Uh-oh. I fit the profile.

The fellow who leaked all those classified documents to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, is getting badmouthed by the residents of his hometown, who are now recollecting all the signals of his future perfidy. Apparently, he was godless, refused to recite the pledge of allegiance, and used big words.

Uh-oh. That sounds like my youth, too. I guess I’m going to be under suspicion now.

Oh, wait — he was also gay. I’m safe!

By the way, they’re threatening him with 50 years in prison. I think they should give him a medal, but I know they won’t.

The Teabaggers are divine

According to their sacred literature, anyway. Would you believe this collection of angry ignorant kooks whining about their taxes in local American politics is actually written up in the Bible? Yeah, this is the fourth Tea Party movement: the first was after the death of Solomon, the second was led by Jesus Christ himself, the third was the Boston event, and the fourth was begun by a ranting overprivileged ass on the Chicago stock exchange, which makes Rick Santelli some kind of prophet, apparently.

Man, these guys are lunatics. American politics is more than a little embarrassing for Americans.

Spot the despot

Hey, if you aren’t listening to atheists talk radio, watch this 1946 film for schools from Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s practically a cliche: black & white, dreadfully wooden ‘acting’, the serious narrator, but it’s also describing how to tell a democracy from a despotism, and the warning signs that your culture is in trouble, in ways that are relevant.

It’s a little disturbing, too. It’s like they’re describing us.

Rush Limbaugh, racist pig and sterling representative of the modern Republican

It’s hard to listen to this. It isn’t just racist, it’s stupid. I have to suspect that Limbaugh is back on the oxycontin.

For a great communicator, he sure does have a knack for drawing out his discussion beyond what is necessary; pithy and cogent are not words to apply to Rush. Here’s the relevant part of his talk.

How many native americans were killed by the arrival of the white man through disease and war?

…

how many people have died since the wm arrived due to lung cancer, thanks to the Indian custom of smoking? Who are the real killers here?

…

Where are our reparations?

The questions don’t make much sense. Of the Native American population that existed in the 16th-19th century, all of them are dead, most by disease and war; it’s what people die of. Typical estimates I’ve seen is that 80% of the native population was wiped out by introduced diseases, and the remnants were killed in wars or forced into militarily monitored districts. The descendants of those people, at least in North America, are largely confined to reservations, where the people have the lowest standard of living, the highest infant mortality rate, the shortest life spans of any group in this country. The white man nearly exterminated all of the native peoples of this continent by infection and execution and confinement.

Conversely, the European invaders have thrived, have suffered no general deprivation of life or liberty at the hands of the native population (although there were transient local flareups of violence that did cause suffering in white populations, but which were always followed by imposing greater torment on the natives).

White peoples: massive net gain. Native peoples: massive net loss. Fat privileged jerks like Rush Limbaugh do not get to play the persecution card.

And don’t even get me started on the smoking comment. Watching your children die of smallpox, seeing your friends gunned down by cavalry, having your land stripped from under you, watching your way of life eradicated, and seeing your descendants condemned to a life of poverty does not quite stack up against lighting a stogie and sipping brandy with your over-privileged pale-skinned buddies. And who, I ask, is profiting from tobacco? I don’t think it’s the native Americans.

Would you believe Rush Limbaugh is the most beloved commentator of the Republican base? It’s past time to recognize what the Republican party is: the last bastion of KKK mentality.

Baffling and ominous

Who needs expertise and knowledge? In the bold new world of the Teabagger Republicans, all you need is a sense of privilege and outrage, and you too are qualified to do rocket science and brain surgery…or, at least, to complain about rocket science and brain surgery. Here’s the latest brilliant idea from a Republican congressman: the National Science Foundation provides easy access to their database of grant awards online, so let’s sic a mob of uninformed, resentful, anti-science gomers loose on the field of already extensively vetted (by qualified people!) awards and have them seek out places to trim the fat.

It’s a proven strategy for pandering to the ignorati; Senator Proxmire used it for years. A lot of research is arcane and deeply imbedded in the context of a specific discipline, so it’s really, really easy to find a grant proposal that looks weird or silly or as if it has no possible utility, and then you can have a press conference and deplore wasteful spending by highlighting it, and making noise about taking back that $75,000 grant and somehow solving the federal deficit. It’s theater, nothing more, and its indirect effect is to belittle all of science in the process.

For some reason, these grandstanders never seem to target defense agencies, where the real money lurks.

So now Eric Cantor is playing this game, and he’s calling on people to hack away at the federal budget by picking nits at NSF. He wants people to search NSF and report back to him with grant numbers that they don’t like.

It’s very peculiar. NSF has a wide brief and offers grants within a great many fields, so Cantor singles out grants to study the kinetics of soccer players and to model sounds for use by the video game industry as wasteful…but why? The latter at least sounds like it would help industry, and ought to be a Republican favorite.

And then he gives hints on searching the database, listing words that might yield boondoggles: “success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc.” Why these are bad, I don’t know. Sure, try searching NSF for grants that mention culture or media; boom, practically every award to a microbiologist pops up. Does he have something against museums? And why lawyers? NSF has a whole program supporting Law and the Social Sciences!

And if lawyers are a waste of federal funds, then I need only point out that Eric Cantor is a lawyer by training. We could save even more money than killing a grant would do by simply firing that bum!

It’s Wikileaks Day

Today, Wikileaks begins releasing a huge collection of US embassy cables, and we’re about to discover the degree of skullduggery that’s been going on.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we’re to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.

Our Republican choices

So North Korea is rattling the sabre again, and I’m hoping some serious, mature people on our side will step up and act responsibly…but I’m pretty sure we won’t find those people on the Republican side. So far, their responses range from the stupid to the evil.

Here’s Sarah Palin babbling away on the Glenn Beck show (Can you guess that this is the stupid part of the range?)

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? […]

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

I really think calling North Korea was nothing but an accidental slip of the tongue, but even without that, the totality of her comments are vacuous, simple-minded chit-chat. And this insipid person wants to be president?

At least she’s better than the odious Glenn Reynolds.

JUST WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW: North Korea fires artillery barrage on South. If they start anything, I say nuke ’em. And not with just a few bombs. They’ve caused enough trouble — and it would be a useful lesson for Iran, too. We can’t afford another Korean war, but hey, we’re already dismantling warheads. . . .

Yeah, because the oppressed people of North Korea deserve to have the flesh seared from their bones in a nuclear hell. You might be able to easily convince me that the ruling dynasty of that sad country deserve it, but civilized people don’t commit such barbarities, and especially don’t commit them indiscriminately against entire populations.

The Mass Libel Reform Blog — Fight for Free Speech!

This is a message from Simon Singh:

This week is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.

The English libel law is particular dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform at
http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Tone, again?

The cartoon is amusing.

i-bc61d0992c37dbd32928660873a61aff-slowpoke.jpeg

Wouldn’t it be nice to have something in between the raving insanity of Beck and Limbaugh, and the mannered, fearful timidity of, say, almost every Democrat currently in office?

Maybe it would help if pundits stopped reacting to everyone who criticizes the wimp on the left as if they were the firebreathing freak on the right.