Decline of a great nation

The German magazine Spiegel has made a damning assessment of the United States.

The United States is frittering away its role as a model for the rest of the world. The political system is plagued by an absurd level of hatred, the economy is stagnating and the infrastructure is falling into a miserable state of disrepair.

Read the whole thing. It’s both depressing and bracing — the first step to fixing these problems is to recognize that they exist. The only question is whether our political leadership has the will to turn its back on the destructive policies of the Republican party, which are what has put us here.

(Not that the Democrats are a lot better.)

I really hope none of you went to Walmart today

I’m with Tyrone Robinson, the underpaid Walmart employee who publicly walked out today.

Tyrone Robinson, the lone worker and protester from Chicago’s Walmart on the far south side of the city, estimates he earns about $15,000 a year doing produce management. One of the demands of the strikes is that workers be able to earn at least $25,000 a year if they work full time.

"My ends ain’t meeting," he said. "My hours have gone down to about 30 hours a week, and I make $8.25."

Robinson, a small African-American man buzzing with nervous energy, was wearing his bright green OUR Walmart shirt and a Bulls cap. (OUR stands for Organization United for Respect.) Tears left a trail down his face on the bitterly cold early morning.

"I know there are other Walmart workers in there that feel like me, but they are just terrified of retaliation because Walmart told them that if you walk off, you will be terminated immediately," he said.

"I want to let them know if I can do it, get up and speak up about what you deserve," Robinson said. "We work hard, we get here on time, we do what we got to do. I feel very proud to do this, and once I return I’ll tell them about it."

When you kill unions, you kill labor, and when you kill labor, you kill people.

I will be looking for Tyrone Robinson’s name in the news tomorrow. I hope he still has his job…but I don’t have much hope for Walmart.

They never learn

The 2012 presidential campaign is over. The 2016 campaign is starting up.

Oh, dog, but I just want them all to fucking go away.

But I am compelled to comment on this. The first Republican out of the starting gate is Marco Rubio. He’s Latino! The Republicans lost the Latino vote again! So he’s exactly what they need: a brown-skinned person who’s just as stupid and socially regressive as the old white geezers they regularly nominate. Apparently, brown-skinned people won’t pay any attention at all to the policies of the candidate, but will just vote on the basis of skin color. Like white Republicans do!

But here’s the thing: Rubio is a creationist moron.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

BZZZZZT. WRONG.

We have answered that. The Earth is 4½ billion years old. It was not created in 7 days, but evolved over billions of years.

And you know, in a country faced with skyrocketing gas prices, it would be nice to have a leadership that understood where oil comes from (hint: it wasn’t poofed into existence 4000 years ago.) With looming climate change, it would be nice to have a leadership that understood how carbon cycles work and how gases affect the atmosphere (hint: no angels are involved.) With the prospect of emerging infectious diseases, it’s necessary that our leadership understand how microorganisms evolve (hint: the moral turpitude of the victims is not usually a factor.)

I don’t expect a president to be a geologist or physicist or climatologist or microbiologist, but I at least expect them to respect and use the informed advice of scientists.

Rubio won’t. Please let his campaign whither and die on his first visit to Iowa.

Only manly men are permitted in the American Taliban

It’s a sad story: the Niagara Falls Reporter was one of those urban weeklies that have been popping up all over the place in the last few decades. A good paper, apparently, with a lot of popularity…and then it was sold to a new publisher, a guy who dreamed of being Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, and it began to go downhill into teabaggery and censorship of the more liberal columnists. A movie reviewer, Michael Calleri, found his submitted reviews disappearing, strangely, so he asked why. The publisher wrote back and explained. It’s a long post with a long letter, but do not be daunted: it’s horrifying. The publisher did not like him reviewing movies with strong female characters.

I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.

where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.

i believe in manliness.

…

with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.

they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.

the male as lesser in courage strength and power than the female.

it may be ok for some but it is not my kind of manliness.

That’s just a short excerpt, and there’s much more. That guy really does not like women, except the meek and mild ones, and he hates movies that feature strong women so much that he doesn’t even want to know they exist.

He doesn’t even notice that in most movies, women “are just lesser versions or shadows of” men. I guess all we need to see in the future are more remakes of The Expendables (which so far I consider the very worst big budget movie of the decade.)

It also reflects something insidious. You can be a world-class idiot and regressive asshole and be filthy rich; there are economic niches, like, say, running a casino or a coal mine, where you can actually thrive with those characteristics, or even better, you can just inherit the wealth. And then what you can do is take over media and poison the intellectual environment.

The teabaggers know this. Christians know this. Look around you and you see it everywhere: there are so many lower level opportunities that can be snapped up and used to shape the culture: you don’t have to run for president or be rich enough to own Fox News. Run for school board, edit the local paper or entertainment weekly, charge into your regional political caucus and twist the agenda of your county. Conservatives are great at doing that, and if they don’t succeed in building something up, they’ll at least have destroyed a public school system or newspaper.

Look around your community. Stark raving lunatics can get positions of influence at the local level. And before you know it, conspiracy theorists and kooks are taking over your state, and instructing legislators on the finer points of madness:

Keep this in mind. We managed to get a conservative Democrat elected to the presidency. He’s going to be crippled because he has to work with a hierarchy of wingnuts.

Irony alert

Guess who just “called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich”?

Bobby Jindal.

He went on:

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Bobby Jindal. Creationist. The guy who allows state funds to pay to teach children from A Beka Books. That Bobby Jindal — the disaster from Louisiana is complaining about dumbed-down conservatism and insulting the intelligence of the American people.

Does he realize that if the Republican party wised-up and tossed out the anti-intellectual wing, he’d be one of the first up against the wall?

WTF, UK, WTF?

A fellow ‘celebrated’ Remembrance Day (aka Armistice Day aka as the end of WWI) by burning a poppy, the symbol of the day, and posting a photo to facebook. This seems to be a free speech issue to me; aren’t we supposed to be allowed to harmlessly criticize practices and ideas? And being allowed to destroy a symbol that you own seems an entirely reasonable freedom. The UK police don’t think that way: the man has been arrested for making a “malicious communication”, whatever that is.

You know what this means? We’re all going to have to post that trivial photo of a burning poppy everywhere.

That’s at the very least. If you’ve got a box full of fake paper flowers and a flamethrower, you know what to do.

As long as you aren’t harming anyone, committing harassment, or otherwise forcing people to pay attention to your sacrilegious activities, you should be free to speak out and demonstrate against anything you object to. Dropping by the VFW and setting fire to their stock of poppies? No, arrest people who do that. Buying a poppy from the VFW, taking it home, and destroying it? You should have every right to do that.

I’m just curious — aren’t the British police going to be really busy this week, checking out everyone’s trash cans and arresting all the people who threw out the poppies they bought to celebrate Remembrance Day? Apparently, you’re supposed to preserve those things forever, and with great reverence.

Voting while brown

Ah, those Republican poll watchers: here’s one phoning in his report on the election.

People were orderly and polite, they were helpful to one another but not to the point of electioneering, but uh-oh, there sure were a lot of non-white people exercising their rights. Just the existence of brown people voting was grounds for suspicion.

It never seems to have crossed his mind that maybe at an open civic function in which all people have an interest, he might see a different group of people than he’d find on the golf course at his country club.

Tin soldier

The recent Petraeus scandal has me divided: I think it’s absurd that we and the press are so sensitive to sex scandals, scandals that are really only the concern of the people and families involved in them, and except where they are hurting other people or perpetuating inequities, I really don’t give a damn where some politician or celebrity is putting their penis. So I’m a bit appalled at the sleazy gawking at some guy’s train wreck of a personal life.

But on the other hand, the press given to Petraeus has been embarrassingly fawning — they’ve treated him like Apollo brought crashing to earth, and as if they just want to put the hero back on his pedestal. There is far too much soldier-worship in this country: I can respect the work and sacrifice of soldiers defending our country, but it does not make them greater than the teachers who educate our children or the firefighters who protect our homes or any other occupation that requires hard work and dedication to accomplish well. And as we know from recent experience, military training does not necessarily make one wiser and a better advisor on how to apply military force.

So I was very happy to see Glenn Greenwald summarize the real story here so well.

it is truly remarkable what ends people’s careers in Washington – and what does not end them. As Hastings detailed in that interview, Petraeus has left a string of failures and even scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight.

Oh, for a media that actually questioned the powerful and how they exercise that power.

Math keeps interfering with the Republican rationale

It’s like math has a liberal bias. One of the current common tropes from the people making excuses for Romney’s loss is that it was Hurricane Sandy’s fault: it broke Romney’s momentum, it gave an unfair advantage to the incumbent, it discouraged Republican voters.

Oops. Data!

No wonder they usually seek comfort in fantasy and lies. The truth hurts.