At Least It's Sunny

Yes, no posting for the last few days. I've been busy doing things not related to politics, and I'm rather glad, to tell the truth. Politics is a depressing subject, full as it is of people who don't want to learn from their past mistakes and yet perfectly willing to blame everyone else for them.

I've been working on trying to find a new Linux distribution to replace the one I've been using. Unfortunately, all of the software projects these projects depend on, including Linux itself, seem to be determined to make everything slower, less reliable, and more difficult to use. The user interface people seem determined to make everything work like on iPhone, which is a dreadful choice if you're used to being able to see what you're computer is doing. Before too long, if things keep going as they are, the average Linux distribution will be as clunky and useless as Windows.

So no real joy there, either.

At least it's gotten sunnier here in the Northwest. I took this photo yesterday while I was out and about yesterday:

Image credit: Photo by Cujo359

There you are - proof of life, with photo.

Sunday Photo(s)

It's the end of January, which is pretty much the dead of winter in the Pacific Northwest, as it is in much of the country. Aside from the occasional sports diversion, it's not a time of high excitement, what with the lack of sunshine. At the Winter Solstice, there's about seven hours of daylight in the Northwest, on a good day. There also aren't all that many good days, so we tend to appreciate the sun when we do see it.

As an antidote, I thought I'd put up a few panoramas I've taken in the American Southwest in the last few years. If you want sun in winter, that's probably the best place to go. In years past, they've often played the Super Bowl in that region, but this year, it's in Indianapolis.

Who knows, you might want to come back here next Sunday, too.

These photos are from El Paso, Texas. The first was taken from tramway station that you take to get to the observation tower on Ranger Peak. Ranger Peak is part of that ridge you feel like you're flying toward if you take off toward the west from El Paso International:

Image credit: All images by Cujo359

That's looking toward the east, with Ft. Bliss toward the left, and El Paso International Airport toward the right. Here's a view of the tram, incidentally:

Which in itself is quite a sight.

Once you're there, the view is pretty spectacular, particularly on a clear day. Here's what things look like toward the southwest, with downtown El Paso near the center, and Cuidad Jaurez, Mexico, in the distance. At one time, before the Mexican War, El Paso and Juarez were one city. You can still see that in this photo:

This view looks toward the northwest, in the general direction of Los Cruces, New Mexico:

I think that's enough sun for now. Don't want to overdo it, now, do we? There will be more next week. Promise. It's already cued up and ready to go next Sunday.

Click on the pictures to enlarge, and have a good Sunday.

Football's Almost Over: 2012 Edition

If you're one of those folks who were hoping to spend the afternoon watching grown men pushing each other around in the mud, you're probably going to have to wait until next week:

Image credit: Screenshot of NFL official Super Bowl site by Cujo359

On the plus side, I only had to scroll down to the second page at the NFL's official site to find that information. Last year when I looked, it was nowhere to be found.

So, next weekend, then. Over at TM.com, this week's Dash of Dan has what Dan describes as the perfect Super Bowl recipe, so you have a week to get ready. I'd recommend adding a half cup of chocolate chips to the brownies, by the way.

Heck, you can probably bake them during the opening ceremonies.

Meanwhile, about the game. Haven't we done this before? Yes, during the lifetime of this blog, in fact. In addition, at least one of these two teams seems to have been in this game quite often in the last decade. Technically, though, this year they aren't likely to be pushing each other around in the mud, since they're playing in an indoor stadium, which was named after the oil company that contributed about 1/6 of the cost of its construction. Not that you can tell by the name of the stadium, but they're playing in Indianapolis this year.

We've just about covered all the reasons I'm not much of a fan of the game anymore.

I'll probably tune in anyway, assuming I can get the brownies ready by then.

Saturday Entertainment

This Doctor Who fan video has been making the rounds. It's snippets of every Doctor Who episode in a ten minute YouTube video, right up to the last Matt Smith Christmas special:



I think my favorite quote from the video is Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor:

It's sad really, isn't it? People spend all their time making nice things, and other people come along and break them.

With so many people mostly capable of the latter, it amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.

But there are lots more good quotes.

Enjoy, and have a good Saturday.

Quote Of The Day

Regarding Twitter's master plan to censor messages that governments want them to censor, Ryan J. Davis writes:

It's great @Twitter is gonna start censoring. All those "let's bring down our brutal dictator" tweets were clogging up my Lady Gaga feed.

Twitter Message by @RyanNewYork

Yes, Twitter really is planning to do this. This is one of many reasons I mistrust large Internet services to do right by their users - they have to make a profit, and sometimes what users do with their services interfere with that.

For movements like Occupy to prosper, they are going to have to figure out how to provide their own communications, at least in certain instances. Any for-profit corporation can be gotten to, given enough time.

UPDATE: For a brief moment, this article identified the author of the Twitter message as "Ryan J. Adams". That mistake is now corrected.

Speaking of mistakes, though, what happened with this message? I wrote that article yesterday, but the announcement just appeared on Twitter half an hour ago.

Finally, Science Fiction Worthy Of The Name

I think I'm going to have to see this:



If you have to ask why, you'll never understand...

The IMDB entry for the movie is fairly sketchy at the moment, since it hasn't been officially released. About the only thing I've concluded from it is that Stephanie Paul looks way too young and perky to be playing the President. It's a comedy, though, so I'll withhold judgment.

Heck, the Nazis could barely get their rockets to land on London, let alone the Moon.

We're All Gonna ... Nevermind: Jan. 26, 2012 Edition

Caption: Not today, nor tomorrow.

Image credit: Screenshot of television series Faces Of Earth by Cujo359

There's another one that's not quite going to hit us, as Space.com explains:

A small asteroid will make an extremely close pass by Earth Friday (Jan. 27), coming much nearer than the moon, but the space rock poses no danger of impacting our planet, NASA scientists say.

The newfound asteroid 2012 BX34, which is about the size of a city bus, will pass within 36,750 miles (59,044 kilometers) of Earth at about 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) Friday, astronomers with NASA's Asteroid Watch program announced[.]

http://www.space.com/14373-asteroid-2012-bx34-earth-flyby.html

We dodged another one.

Caption: A screenshot of the Space.com video of asteroid 2012 BX34's path over the next few days. How far is 7.0E-4 astronomical units? Not far enough, that's for sure.

Image credit: Screenshot of the Space.com video by Cujo359

As with the last bus-sized bit of bad I wrote about, the experts think that even if this thing had been headed for a landing here on Earth, it would have burned up in the atmosphere.

So why write about it?

One day, one of these things won't be a near miss. If they're a little bigger, say a few times the mass of this one, it won't burn up in the atmosphere. It will put something like this in some part of the Earth's surface, or it will produce a lot of atmospheric disturbance and tidal waves on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Right now, there's not a damn thing we can do about that.

No, correct that last sentence - there's nothing we seem to want to do about that.

I'd say this is one of three more-or-less preventable things that could destroy life as we know it here, and about which we're not doing anywhere near enough. The other two are climate change and nuclear proliferation. Ironically, all three would kill us off in the same way - by altering our climate so radically that no human could survive.

Yes, I know, only little girlie men worry about stuff like this. Like for instance, Rusty Schweickart, who never did anything more courageous than riding a 360 foot-tall pile of explosives into Earth orbit and back. Here's what he has to say on the issue:

"We have the capability — physically, technically — to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts," said former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman of the B612 Foundation, a group dedicated to predicting and preventing catastrophic asteroid strikes. "We are now able to very slightly and subtly reshape the solar system in order to enhance human survival."

Deflecting Killer Asteroids Away From Earth: How We Could Do It

Yes, we are able to, but as with so many other forms of disaster prevention or preparation, we just seem to come up with all sorts of excuses for not doing it. Technologically, moving asteroids the size of the one that made Meteor Crater is nothing but an expensive and time-consuming engineering problem. As that article states, there are ways of dealing with them. Given enough time, even far larger asteroids can be deflected.

But most people would rather trust their deities to prevent this, I suppose.

Perhaps it's just an evolutionary test. Any species smart enough to prevent something like this from happening, but too stupid to try, isn't smart enough to survive.

UPDATE: Oops. Forgot the link to the first Space.com article. It's there now.

Taylor Marsh: We Need Our Own Tea Party

Caption: No, they're not terribly bright, but when it comes to understanding how politics works, they're way ahead of your average progressive.

Image credit: Look At This Teabagger


In what may become something of a trend, Taylor Marsh was given space at U.S. News And World Report to criticize the Obama Administration on progressive grounds, and she made good use of it:

The Democratic base has a passive-aggressive relationship with Obama that resembles a dysfunctional love affair. He has all the power and the base has absolutely none, unless you count the gay and lesbian contingent which was as good a model as the Tea Party on how to get it done. It's not that progressives couldn't have power; it's that they refuse to wield any.

So they cannot pressure Obama at election time because he knows his Democratic base will be there. After all, they're not the Tea Party. It doesn't matter if they're unhappy, all that matters is he's got their vote and he knows it.

Time for a Tea Party of the Left

The title of that article is telling. We don't have the equivalent of the Tea Party on the Left. I've been writing that so long that I don't even feel like finding any links for it. I wrote such an article three days ago. The fact is that the Democrats do what they do, which is to fail to live up to any of our expectations, because most progressives continue to vote for them anyway. There are many reasons for that, but when I have to summarize our current political situation in one sentence, that's it.

No, the Occupy movements are not a Tea Party of the Left. They are avowedly apolitical, and as I've discussed already at some length, there's no reason they should be. They're a hammer, not a scalpel. They're simply demanding that we do something about the problems facing us.

As someone commented over at Taylor's blog post on the article, this may be the start of a trend of right-wing news organizations giving progressives a chance to criticize the Obama Administration. I'm all for that, for two reasons.

The first reason is that no one else gives us much of a voice to do such a thing. Beyond Glenn Greenwald, I have a hard time thinking of anyone who frequently criticizes the Obama Administration from a progressive perspective in the mainstream news. Most of the truly independent progressive voices are left to find their own outlets (like this one), or are confined to big blogs like FireDogLake or Daily Kos. There's Raw Story and Rolling Stone, of course, but neither is what I'd call mainstream news. So having a voice at all is a good thing, whatever the motivations.

Second, and this is the more important one, until progressives are seen as the roadblock to power in the Democratic Party, they will continue to be ignored. I've been saying that in one way or another since I wrote this regarding the Obama Administration back in March, 2009. The writing was clearly on the wall by then, just two months into Obama's first term. Anyone who can't see that by now either isn't looking or doesn't want to see it.

To progressives who are tired of being ignored, I'd say you should try first to explain to Democrats in the only language they will listen to that you've had enough. Don't support them, and if they don't vote the way you want, don't vote for them.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about this article is that Taylor Marsh wouldn't have written it two years ago. After a lot of haranguing from folks like me who understand this particular aspect of political power, and having watched what we've predicted unfold, Taylor figured it out. She used to call herself a "Democrat", now she uses the term "liberal", because, as she figured out, those two labels are no longer the same. Sadly, she's way ahead of most progressives on this front.

If progressives want real political power, they have to demand it. It's that simple. Until enough progressives do that, we will continue to be ignored, and I find it hard to blame Democrats, or any other politicians, for doing so.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: OWS/Tumblr

Alternet's Lynn Parramore, discussing Newt Gingrich's bona fides as a populist, in an article on the effect that Republican politics and the Occupy movements are having on each other:

The worst thing about Newt is what political economist Thomas Ferguson pointed out in a paper for the Institute for New Economic Thinking – namely that Newt was the key architect of the current pay-to-play system in Congress. More than anyone else, he is responsible for building the system in which members of Congress who bring in the most cash get the plum and powerful committee appointments. It was not always thus. Before Newt and his buddy Tom Delay saw the potential for pay-to-play, committee appointments came through seniority. But after Newt & Co. came to power, influence in Congress was nakedly up for sale. Today, both parties actually post prices for key positions, as Ferguson noted in the Financial Times.

Will the Mitt/Newt Slugfest Boost the Occupy Movement?

[links from original]

Not only has this system been a powerful source of corruption that now affects both parties, it has also been a hammer that party leaders can hold over the heads of dissenting members. It's a rare individual who can stand on his own and continue to win office without the support of his party, and the system virtually guarantees that those who don't play ball will be out on their ears.

I don't know if all this hypocritical, and largely fact-free, debating of populist economic concerns is likely to mean much to the Occupy movements. My own perception is that there are just as many people on the Right as on the Left who are looking for easy solutions, and aren't terribly interested in being told the ugly truth of things. It's far better to tell conservatives that it's the fault of immigrants, the Muslims, or the Mormons that we're in the state we're in. It's been far too easy to tell progressives that if we just find candidates who aren't "divisive", everything will be fine.

Still, Occupy movements are having an effect on the debates, and will continue to as long as they can find ways to get their message across. Changing the nature of the debate is a good first step. The next is to make sure it's at least somewhat honest.

If the recent Republican debates are any example, that's going to be a lot harder.

Thought For The Day

Caption: John B. Anderson, independent candidate for President in the 1980 election. In my first act of childish irresponsibility in presidential elections, I worked and voted for him.

Image credit: Warren K. Leffler/Wikimedia, converted to JPEG format by Cujo359

In answering a comment about yesterday's article, it occurred to me to wonder, all these years later, why I decided to vote for John Anderson for President in 1980. Wikipedia reminded me:

When questioned about which episode in their career they most regretted, none of the other candidates would answer the question, except Anderson, who cited his vote for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Unlike the others, he said lowering taxes, increasing defense spending, and balancing the budget was an impossible combination. In a stirring summation, Anderson invoked his father's emigration to the United States and said that we would have to make sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. For the next week, Anderson's name and face were all over the national news programs, in newspapers, and in national news magazines.

Wikipedia: John B. Anderson

He was willing to speak uncomfortable truths. In retrospect, I don't think his desire to balance the budget at the time (we were in the middle of a recession caused by the oil embargo, among other things) was a wise idea, but he was the only one of the Republican candidates of the time who was willing to admit that increasing spending, lowering taxes, and balancing the budget were not possible to do all at the same time. He also said that gun owners should be licensed, a topic that wasn't popular with the GOP faithful.

Instead of nominating someone who was honest, the Republicans nominated someone who told them fairy tales about welfare queens and morning in America. That individual was then elected President. In fact, if you added up the votes that Anderson and Jimmy Carter, the other honest guy in that election, received together, they were still far fewer than Reagan received. This, I think, is when I lost all respect for the average American voter.

Image credit: Shepard Fairey/The Village Voice

Whatever solution progressives come up with to our current situation, we are certainly up against the problem that liars make better Presidential candidates than honest people. You could see that in the primary in 2008, when Hillary Clinton, whose attitudes and faults were there for all to see, lost to someone who did his best to pretend he was something he wasn't, and that his opponent was something she wasn't. He's been lying ever since, and plenty of people have yet to catch on.

Far too many Americans want to be lied to, not because they enjoy being lied to, but because they don't want to face reality.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Found it here

From a few days ago, Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report on the idea of what constitutes a wasted vote in American politics:

This imposition of false and meaningless choices is how, in these United States, our voices are suppressed, our votes wasted and made irrelevant, with the black vote rendered most irrelevant of all.
...
This is how the game is played. This is how the legal and symbolic authority of millions of our wasted votes is hijacked every election cycle, making possible wars we do not endorse, ratifying policies we never wanted, and pretending to believe promises we know, or should know will never be kept. This is what Eugene Debs referred to a century ago, when he declared he would rather cast a meaningful vote for what did want, and not get it, than a fake and hollow one for what he didn't want, and get that.

And so, a hundred years later, the game is still the game. If we want our votes to have any meaning, it's time to reject the fake choices between the two corporate parties. It's time to wise up, to grow up and like adults, to take a view longer than dessert, or the next two or three elections.

How To Waste Your Vote In 2012

I find it hilarious that people who insist I need to vote for Democrats, because the Republicans are so much worse, consider themselves to be adults, or the responsible people. I have no such illusions about myself, but simply voting out of fear isn't an adult choice, nor do I think it particularly responsible. No candidate, and no party, is going to meet all my expectations. I am even happy to compromise a little if at least some of what I want can be passed done by a candidate or party who can win, even though someone else might do more.

However, I also believe that Eugene Debs is right. I think Ralph Nader was right when he said that when you choose the lesser of two evils, what you end up with is evil. That's what our choice was in 2008, and for the only time in my life, I voted for someone for President, Barack Obama, who I believed was unqualified for the post. Even at the time, I knew the man was a liar and unlikely to do much of anything that many voters thought they were sending him there to do.

I won't make that mistake again.

That's why I will vote for whoever best represents my attitudes about government policy, whether those people are from major parties or not. If none of the choices represent what I want in an elected official, I won't vote in that race. Simple as that. No more choosing evil. We have evil already. If the political parties want to succeed, they're going to have to do better.

When enough progressives vote that way, they will do better.

Politics is a market, and like all markets, it responds to what pays the bills. Being out of office doesn't pay the bills, regardless of what you want to accomplish.

You are welcome to disagree, but if you think that makes you the adult one, then you are also welcome to kiss my furry ass.

(h/t Joyce Arnold)