.

Fundamentalist religion is attempting to rein us in. Governments want to control, not serve, the governed. This has always been the case. The powerful never relinquish power easily, and they always desire more power. It’s easier for them to take it from people made willfully powerless.

War, poverty, ignorance and despair are rising all around us.

We should be thrilled
.

After all, the Enlightenment grew out of a desperate age. Europe was torn by war, crushed by despotic governments, ripped apart by religious strife, and it was from this harrowing that the philosophes grew. When I look at the conditions surrounding the Enlightenment, I see clear parallels. Strife can destroy people: it can also galvanize them.

I think we’re standing on the cusp of a new Age of Enlightenment.

Bloggers are the new pamphleteers. What bloggers are saying today about politics and religion, life and learning, show the same spirit as those tracts poured from the pens of subversive thinkers who went on to redefine the foundations of the world.

Comments threads and message boards have become the new salons, where ideas are exchanged and intelligence elevated. Those discussions wouldn’t have been out of place in the most illustrious gatherings of learned people.

All we need is the passion, the commitment, and the courage those revolutionaries displayed. Nothing is beyond us. But we have to step outside of the little boxes we’ve put ourselves in. Scientists need to brush shoulders with artists. Writers need to converse with mathematicians. Political philosophers and musicians should mingle. That cross-fertilization of knowledge is what leads to world-shaking ideas, quantum leaps in human understanding.

Politeness and deference are sweet social ideas, but we can’t defer to those who would impose ignorance and superstition. Contention was the order of the day during the Enlightenment. We should never shy away from it. Conventional thinking will get us nowhere. The world is on the cusp of a crisis: we’re never going to get anything solved if we don’t break away from tradition and habit. We won’t solve a damned thing if we don’t risk capsizing the boat.

The philosophes changed the world not by force of arms, but force of mind. Their ideas, their writings, their experiments, are what changed the world irrevocably.

It can happen again. Ignorance has no power to stand against those who dare to know. And those who dare have the power to change everything.

Here and today begins a new age in the history of the world. Some day you will be able to say – I was present at its birth.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sapere Aude!

Self-Righteous Exclusionary Bullshit

jacob1 Comment

Progressive Conservative deserves a more coherent response than I’m capable of just now. I’ll leave it up to you lot to go read his comment and respond accordingly: my thoughts will follow after Aunty Flow has stopped creating her usual havoc. I’m just pleased to have a dissenting view round the place, albeit one that contains elements that thoroughly piss me off. I’m sure the feeling’s mutual. The point is that he’s brought some ideas to the table that bear debating.

In my sorry state, however, all I can do at the moment is riff on a theme he brought to mind: self-righteous exclusionary bullshit.

This is by no means a purely Christian trait. It’s a human one. I read quite a lot of history, and many common themes run through it. Self-righteous exclusionary bullshit is a major one. Call it tribalism, nationalism, or religion, it all comes down to one group of fuckers thinking they’re better than all the other fuckers to such an extent that they get obnoxiously overprotective of their petrified views. Nobody else could possibly be as perfect as they are, so nobody else’s point of view means jack shit. And if that’s all it was, it would just be annoying, but the self-righteous exclusionary fuckers then go on to paint everyone else’s views as evil.

Every human group and enterprise suffers from variations of the disease. I’m fully aware of that. The very definition of human could be “a jackass who thinks they’re right and everyone else is wrong.” It’s just a matter of degree. Some of us jackasses pause a moment to ask, “Am I right?” before gleefully proclaiming everyone else wrong. Some of us enjoy being proved wrong, or at least handle it gracefully and adjust accordingly. The jackasses I’m talking about not only refuse to admit the possibility they could be wrong, they won’t accept proof when they are and instead of adjusting themselves, they try to adjust everyone else by force of dogma or arms rather than evidence and persuasion.

The self-righteous exclusionary fuckers can’t budge aside to accomodate differing views. Most of the folks I hang about with these days may hold views diametrically opposed to mine, but we put more emphasis on the points of agreement, allow the apostasy, and would never, ever, dismiss or exclude each other on the basis of a few disagreements. Not so the self-righteous exclusionary fuckers.

For example:

Having been drawn to Senator Obama’s remarkable “love thy neighbor” style of campaigning, his express aim to transcend partisan divide, and specifically, his appreciation for faith (“secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square”), I did not expect to be clobbered by co-religionists.

On the blogs, I have been declared “self-excommunicated,” and recently at a Mass before a dinner speech to Catholic business leaders, a very angry college chaplain excoriated my Obama-heresy from the pulpit at length and then denied my receipt of communion.


You heard that right. Doug Kmiec, devout Catholic, was told he couldn’t cannibalize Jesus because he backed the wrong candidate.

Granted, the chaplin’s reaction was extreme, and I doubt many Catholic priests would deny some poor bastard communion just because he’s voting for Barak Obama, but it’s a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. There’s no room for dissent in that particular chaplin’s flock. He’s a self-righteous exclusionary fucker practicing self-righteous exclusionary bullshit.

So was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. Modern fundamentalist Islam has raised the art of self-righteous exclusionary bullshit to a pinnacle not achieved since the Middle Ages. Our very own fundies can only aspire to that kind of bullshit. Nothing would make them happier than a theocracy – or so they think. (Just wait until the wrong denomination gets their hands on the reins, you silly shits. You’ll be begging for the good ol’ days of separation of church and state.)

I gave up Christianity because of this crap. Other religions, including other branches of the Christian (dysfunctional) family tree, seemed to have some pretty nifty ideas, but God forbid you bring them up. Church X had it right and Churches Y, Z and T had it completely wrong, and as for those other so-called religions, they’re all tools of Satan. It got so bad among the youth group that the youth pastor devoted an entire night to slamming M.C. Hammer – that’s Christian Minister M.C. Hammer – for having a dude in a red devil costume in one of his videos.

My Christmas cards in the following years were in direct protest of this trend. They had a cutsey little painting of people of multiple colors and faiths gathered round, and a quote that said, “God created so many different kinds of people – why would He allow only one way to worship Him?”

Good question, Rocko.

America’s self-righteous exclusionary bullshit gets up my nose just as badly. America goes through these petulant phases where the rest of the world has absolutely nothing to contribute and America is the only way. American fashion, American democracy, American entertainment, American ad nauseum – and ignore the fact that other democracies do a better job taking care of their people, other countries produce entertaining entertainment, other countries are leading the way in fashion. You remember that whole flap over Japan and trade back in the nineties? America was so perfect she couldn’t possibly be losing market share because America’s no longer top dog in manufacturing. Oh, hell, no. Those evil Japs were up to all kinds of shennanigans. Total conspiracy to keep America down. Or some such crap. The problem with self-righteous exclusionary bullshit is that it can’t admit reality. It sure as fuck doesn’t allow for course corrections.

Thankfully, we didn’t have a self-righteous exclusionary fucker in office at the time, or we might have seen some extremely stupid antics. Like a second invasion of Japan.

The self-righteous exclusionary fuckers in power right now have taken the bullshit to a whole new extreme. America used to admit that, although she was perfect in every way and couldn’t possibly be made better by other countries’ input, treaties like the Geneva Conventions weren’t beneath her. She could abide by them without undue difficulty. Then the fuckwits took over, and decided that since America was perfect in every way, nothing she did could possibly be wrong, so what the Geneva Conventions quaintly called “torture” was just “enhanced interrogation” and absolutely fine as long as it’s America or her proxies doing it. The self-righteous exclusionary principle went into overdrive, excluding every opposing view.

You see how that weakens a country, right? Weakens a country, a faith, a person.

Self-righteous exclusionary bullshit serves no one in the end. All of these self-righteous exclusionary fuckers playing holier-than-thou lose an opportunity to adapt, grow stronger, savor a world that’s full of variety and incident and damned interesting stuff. And they make it harder for folks like myself, who try to avoid being completely self-righteous exclusionary fuckers, to include them. You see, the problem with a self-righteous exclusionary fucker is that if you give a millimeter, they take ten thousand miles and run you out of the country in the bargain.

That complicates matters.

What I’d like to see is a world of self-righteous i
nclusionary bullshit. Huma
ns are always going to be self-righteous and full of bullshit, but the world’s a banquet, and I’m damned tired of the fuckers who insist that only certain items at the buffet can be enjoyed.

Self-Righteous Exclusionary Bullshit

Tragedy and Comedy

jacob1 Comment

My emotions feel like they’ve been strapped to an automated pogo stick and set to bouncing between extremes. Part of this is likely due to perimenopause and the imminent arrival of Aunty Flow, but most of it’s down to the news cycle rather than the natural one. It’s been one of those days when I look at the world and say, “What a fucking piece of work.”

Grab a pogo stick of your own and bounce along, my darlings.

Tragedy:

JAIPUR, India – A series of bomb blasts across the ancient Indian city of Jaipur killed at least 80 people and turned busy markets, a jewelry bazaar and a Hindu temple into scenes of carnage, police said Wednesday.


This sort of thing always leaves me sick and shaking with outrage and horror. What sort of sick fuck thinks this is what their God wants them to do? When are humans going to stop being so fucking stupid and so fucking blind and realize that violence is just a particularly loud way of saying you’re a weak, frightened little coward who deserves to be despised?

No one does a greater dishonor to their beliefs than when they decide that blowing a bunch of innocent people to pieces is the right thing to do. Filling an empty argument with explosives doesn’t make it compelling. Having the power to kill doesn’t make you right: it makes you a disgusting, murderous loser.

Get off of my planet.

Comedy:

Bob Barr will run for president! Celebrate!

You may remember Barr from such low points in American history as the hypocritical “impeach Clinton because he’s the only one of us having an affair” fiasco, and the passage of the draconian “Defense of Marriage Act.”

So why am I excited? Think Nader. But conservative. Bob Barr has the same appeal to selected elements of the Republican Party that Nader has to elements of the Democratic Party. In many ways, he’s more conservative than George W. Bush. And he’ll be running as a Libertarian, a party with intellectual bona fides and support from right-wing talk radio (just ask Neal Boortz). In a party that distrusts McCain as “too moderate” for them (see my earlier post), Barr is just the thing we need to either throw the general election into disarray, or spread McCain’s already weak funding just a little too thin.


Oh, my darlings, I’m feeling shades of Dr. Evil here. The laugh is fairly erupting from the bit o’ my belly. In fact, as I told Ames in his comments thread, I feel nearly compelled to go campaign for Bob Barr. ‘Twould be an act of kindness, truly: conservatives should not be denied the excitement of having a choice of candidate. I can’t wait to tell my conservative friends who’ve spent the last few months bitching about how much they hate McCain the excellent news. I shall become an evangelical Barrist!

Tragedy:

MIANYANG, China – Soldiers hiking over landslide-blocked roads reached the epicenter of China’s devastating earthquake Tuesday, pulling bodies and a few survivors from collapsed buildings. The death toll of more than 12,000 is certain to rise as the buried are found.

Crews worked through a steady rain as they searched wrecked towns across hilly stretches of Sichuan province that were stricken by Monday’s magnitude-7.9 quake, China’s deadliest in three decades. Tens of thousands of homeless spent a second night outdoors, some sleeping under plastic sheeting, others bused to a stadium in the city of Mianyang, on the edge of the disaster area.

[snip]

Buses carried survivors away from Beichuan, which was flattened — a few buildings standing amid piles of rubble in a narrow valley, according to CCTV video.


The next time you bitch and moan about all those icky government regulations dictating how things should be built, the next time you’re tempted to be pissed at the delays as bits of perfectly good roadway are ripped up to make them even better bits of roadway, think of this: a whole city fell down on these people.

A whole fucking city.

And as for you creationist fucks who want God’s will to trump science, all I can say is this: tell me again how much you hate science when the folks studying plate tectonics are finally able to accurately predict earthquakes. Just think of them as Noah if you have to: I’m sure you could make a case for science being the new Noah’s Ark, right?

Comedy:

COFFEEVILLE, Miss. — Democrats scored a remarkable upset victory on Tuesday in a special Congressional election in this conservative
Southern district, sending a clear signal of national problems ahead for
Republicans in the fall.

The Democrat, Travis Childers, a local courthouse official, pulled together a coalition of blacks, who turned out heavily, and old-line “yellow dog” Democrats, to beat his Republican opponent, Greg Davis,
the mayor of Southaven, a Memphis suburb. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, the vote was 54 percent for Mr. Childers to 46 percent for Mr. Davis.

The seat had been in Republican hands since 1995, and the district, largely rural and stretching across the northern top of Mississippi, had been considered one of the safest in the country for President Bush’s party, as he won here with 62 percent of the vote in 2004.


HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Take that, you neocon Republicon fuckers! We’re three for three! Who’s your daddy now, douchebags? AH HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Tragedy:

Both Mississippi candidates depicted themselves as down-the-line conservatives on social issues, and there was little difference
between them on abortion and gun rights: staunchly against the first, and for the second.

Sigh. Deep South conservatives: pissed off enough to elect Democrats, but not yet enlightened. The pogo stick bounces on.

Tip o’ the shot glass to The Carpetbagger Report and Submitted to a Candid World, who provided all of the news contained herein. What? You think I actually sift through the newspapers myself?

Tragedy and Comedy

Vintage Market Bullshit

jacob1 Comment

Back when humans rode dinosaurs and God was busy stuffing fossils into geological strata as part of his elaborate plan to punk scientists, I took Western Civilization I from a Calvinist named Ken Meier. He started the course by handing us a quote and asking us to date it. It was one of those “damned kids these days” moans. I, being prone to reason and highly suspicious that this was a major set-up, plumped for the 1500s while most folks in class were guessing the 1950s and Professor Meier just smirked at us all.

I was off by 2,000 years: it was from an ancient Greek, and it sounded exactly like what every generation of adults has said about every generation of teens since time began.

One day, I may extract myself from the gravitational anomaly otherwise known as my chair and go look the quote up for you. Today is not that day. But it comes to my mind because I’m in the midst of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, and it’s a long treatise on “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Digby’s “Deep Insight” source has a stellar example:

The Fed has now become a merger and acquisitions specialist for investment banks. After the public has been put on the hook for $29 billion in highly questionable securities in the Bear Stearns debacle, there is an acknowledgement by the Treasury that there should be just a bit more regulation. Maybe start with minimum capital requirements in the investment banks and hedge funds. The political system has allowed this financial behavior to flourish, so now there are fig leaf reforms proposed by the Bush Administration. John Kenneth Galbraith once said that once the last of those who steered the country through the financial regulatory framework after the Depression were dead, the financial system would find a new way to implode. Capitalism, he explained, could not help itself.

The financial sector broadly defined is now over 20% of the economy. The addiction to risk and debt in the financial sector has dragged down the whole economy. Miracle returns at some private equity firms and hedge funds are built on cheap leverage. Meanwhile, the small investors saving for retirement are like lambs being led to slaughter. When measured in Euros since the peak in 2000, the Dow has lost nearly 40% of its value. Many of those baby boomers can forget about those extended European retirement trips.

This kind of insanity has been happening since markets came into existence. I refer you to Tulipmania, the South Sea Bubble, and this depressing list of notable stock market crashes. In America, a bubble sprang into being nearly simultaneously with the creation of the First Bank of the United States:

“When trading in shares commenced, prices promptly took off, buoyed by a money fever such as Americans had never witnessed…. So frenzied was the trading in scrip that many investors doubled their money within days, and the resulting madness was dubbed “scrippomania.” [Chernow, page 357]

Revolutionary war soldiers who had been paid in bonds sold those bonds to speculators for a pittance: one of the first American instances of “small investors” being “led to slaughter,” as Deep Insight so starkly puts it. Speculators made money. The country went apeshit. Thomas Jefferson, a dyed-in-the-wool misty-eyed agriculturalist, moaned. He frequently denounced the stock market as “gambling.” He complained to George Washington that paper money was “withdrawing our citizens from… useful industry to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species of gambling, destructive of morality, and which had introduced its poison into the government itself.” James Madison was beside himself with outrage. Invective and accusations flew, political parties were born, and North and South squared off as Alexander Hamilton played Federal Reserve with the economy and stablized the markets nearly by himself. Under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, a group of gentlemen met to bring some sanity into the markets and created the New York Stock Exchange.

What’s happening in the markets now has happened before. It’s pure vintage bullshit.

What’s the history we’ve learned over and over? Markets crash. Perfect laissez faire leads to rich bastards and wanna-be-rich-like-now bastards creating chaos. The government has to step in to pick up the pieces. Reactionaries wish we’d all go back to milking cows. Small investors get dismembered and left wondering where all their fucking money went. Oh, and when you remove government regulation, people get incredibly stupid and think that things like rampant speculation and subprime mortgages are fantastic ideas. This time, the bubble won’t burst! Ohshit.

I imagine Ken Meier’s still wearing that smirk. It’s the history professor’s patented “nothing new” smirk, and it makes me wonder: when the fuck are we going to learn?

Vintage Market Bullshit