Slobber And Spittle

Saturday Entertainment

2012-01-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-26T14:06:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-23T22:26:00.000-08:00

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)

I Don't Like Ice

2012-01-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about electric power utilities, but I do know that they hate ice storms. Ice storms break power lines that have weakened, and they break trees that are near power lines. What ends up happening is lots of little bits of damage that add up to no power.

All of which is a way of saying that I haven't been anywhere on the Internet the last few days.

Happily, there are some good pictures.

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

Enjoy your weekend.

PIPA: A Change Of Heart

2012-01-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

If you think that public pressure on an issue never has an effect on the minds of legislators, here's proof that you're wrong, courtesy of the Twitter feed of U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch:

After listening to the concerns on both sides of the debate over the PROTECT IP Act, it is simply not ready for prime time.

Twitter message from @OrrinHatch

That’s why I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my cosponsorship of the bill.

Twitter message from @OrrinHatch

Of course, there are a number of big players involved in this campaign, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Those firms have far more influence than ordinary citizens. Still, part of any effective political strategy is to find allies, and this is no exception. Those companies' reasons for opposing the legislation are different from ours, but they benefit from a free Internet, too.

Strike!, Part Deux

2012-01-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

The rest of the Internet is on strike, but this is what's going on in my back yard right now:

Image credit: Photo taken and processed by Cujo359

Yes, it's snowing here, and as is traditional in the Pacific Northwest, everything grinds to a halt. Going on strike from the Internet seems to be a colossal sacrifice at the moment.

I know you're not getting your fill of cute animal photos, so there you are.

Now, go sign the petition.

Strike!

2012-01-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Fight For The Future

While this blog will not be "on strike" today, I fully support the aims of these Internet organizations, which are taking the day off to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and its sister legislation, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). These two acts, the U.S. House and Senate version of the same bill, respectively, are supposedly designed to prevent copyright theft on the Internet.

This is, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, a ridiculously restrictive and dangerous bill:

The "Stop Online Piracy Act"/"E-PARASITE Act" (SOPA) and "The PROTECT IP Act" (PIPA) are the latest in a series of bills which would create a procedure for creating (and censoring) a blacklist of websites. These bills are updated versions of the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA), which was previously blocked in the Senate. Although the bills are ostensibly aimed at reaching foreign websites dedicated to providing illegal content, their provisions would allow for removal of enormous amounts of non-infringing content including political and other speech from the Web.

The various bills define different techniques for blocking “blacklisted” sites. Each would interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. SOPA would also allow rightsholders to force payment processors to cut off payments and advertising networks to cut ties with a site simply by sending a notice.

These bills are targeted at "rogue" websites that allow indiscriminate piracy, but use vague definitions that could include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire, and Rapidshare; sites that discuss piracy such as pirate-party.us, p2pnet, Torrent Freak, torproject.org, and ZeroPaid; as well as a broad range of sites for user-generated content, such as SoundCloud, Etsy, and Deviant Art. Had these bills been passed five or ten years ago, even YouTube might not exist today — in other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

Internet Blacklist Legislation

The potential for abuse is obvious to anyone familiar with how YouTube, for instance, has been gamed numerous times into blocking content that was wrongly alleged to be in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by people who simply wanted to make the content disappear. It would also give entertainment companies that also provide Internet presence the opportunity to censor sites that compete with it, at least on its own networks.

The Obama Administration has gone on record as being opposed to these bills:

Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

Of course, counting on the Obama Administration to stand on principle is a good way to be disappointed, as we learned with the recent reverse course on the unlimited detention provisions added to the NDAA.

Intellectual property, the concept that includes ideas like patents and copyrights, is a deal that society strikes with people who have spent time and effort creating something of value. Most modern countries, including the U.S., make a deal with people who invent or create innovative work. That deal is that they have the exclusive right to sell that particular work or product for a set period. This makes the work of innovating monetarily valuable, because without it anyone could then steal the work and sell it as his own, usually at lower cost.

What has happened in recent years, though, is that these ideas have gotten out of hand. Partly thanks to the not terribly bright practice of shipping the designs of our products overseas to be manufactured by others, it is now far more difficult to control the use of the designs or works that U.S. intellectual property law is supposed to provide. Meanwhile, those protections have been extended for enormous periods, well beyond the lifetimes of the people who came up with the works in the first place. When movies that are so old that all the people who made them are dead can still be claimed as intellectual property by the corporations that own the rights, it seems to me that it's time those rights expired, too.

To try to enforce these increasingly unenforceable intellectual property rights, various corporations that own those rights and the congresspeople they've bought and paid for are determined to turn the Internet into a shopping mall. And it will be a shopping mall where the security guards can look in your bags, your purses, and your clothes any time they like, then can beat the crap out of you and throw you outside.

So, the Internet is going on strike. Not all of it, of course, but many of the things you're used to doing on the Internet today will be harder, and you'll be asked numerous times to do this:

Sign the petition to remind your congressmen that they work for all Americans, not just the ones who have enough money to hire lobbyists.

UPDATE: Here's what Raw Story has to say in support of the strike:

Raw Story is, as always, a small, privately-owned company, so we understand uniquely the problems caused by people who reprint our articles without permission or attribution, taking the intellectual property of our company and our employees without so much as a pageview in return. But our reporting has shown, time and again, that neither SOPA nor PIPA will help small companies like ours do much, if anything, to combat the theft of our intellectual property — heck, even the movie industry can’t say that its profits are actually down, despite rampant piracy. SOPA/PIPA is simply a cudgel supported by large, corporate interests who would rather spend money lobbying for outmoded legislation intended to stall the internet’s engine for change rather than learning a new way to operate in a modern world.

Announcement: Raw Story to go dark on January 18 to protest SOPA/PIPA

I'd have to agree, I don't see how this would help anyone legitimately reclaim or recover losses for stolen intellectual property. It can be used as a way for corporations that both provide content and Internet access to stifle competition, though.

Quote Of The Day

2012-01-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

Economist Dean Baker on the Washington Post's recent whitewashing of our economic situation:

So there you have it. Don't worry about how much money Robert Rubin and Angelo Mozilo made off the housing bubble and the difficulty that you are having finding a job, paying for your health care or your kids' education. Just be thankful that you have an iPhone.

The Average 12-Year-Old is Taller Than the Average 6-Year-Old: The Post Gets Desperate in Making the Case Against an Inequality Problem

Actually, that's just the punch line. Read the rest for a good explanation of how the press lie to us about this subject these days.

It's sad when economists and others can spend so much time telling us what our nation's premier news publications get wrong about the economy, the law, and foreign affairs. Then those publications wonder why they can't find subscribers. As a friend of mine often says, I don't need to pay people to lie to me. Plenty of folks will perform that service for free.

The Candle Or The Dark?

2012-01-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Occupy Wall Street

Apparently, today is a day to light candles:

January 15th, 2012 @ 7:00pm in Each Time Zone Globally

Via J15global.com: On his birthday and in the spirit of Dr. King’s vision for racial and economic equality, peace, and non-violence, we are holding candlelight vigils to unite our world in a global movement for systemic change.

The Vigil for Unity is followed by Occupy the Dream on January 16, and the first day of Occupy Congress actions, on January 17.

Wherever we may be, whether in our homes, in city squares, online, Occupies, or at work, we lift a beautiful message high above the political dialogue. We light the dream of a more equitable world in our hearts. We can overcome!

Dr. King said ‘A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and say: ‘This is not just.’

Occupy Wall Street announcement about Jan. 15 vigil

I'm not much into candle burning, but I love the expression "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness", so consider this a virtual candle in our virtual world.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

For anyone who is active in politics, or wants to understand how activism works, one of Dr. King's most important legacies may have been the Letter From A Birmingham Jail (see UPDATE 2 below). While being held for his actions in a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, King used the time to compose a letter that explained the reasons he and his compatriots used demonstrations and civil disobedience to protest the injustices that African Americans faced in the South of those days. One of the paragraphs that stands out for me, as if it were calling directly from that time to this is:

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]

We, too, live in a time of monologue. Our press is largely controlled by the people who don't want things to change, who like them fine the way they are. Until the Occupy movements changed the discussion, we seldom even saw discussions of the widening gap between the upper few percent of our population and the rest of us. As first the poor and lower middle class, and now the rest of the middle class have lost ground, we have been told by the people who are pleased to call themselves our leaders, that everything is just fine, and we should just shut the hell up.

Caption: Where did all the economic growth end up? Into the hands of the richest people in the country, mostly.

Image credit: Economic Policy Institute

What Dr. King was saying, in essence, was what I was saying:

You don't arrange a protest to deliver a doctoral thesis. You arrange a protest to deliver one simple demand to your rulers: Get it done.

The Place Is The Message

Demonstrations happen because there is no talk, or nothing but talk. All we have gotten the last few years, when we haven't gotten screwed, is talk. And that talk has been a monologue.

Absolutely nothing has changed since I wrote this on MLK Day a year ago:

Caption: Soldiers from Company A, 3-187th Infantry watch from an observation post as bombs are dropped on insurgent positions during Operation Iron Blade II in Ghazni Province Nov. 28.

Image credit: Lt. Col. David Fivecoat/U.S. Army

In a time when we have no real enemies worthy of the name, we've become obsessed with defense, spending far more than any other advanced country and getting even less. We pay for these priorities in lost jobs and diminished prospects. After the Second World War, we were the world's leader in physics. Now, thanks to our neglect, coupled with Europe's interest, they appear to be regaining the lead they had in the early part of the Twentieth Century. From going to the Moon in a decade, our space program can't even service the space station it built. The next generation of boosters has been canceled. Our infrastructure inadequate and crumbling thanks to decades of neglect. We sacrificed all this, not to mention our health care and retirement, to be better at destroying someone else's country than anyone else is.

Dr. King's Nightmare

That's why there are demonstrations, because when we talk, we're not listened to. As another African American activist, Frederick Douglass, once wrote:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Until demands are made, until there's a clear implication that the next step will be even more unpleasant for those in power if things don't change, nothing will change. That's as clear now as when Douglass was trying to free his people from the slave owners, or when Dr. King was battling white racists and their enablers a century later.

As Jackson Browne would say, no one rides for free.

We're headed for a dark time. With income inequality getting worse, there is no way that the power shift can be halted without a lot of, to use Dr. King's word, "tension". How dark it will be, and how it ends, will be largely dependent on how insistently we demand what we need, and what we do when we don't get it.

That's what Dr. King taught us.

UPDATE: Slight edit to remove a sentence that I didn't complete...

UPDATE 2 (Jan. 16): The University of Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute has an annotated version of MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail online. If you're not too aware of the history of the civil rights movement (and who below the age of 60 is these days?), it's a good way to read the letter.

Sunday Photo(s)

2012-01-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

In the Midwest, and some parts of the basin and range region, there are days when the clouds provide their own amazing scenery. Being able to see long distances without obstructions like hills and mountains allows an observer to watch clouds pass by for hours as the weather changes.

When you live on either the East Coast or West Coast of the United States, such opportunities are more limited. There are always hills or mountains around to block your view, as well as the occasional building. One of the better vantage points out here for cloud watching is the shore itself.

This is the view from Lincoln Park, in southern Seattle, just west of the ferry docks:

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

(More pictures after the break)

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Another Look At Our Future

2012-01-14T01:10:00.000-08:00

Isn't this a sign of the times?

Organised crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country's biggest "bank" and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms, according to a report on Tuesday.
...
Organised crime now generated annual turnover of about 140 billion euros ($178.89 billion) and profits of more than 100 billion euros, it added.

"With 65 billion euros in liquidity, the Mafia is Italy's number one bank," said a statement from the group, which was set up in Palermo a decade ago to oppose extortion rackets against small business.

Mafia now "Italy's No.1 bank" as crisis bites-report

Why would anyone, particularly someone as familiar with the Mafia as Italians must be, use their services? The article eventually gets around to answering that one:

Typical victims of extortionate lending were middle-aged shopkeepers and small businessmen who would struggle to find a new job and who were ready to try anything to avoid bankruptcy, it added.

"They are usually people in traditional retail sectors like food, greengrocers, clothes or shoe shops, florists or furniture shops. These are the categories which, more than any other, are paying the price of the (economic) crisis," it said.

According to a separate report this week from small business association CNA, 56 percent of companies had seen banks tighten their lending requirements in the past three months.

Mafia now "Italy's No.1 bank" as crisis bites-report

There's money to lend, of course, but the banks see no reason to lend it. Pretty much like things are over here. My guess is that Italy isn't the only country that's going to see its organized criminals profit from this thing.

Of course, it could be said that the main difference between the loan sharks and the real banks is who they ruin. Big banks seem to be content to ruin big businesses and small countries. The mob is more ambitious.

The Real Question

2012-01-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

Caption: Screenshot from Live Leak video of U.S. Marines about to urinate on dead Taliban.

Image credit: Screenshot of this video taken and reduced by Cujo359

The video is making the rounds, if you want to see it, it's here, among other places. You can see screenshots here. Personally, I've seen all I want.

There are people, like the sad excuse for a human being CNN hired as its Tea Party viewpoint who think that things like this are just dandy, and what's everyone's problem? Needless to say I disagree with this point of view.

On the other hand, I am neither shocked nor appalled by it. This sort of thing is going to happen in a war. Behavior like this, as disgusting as it is to us, isn't unknown in warfare. I've never been in combat, so I can't speak to what that's like. But I know my own personality well enough to know that if a group of people scared the hell out of me, making me fear for my life or the life of someone I cared about, and then I had a loaded weapon placed in my hands and the chance to deal with the problem, the results would not be pretty, nor would the aftermath.

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John Edwards Diagnosed With Serious Heart Ailment

2012-01-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

Caption: John Edwards in happier, and healthier days, speaks to reporters in New Orleans after announcing his candidacy for president, December 28, 2006.

Image credit: the Edwards campaign

According to multiple sources, former presidential candidate John Edwards has a heart condition that has delayed his trial on misuse of campaign funds:

A federal judge says she has two letters from a cardiologist saying ex-presidential candidate John Edwards has a life-threatening condition that will require surgery in February.

John Edwards Has Life-Threatening Condition: Doctor

Both CNN and CBS have similar news stories on file.

I see no word yet on what the condition is, but if it requires surgery it's bound to be serious. Edwards is 58 years old, and will go on trial soon. It's not a time for elective heart surgery.

According to CNN, Edwards faces up to thirty years in jail, and $1.5 million fine, if convicted. Those are the sorts of numbers I recall from earlier reports on Edwards' upcoming trial.

Edwards was the candidate I endorsed during the 2008 election.

UPDATE: From the Charlotte News Observer report concerning Edwards' condition:

Judge Catherine Eagles did not disclose the medical condition afflicting Edwards, but said she had received letters from his cardiologist.

In those letters, the judge said the doctors wrote that the condition was treatable and the former U.S. presidential candidate had a good chance of success if the course of treatment were followed.
...
She indicated that his condition has given him problems on three occasions since being diagnosed in December. She said his condition has affected his daily life and makes it difficult for him to drive.

Judge delays Edwards' trial, confirming medical condition

Which is probably as much as anyone can write on the matter without a statement from Edwards' attorneys.

Quote Of The Day

2012-01-13T02:27:00.000-08:00

From the ignominy of last month's smackdown, Robert Reich has recovered enough of that magic to be the quote of the day:

The Republican right thinks Paul’s views on the economy are responsible for this fire among the young. Yesterday evening, on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC program, I squared off with Larry and the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore. Both are convinced young people are attracted by Paul’s strict adherence to the views of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and Paul’s desire to move America back to the gold standard.

Baloney. The young are flocking to Ron Paul because he wants to slice military spending, bring our troops home, stop government from spying on American citizens, and legalize pot.

The Youthful Magic Of Ron Paul

Let me just break in here and point out the obvious - this isn't quite true. There are some people that age who have just read Atlas Shrugged and now think they should be selecting their luggage and travel kits for when they go Galt. In the meantime, they are no doubt fans of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Whatsisname. Still, I'm pretty sure Reich's correct, if only because those were the things that mattered to me back in those days, and I don't think things have changed that much in the intervening years. In fact, if anything, civil liberties and ending the drug war are more of a priority now than they were back when I was part of the youth vote. Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore are almost certainly seeing what they want to see, and ignoring the fact that much of what is appealing about Ron Paul to anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass has nothing to do with his crackpot theories of economics.

Reich concludes:

[I]f Republicans — or Democrats, for that matter — want to win over much of the nation’s young next November, they’d do well to listen carefully to Paul’s positions on national defense and civil liberties.

The Youthful Magic Of Ron Paul

I think that if there's one sure thing about the 2012 election, aside from the futility of swapping Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, it's that damn few in either party will listen.

What Football Can Teach Us, Part II

2012-01-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, American discourse is far too full of metaphors, similes, and references to sports. Given my attitude about sports, football in particular, it probably would have behooved me to avoid this discussion, but then I read this column by The Nation sports columnist Dave Zirin, concerning last weekend's playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Denver Broncos:

My central Xs and Os mistake in predicting a Pittsburgh blowout was ignoring the injuries that had ravaged the Steelers. Their quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, had one working leg, with his other ankle swollen to badly he had to wear a larger shoe. Their Pro Bowl center Maurkice Pouncey and starting running back Rashard Mendenhall were both out with injuries. Their safety Ryan Clark also couldn’t play with a serious blood disorder. It was certainly ignorant of me to ignore that long list. But I made an even bigger mistake than that.

I made the cardinal error of applying the laws of politics to sports. In the last two weeks, two Republican primary also-rans—Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry—invoked the name of Tim “Focus on the Family” Tebow to inspire their flagging Christianist base. To put it mildly, the gambit failed to work for either candidate. I was over-eager to see Tebow then fail in their footsteps.

Tim Tebow: Praising the Player. Hating the Game

I've seen this tendency in people before, and not just regarding the case of self-righteous jerks like Tim Tebow. It's a fairly common mistake people make - mistaking their wishes for what they should know is actually true.

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Happy, Happy. Joy, Joy. Oh, Wait, We're Still Unemployed?

2012-01-08T13:08:00.000-08:00

There was, as usual with unemployment reports that sound positive, all sorts of hoopla from Democrats about how marvelous it is that we're finally on the right track economically. Their usual apologists in the press are taking a crack at making this pig look perfect for that shade of lipstick. I think all you have to do is read Paul Krugman's or Brad DeLong's frank assessments to realize that this is overblown, but maybe the best rebuttal came from Dean Baker yesterday:

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Another Anniversary

2012-01-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

In what is, perhaps, more of a milestone than others, the comic xkcd turned 1000 on Friday:

As usual, xkcd author Randall Munroe can't resist tossing in some geek humor. (For the uninitiated, 1024 is the next-nearest power of two. It's also the number of somethings we computer types are usually referring to when we refer to a 'K' of something, though we sometimes round off to 1000 to make it easy on you ten-based folks.)

Congratulations, and as long as you're happy about the idea, here's hoping for a thousand more.

New Year's Day

2012-01-01T23:03:00.000-08:00

It's finally 2012. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I'm glad to see the back of 2011.

Caption: The Oregonian Clock, or what's left of it, at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland. Here's part of what the sign next to it said:

The Oregonian Clock was originally purchased in 1892 for the old Oregonian building on SW Fifth and Yamhill. It is a model 4S tower clock, manufactured by the E. Howard & Co. of Boston. The model 4S is a heavy duty hour striker that could operate the hands of up to four dials from 8 to 30 feet in diameter.

Image credit: Photo by Cujo359

Now, I might have tried to find some New Year's-themed music, but Dana embedded "New Year's Day", which is quite likely the one I would have chosen. Suzanne went with ABBA, which I think I can honestly say I will never do.

So take your pick. And enjoy the fact that I managed to find a picture of a clock.

Hope yours is a happy 2012.

So Wrong, It's Gotta Be Right

2011-12-31T01:14:00.000-08:00

While I wasn't paying much attention to the Internet, Robert Reich went and said something egregiously stupid:

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

My Political Prediction for 2012: It’s Obama-Clinton

There aren't a whole lot of things I know about politics, but one of them is surely this: I know, within a half percent of the electorate or so, how many voters who don't live or work in the Washington, DC area care about who the vice presidential nominee is on a ticket. That number is zero. No one cares. Face it, next to who is second in the American League's most walked category each year, there is nothing that matters less in our lives than who is the person who sits around for four years not quite daring to hope that something bad happens to the President.

Unless the Vice President is named Dick Cheney, the person occupying that position has almost no power to affect anything of importance. In fact, President Bush would have been within his rights to tell Cheney to shut the hell up and stay down at the Naval Observatory until he was needed, which would be about the same time that Hell froze over.

That's the first thing Reich got wrong.

The next is what we're upset about. It's not about Obama's "cave-ins" to the GOP. It's that this is what he wants to do, and that no one in the Democratic Party has been willing to tell the truth about that, let alone stand up for what the party should be about.

What they do instead is suggest things like changing Vice Presidents.

All that wrong in a few sentences.

The only thing he may not have gotten wrong is that Obama will make this change. It won't make any difference, but there are plenty of folks like Reich who think it will. One of the things you can count on from our leaders is that when the going gets tough, the tough change the org charts. If I thought Hillary Clinton still had her own ambitions about being President some day, I'd think it unlikely that she'd accept such an offer, but she's in her mid-sixties now. She may really be thinking about retiring soon.

Being associated with the failures of a second term of Barack Obama's presidency would be an excellent way to guarantee having nothing better to do than go home. I suppose that under those circumstances, being the first female Vice Presidential candidate who got to move into the Observatory would be achievement enough.

So it's possible that Reich could be wrong, and still be right. Sadly, that's how things are these days in our nation's capital. Often, doing something dramatic is more important than doing something that makes sense.

Has It Been That Long?

2011-12-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

Five years, and still proudly obscure:

Image credit: I Has A Hot Dog

Five years ago was the first time I published here. Not much has changed since then. I suppose that's just as well.

Actually, I just loved the cartoon. I've seen that view of a Labrador Retriever many, many times.

The Story In The Rocks

2011-12-30T23:18:00.000-08:00

Apparently, a bit of my work is going to be published soon. No, it's not this picture, though I wish it could have been:

Image credit: Cujo359

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Follow-Up E-mail From Darcy Burner's Campaign

2011-12-30T13:00:00.000-08:00

As an update to this article about Darcy Burner last week, I received an e-mail response ~~yesterday~~Tuesday, which I'm going to print in its entirety minus valid e-mail addresses:

From: Alex Hendrickson <xxxx.xxxx@darcyburner.com.invalid>
To: Cujo359 <nom-de-ordinateur@a-big-isp.net.invalid>
Subject: Re: Send a nerd to Congress
Date: Dec 27, 2011 11:18 AM
Hi Cujo359,

Thank you for sharing your blog,

Darcy has some very strong feelings about the NDAA 2012 bill, as follows is her statement:

"I remain strongly opposed to this bill.

Many members of the media and of Congress have tried to assure us that the ‘improved’ language in the NDAA 2012 renders Americans ‘safe’ from the draconian provisions which lie within it. But regardless of how this President says he would interpret the language, I am opposed to any erosion of our Constitutional rights-especially when we are asked to rely on the goodwill of whomever the President might be in the future.

Due process was given extensive protection in the Bill of Rights for good reason. I wholeheartedly believe our modern world requires greater due process protection, not lesser.

We can not continue the illegal and immoral Bush era policies of rendition and torture of any person, regardless of their nation of birth. Simply sweeping suspected terrorists off to indefinite detention, without due process, representation or basic human rights is unacceptable, and un-American."

Please let me know, if I can provide you with any further information!

Alex Hendrickson

Darcy Burner for Congress

I tried to do an Internet search for any mention of this online, and have not found anything. Ms. Burner's issues page still does not mention this issue specifically. I'm sure that the Burner campaign assumed I might publish this e-mail, since it is from a public official discussing a publicly accessible Internet site (mine).

Interesting, only one congressman from the Washington delegation voted against the NDAA. That congressman was Jim McDermott:

“I have heard from nearly a thousand of my constituents in opposition to the appalling language in the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains sweeping provisions that allow the President to indefinitely lock up American citizens without charge or trial. History shows that acting on fear has dangerous and irreparable consequences on our nation – the illegal internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is a prime example. I also reject the language in the bill that would severely restrict the transfer of detainees in Guantánamo Bay for any purpose, including trial in federal court. The Senate bill is un-American, unconstitutional and unnecessary. I urge my colleagues on the Senate and House Armed Services committees to strike out these abhorrent provisions in the final defense budget bill.”

McDermott Statement On Defense Bill’s Indefinite Detention Provision

The Stranger has has an article containing his speech on the floor of the House that day.

What I find appalling is that no other of the state's Democrats joined in rejecting that bill. This is why I don't take statements like Darcy Burner's at face value anymore, at least when it comes to figuring out whom to support.

UPDATE: I actually put this on a timed release two days ago, so the e-mail in question arrived the day before that, Tuesday.

In a followup e-mail, Burner campaign representative Alex Hendrickson mentioned that he expected there would be some updates to the issues page of the website, and that Darcy Burner has mentioned this issue in some of her campaign speeches recently.

I'll keep an eye out to see what's going on both with the Burner campaign and other local congressional campaigns.

It's Redistricting Season

2011-12-28T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Washington State Redistricting Commission (WSRC) has come up with a proposed set of new congressional districts for our state. I've taken the Google Maps overlay of the districts and labeled them:

Caption: Latest proposal for new congressional districts by the Washington State Redistricting Commission.

Image credit: Screenshot of WSRC's Google Maps overlay and yellow district number annotations by Cujo359

If you can't read the map, click on it to make it full size.

There are a few interesting things about the new districts. One is that they don't look gerrymandered. I'm sure there was some possibility for political hijinks here, but generally speaking, these are districts constructed out of communities that are similar to each other. In contrast to the old 9th District, the new one is made up of emerging cities around the periphery of Seattle. We all have similar issues and concerns.

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And So This Is Christmas...

2011-12-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Christmas. For those of you who celebrate it, I hope it's a good one. For the rest of us, for whom it's a somewhat normal day, there's not as much to do. Thankfully, some folks have been beavering away on the Internet, providing new content.

First, let's listen to one of my favorite Christmas songs:

John Lennon - Happy Christmas (war Is Over) - Click here for more Metacafe videos

Just one year, I'd like to not have to think "Yes, I wish that's the way it was" when I listen to this song. Maybe next year. More likely about when Hell freezes over.

Now, let's start with a comment left yesterday by stanchaz:

You don’t need to be religious to understand -and embrace- the idea that "Whatsoever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." But many of the 1%, in blind greed and endless schemes, have forgotten this. They have closed their eyes to what the word "society" should really mean, what it can mean. But due to Occupy Wall Street, we are finally talking less about CUTS and more about BLEEDING.

Quote Of The Day, Dec. 23, 2011 (comment by stanchaz)

Go to the link to read the rest. It's a worthy rant. As I've often explained, to me the major religions are better as Rorschach tests than as inspiration - what people get from them tells you more about them than it does the religions themselves. It does amaze me though, as I've mentioned before, that a religion whose founder was executed for picking a fight with moneychangers in a temple has managed to accumulate so many greedy and feckless adherents.

Image credit: via Art Pronin/TM.com

Over at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Oscar, James Ala has some thoughts on the ease with which the American upper class use the term "class warfare" any time we expect them to share more of the burden of running our society:

I have no patience with the meme, as I hope you have gathered. It is an over-the-top bit of hysterical heavy breathing. No one in the US is rallying the lower orders to fetch their weapons and torches to burn down the residences of the new Robber Barons. No one is advocating that the 0.1%, hyper-wealthy billionaires be chopped up into cat kibble. No one is advocating that the women-folk of this subset be raped, or that the even smaller subset of pregnant hyper-wealthy be cut open, or their infants be beaten to death before their mother’s eyes. Wall Street was temporary occupied, it was never burned down to its foundations.

I wonder when or how the super-wealthy became so thin-skinned. When did they come around to the notion that they should never, ever, hear a discouraging word? What weird form of egomania makes them need to hear how marvelous, great, wonderful, munificent, and super sexy they are? When did they become so thin skinned?

On Class Warfare

I think the trivial use of this term happens for a couple of reasons. The first is that this generation of upper-crust types has been so insulated from the world the rest of us live in, and so protected from any real danger, that they have absolutely no idea what a real war is. The other reason is that it's a cheap propaganda phrasing, and there are plenty of folks who think thoughts no longer than what you can print on a bumper sticker. They'll latch onto that phrase and repeat it endlessly.

Of course, the real irony is that it's the rest of us who are dying in this "class war", not they. We die because we can't get medical treatment, because we live in the pollution they cause and successfully lobby the government not to be forced to clean up, and when they cut our safety net programs to pay for their using the financial markets as a slot machine.

So, I guess maybe for us it actually is a war. If that's the case, we're definitely losing.

Finally, in keeping with our theme of (lack of) Christmas generosity among those most able to show some, here's a quote from Art Pronin at TM.com:

Recently Damon also said this great bit on paying higher taxes. Note the ending line there:
“The wealthy are paying less than they paid at any time else, certainly in my lifetime, and probably in the last century,” Damon told a reporter at the same event. “I don’t know what we were paying in the Roaring ’20s; it’s criminal that so little is asked of people who are getting so much. I don’t mind paying more. I really don’t mind paying more taxes. I’d rather pay for taxes than cut ‘Reading is Fundamental’ or Head Start or some of these programs that are really helping kids. This is the greatest country in the world; is it really that much worse if you pay 6% more in taxes? Give me a break. Look at what you get for it: you get to be American.”
Paying higher taxes to pay for better education, Pell grants and access to the American Dream. What a concept!

Progressive Notes: BREAKING NEWS ON SC VOTER ID LAW/DOJ, A Wyden-Ryan Take Down, Damon Strikes Again, Taibbi on OWS Pushing Pols, and Other Doings

Yes, what an idea. Making our economy more productive by educating people better - that's an idea most of us used to buy into. It's not just about being generous, it's about making your own world better. Which I think is what that Christ guy was talking about...

Merry Christmas, or happy Sunday, whichever it is for you.

Captchaing Comments

2011-12-24T13:20:00.000-08:00

Because this subject came up on another blog, I thought I'd add a point about how I manage comments here.

The first thing I should say is that, thanks to the way I have things set up, I don't have to manage them all that much. I like it that way. I don't have to spend a lot of time, as I do for another blog I associate with in a different persona, cleaning out spam comments that people from around the world feel obliged to leave there.

I've written before about how I have comment moderation set up, and none of that has changed. What I have not done is noted that I also use captchas, which is that annoying graphic that looks vaguely like Roman alphabet letters that you have to type in so that you can comment here. Compared to that link in the last sentence, I think that the Blogspot captchas are easier to read. Still, they are deliberately made more difficult to read than standard print. That is supposed to make them more difficult to interpret using software, which in turn makes them more difficult to fool to put spam into blog comments and online forums.

Still, if someone has a bit of difficulty reading anyway, captchas can be an obstacle to posting. I suspect that people who are dyslexic, for instance, would have more trouble. People who have trouble reading the screen to begin with, of course, are also going to find it harder to interpret captchas.

I don't intend to change this policy. I'm sorry that it's harder to comment because of them, but the only alternative I see is either to put every comment into moderation, which can take time and (at least theoretically) limits commenters' ability to interact with each other, or to spend a lot more time watching comments. I don't want to do either.

So, what I will do is offer some advice on how to make them a little less irritating.

Most modern browsers, Firefox being the one I'm most familiar with, have had a way of enlarging whatever is on the web page the user is looking at. That feature, normally referred to as "zoom", enlarges both graphics and text. Using Firefox, a page can be zoomed larger by using the Ctrl-+ key, which means holding down that key in the lower corner of the keyboard marked Ctrl, and then hitting the plus (+) key (of course, you'll have to hold down the Shift key at the same time, if you're using a standard U.S. keyboard). The Ctrl-- key (the minus key with Ctrl) will zoom the page smaller. If you can't remember how many times you enlarged or reduced the screen, then just hit Ctrl-0 to reset it to what it would be normally.

It looks as though Google's Chrome works this way, as does Internet Explorer.

Go ahead and try it by scrolling to the top of this page and using those keys. Note that both the image of the Stooges and the type get larger or smaller. That's what will happen to captcha images as well.

To sum up:

Zoom in (enlarge): Ctrl-+
Zoom out (reduce): Ctrl--
Reset to normal size: Ctrl-0

That should be true for just about any modern web browser on just about any operating system that doesn't include the syllable "Mac". For those afflicted with that particular OS, there are doubtless other ways to zoom in and out. (If someone happens to know how to do that on a Mac, please leave a comment explaining how, or a link to a page that does.)

Give it a try. It's possible that this won't be enough. In that case, please let me know, but it's something to try. It's also possible to comment via e-mail. I promise I'll read your comments, provided they aren't caught in the spam filter of my e-mail account.

UPDATE: In a comment, James Ala explains how things work on Macs:

In OSX the Command key works almost like the control key in Windows. Thus command +/- to zoom in or out. Works in Firefox and in Chrome, plus in Opera. I won't test Safari because I can not stand that browser.

So, to sum up, substitute the Command key anywhere you see Ctrl in the article, and it should work on Macs, too, with the possible exception of Safari.

Thanks, James.

Hope You Don't Mind Brown For Christmas ...

2011-12-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Caption: My front yard on Christmas day, back in 2008. This will be an increasingly rare sight in the years to come.

Image credit: Cujo359

Looks like Think Progress has found another measurement of climate change to supplement the not-quite-universally recognized Climate Change Cherry Tree:

This winter has been unusually warm, crippling ski resorts, ruining holiday traditions, and dashing hopes of a white Christmas across the northern hemisphere. While the billions of tons of greenhouse pollution in our atmosphere sometimes encourage freak snowstorms, the primary effect of global warming on winter is, well, warmer temperatures — making white Christmases less likely.

Global Warming Hates A White Christmas

Locally, the National Weather Service is predicting rain for Christmas day.

Seems like one of the costs of our continued dependence on fossil fuels will be fewer white Christmases and less opportunity to engage in winter sports that can't be played indoors.

Personally, even this doesn't cost doesn't seem worth it to me.

One More Thing ...

2011-12-22T01:20:00.000-08:00

Caption: Three Fingers Mountain, near Conway, Washington.

Image credit: nordique/Flickr

Actually, three more things before I give up for the night. As if there isn't enough to read out there, here are some interesting links from the blog roll.

First up is University of Minnesota Associate Professor P.Z. Myers on a fascinating topic, why women menstruate.

A new paper by Emera, Romero, and Wagner suggests an interesting new idea. They turn the question around: menstruation isn’t the phenomenon to be explained, decidualization, the production of a thickened endometrial lining, is the key process.

All mammals prepare a specialized membrane for embryo implantation, the difference is that most mammals exhibit triggered decidualization, where the fertilized embryo itself instigates the thickening, while most primates have spontaneous decidualization (SD), which occurs even in the absence of a fertilized embryo. You can, for instance, induce menstruation in mice. By scratching the mouse endometrium, they will go through a pseudopregnancy and build up a thickened endometrial lining that will be shed when progesterone levels drop. So the reason mice don’t menstruate isn’t that they lack a mechanism for shedding the endometrial lining…it’s that they don’t build it up in the first place unless they’re actually going to use it.

So the question is, why do humans have spontaneous decidualization?

The answer that Emera suggests is entirely evolutionary, and involves maternal-fetal conflict. The mother and fetus have an adversarial relationship: mom’s best interest is to survive pregnancy to bear children again, and so her body tries to conserve resources for the long haul. The fetus, on the other hand, benefits from wresting as much from mom as it can, sometimes to the mother’s detriment. The fetus, for instance, manipulates the mother’s hormones to weaken the insulin response, so less sugar is taken up by mom’s cells, making more available for the fetus.

Why Do Women Menstruate?

And no, it's not because it's fun. That's a different topic.

There's lots more, of course, including a cladogram with lots of funny-sounding names on it ("Llama Glama" is my personal favorite), but that's the gist of it. This gets back to a discussion I had a couple of weeks ago at Paul Sunstone's blog, on an article about why horses have manes. I said, mostly correctly I think, that animals do not evolve or keep features they don't have a use for. It's not worth the energy and materials (food) needed to create them.

The thinking about menstruation goes along those lines. With that little added notion, it's worth a read, I think, to understand a bit about how evolution changes us.

The second bit is more typical fare for this blog, an article by Robert Reich on the current state of the Republican Party, and how it got there. It's pretty true, I think. The only thing I think it's important to add is that the Tea Party, while it went about it much differently, was another reaction to the unresponsiveness of our political institutions, particularly at the federal level like the Occupy movements have been. The Tea Partiers, though, tend to be authoritarians who believe in individual profit, whereas the Occupy folks tend to take the view that if the community is better off, so are we all. Neither is true or right under all circumstances, but I'm usually more in agreement with the Occupy folks. Communities can help themselves, individuals can't always.

Those are important points, because when you understand them it's much easier to see why the Tea Party was quickly subordinated by the Republican Party and Occupy movements have refused to be co-opted by the Democratic Party. I don't think it's because the Occupy folks are stronger, nor do I think they are necessarily smarter. They're just more committed to collective action. They make their decisions in assemblies, sometimes by unanimous consent only, others by a supermajority. That can be unwieldy, of course, but when they do make a decision it's a lot more likely that they will all be committed to it. Since these movements exist in large measure due to the failure of the Democratic Party and traditional progressive institutions, the relationship between them is likely to be arm's length at best.

The third is an article that James Ala wrote a couple of days ago at his place:

A crime was committed this week. It was murder most foul. Some might call it a mercy killing, the victim was barely alive after all, but this ignores how the victim was starved, beaten, and abused over the course of a decade.

The murder was quite nefarious and performed by a cabal of bad actors. The conspirators had a long history of malice towards the victim and had laid their plans long before the actual act.

At first the attack was focused on the Forth Amendment. The cabal used all matter of devious, incremental means to chip away at the protections of the Forth. Most useful in that chipping away was the “War On Drugs.”

The Slow Death Of Civil Liberties.

Like Reich's article, it's a good review of how we got to this sorry state of affairs, this time that state of affairs being the demise of what was once a promising experiment in self-government. Think of it as an expansion on this article that I wrote three weeks ago. It's actually a lot more than that, but you can think of it that way anyhow, because if I had the heart to contemplate the subject long enough, I would have written something similar.

There, that should keep you for awhile.

Quote Of The Day

2011-12-22T00:30:00.000-08:00

Image credit: OWS/Tumblr

In an article discussing a letter from The Council Of Elders, a group of leaders from "social justice movements" of the 20th Century, to the Trinity Episcopal Church of New York concerning Occupy Wall Street, Joyce Arnold wrote:

“This moment of deep social crisis” and “The pursuit of justice in America.” That’s one of the best summaries of why the Occupy / 99% movement came into existence and continues to evolve that I’ve heard. There is a deep, wide, expanding crisis for millions. Lose your job, be unable to find another one within six months or so, and you have a mark against you in the job market. Be unable to find full time employment for a year or two, and the marks are bigger and probably permanent. Trust the professionals who assured you the mortgage you were being offered was good, find out how wrong that was and join the millions foreclosed upon, and you have a mark against you. If you were fortunate enough to have health insurance to begin with, but lost it along with your job, and you have a mark against you. Graduate from college at a time of high unemployment, be unable to get a job in your field, and you have a mark against you. Bump into the racial, gender, economic, orientation and other existing prejudices, and you have a mark against you, and “the pursuit of justice” becomes a bigger uphill climb.

“This moment of deep social crisis”: Council of Elders and Occupy

That puts where we are and why the Occupy movements exist about as succinctly as anyone has. It's also why I, among other people, have little use for the Democratic Party or many so-called progressive organizations. They've stood by as all this happened, fooling themselves, and many of us, into thinking that they were actually going to do something about all this Real Soon Now.

And here we are, looking up at what we were a generation ago.

There's really nothing constructive I can add to that thought, come to think of it.

A New Kind Of Identity Politics?

2011-12-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

Caption: A publicity shot from Darcy Burner's last campaign. I'm too apathetic about her latest to find a new one.

image credit: www.darcyburner.com

This message came in several of my e-mail inboxes from Darcy Burner's campaign today:

Congress has lots of doctors.
Congress has lots of lawyers.

You know what Congress doesn’t have lots of? Geeks!

So when they consider legislation affecting the Internet they get it wrong – and defend themselves by saying, “I’m not a nerd.”

It's time to change that! Will you help by contributing to my campaign?

The Internet is the most important invention of the last 50 years. It has increased the transparency of government; made it possible for grassroots donors to bind together and change campaigns nationwide; and was used to organize the Arab Spring.

Over the last couple weeks, Congress has been considering legislation that would destroy the open Internet. It would allow anyone holding a copyright to say that a site – even just a commenter – infringed on their copyright – and the domain name of the site would be revoked without due process.

I've already explained my view of identity politics, but I think there is something to be said for more diversity in the career paths people take to get to Congress. It would be nice to have some technology professionals there (a category that includes engineers), as well as a few tradespeople. Better yet, how about a few people who are unemployed? If there's one group of people who are getting a look at America's future, it's the folks who are already on the unemployment rolls.

So I have mixed emotions about this.

Still, in interest of further derailing a conversation about intellectual property rights that is never going to happen, I'd like to let the Burner campaign see how their front page looks to me:

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359

So, one nerd to another, how about making use of that NOSCRIPT tag, eh? Your geek cred isn't looking too shiny at the moment.

Thanks to things like this, I'm largely over my Darcy Burner crush. On the day Congress passed the defense authorization that effectively eliminated habeas corpus for federal agencies, I got an e-mail from her office with some platitudes about thanking veterans. I see nothing about that event on her issues page. She was plenty outspoken about Republican malfeasance back in the good old days. Unfortunately, Ms. Burner has proved to be another progressive politician who is good at avoiding issues that are troublesome for the Democratic Party. We have plenty like that already. What we need are progressives who will make trouble.

If I happen to end up in Darcy Burner's congressional district, I'll vote for her. When it comes to spending time and money getting her elected, however, I'm sure I can find better things to do.

Quote Of The Day

2011-12-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Twitter image via Matt Stoller

It's from a couple of days ago, but it's still a good one. After discussing the changes that have happened in our nation's capital in the last couple of decades, the increased defense spending, Medicare costs going out of control thanks to the program not being allowed to negotiate prices the way private insurers can, and the trend toward favoring the rich with tax breaks, Robert Reich concludes:

“Big government” isn’t the problem. The problem is big money is taking over government.

Government is doing less of the things most of us want it to do — providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving our roads and bridges and water systems, and maintaining safety nets to catch average people who fall — and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy want it to do.

Some conservatives argue we wouldn’t have to worry about big money taking over government if we had a smaller government to begin with.
...
A smaller government that’s still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, big agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors, and rich individuals.

It just wouldn’t do anything else.

The Defining Issue: Not Government’s Size, but Who It’s For

People who talk about making government smaller have been selling, or buying, a bill of goods. We are the fourth largest country in the world based on population, with by far the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP). We, as a nation or as individuals, have economic and military commitments around the world that dwarf some countries' GDPs and defense establishments. Expecting our government to be small is an exercise in foolhardiness on that basis alone.

Image credit: Occupy Together/Twitpic

But the more obvious, and more telling point is that "small government" has really served as a shorthand for the rich serving themselves, by helping themselves to our tax money, our government revenue, and to its ability to make changes in our society. They have used the courts to make it easier to do whatever they want to their employees, reversing decades of reform. They are making it harder to put them in prison for their malfeasance, thanks to a weakened regulatory system. Every year or two they try to change the way the Internet works so that they can crowd out the small, independent voices and businesses by, in effect, charging them protection money to make sure their sites are served.

They already own any news organization large enough to matter. They managed to bribe the government into letting that happen, too.

They could do this with small government, too, and even more easily. Power and wealth tend to accumulate in the hands of the people who are aggressive and ruthless enough to take it. That is a lesson that's as old as civilization, and only outright fools ignore it. Government can be a way of minimizing that trend, but only if it works for us. It doesn't now, and it hasn't for a long, long time.

None of the people who advocate for smaller government have proposed a practical alternative. Which, I think, should tell you where their loyalties really lie, assuming they're not outright fools.

Happy Solstice, 2011

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

Caption: Snow even improves the look of a big set of stone blocks in the middle of a field. One of the reasons Stonehenge exists is to mark the coming of the Winter Solstice.

Image credit: English Heritage

Every other day of the year I'm an atheist, but one day each year brings out whatever pagan instincts I have:

The winter solstice marks the shortest day and longest night of the year. In the Northern Hemisphere, it occurs when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, which is located at 23.5° south of the equator and runs through Australia, Chile, southern Brazil, and northern South Africa. This year, the Northern Hemisphere solstice will occur at10:30 pm MST on December 21, 2011. For a complete listing of the dates of the winter and summer solstice's and spring and fall equinox's through 2020, check out this site from the U.S. Naval Observatory.

In astronomy, the solstice occurs at the moment the earth's tilt away from the sun is at a maximum. Therefore, on the day of the winter solstice, the sun appears at its lowest elevation with a noontime position that changes very little for several days before and after the winter solstice. In fact, the word solstice comes from Latin solstitium or sol (the sun) + -stit-, -stes (standing).

The Winter Solstice

Yes, once again, it's the Winter Solstice. Soon, the too-short days in my neck of the woods will start to get longer, and in a month or two, we'll be thinking about spring, which might include the idea of planting things, or might only include the idea that very soon we won't have to remember to bring extra clothing and tire chains on a trip. For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, it's a day of hope and renewal.

Caption: Buds from the not-quite world famous Climate Change Cherry Tree, which is nature's way of telling us whether climate change is happening this year or not. Taken on February 20, 2011.

Image credit: Cujo359

So, whether you celebrate the Winter Solstice as Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Bodhi Day, Ramadan, or whatever, happy holidays.

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, just remember that you get your own version in six months, and enjoy your summer.

PZ Myers On Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-21T01:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't felt like writing about Christopher Hitchens' passing. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think his credulous and arrogant support for the war in Iraq was probably the biggest reason. Whatever else he's done, and he has done a lot, that's a stain that deserves to be on his memory. No one with a properly skeptical mind would have believed the case for war. It wasn't there. Yet Hitchens trumpeted it as though he was a high priest delivering the word of his god.

Meanwhile, in his second article about Hitchens, biology Professor P.Z. Myers gets it pretty close to right, I think:

Hitchens was a complicated fellow: talented and intelligent, and on some subjects he was warm and humane and a true child of the Enlightenment. And on others, a bloodthirsty barbarian and a club-carrying primitive. At least in his final months it was the civilized and thoughtful humanist who emerged most.

The dark side of Hitchens

Besides his support for that disastrous war, my other lasting impression of Hitchens is his voluntarily subjecting himself to waterboarding. As he wrote before the experiment, he didn't believe it was torture. After experiencing it for himself, he courageously wrote that it was, indeed, torture. That was Hitchens in one bad afternoon - the arrogance to think that what other people who had experienced it said about it wasn't true, the curiosity to try it for himself, and the honesty to write about what he experienced and what he felt afterward.

Oh, and by the way, in that article he finally got around to mentioning Malcolm Nance, a counter-insurgency and SERE expert whom I'd quoted almost a year previously. He wasn't hard to find.

It was interesting to see that Prof. Myers was somewhat in awe of Hitchens. I can't see PZ being fooled by some con job like the "case" for the Iraq War, nor would he have ever been fool enough to believe that waterboarding wasn't torture. For my money, Myers is a hell of a lot smarter. I suspect that's because, as a scientist, Myers is uncomfortably aware that even really smart people can be really, really wrong. All they have to do is forget that it's possible.

Hitchens was a complicated man. Whether he will be missed probably depends on how those complexities worked out for you. I'm sad to say that I won't miss him all that much, except as an example of how arrogance can make you stupid.

Sunday Photo(s)

2011-12-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

Last September, I finally got to see one of the most famous places in the state of Washington, Mt. St. Helens. I have written before about the eruption that took place back in 1980, the year after I arrived in the Pacific Northwest.

These are pictures I took at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, which is named after USGS geologist David A. Johnston, who died making observations of the eruption.

Image credit: Screenshot of Google Maps data presented on TangoGPS software taken and annotated by Cujo359

That's a screenshot of a TangoGPS image of Mt. St. Helens, using Google's satellite photo data. I've added the notations to show where state route 504 ("S.R. 504") and the Johnston Ridge Observatory are in relation to the Mt. St. Helens crater.

As the first ridge the eruption hit, Johnston Ridge didn't fare all that well. Thirty years later, the ridge is still littered with dead trees and stumps that were created by the explosion.

There's a big multimedia presentation at the Johnston Observatory about the eruption, and the things that have happened on the mountain since that day.

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

The most spectacular view, of course, is the mountain itself. The Observatory sits near the open side of the Mt. St. Helens crater, providing a view of the still-active region inside. This is a panorama of the mountain, with the Observatory's patio on the right:

Catch the mountain at the right time, and you can see into the crater itself:

The lava dome is clearly visible within the crater. That view didn't last long. As the preceding photo shows, the clouds started obscuring the crater. Before we left less than two hours later, it was barely visible.

That dome has changed shape several times since 1980. As I said, this mountain is still active. This sign shows that rather clearly, as it discusses the various eruptions and changes that have happened just in the last few thousand years. Every few centuries, something about this mountain changes in spectacular fashion.

Click on the images to enlarge. Have a good Sunday.

UPDATE: Added an explanation of the last photo.

Only In America

2011-12-16T14:18:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Various artists

Well, maybe other countries could have come up with this sort of thing, but it's really just our style:

A new Occupy Wall Street-related art project: the "Police Brutality Coloring Book." The copy states explicitly that it's "not for kids." The description continues:

"This is an art project/zine. 46 contemporary artists have contributed drawings in response to the recent wave of excessive force used by the police in U.S. cities."

The list of artists includes big names like Shepard Fairey (who caught some flak for his Occupy poster and did the art for Time Magazine's Person of the Year issue for "The Protester") and Quel Beast.

Shepard Fairey is also famous for this poster:

Image credit: Shepard Fairey/Wikipedia

Which, with the Obama Administration's efforts to coordinate all the beatdowns of Occupy movements lately, is something I find to be rich in irony. Apparently, so does Shepard Fairey, as his defense of a more recent variation on that theme has shown:

Caption: The version of Shepard Fairey's "Occupy Hope" poster that some Occupy members were complaining about. Fairey later altered the poster, as can be seen at the quote credit link.

I have zero contact with the Obama campaign. I am disappointed with many aspects of Obama's presidency and I am far from an unconditional Obama supporter. The round logo I made is not Obama's O logo. His O uses curved stripes and a white sun. The stripes in my 99% logo are straight. I saw my 99% logo as subverting his logo more than amplifying it. I wanted a patriotic frame for the 99% logo to assert that the Occupy movement IS patriotic. The use of the word HOPE is more saying that Occupy is the greatest Hope we now have, but it would be great if Occupy pushed Obama in the right direction.

Shepard Fairey Changes Unpopular 'Occupy Hope' Poster Under Pressure

Speaking of irony, what other country can honestly say that they've put so much money and effort into making police forces so well armed and so isolated from the people they do the things that are no doubt described in this book, and can also create a group of artists who are willing to chronicle the end product of that process in all its ugly detail?

I can't really recommend this book, because I haven't seen any of the art, even after poking around on the Internet for awhile. I can, however, observe that there is plenty of material out there, a fact that many of us have been documenting for some time.

Fearless Predictions For 2012

2011-12-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

Caption: "Answer unclear".

Image credit: Mashup of this image and this one by Cujo359

I hate to make predictions, since I hate having to grind my teeth months later when I see what I wrote. Nevertheless, since I published these in a comment elsewhere, here are mine for 2012:

Occupy will continue to change tactics. Realizing that their nonstop protests aren’t getting it done, they’ll make more efforts to cost Goldman Sachs, et. al., real money in hopes that they’ll change their ways. I think those predicting that there will be violence at one or both of the party conventions next year are accurate. What I will add to those predictions is that the violence will be mostly, if not entirely, perpetrated by police.
The Republicans will nominate someone “safe”, like Mitt Romney, for President. He will win. Between progressives being so unconcerned with Obama’s re-election, and times getting even worse, he won’t stand a chance.
Times will get worse. The stimulus has run out, and there’s nothing to replace it. Government will respond by doing the same things that got us here – more austerity, and less regulation.

Of these predictions, I think only the last one needs any elaboration. The first is pretty vague, but the events it describes are subject to rather vague forces, so I don't think one can do much better.

The economy will continue to get worse. By that, I mean that it will grow at a rate that is less than that which will create net jobs beyond what is needed for an expanding population. That typically means something less than two-ish percent growth. No, you don't get to say I was wrong if growth is 2.1 percent. You get to say I was wrong if there were more than a million net jobs added next year. That means a million beyond labor force growth, which I would conservatively define as:


12 months * 90,000 jobs/month = 1.08 million jobs.

So, if the numbers of employed grow by more than two million jobs, I was wrong. I say that this is a conservative estimate, because it's the smallest number of new laborers per month that I've seen any credible economists use. I think that number should be higher, but we'll be conservative here.

We'll be lucky if there's any net growth at all. Nothing that either our government or Europe's various governments are doing instill any confidence at all that things will get better. Austerity will continue until the economy improves, which is to say that the economy will not improve.

So there, fearless predictions. For the most part, this is obvious. The only risky one is predicting that Obama won't be re-elected, but I'd give that one at least two to one odds of being right.

Hey, Wow, I Was Right!

2011-12-15T11:56:00.000-08:00

Caption: The Constitution. To the surprise of no one with a working mind who has been paying attention, the President wiped his ass with it again today.

Image credit: National Archives

I thought I'd start with the good news for once. I was right when I wrote this:

That provision [allowing the President to detain anyone he deems to be a terrorist indefinitely], part of the Defense Authorization Act (DAA), will now go to the President for signature. In light of the announcement today that he can kill anyone he wants as long as he can convince himself that that person has "taken up arms" against the United States, I think the odds of him vetoing this bill are about the same as mine winning the Powerball lottery this week.

No, I did not buy a lottery ticket.

Democracy's Last Gasp?

The bad news is that as of today, as Glenn Greenwald reports, you can take the question mark off the title of my article now:

In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of "any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s]," only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure - and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won't repeat those points here.

Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law

[links from original article]

Yes, it's at least conceivable that some later Congress will retract this bill. As Greenwald points out, there is precedent from the 1950s for this sort of bill. But back in the 1950s, there were leaders and prominent individuals who were willing to stand up and say that this was wrong. I don't see too many of such people this time around. Certainly, the con man who occupies the White House has no such scruples, as Glenn reminds us:

[T]he most persistent and propagandistic set of myths about President Obama on detention issues is that he tried to end indefinite detention by closing Guantanamo, but was blocked by Congress from doing so. It is true that Congress blocked the closing of Guantanamo, and again in this bill, Congress is imposing virtually insurmountable restrictions on the transfer of detainees out of that camp, including for detainees who have long ago been cleared for release (restrictions that Obama is now going to sign into law). But — and this is not a hard point to understand — while Obama intended to close Guantanamo, he always planned — long before Congress acted — to preserve Guantanamo’s core injustice: indefinite detention.

Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law

[emphasis from original]

There will be a few prominent progressives who speak out about this, and probably some libertarians, maybe even a few conservatives, but not many. Most "progressives" will be making excuses about how this was so necessary due to the vastly greater threat posed by a few religious fanatics who are now dead, or how those nasty Republicans were responsible for making a Democratic Senate pass this bill, and for making a Democratic President sign it.

Anyone who both has the convictions and courage to resist this and the ability to do so has been purged from the Washington, DC system.

So, this is a good news, bad news story. Somehow, I don't think the good news outweighs the bad, but I keep getting lectured that I'm not being an optimistic enough Internet persona, so I guess we'll call this a "balanced" news story.

UPDATE: In this video from yesterday, Cenk Uygur finally gets it.

Cenk returns to the Defense Authorization Act, which the White House now says senior advisers will not recommend that President Obama should veto. “In all of the troubles I’ve got with President Obama, he couldn’t be that bad, right?” Cenk says he thought, even as others argued that NDAA seemed constructed to give the executive branch more power, not less.

Better late than never, I suppose.

"Embrace Your Inner Rich Douchebag"

2011-12-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show's John Oliver gives Mitt Romney some priceless advice on rhetoric for rich presidential candidates:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Yes, just explain to your opponents that you'll do to them what you've done to everyone else.

(h/t Comrade E.B. Misfit, who usually finds these gems before I do.)

Monday Morning Videos

2011-12-12T14:02:00.000-08:00

It's Monday, so let's just sit on the couch and look at some videos:

Via The Partisans, via Dusty, here's a marvelous parody of Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent ad declaring that he believes in his god, no matter who doesn't:

What's so funny to me about Perry and his paranoid view of the world is that non-believers have been voting for candidates of nearly all political parties since we've been here. It's not that we don't have choices. We could always start our own minority parties, after all. It's just that, in most cases, it doesn't matter that much to us. Sure, I'd like for there to be more atheists and other religious minorities in government, but that has always come a distant second to my desire for better government, and for a better world. If Christians want to bring those things about, then I don't care if it's because they think their bearded guy in the sky told them to or not. If, as in Rick Perry's case, they want to make things worse, then I don't care if they're outspoken atheists who want to expunge all religious tests and references from government - they're still the wrong candidates.

Heck, looking back on it, I wrote this almost five years ago on this topic:

Organized religions are too often political institutions themselves, in that they seem to spend far more time worrying about things like their religion's popularity and finances than to their spiritual beliefs. They don't strike me as any more interested in the good of the nation than oil companies or big pharma are. The more the people who run them are ignored, I think, the better off we'll be as a society. Having a diverse range of religious beliefs represented in Congress can go a long way toward making that happen.

In short, with its first female Speaker and more minority religious views represented, the Congress became more representative of the country today.

More Diversity

Does Congress really seem any more representative of all of us to you? I certainly don't think so. In my opinion, they've never missed a chance to screw us in favor of the people who finance their campaigns. That's certainly not what all of them are there to do, but whether Congress were composed entirely of white, Christian, heterosexual men of northern European ancestry, or of Asian lesbian women who were all staunch non-believers, wouldn't make a bit of difference to me if they continued to produce what they've been producing.

Barack Obama has certainly proved that it's going to take more than voting for someone from a different ethnic background to change things. In retrospect, Nancy Pelosi showed that it's going to take a lot more than putting women in positions of power in Congress, too.

If anything, identity politics means even less to me now than it did back then. It's what a candidate has done in his political and other careers that matters, not what he looks like, what nonsense he believes in one day a week, or where he carries his (or her) genitals that matters.

The other video has no political ramifications that I'm aware of, but it's one of those things that you just don't see every day:

Thanks to Starspider and Dana Hunter for preserving the memory of this treasure. After all, videos of cats and dolphins so rarely attract attention, we need to do all we can to promote them. Otherwise, the malevolent forces waging the War Against Felines And Cetaceans will win, and we can't have that now, can we?

December, 1941

2011-12-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

Over at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Oscar, James Ala reminds us that at about the same time that this was going on:

Caption: U.S. Navy battleships burn during the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

so was this:

Caption: Soviet soldiers advance on skis and tanks during the Battle of Moscow, December, 1941.

Image credit: Wikipedia

When the invasion did come, Stalin went into a three day funk. He locked himself into his room and took no callers. Most people would have done the same. The first days of the invasion were utter disaster. The Nazis chew up Soviet men, material, and land at a frightening pace. Most of the front line Soviet assets were gone by day three. The Red Army barely had a pot to cook in. Air power was vaporized on the ground, tanks, artillery, and men quickly followed when they lost air support. The Wehrmacht was turning Russia into their own personal playground, and there was not much the Red Army could do about it-- other than retreat.

The Less Know December Event Of World War Two, 70 Years On

Eventually, the Soviet Union stopped the German advance, at a tremendous cost. Then, on December 5, 1941, they began a counterattack that would drive the Nazi armies away from Moscow.

As James notes, we tend to forget, if we even knew, that the real job of breaking the Nazi war machine was mostly done by the Soviet Union and its few allies in the region. Tens of millions of people died there in what must rank as one of the most brutal campaigns of any war. The North African and Italian campaigns, and even the Western Allies' air campaign against Germany were sideshows in comparison.

And by comparison, the human losses at Pearl Harbor probably would have seemed like an average morning.

If you're not familiar with the goings-on in that part of World War II, then do yourself a favor and go read his excellent summation.

Saturday Entertainment: The Game That Moves As You Play

2011-12-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

Based on the subject matter, you'd never know that this song was composed thirty years ago:

Drink at the Bar Nothing bar anything
But the bottom step of the ladder
It keeps gettin' higher and higher

Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.
It keeps getting sooner or later.
This is the game that moves as you play.

X: The Have Nots

The song's lyrics make it clear that the things Occupy has been protesting, and the things that a whole lot of us have been pointing out in the last few years, aren't recent phenomena. The gap between the rich and the poor started getting wider back in the 1970s, and it was folks, as the composer put it, at the bottom of the ladder who were the first to notice.

This is one of the more well-known songs of a Los Angeles punk rock group called X. According to their website, they'll be doing a tour of the Southwest soon.

Twittering Of The Day

2011-12-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

I suppose that in a virtual world where a rabid St. Bernard can blog about politics, something like this was inevitable:

Image credit: Screenshot of this Twitter page by Cujo359

What's next, spiders?

Progressive Idiocy: The Power Of Inconvenience

2011-12-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Occupy Together

A few years ago, the transit workers in New York City went on strike over declining benefits. Needless to say, this inconvenienced a lot of people, most of whom had little or no power to affect things. But it worked because it also inconvenienced the people who really count. That was the only way things were going to change.

Anyone who says that they shouldn’t have gone on strike, and there were quite a few, were saying that the people in those unions should accept the lower benefits that were offered, so that they could go on about their own lives unaffected.

So it is with some "progressives" who complain about the tactics of the various Occupy movements. Actually, that's a rather broad claim. There's been senseless destruction and some criminal activity. That's not helpful. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the disruption, inconvenience, and other costs of having a bunch of people just suddenly show up somewhere that wasn't meant to handle them.

Most of us already have all the trouble in our lives we can handle, so when things like this happen, it’s natural to resent it. There will always be people among them who are going to claim,without ever offering viable alternatives that haven’t already been tried and shown to fail, that there were other things they can do. Someone yesterday thought he was justifying such a claim by passing along an article about how K Street lobbyists said they weren’t inconvenienced by what’s going on in DC. Seriously? Why in the world would I expect a group of people who make their living as lying hypocrites would be telling the truth all of a sudden? Of course they’ll say that. They want people to think that this is having no effect on them. It’s like asking a professional sports team before the game if they think they can win – if you don’t know the answer already, you don’t know what you’re looking at. They want you to think that you’re the only ones being inconvenienced, because if it is then what is being done is useless.

This is affecting the people who run things. It’s probably not affecting them a lot, and it’s certainly not affecting them enough, but it is affecting them. The only thing they care about is profit and loss. Make the losses big enough, and they’ll change. Don’t, and things will continue as they are.

They’ve made a big, coordinated effort to make this problem go away. That isn’t because they give a crap about whether we’re inconvenienced or not. It’s about them. When people choose not to go to some place because it’s crowded with protesters, or when the docks are shut down, or the homes they fraudulently repossessed are occupied, they’re taking losses, and they don’t like that.

I’d think that all this would be obvious by now, but apparently it’s not. I guess there are a lot of people out there who don’t know what they’re looking at, and see that as someone else’s failure. So we’ll go on belaboring the obvious until enough people catch up.

Afterword: This was a comment I left at another site, slightly edited.

Progressive Idiocy: Forgetting How We Got Here

2011-12-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

Caption: The Constitution. Safely hidden from prying eyes in the Library of Congress.

Image credit: National Archives

The progressive "blogosphere" is all a-twitter (and a-blogspotter, one supposes) about the latest Republican congressional travesty:

Republicans in the U.S. Senate today blocked the nomination of Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The vote, on a motion to end debate, was 53-45, with 60 votes required to move the nomination ahead.

U.S. Senate Republicans Block Cordray for Consumer Bureau

Certainly, the Republicans deserve blame for this. No one made them vote to filibuster this nomination. The sad fact is, though, that the Democrats had an opportunity to change this at the start of the Senate session last January, and they demurred:

Senate Democrats had an opportunity to get together and make the Senate a working, majority-rule-based chamber. They could have recently used the “Constitutional Option” at the start of this new Congress to rewrite the Senate rules to either eliminate the filibuster outright or at least make staging a filibuster more difficult. Yet, due to a combination of a greedy refusal to give up any individual power, and a pitiful cowardice about a potential future in which the voters reject them, Senate Democrats collectively chose to throw away this opportunity. By doing nothing, they effectively voted to give Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell total veto power over everything.

After Failing to Change Senate Rules, Democrats Lose Right to Blame Mitch McConnell

[link from original article]

The "Constitutional Option" he's referring to is that the Constitution says in Article I, Section 5 that Congress can decide what rules it will work by. Generally, each new congress agrees to use the same rules as the previous one did, but there's no reason that can't change.

Why did they refuse to do this? Two possible reasons come to mind:

First, they are politicians, and politicians never give up power willingly. You might find that a cynical statement, but it is not. Politicians need power to do their jobs effectively. Whether they define "doing their jobs" as building a better society or plundering it, they need power to do it. In my opinion, this is the most fundamental rule of politics. To not understand it is to discuss politics at the level of a babbling idiot. In fact, babbling idiots would probably find such a discussion boring, too.

Second, and this is me being cynical, it seems like a great excuse for Democrats to not do the things that their supporters want them to do, but their benefactors do not. The financial, defense, and energy industries, to name three of the more blatant ones, have their own agendas and very deep pockets. Those agendas are not progressives', generally speaking.

Progressives and others have begged the Senate to make this change in the past, and they have not. Unless the power to pass legislation and get other things done is more important than having the power to stop it, then I don't think that's going to change without, as I like to say, someone making a demand.

What's more, as anyone who wants to think back as far as the last presidential administration would recall, when the Democrats could have blocked radical conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and elsewhere, they declined. They also declined to block the bill that made Bush's illegal surveillance of Americans legal, among other things. They didn't use the power of filibuster to their supporters' advantage when they held it.

So, while blaming the Republicans for exploiting this predicament is no doubt emotionally satisfying to some, it is only part of the story. The other part is that the Democrats really have no one to blame but themselves.

Saturday Entertainment: Me Talk Pretty (Special Thursday Edition)

2011-12-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

One of the few e-mail lists I haven't unsubscribed myself from is for one of the local entertainment ticket agencies. Every once in a while, there's a band on one of their announcements that sounds interesting, if for no other reason than they have a clever name.

Such is the case with this band, Me Talk Pretty:

They sound like a band with potential. Julia Preotu, the young woman who fronts the band, has one of those versatile voices that works well in rock and roll, and the band behind her sounds pretty tight. You can listen to their album at less-than-hi-fi at Soundcloud. Of course, saying they have potential sounds like a really backhanded compliment, now that I see they've been around since at least 2006:

Me Talk Pretty can call New York City its home, but its members aren’t all from around here: recent Romanian emigre Julia Preotu fronted the band, her small, thin form belying a strong voice, with barely a trace of accent; on guitar Spanish-born Leon Lyazidi provided solid backing with a strong grunge influence, along with the rhythm section of James Kluz on drums and Joseph Smith on bass. Me Talk Pretty’s set built well, climaxing with “Ana,” which is the title of their new CD.

MedusaFest 2006

Judging from the lack of any other album information on their website, I'd say they have recently gotten a big contract, but who knows? I count one EP and at least one other CD that they've produced, in what is apparently the new style: on their own.

They're coming to the Pacific Northwest this weekend. If it weren't for my twin aversions to crowded, dark places with lots of beer on the floor, and to being the oldest person in the room by a healthy margin, I'd probably go see them. (Plus, sadly, I already have other plans.)

Progressive Idiocy: Repeat After Me - "Power Concedes Nothing..."

2011-12-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

Caption: King John of England signs the Magna Carta, handing over power to nobles and granting rights to English citizens. He didn't do it because he wanted to. If it had been up to today's progressives, he never would have.

Image credit:
Cassell's History of England - Century Edition (via Wikipedia)

On days like today, I think that I need to start a campaign to have this quote stamped on the foreheads of progressive activists in reverse, so they can read it each morning when they look in the mirror:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass

It's certainly not a concept they're familiar with.

Read More >>

Twittering Of The Day

2011-12-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

Retweeted by several folks, this one captures a lot about Occupy Wall Street, the banks, and the sometimes daft priorities of our society in fewer than 140 characters:

#OWS should take a bath right after the banks get their haircut. #newtsbeautysalon

Twitter Message by @Casual_Obs

I see nothing to add.

Sunday Photo(s)

2011-12-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

I saw this little guy at Lava Butte, in the Deschutes National Forest, Oregon, back in August:

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

Read More >>

What Killed Cain's Campaign

2011-12-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

Humor, particularly political humor, can often put things in perspective in a way that serious analysis can't. An example of this phenomenon is provided by The Onion,referring to the presumed end of Herman Cain's presidential bid:

Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons

The Onion

If he had flubbed a question like "does Israel have nuclear weapons?", or "does Pakistan have nukes?", I might have been able to overlook his not knowing. But China? They've had nukes since Cain was a teenager.

And yet, it appears that it will be an affair that finally dooms him. There's a case to be made that in Cain's case, this is just another in a long string of examples of the man's mendacity, but to me, lack of knowledge of basic facts about our national defense trumps character flaws. If character was the overriding issue, I don't think I would have voted for anyone in a general Presidential election since I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and before then pretty much every election since I turned 18.

UPDATE/Afterword: As Stephanie Zvan points out, even if one just looks at the various accusations of womanizing by Cain that have surfaced recently, there are still far worse things than a long term consensual extra-marital affair to worry about:

He was fine when four women said he sexually harassed them and assaulted at least one of them. Those four women could be dismissed on the campaign website as “money hungry,” “vile liars,” conducting a “liberal lynching” for “5 minutes of fame.” Their character and even their sanity could be called into question while Cain brought in more donations than ever. But then…

Then one woman showed up who said her interactions with Cain were consensual and long-lasting and that he helped to support her. And this is when everyone decided Cain’s campaign was over.

Where We Draw The Line

For what it's worth, I thought Cain's campaign was essentially over two or three debates ago. Still, it's interesting that this is what finally did him in. It may just have been the last straw, after numerous allegations that had at least a little substance, but it does seem a strange thing to end this campaign on.

It's certainly among the least of his alleged sins, and it doesn't hold a candle to his clear ignorance of just about any subject related to being President.

Brutality Or Stupidity

2011-12-01T14:55:00.000-08:00

For me, it's hard to tell which in this video. It's of last night's Occupy Philadelphia protests, with police horses injuring a reporter who is in the crowd. Kevin Gosztola referred to it in a Twitter message as being a deliberate attack, but if you watch the video carefully, it doesn't look that way:

I don't see the police officers who are on foot making offensive moves. The most assertive they get is when one of them urges the protesters to get back on the sidewalk. The horses, particularly the dark one with the white streak on his face that appears to be the one that hit reporter Vanessa Maria, seem to be very nervous, thanks to all the noise, the large number of people who are shouting and looking cross, and perhaps confusion on the part of their riders. Whatever the reason, they all look to be nervous and twitchy.

Read More >>

Democracy's Last Gasp?

2011-12-01T12:56:00.000-08:00

Caption: The Constitution. You'd never know that members of Congress and Presidents swear to protect and defend it.

Image credit: National Archives

I wonder if, years from now, we will look back on December, 2011 as being the month when democracy had its last gasp in America:

U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
...
[Pentagon counsel Jeh] Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

Obama lawyers: Citizens targeted if at war with US

There it is, in black and white. The President says that he can have anyone killed who he deems to have "taken up arms" against the United States. Considering that Anwar al-Awlaki, the first object of this particular raping of the Constitution, has not been proved to be anything more than a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, it's hard to imagine that actually using weapons against the U.S. will be required next time, either. Since the Obama Administration has so far successfully resisted all efforts for an independent review of the evidence against al-Awlaki, any other involvement will probably remain unproved, and unreviewed. What al-Awlaki said about Americans is about what many right-wing pundits say about liberals, yet Obama hasn't seen a need to take them out.

You won't see this mentioned much on television news, but there's a portion of the U.S. Constitution, the document that all members of Congress and Presidents swear to defend, that has something to say about this:

Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

U.S. Constitution, Amendment 4

I can't wait to hear the career progressives' rationale for this one. No doubt the nasty Republicans made him do it. You know, it's because of all those Bush holdovers whom President Obama refused to fire when he took office. Um, wait - nevermind. No, I really can wait to hear all that, but I probably will anyway.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate, which is still controlled by the Democrats, did this a couple of weeks ago:

The Senate Armed Services Committee voted Tuesday to approve a new version of the defense authorization bill that changes detainee-related provisions in the measure and could clear the way for the legislation to reach the floor as soon as this week.

However, the changes did not assuage the concerns of the chief critics of the legislation in the Senate, at the White House or the Pentagon, making the bill's ultimate prospects unclear. At the Democratic caucus lunch Tuesday, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) all expressed strong opposition to the modified detainee language, sources said.

Senate panel alters detainee language in defense bill

The amendment (PDF) does not contain any language that limits who can be detained, beyond what our armed forces think is necessary. The language is so broad that it could easily be construed to include U.S. citizens, even those still in the United States.

As Marcy Wheeler observed yesterday:

[W]hile I’d be happy to see the provisions in question fail (because the provisions represent a further militarization of our country), effectively the argument being made is between those (the Republicans, enabled by Levin) who support further militarization of law and those (DiFi and, especially, the Administration) who want the Executive Branch to continue fighting terrorism (and whatever else) with an intelligence-driven approach bound by few legal checks.

Detainee Debate Heats Up: The Rule of Martial Law Vs. the Unitary Spookery

From following twitter messages by Marcy Wheeler today, who has been following the Senate proceedings, it appears that amendments that would have limited these abuses to foreign soil, or anywhere, have been voted down.

That provision, part of the Defense Authorization Act (DAA), will now go to the President for signature. In light of the announcement today that he can kill anyone he wants as long as he can convince himself that that person has "taken up arms" against the United States, I think the odds of him vetoing this bill are about the same as mine winning the Powerball lottery this week.

No, I did not buy a lottery ticket.

The vote on the full DAA will be coming up soon, maybe today, probably before the end of the month.

Nor do I think, as Wheeler suggests he could, that Obama will simply draw up guidelines that allow all detainees to be tried in civilian court, or released for lack of evidence. Rule of law doesn't seem to be big on the President's list of priorities, at least not when that law applies to him.

I'd love to be proved wrong on either of those predictions, but I don't see it happening. I'm generally only wrong when I'm being optimistic these days.

So, cue the professional progressives who will explain how all this is vitally necessary to defend the United States, and how we'd better not let the Republicans get away with this by winning the White House, or some equally ass-backwards logic. Does anyone think that if Rachel Maddow or Ed Shultz discuss this bill that they will mention that Democrats control the Senate, and if they wanted to, the leadership could have prevented this amendment from coming to a vote? Would they mention that Republican Party discipline is such that no one dares to break ranks on bills like this in the Senate? Probably not.

Just another reason I believed Cenk Uygur when he said that MSNBC sees its job as being a propaganda outlet for the Democrats.

UPDATE: In case you think that overreach by the government in the name of security is only a concern of poofy liberals, here's a part of an editorial by Reid Smith at The American Spectator:

While I'm certain Greenwald isn't the most popular policy mandarin among The Spectacle's [Smith's column] readership, he has isolated an authentic threat. Likewise, I'm not always on board with Rep. Paul, but I was distressed by his remarks that this potential suspension of due process and civilian trial would be the first of its sort since the American Civil War. We've had a decade to process the lessons of 9/11. I always thought that the wars being fought overseas would eventually draw to a close. I wouldn't have guessed that they'd simply embed themselves right here at home. Perhaps we've become addicted to our fear. Perhaps it gives us some small comfort to assume that we're being well protected.

But consider the context. We're not talking about the hassle of dealing with that "crack squad of savvy, motivated personnel" manning hand-wands and sporting royal blue TSA frocks. I suppose we can live with in a world where our liquids, gels and aerosols must be tucked ever-so-less-ominously into 3.4 oz. containers. "Enhanced pat-downs" still seem ridiculous...but I digress.

This bill represents a shocking, yet formal codification of what we've come to understand as right and proper in a post-9/11 world.

National Security Nonsense

[links from original - the Greenwald link was placed earlier in the column]

So, with conservatives, libertarians, and progressives all seemingly against this sort of thing for one reason or another, why do we keep getting our collective asses handed to us? Nothing has stopped this march toward a national security state in the last decade or so. Even some of the votes against it by some Democrats seem insincere, since they never make parliamentary moves like filibustering to stop these things. On this question, there were 45 Senators opposed, and yet the thing has passed.

UPDATE 2/Afterword: Marcy Wheeler, AKA emptywheel, gets the last word on this one:

You think the fact that Senate just said Americans should be indefinitely detained has anything to do with 91% of country who hates them?

Twitter message by emptywheel

It's just one of many reasons, I'm afraid. Still, many of those reasons come down to betraying the oath they took, when they're not purely about selling the rest of us out to the rich and powerful.

Cenk Uygur Criticizes MSNBC's Support Of Democratic Party

2011-12-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

Image credit: The Franklin Institute

At Raw Story, Cenk Uygur explains why he left his position at MSNBC:

“I know what the institutional, sometimes unspoken rules at MSNBC are,” Uygur said in an exclusive interview. “So, relatively speaking, you know what you’re going to get with MSNBC shows. I would be surprised if they changed that recently. But MSNBC, I think, mistakes their mandate as being pro-Democratic, as opposed to pro-progressive. I think that’s a really important distinction.
...
“I didn’t want to work at a place that didn’t want me to do my kind of show, that wasn’t interested in my kind of show, didn’t want to challenge power,” he explained at the time. Uygur later told Olbermann that he felt like MSNBC sacrifices truth for access to elected officials, and he wanted no part in it.

Cenk Uygur: MSNBC ‘mistakes their mandate,’ does ‘great disservice’ to viewers

While Uygur's statement might be considered office gossip or self-serving nonsense, there are a couple of things that lead me to believe it's not. One is that both he and Keith Olbermann left at about the same time. The other is that it was obvious that MSNBC was doing exactly this, whether there was an edict or not. Since two of their principal reporters have left, I suspect there is something to that. While Dylan Ratigan is allowed an occasional rant, his show doesn't appear in prime time. I really see no one else left there who has the ability to criticize the Democrats when they abandon progressive principles in prime time.

Frankly, if I were a conservative, but somehow retained all my other instincts and knowledge, I'd be as appalled at Fox as I am at MSNBC. Their clear objective is to be a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party. As I've written plenty often, being tied to one party inevitably means that you are not going to be true to your principles. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to find such complaints among conservatives.

This is why I don't bother watching the cable news shows. None try to offer anything like real reporting, which means letting the chips fall where they may. Fox shamelessly supports Republicans, MSNBC shamelessly plugs Democrats, and CNN shamelessly avoids having an opinion. None puts informing the viewer among its top priorities.

I'll stick with online news, thank you very much. In a few years, there will be a Raw Story-like site that will rival the cable news channels for viewers. That's how things are going, and given the utter lack of journalism at the three main news channels, I don't see why anyone wouldn't make that switch.

Find Me An Image For "Pedant"

2011-12-01T02:02:00.000-08:00

Read this tweet by nedwards, and you'll never forget the definition of "pedant":

A pedant walks into a bar. Well, it's a restaurant with a bar. Technically it's a brewpub since it has an onsite microbrewery.

Twitter message by nedwards

Sometimes, a picture is better than a definition...

"They're Not The Counter-Culture. They're The Culture"

2011-11-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

With those words, Bill Maher makes more sense of the Occupy movements, and what has motivated them, than most of what passes for our news:

But then, he is our answer to Mark Twain.

UPDATE: I guess we're doing videos today. Here's Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explaining how the latest news about the bank bailouts by the Federal Reserve help explain the Occupy movements:

Long-time readers will recall that I mentioned this some time ago. What the documents have confirmed is the magnitude of that bailout. I wasn't one of those shocked or surprised by this announcement. The only thing that I find surprising so far is that Bloomberg, who also broke this latest story, had run articles back then saying there was anything from $15 to $23 trillion in financial support to banks. So far, the number appears to be more like $8 trillion, according to documents in the latest FOIA release. If you add that to the GAO audit's figure of $16 trillion, it just about adds up to $23 trillion.

That may just be coincidence, though. It's just as possible that most or all of the same money is being referred to in both reports.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-27T21:35:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Solnit's op-ed at Al Jazeera:

When civil society sleeps, we're just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.

Consider the liberal mayor of Oakland, who speaks with outrage of people camping without a permit but has nothing to say about the police she dispatched to tear-gas a woman in a wheelchair, shoot a young Iraq war veteran in the head, and assault people while they slept. Consider the billionaire mayor of New York who dispatched the NYPD on a similar middle-of-the-night raid on November 15. Recall this item included in a bald list of events that night: "Tear-gassing the kitchen tent." Ask yourself when did kitchens really need to be attacked with chemical weapons?

Ms Civil Society vs Mr Unaccountable

I think the long process of waking America up is just beginning. The next few years are going to be troubled. How troubled they are depends largely on the limited smarts and extremely limited humanity of the upper classes, both in America and Europe. How soon they wake up to the fact that their world is changing, too, depends upon those rare and little-valued traits.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-26T14:07:00.000-08:00

Yves Smith, who publishes the website Naked Capitalism, on the latest events in Europe:

Perhaps I’m too far from the carnage to have an accurate reading, but the news reports seem more anesthetized than shellshocked. It seems almost as if the European leadership has successfully faked its way through so many past crunches that they are unable to perceive that the same old tricks are no longer working. And it is increasingly looking as if their dulled reaction times are so out of line with market events that even if they were to snap our of their stupor now, it would be too late.

Eurocarnage Continues

I think she's right, if only because it looks rather like the anesthetized response to our economic woes on this side of the Atlantic. The debate in DC, from what I can tell from my remote position, is still about how much austerity we need to right things. The answer is that there is no amount of austerity that will right things, as enough sensible economists have explained. Only getting people back to work, at better pay and benefits, is going to right what's wrong with our economy, and sucking the government dry isn't going to do that any more than sucking the rest of us dry did.

Not coincidentally, this has been going on in Europe, too.

Yet the things that seem to occupy most peoples' minds about politics have nothing to do with our predicament. The general political debate continues to be how much of a foreign-born Islam-loving socialist President Obama must be on one side, and how much of a racist and metaphorical arsonist you must be to criticize him on the other. Actually understanding and dealing with what's wrong with the American economy, or the rest of the world's, seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind.

Which is one of the reasons next year's election isn't going to change jack, regardless of who wins, as I explained months ago:

All the people who tell me that things will be worse if the Republicans are back in power are smoking a substance I wish I could still partake in. Neither party gives a crap about the poor or the middle class right now, because progressives don't want to make them. Until they do, until they decide to break one of the parties and either reform or replace it, nothing will change for the better.

An Interesting Rant By Dylan Ratigan

I guess I must have been in a particularly racist and metaphorically arsonist mood when I wrote that...

So, Europe is going down, thanks to the complete lack of responsible leadership over there, and we'll be going down with it for basically the same reason.

Afterword: Yes, all but the first two of those links are from past Slobber And Spittle articles. Anyone who is surprised or shocked by what is about to happen simply hasn't been paying attention.

Saturday Entertainment: Twisted Christmas

2011-11-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

It's a couple of days after Thanksgiving, and Christmas is already in the air. If you get as fed up with it as I do, you might want to try one of my favorite forms of relief:

I'm a fan of the old Animals songs, so this is one of my favorites.

There are about a half dozen Twisted Tunes albums now, and I suspect that round about December 15 most of you will have at least a few in your MP3 players.

You're welcome.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

Caption: An artist's vision of a terraformed Mars.

Image credit: edawan/Celestia Motherlode

Attaturk, discussing the latest shenanigans of Moody's, other credit rating agencies, and Masters Of The Universe generally:

I do believe the world’s credit agencies are readying their escape pods and are preparing to escape the gravity of the Earth they’ve helped create.

Investing In Mars

They'd better start terraforming the place right now, or it's going to be awfully hard to breathe when they get there in a couple of decades.

What TIme Magazine Shows The World, and Us

2011-11-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

No sooner do I get on Twitter this morning when I see this message from Glenn Greenwald:

So revealing: here's what Time Magazine thinks of its American readership http://is.gd/vQyCwg (via @IRANALLIANCE)

Twitter Message from Glenn Greenwald

I follow the link, and the first thing I see is a paragraph that says that Time content is available to online subscribers only. OK, this is a bit greedier than most online magazines, but still not what I'd call a slap on its readership. Then I scrolled to the bottom, and there was the answer:

Image credit: Screenshot of Time online magazine by Cujo359

Yes, if you live in the U.S. they charge you for more trivial content than they show the rest of the world.

I doubt that I will ever be a subscriber, even if I become fabulously rich and just can't think what else to do with the money.

Another Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T11:12:00.000-08:00

Caption: The inflatable turkey who guards Redondo from evil doers on Thanksgiving Day. Or something...

Image credit: Photo by Cujo359

It's Thanksgiving once again. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, because there's not much involved besides making a dish of something I know how to make and going to visit people I like.

If there's anything to be thankful for, it's that I can still do that.

Happy Thanksgiving, or happy Thursday, whichever applies.

'Borrowed' Photo Of The Day

2011-11-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

This one's copyrighted, but I couldn't resist:

Image credit: Stephane Guisard/APOD. Reduced by Cujo359

Here's the caption from Astronomy Picture Of The Day:

From an altitude of over 5,000 meters, the night sky view from Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes is breathtaking in more ways than one. The dark site's rarefied atmosphere, at about 50 percent sea level pressure, is also extremely dry. That makes it ideal for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) designed to explore the universe at wavelengths over 1,000 times longer than visible light. Near the center of the the panoramic scene, ALMA's 7 and 12 meter wide dish antennas are illuminated by a young Moon nestled in the arc of the Milky Way. ALMA's antenna configurations are intended to achieve a resolution comparable to space telescopes by operating as an interferometer. At left, a meteor's streak and the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, the Large (bottom) and Small Magellanic Clouds grace the night.

Astronomy Picture Of The Day: November 23, 2011

Go to the link for explanatory links and the full size image.

I'm amazed at the quality of this panorama. As regular readers are probably aware, I quite often make panoramas for the Sunday Photo articles here, using Hugin software. The quality of those panos can be anywhere from good to great, but such a detailed star field would be at least a little muddled the way I do them.

In short, I'm impressed.

Of course, the view is lovely, too. I'm envious. I suppose if I were living there I'd be obsessing about the cold, heat, and isolation, but it sure is lovely.

Stephane Guisard has much more photography of astronomy on display at his site, including this photograph.

UPDATE/Afterword: As with a previous APOD I published here, I've asked permission to leave this photo up here. My schedule being what it is, this will probably be up until tomorrow in any event, and maybe Friday.

UPDATE 2 (Nov. 24): I have received permission from Stephane to publish the photo, as long as I added links to his photography page. Done, and thanks.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-23T11:24:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich does a good job saying something that I said the other day:

If there’s a single core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy. With money comes political power.

Yet when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they’re told the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Instead, they’re treated as public nuisances – clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces.

Across America, public officials are saying Occupiers have to go. Even in universities – where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct – peaceful assembly is being met with clubs and pepper spray.

The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force.

The First Amendment Upside Down. Why We Must Occupy Democracy

It's sobering to read this coming from folks like Reich and Bill Black, because they're establishment people you wouldn't expect to be talking about how messed up things are. Read Reich's rant through to the end, and you'll see what I mean. That people like them see this should be one more reason to be concerned that the next few years may be very perilous.

Spain Cleans House, Sort Of

2011-11-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

Caption: Ibiza, Spain.

Image credit: Found it here

Al Jazeera reports:

Spain's crippling economy and record unemployment have finally threatened the Socialist Party's seven-year rule led by Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero, the prime minister.

On Sunday voters went to the polls in what was expected to bring a meteoric shift to the center-right, with opinion polls putting the Popular Party candidate Mariano Rajoy well ahead.

Spain's boom to bust

Spain's Socialist Party has now been shown that pleasing the banks and other finance people is no way to maintain a majority. Whether they actually take that lesson to heart, or continue to ignore it for a time, remains to be seen. If our own Democratic Party is any example, it will take a number of whacks with the clue stick before they pay attention. I'll bet that, just like here, there is no end of people who are willing to tell the Spanish left that they should know better than to vote for those mean, scary Other Guys (tm).

The article continues:

Rajoy has vowed to make austerity cuts "everywhere" except for pensions, but has given little of the details away. European leaders will be watching the results closely to see whether this will be the man who can lift the Eurozone's fifth-largest economy back onto its feet.

Can a new set of leaders rescue a country that is headed into another recession?

Spain's boom to bust

Anyone who doesn't make the mistake of talking to finance ministers to figure out what's going on with Western economies already knows the answer to that one. Let me put it simply:

No.

Why? You can't get out of a hole by digging.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

2011-11-21T16:48:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Congressional Budget Office (via Beat The Press)

In yet another example of how wonderfully government is working for us lately, Reuters explains how the congressional Supercommittee has solved all of our economic problems:

Lawmakers abandoned their high-profile effort to rein in the country's ballooning debt on Monday in a sign that Washington likely will not be able to resolve a dispute over taxes and spending until 2013.

Lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort

First, let me take a side trip here while I get all Dean Baker on Reuters' ass and point out how loaded the words "ballooning debt" are. Ballooning, are you serious? The debt is still less than our GDP, which is about the only valid way of measuring this kind of thing.That's a lot, but it would have been a hell of a lot less had we not been running deficits all through the Bush Administration, who gladly told us that we could both lower taxes for the rich and finance a couple of wars, and the Obama Administration who told us the same thing. The only difference is that the Obama Administration told us this in such a way that they made career "progressives" all warm and sticky inside, whereas the Bush Administration were just a bunch of feckless warmongers.

As that Dean Baker link points out, interest on that debt is a small fraction of GDP, easily affordable. I wish I could have gotten a mortgage for my house that only consumed three percent of my income.

But anyway...

I suppose that if I'd bothered to put down at the time what my expectations were when this committee was announced, it would be that they would debate endlessly how hard to screw the 99% of us who aren't financing their campaigns. Then, I probably would have predicted, they'd have settled on not screwing us quite as hard as they could have. In that latter part of the prediction, I appear to be in error. Even when the parameters of the solution were restricted as I suspected they would be, the collection of assembled legislative geniuses couldn't agree.

Image credit: Mark M./Occupy Together

I feel so silly now.

They could have agreed to repeal the Bush tax cuts, and then get our armies out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and could have completely eliminated the deficit. That, however, would have taken disappointing the people they work for. So we knew that wasn't going to happen. Left with no viable way of reducing the deficit without either committing political suicide or making themselves ineligible for lobbying gigs after their days in Congress were over, they decided to do nothing.

Go figure.

In the end, they behaved the same way as the larger, but still remarkably shallow gene pool they came from had. While it wasn't what I would have predicted, it's an outcome that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

History, Blah, Blah

2011-11-21T15:39:00.000-08:00

Caption: A "duck and cover" drill during the Cold War. Weren't those just the best times ever? Nothing worried our little heads back then.

Glenn Greenwald makes a number of interesting points in yesterday's column, but this one stands out for me, in the context of what I've been writing recently:

The second exacerbating development is more subtle but more important: the authoritarian mentality that has been nourished in the name of Terrorism. It’s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters. It’s an even smaller step to go from supporting the power of the President to imprison or kill anyone he wants (including one’s fellow citizens and even their teenaged children) with no transparency, checks or due process to supporting the power of the police and the authorities who command them to punish with force anyone who commits the “crime” of non-compliance. At the root of all of those views is the classic authoritarian mindset: reflexive support for authority, contempt for those who challenge them, and a blind faith in their unilateral, unchecked decisions regarding who is Bad and deserves state-issued punishment.

The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying

Here I have to differ. Having grown up during the Cold War, and having seen much of the early propaganda that our government and other "concerned" organizations of the time produced, I can tell you that there's nothing new about this impulse. What's new is that it has been so successful this time.

Caption: According to Wikipedia, this is the Trinity explosion 0.016 seconds after ignition.

Image credit Los Alamos National Laboratory (via Wikipedia).

During the Cold War, we actually had a real threat to our existence, which was the threat of all out nuclear war. This is something that I think people under thirty-five have a hard time understanding - we lived with the threat of annihilation every day. I remember vividly the first time I was really confronted with this reality as a seventh grader - that the place I lived in was near enough to military targets that it could be destroyed by the huge weapons of the day, or, worse yet, that we could all be killed by the radioactive byproducts of those weapons.

Caption: In between drinks, Senator Joseph McCarthy [left] hunts for ~~terrorists~~communists.

Image credit: Library Of Congress/Wikipedia

Facing a threat like that, it should not be surprising that there were repeated calls for just the sort of things we're seeing now. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and all the foreign and domestic hijinks that followed, was an example of the paranoia and ruthlessness of those times. The Army spied on anti-war protests during the 1960s, and the CIA, with the help of the National Security Agency (NSA), felt free to spy on Americans in the name of finding out who the traitors and communists were among us. The McCarthy hearings were just another symptom of the paranoia, as good people were "black listed", prevented from finding work in their professions, because they were suspected of having communist leanings, and thus, sympathies toward the USSR. We were told that communists were everywhere, that they could be any of us.

Some of us were fool enough to believe it, too.

There were folks like the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom to remind us how suspicious we should be. I remember being shown a John Birch Society film that smeared Alger Hiss as a traitor. Nowadays, we seem to remember the JBS as the nuts who were afraid of fluoride in water, but in reality they and their compatriots were a paranoid reaction to the dangers posed by the Soviet Union. Some of the dangers were real, of course, like the Red Army and the thousands of nuclear weapons the USSR possessed, but much of it was the paranoid ravings of these folks. Their message was "be afraid", and many of us never missed a chance to be.

Thankfully, calmer heads prevailed back then. The Church Committee ended domestic surveillance by the defense establishment, establishing that this was the province of the FBI. One of the results of this was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which basically decreed that any spying done by the defense establishment on Americans had better be related to foreign intelligence operations. Eventually, the USSR was shown to be the hollowed-out, corrupt empire that quickly fell apart in the late 1980s. For a little while, at least, we could rest easy, knowing that there were no real threats to our existence.

Which, near as I can tell, is the difference between then and now. Oh, that, and that we aren't facing anywhere near the danger of nuclear armageddon now.

What's changed since then, you ask? I'm not really sure. I think one answer, though, is that back in the 1950s through the 1980s, we were still led by people who remembered fighting despotism in two world wars. By that I mean, they literally remembered it. President Harry S Truman was a WWI veteran. Presidents John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush were both WWII veterans, and both were nearly killed in combat missions. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., JFK's brother, was killed when his bomber was destroyed testing a new munition. Contrast that with Vietnam, where it was rare for the sons of America's leading families to be involved. John Kerry is one of the few exceptions I can think of. Vietnam-era scions President George W. Bush and Vice President Dan "Potatoe Head" Quayle avoided serving in Vietnam. The elder Bush and the two Kennedys volunteered for service, where Little Bush and Quayle voluntarily stayed away. In contrast to the elites of our parents' and grandparents' generations, the elites of the baby boomer and younger generations have learned that they can do whatever they want, and leave all the sacrificing to the rest of us.

Caption: One of the Harolds discovers a flaw in his defense policy.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Based on Internet traffic and the like, it appears that the collective reaction to the things I've written about history and its meaning for our own political problems has produced nothing but a big yawn. History is just so darned boring, isn't it? Yet not understanding those lessons has continually led us to do the wrong things. Endless waiting for President Obama to do the right thing, for instance, could have been avoided if those people had paid attention to the lessons I wrote about in the first of these essays. What history ought to be telling us right now, in big, bold, bright letters is that the elites of our country no longer feel the need to care about what happens to us. They only cared about freedom back in the day was because they risked their own lives for it, which they now realize they don't need to do. They can and will take care of themselves.

The only way they'll care about us is if we make them.

So, I suppose I'll just keep writing about this until people get the idea, or until there is so much material that I can print it out, roll it up into a nice, solid club, and whack people over the head with it the next time they try to tell me that all this is, like, completely unprecedented and all.

I think I'd better do some weight training so I can heft it, because I think it's going to be one huge club before we're done.

Sunday Photo(s)

2011-11-20T10:37:00.000-08:00

Fall is happening rather late in the Pacific Northwest this year. It was a mild, rainy summer, so the trees didn't dry out. These photos are from the last couple of weeks.

Image credit: All photos by Cujo359

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

Two Days In October, Two Days In November

2011-11-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry, no real Saturday Entertainment today. It's the weekend, so I've got another 14 hour day ahead of me.

I'll try to embed some Buffalo Springfield, though, since they seem to be as relevant to things that are happening now as back in 1967:

The song was written, of course, about the protests and the turbulence of those times, of a war that no one with any sense should have wanted to fight, segregation and prejudice directed with no compunctions at African Americans, and the general feeling that we had lost something of ourselves as a people.

Read More >>

Big, Gigantic Thought For The Day

2011-11-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Mark M./Occupy Together

They probably don't realize it, but there's a big difference between folks like Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich is refusing to elaborate on his work at Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant that hired the former House speaker as a consultant months after he left Congress, and paid him more than $1.6 million over eight years.
...
Gingrich has yet to make a convincing argument about his eight-year long relationship with the once-beleaguered organization. His comment that he was hired as a “historian” has, in fact, put his credibility into question even more.

Freddie Mac Ties Threaten to Hurt Newt Gingrich’s Credibility

and the rest of us. That is this:

If I had earned $1.6 million from someone, I'd have remembered what I did for them. I would have remembered, because it would have taken decades to earn that money, and they'd be the only people I was earning anywhere near that kind of money from.

I suspect that at least 99% of Americans could say the same thing...

(h/t Jon Walker)

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-18T17:05:00.000-08:00

Keith Olbermann once again displays his grasp of events and irony:

For the entirety of the life of our nation, democracy has been protected - not merely by the strenuous efforts of those who cherish it, but mostly, and most profoundly, by the limitless stupidity of those who would ration it, keep it for themselves and themselves alone, or destroy it.
...
American freedom has not flourished in spite of these morons of history, it has flourished because of them - because they overreacted, because they under-thought, overreached, and under-understood.

Keith’s Special Comment: Why Occupy Wall Street needs Michael Bloomberg

In the remainder of this video, Olbermann makes his case that it has, quite often, been those in power who have inspired the cause of freedom by foolishly and brutally trying to limit it to those particular uses of it they agree with.

He makes the point that, far from helping his own cause, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's expensive and sometimes brutal overreactions to the Occupy Wall Street movement have made it stronger. I can't argue with that point at all. It's a lesson that Ghandi made famous long ago with his litany:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

It only took two months for Occupy to reach the fighting stage.

The Limits Of Force

2011-11-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

Sadly, I can't actually show you this photo, because it's an AP photo and the rules that apply to everyone else in America don't apply to them. But go here and look at that photo. Now that you have the context, pretend it was that photo here in place of this paragraph.

Wow. Portland’s Finest must be so proud of themselves right now. That's some good aim – got her right in the face. She looks like a serious threat to all those cops, too. What is she, 115 pounds (that's like, 52 kilograms for you foreigners)? Maybe they should put a couple of beanbag rounds into her before she hulks out on them.

I'm sure it was just purely awful down there for those police. They must have had their hands full with those protesters, what with them being all suited up in body armor and helmets. Oh, wait, that's the police.

I'll bet she was saying something really mean to those guys, too, something like "You're twice my size, covered in armor, and heavily armed. How much of a pussy do you have to be to be waving a can of pepper spray in my face?" You, know, something really uncalled for like that.

Like that granny and pregnant lady in Seattle, or those female protesters trapped in that pen in New York City, I'm sure she had it coming.

Yes, here's what Seattle's Finest had to say about their little moment in the Sun:

SPD spokesperson Jeff Kappel wrote on the department’s blog that “Pepper spray was deployed only against subjects who were either refusing a lawful order to disperse or engaging in assaultive behavior toward officers.”

Elderly woman, pregnant woman hit with pepper spray at Occupy Seattle

Yeah, Granny had it coming.

Perhaps it's just another unfortunate byproduct of my upbringing, but somehow I got the notion before I left my teenage years behind that when you're strong you don't use that strength to hurt people who are weaker than you are. You take crap from them and, if it's necessary, you only use what force is necessary to keep them from hurting you. Do otherwise, and you become a bully at best, and a monster at worst.

Police are supposed to behave that way, too. We need them to show restraint, because we give them weapons and the right to tell us to do things we don't want to do. Most police, in most situations, undoubtedly do this, but some don't. When they don't, they're as much of a problem for the rest of us as the criminals they're supposedly protecting us from.

When it's done right, police work is a tough job. It requires far more forbearance than I can manage on my best day. You have to watch and listen patiently as the people you encounter use the same evasions and lies to get out of things they probably shouldn't be doing. You have to keep your temper in check when they don't do the things you are allowed, and in many cases required, to tell them to do. You have to maintain the perspective that if it were you in those situations, you'd probably be doing the same things. You have to do all that without loathing either them or yourself, so you don't become a crazy person or a monster. As study (PDF) after study has shown, many don't manage.

You won't see me jumping up and volunteering to do police work anytime soon.

Caption: Detroit police keeping an eye on all those Negroes who had it coming, back in 1967.

Image credit: Dunno source. Found it here

Still, incidents like the ones I've pointed out never seem to result in any punishment for the people involved. Cops who repeatedly use too much force, like Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, never seem to get more than a slap on the wrist. These guys are a danger to their society, because every time they show up at a potentially hazardous situation, they are just the guys who can turn that hazard into a reality. It happened in Detroit back in 1967, in Brixton last summer, and in countless other places.

Sometimes, force is necessary. Sometimes, it's essential. Using it indiscriminately, however, can lead to far worse consequences. Force applied to people will often engender fear, loathing, anger, and mistrust. What it has never engendered, in my experience, is understanding or respect. Police need to have the wisdom and the patience to use force wisely. When they don't, what we're left with as ordinary citizens is to try to shame other cops and the politicians who supposedly are their bosses into keeping these guys in control, or getting them out of police work altogether.

I think you can expect to see more of these articles in the days ahead.

UPDATE: As Teddy Partridge explains, when force doesn't work there's always lying...

Chris Hedges On The Inevitable

2011-11-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Occupy Together

Chris Hedges, from an editorial at Truthout a couple of days ago, discusses the folks who run our country, and what they no doubt think of the rest of us:

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

There are any number of thoughts that have come to mind reading this article, and these words in particular. One is that after I Don't Believe In Atheists, I've learned not to trust Chris Hedges when he tells me what's on someone else's mind. He certainly doesn't understand atheists. Still, this quote describes my own predispositions concerning the rich, so I suppose I take them more seriously on that account. These folks, the MOTUs if you will, certainly have been feeding us a combination of meaningless pap and outright lies via their news and entertainment empires. They are not ashamed to laugh at all the little people as we're fighting for our futures here. If they don't think the way Hedges describes, then I doubt their thoughts differ in any way besides some trivial detail.

But the more important thing is this - these so-called Masters Of The Universe can't even run their own businesses properly. Europe is about to collapse into a depression, not because it doesn't produce things of economic worth, but because its financiers and politicians (and ours) won't take a temporary loss. They need virtually all of Europe's citizens to lose their pensions, their livelihoods, and their health care in exchange for keeping their fat asses afloat. That's what this has boiled down to, not some unsolvable economic problem.

That's why they will ultimately lose. They have become too soft and weak-minded to even handle their own affairs properly. They have lived so high and so foolishly that they need us to bail them out. All they have left is force, which they have used so early in this campaign that you have to wonder if they have any courage at all. We, on the other hand, learn to live without more every day. Our lives get harder as they get softer. One day, all that wonderful pap on the TV won't be enough.

Hedge's column uses the word "revolution", which means a change so sudden and large that the established authority can't keep up with it. What that amounts to, even if the revolution is a peaceful one, is chaos and uncertainty. They might be interesting times, but they are by not good times. That's what the ancient curse "May you live in interesting times" means to me.

As I've written before, what's coming is something that no sane person should want, but there's a sad inevitability to all this. I don't see the greedy fatheads who run things, or their pet politicians, making any better choices yet, so it looks like things will get a lot uglier before they get better.

If I were you, I'd be getting ready for some chaos about now.

Angry Tent Is Angry

2011-11-17T17:46:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Occupy Oakland haven't lost either their drive nor their sense of humor:

(h/t Affinis at Corrente

Afterword: If you're wondering about the meaning of the title of this article, go here, and check the page title.

Sign The Petition: Make Free Speech For Real People Only

2011-11-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (MA-03) has posted an online petition at his candidate's website:

"It's time for a constitutional amendment that makes it clear Free Speech is for people, not corporations. It's time for a constitutional amendment that lifts up the promise of American self-government: of, for, and by the people."

Corporations Aren't people

Just like the last time I encouraged readers to sign an online petition, I'm not sure what good it will really do. I view these things as more publicity stunt than serious legislative effort. We need to have this conversation, though, and we need to keep this issue in front of Congress until it does something useful.

Occupy Dallas Cleared Out

2011-11-17T00:26:00.000-08:00

In the latest in a wave of operations designed to clear Occupy movements out of the areas they had been occupying, the Dallas police tonight cleared Occupy Dallas from a city park. The Occupy Dallas people had received warnings this was happening, including this one:

The "Occupy Dallas" movement moves in to day 40 today and into court, but will protesters be able to keep their camp behind Dallas City Hall?

Last week, the city demanded they clean up their act or lose their designated place on city property.

Day 40 of Occupy Dallas

Tonight, a final warning was spread via Twitter. One such message came from a reporter for local television station WFAA:

BREAKING: Dallas Police Asst Chief saying #Occupy campers will have chance to get property and leave before sweep in next few mins.

Twitter message from Jason Whitely

That was followed soon by a report from someone identifying himself as @OccupyIntel:

-ALERT DALLAS- Confirmed presence of 10+ mounted patrols, 15+ SWAT, and 75+ in riot gear in parking lot.

Twitter message from OccupyIntel

Soon after, the police moved in. This Twitter message arrived about 11:30 PM PST:

BREAKING: Dallas Police with flashlights going tent to tent at #Occupy camp looking for people. They will be arrested for trespassing.

Twitter message from Jason Whitely

Finally, at about 11:50 PM PST:

And just like that, our City Hall occupation seems to be over. Of course, this is very, very far from over.

Twitter message from OccupyDallasCOS

My guess is that this will avail the Dallas authorities about what it has everywhere else, which is to say that people will simply reorganize and return.

Some Good News For One State

2011-11-16T22:40:00.001-08:00

I figured that someday someone would take on the robo-signers, but if you'd asked me if I thought action would come from this quarter, I'd have said no:

A Nevada grand jury has handed up criminal indictments against two title officers employed by Lender Processing Services Inc. for allegedly directing and supervising a robo-signing scheme, in which documents filed in foreclosure cases were signed without proper legal review, Nevada...

Nevada Grand Jury Indicts Two in Alleged Robo-Signing Scheme

That's all I can read for free.

As you can see, it wasn't the Obama Administration that brought these indictments. No surprise there, I'm afraid. I think every state in the union will bring indictments before Obama and Holder will do anything to piss off the people they work for.

Check Naked Capitalism tomorrow for more details, as Matt Stoller just announced this via Twitter. I suspect either he or someone else who writes there will be yakking about this shortly.

Mario Savio And The Gears Of The Machine

2011-11-16T20:57:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Occupy Together/McMillan/Furlow

The more I discuss and watch the Occupy movements, the more I'm reminded of the last turbulent time in our history, the 1960s. For those who weren't around back then, this was the time when many of the things people take for granted today started. The war in Vietnam was perhaps the biggest concern, but the Civil Rights movement, which was aimed at achieving equality of opportunity for African Americans and other minorities, was also in full swing.

As I wrote after Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential race, when I was a boy there were still many places in America where they would have been debating whether someone like President Obama, a child of a white mother and black father, could use a "whites only" water fountain or not. In most of those same states, his parents' marriage would have been illegal, merely because they were from different "races".

It would have seemed incredible back then that a black man would one day be President.

That change didn't happen because people sat back and waited. It's one of the sad ironies of modern America that our President, the first black man to hold that office, should think so little of the people today who are trying to make their own futures better.

Which brings us to the title of this post. I had not heard of Mario Savio before tonight, but as Rachel Maddow observes, what he said in December, 1964 is timeless. It is as much about today as the 1960s. Back in 2009, Battlestar Galactica used the phrases that Savio made famous almost verbatim in the episode "Occupation". It has become a part of our culture, much as Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech did:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Wikipedia: Mario Savio

That reference is in the first few minutes of this clip, but I think it's worth watching the whole thing if you have the time:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(See NOTE 1)

That's what the Occupy movements are, and will have to be in order to succeed - the bodies that are flung on the gears. Until the people who run things realize that they will not profit from things as they are now, they will not let things change.

Whether we know it or not, that's what people like Mario Savio have taught us.

In the early part of that clip, you'll notice that Savio refers to "a well-meaning liberal", meaning someone who, while he might wish for a more progressive society, wasn't willing to rock the boat to get one. You can see those same types of liberals today, talking about how we can't go too fast, that the Occupy movements are the wrong way to express our ideas, etc. They seem unable to grasp that we've already tried the approved way of changing things, and it didn't work.

What we got was Barack Obama.

Obama was the candidate the rich and powerful approved of. He was a hit with just about every news organization of sufficient size to include television stations. It happened overnight, as I remember now. That was the first sign that things weren't what they appeared. With the Obama Administration coordinating the beatdowns of Occupy movements throughout the country, we can now see things coming full circle - the man who benefited from the changes of the 1960s enough to become President has fully repudiated any notion that what people did back then was of any value.

The wonderful thing about history is how it keeps happening over and over again.

NOTE 1: Since MSNBC provides the video for free, I leave the links here that they provided with the embedded clip code. No endorsement is expressed or implied.

This Land Ain't Your Land

2011-11-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

Don't you just love the sense of entitlement here?

"Karl Rove is the architect of Occupy Iraq, the architect of Occupy Afghanistan!” yelled the demonstrators. Occupy Baltimore had infiltrated the crowd and began chanting against Rove. “Who gave you the right to occupy America?” asked Rove to the protesters, apparently unaware of the Bill of Rights.

Karl Rove Flips Out At Protesters: ‘Who Gave You The Right To Occupy America?’

For my part, I'd love to hear Mr. Rove explain why we don't have the right to occupy the land we were born in. Odds are, most of the protesters were.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-16T17:30:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Occupy Together

Robert Reich hit it on the head yesterday:

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

Occupiers Occupied: The Hijacking of the First Amendment

What does that mean? Note this bit from this article yesterday at examiner.com about Homeland Security's conference call regarding the police actions against the Occupy movements:

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules.

'Occupy' crackdowns coordinated with federal law enforcement officials

So, owning all the sources of information, and blanketing us with nonsense is free speech, but making one's voice heard over that din is not.

As many people suspected yesterday, the raids in several cities were coordinated. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let the cat out of the bag yesterday in an interview with BBC. It was confirmed by the report I quoted above, among other places.

This is how both our local and federal governments have decided to handle the Occupy movements - as a disturbance and a nuisance. As long as they actually are small enough to be a nuisance, that will work.

In the long run, though, I think the situation will make their numbers grow.

Getting UnTwittered Just Got Easier

2011-11-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

Think of it as the Internet's way of saying you need to get a life:

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359

In my case this is mildly annoying, because I need to embed a Twitter feed URL in a post I'm writing for someone. Hopefully, this long international nightmare will be over soon.

Saturday Entertainment: Guess The Movie

2011-11-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

This photo was inspired by a movie. Can you guess which one?

Image credit: StudioArthur

Answer here.

To quote Dr. McCoy: Don't lose yourself in the part.

Profiles In Fierce Advocacy: Sometimes You Have To Make A Decision...

2011-11-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Cosmic Beaver

You know, being a Fierce Advocate can be trying sometimes. People expect you to decide things. In fact, if they're liberals, they always seem to expect you to decide things in a way that isn't terribly easy. Take this for instance:

More than 10,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., last Sunday with a simple goal: Encircle the White House. They succeeded, just weeks after 1,253 people were arrested in a series of protests at the same spot. These thousands, as well as those arrested, were unified in their opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline, intended to run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas. A broad, international coalition against the pipeline has formed since President Barack Obama took office, and now the deadline for its approval or rejection is at hand.

Keystone XL: Ring Around the Rose Garden

Liberals are always on about the environment this, the ecology that, "global warming", blah, blah. You'd think they never had to run a political campaign. If you were a Republican, of course, you could just ignore them. Unfortunately, Fierce Advocates can't be Republicans. It's a rule or something. Anyway, if you're a Democrat, you can insult liberals sometimes, but after a while even the really dumb ones will catch on. So you can't do that too often.

And, you know, they really, really go on about that environment thing.

What's a Fierce Advocate to do?

Well, hey, that's easy! You procrastinate:

Obama said in a statement that he supports delaying a decision.

“Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment, and because a number of concerns have been raised through a public process, we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood,” Obama said. “The final decision should be guided by an open, transparent process that is informed by the best available science and the voices of the American people. At the same time, my administration will build on the unprecedented progress we’ve made towards strengthening our nation’s energy security, from responsibly expanding domestic oil and gas production to nearly doubling the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks, to continued progress in the development of a clean energy economy."

Obama punts Keystone XL pipeline

Put it off until after the election. Genius!

Because, you see, it's a really, really complicated thing. Either we let some foreign company build a leaky pipeline through the Midwest so that a few people can have some low paying jobs for a while, or we don't. Doesn't that sound really, really complicated?

Of course, it plays better when you can say that in your really serious voice, but if you can't manage that, there's always the option of a press release.

Once the election is over, then you can let those nice Canadians build that pipeline with Indian steel using their Japanese heavy equipment, pick up your speaking fee, and move on. After all, there's no rule that says you have to live in the Midwest, right?

I know what you're thinking, there's a catch. What about all those liberals? I mean, you need the silly buggers to vote for you, but they they complain about everything we do!

Now, that's easy.

You see, there are liberals who are smart enough to figure out what's going on. But some of them can be persuaded to go along to get along. Isn't it just great that the economy is so bad? Others, as we've mentioned already, aren't all that bright. So that leaves just a few troublemakers who aren't quite smart enough to be bought, and not quite stupid enough to believe what they're told by those who are. But there aren't that many, really. Just call them mean, old racist poopyheads who want to burn everything down, and no one will listen to them.

After all, even arsonists don't want to be called racists, and I suspect racists don't want to be called arsonists, either. No one likes being called a poopyhead. It's a sure-fire winner of a rhetorical strategy.

So, there you have it. Anything else we can help you with, Mr. President?

No Sooner Do I Slap Down The Republicans...

2011-11-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

Image credit: Mark M./Occupy Together

Just in case you didn't catch on to this the first few times they did it, the Democratic Party's leading lights once again offered to screw the rest of the country so that they wouldn't have to disappoint the people they actually work for. As Jon Walker reports:

The Democrats on the Super Committee, in their efforts to reach an deal with Republicans, have offered a new deficit reduction package and just like their last offer this one also contains cuts to Medicare benefits. From Politico:
...
There was the opportunity for Democrats to go into the 2012 election with a clear and important distinction between themselves and the Republicans. The Republicans have already come out for cutting Medicare benefits so the Democrats could have taken a firm and very popular stance against cutting Americans’ Medicare benefits.

Super Committee Dems Again Offer to Cut Medicare Benefits

Distinction? But, the Republicans are so much scarier. They're going to take away our Social Security and Medicare, and ...

Wait, I'll get back to you.

Afterword/UPDATE: It didn't fit in well with the preceding narrative, but here's yet another reason to go out and boost Democrats in their fight against The Other Guys (tm), courtesy of masaccio at FireDogLake:

Suzi Khimm of the Washington Post asked a “senior administration official” why the White House opposes a financial transactions tax of .03%, and got this absurd response:
We share the goal of wanting a more stable financial system. We share the goal of wanting a more progressive tax system. The only real questions are — what’s the best way to do that?”
What evidence is there for this nonsense? This is the crowd that didn’t have the stomach to stand up for a crystal-clear campaign promise to raise taxes on the rich, which is how we get a “more progressive tax system”. This is the crowd that couldn’t stand up to the Derivatives Emperor, Jamie Dimon, whose balance sheet is now festooned with a notional value of $77 trillion in various types of derivatives.

Obama Won’t Support a Tax on Rich Traders

[links from original]

It boggles the mind that anyone could seriously assert that the Democrats are any less feckless or useless on the issue of the economy these days than Republicans are. They have stood by and let all this happen, even though they clearly had the power to fix it at one time. They chose not to. After their defeat in 2010, they chose to keep the congressional leaders who brought them that defeat.

Could anything be more damning then their refusal to change course, after what happened in 2010, in Ohio and Mississippi yesterday, and in the face of continuing protests all across the country?

I can't imagine that there is, but I think it's quite possible the Democrats will provide an example before 2012 is done. And in the wake of it, many progressives will continue to provide examples of the pathetic rationalizations that have enabled this foolishness up until now.

Quote Of The Day

2011-11-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

It's nice to know that not everyone is obsessed with style over substance. At Policy Shop, David Callahan makes clear that what's wrong the Texas Governor Rick Perry's debate performance last night wasn't a bit of forgetfulness:

Forget the fact that Governor Rick Perry had a "brain freeze" last night when asked at a GOP debate to name the three government departments he wants to ax. We all sometimes forget what we were going to say and one of the worst things about politics today is that people get ridiculed and attacked for being perfectly human.

What actually deserves attention here is the ideological extremism and intellectual laziness of Perry's proposal to kill off the U.S. Departments of Education, Commerce, and Energy. For Perry, the principle of just generally downsizing government is clearly more important than the details, and even if he were faster on his feet last night, you can bet that he would be pressed to explain why these departments should cease to exist and who, exactly, would take over their vital functions.

Point of Perry's Stumble: Hating Government is a Reflex, Not a Plan

Callahan goes on to point out the things that those government departments do, and what we would have to find some other way to do them if they were replaced. My guess is that if someone like Perry were elected, most of the function of those departments would merely be moved into other departments. The Department of Defense would take over at least part of the Department of Energy's function, since there's no way anyone in our government is going to say we can do without nuclear weapons. He might just end up giving them Commerce's job, too. Why not? I can see our new export support policy right now: "Nice trade policy you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

Anyone who thinks that our government couldn't do with a little reorganization hasn't worked with it, I suspect. But simply saying that you're going to eliminate entire departments isn't a way of impressing me.

In Which I Get Punked, Sort Of

2011-11-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

Caption: OK, first you say there's a bone down there, and then ...

Image credit: Screenshot of this heartwarming story of a man and his dog by monty of Dead Air, reformatted by Cujo359.

Yesterday, a commenter named John Myste left a comment at Left Wing Nut Job article "If corporations are people, why aren’t the bastards paying their taxes like the rest of us?":

I am about as liberal as a person can be, but I have a real problem with corporate taxes. It is a justice thing. My opinion is logical, not partisan.

It would be really nice if we could get rid of corporate taxes altogether. I have always thought that, really. However, that would create a tax sheltering problem; but corporate taxation is tyranny.

Corporations are not people, so they should not have to pay taxes. Only people should have to pay taxes. Only people realize earnings. Corporate taxes complicate the paperwork for hard-working business men who are just trying to make it buck, if you know what I mean. If it were not for the generosity of these businessmen, the homeless would not be able to find a job, instead of just choosing not to, and then they would starve instead of eating my corporate taxes.

If corporations are people, why aren’t the bastards paying their taxes like the rest of us? comment by John Myste

It goes on at some length, which might be instructive to read for reasons I'll get to in a moment. Having read it through, I left this comment in reply:

Well, let’s see, divide the universe into two classes of objects, persons and non-persons, the latter class of which all are alike in some mysterious way, and then extend the 14th Amendment to cover taxing people at different rates, then, gosh, we just have to agree that corporations are people, too. Add in a little dash of “the poor don’t pay taxes”, plus a “you’re just really, really stupid if you don’t see things this way”, and you have some real crank comedic gold here.

If corporations are people, why aren’t the bastards paying their taxes like the rest of us? comment by Cujo359

To which came this reply:

You make me feel rebutted. I recant my entire corporate argument.

If corporations are people, why aren’t the bastards paying their taxes like the rest of us? comment by John Myste

When it comes to social interaction, I'm one of the dimmest bulbs who can still manage to have acquaintances who are living human beings. Even so, it was pretty clear I was being mocked, I just wasn't sure how.

Go read the rest of that comment thread to find out why.

It seems to be tougher than ever discern the difference between parody and real political discourse these days. If there's a moral to this story, pointing out the flaws in an argument, rather than just calling names and being done with it, can be instructive either way.

Oh, and watch out if a commenter named "John Myste" leaves something in your comment thread.

Afterword: Also noted in the thread that Dusty had to take one of her feline friends on one last trip to the vet today. My condolences. I've taken that trip twice now, and I don't think it will get any easier no matter how many more times I do it.

Maybe this will cheer you up a little. Mike Tyson playing Herman Cain - is that typecasting?

El Hierro Volcano Live (More Or Less)

2011-11-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

Updated Nov. 12. See UPDATE 2. Expat was kind enough to send along a new webcam link in comments.

Updated Nov. 10. See UPDATE at the bottom of the page. It turns out that this really is a still image, not a live webcam. Maybe "tomorrow".

Another little wonder of the modern age, the La Restinga webcam on El Hierro Island near the volcanic disturbance there, demonstrates what's possible with an Internet connection and a little technology. Here's a vista of the village, with the boundary between the volcanic debris and the more-or-less clear ocean waters clearly visible:

Image credit: Screenshots of La Restinga webcam by Cujo359

There is a Google Maps insert that shows where the camera is pointed at any time:

I'm not sure how live this image is. It's about 2PM here in the Pacific time zone as I'm capturing these images. Presumably, it should be dark in the Canary Islands right now.

Still, in view of the Internet connectivity issues the webcam was having earlier, I'd suggest that if you don't have a good reason to monitor the situation you ought to just have a look, and then close the page. That way, someone else gets to enjoy the view.

(h/t Dana Hunter for pointing this out.)

UPDATE (Nov. 10): I grew even more suspicious that this was a stored image when I went to the webcam site this morning and saw the same image, right down to the same clouds being in the same places. Expat provides a quote from Earthquake Report's live blog of the volcano:

"Update 10/11 – 13:49 UTC:

- Some of our readers have just asked us to make it clear that the HD-Webcam @ La Restinga (http://www.ilovesantacruz.es/newweb/camara-web-situada-en-la-restinga/2011/11/) shows only a still panorama picture. Like we said already in our 13:42 update, El Hierro authorities are missing a great chance to promote the island. The webcam was promised to be functioning today, but … it remains a promise only. J… did her best to get it done, but she is more used to the “tomorrow” promise on this otherwise so peaceful island."

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

The link at the bottom of the quote is probably the best place to go for up to the minute news on the volcano. Since there are two people on site, there won't always be reports at any given time, but they seem to be as current as it gets, given that this is a small island with small population.

If you watch the static picture at that webcam site, though, you'll notice that the webcam has its own little solar power supply. It's clearly equipped to power itself. I suspect that what they need to do is set up communications between the camera and the nearest Internet service point, which may not be the nearby village.

The ideal setup would be a direct link from the camera to a computer that's in a safe location. The computer would store the images, and make sure that they were mirrored in enough places to handle the traffic.

Setting all that up would take a bit of time, but other than the onsite requirements of communications and possibly a computer, it's all in place already.

This would explain the delay in getting things operational. I'm sure it's not the only possible explanation, but it's one of them.

UPDATE 2 (Nov. 12): That webcam link still has a static image on it that is now at least three days old.

Expant sent along a comment with a new webcam link. That one appeared to be live yesterday. I haven't checked it yet this morning. I won't be able to update anymore, but since people are still arriving here looking for a webcam link, I thought I'd at least try to be helpful.

UPDATE 3: Just checked - the new webcam link still looks to be live. It's night right now in the Canary Islands, so it's hard to tell how good the images are.

At least this webcam page is getting that right. If you want to see what that area looks like on a nice sunny day, check the original webcam

Progressive Versus Conservative Economics

2011-11-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

Economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took a moment to belabor the obvious yesterday in his blog:

Let me start with a puzzle: why did faith in the wonders of financial deregulation persist so long?

After all, if you step back from the record, deregulation began producing disasters from early on. Early deregulatory moves helped bring on the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s; Garn-St. Germain produced the savings and loan debacle; freed-up capital flows produced the Asian crisis and LTCM; and now we have the great bust. So why were Very Serious People so convinced that it was a good thing?
...
these are pure fantasies on the part of the right. The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

Boom For Whom

Obvious, because in fact I've mentioned it myself once or twice. When you consider that most of the people who package and recite today's television news are included in the red bars, it's all the more reason to understand that we've been sold a bill of goods. Our economic growth since Reagan has averaged less than it did in the preceding years since the end of World War II, as the calculator at Measuring Worth helpfully shows in table form:

US
1945 to 1979
1980 to 2010
Real GDP 3.19% 2.73%
Real GDP per capita 1.76% 1.68%

See NOTE 1

US	1945 to 1979	1980 to 2010
Real GDP	3.19%	2.73%
Real GDP per capita	1.76%	1.68%

Not only has the general growth of the U.S. economy been slower since the conservatives took over, but, as both Krugman's chart and a whole host of other charts have shown, the income distribution has been far worse for the vast majority of Americans as well.

Why did I pick those particular periods? They roughly represent the times when first progressives, and then conservatives were in charge of the American economy. There were good times within both periods, as well as bad. We've conducted a seventy year-long experiment in the power of these two differing economic philosophies. To conclude that the conservatives did better requires a lot of mental contortions that I'd just as soon avoid.

NOTE 1: I created this chart by putting those parameters into Measuring Worth's handy annualized growth calculator page. Then I just copied and pasted the HTML source for the resulting table.

Here is the suggested credit note from that site:

Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson
"Annualized Growth Rate and Graphs of Various Historical Economic Series," MeasuringWorth, 2011.

URL: www.measuringworth.com/growth

And The Votes Are In

2011-11-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

There are a couple of bits of good news from today's elections. This election was almost entirely state and local races. While there may be other news with more than local implications, these two jumped out at me thanks to Taylor Marsh.

First, in Ohio, SB-5, the regressive law that was meant to break the public employee unions in the state, has been repealed by a substantial majority:

Unions hung a humbling defeat on Kasich, who has fast become his party’s poster boy for conservative overreach, by rolling back Senate Bill 5, a new collective bargaining law that bars public sector strikes, curtails bargaining rights for 360,000 public employees and scraps binding arbitration of management-labor disputes.

Ohio Senate Bill 5's repeal buoys Dems

This was an important victory for the public employee unions, and arguably could reverse the trend of decreased union power in politics. I think the latter will only happen if the unions learn that they must treat Democrats as potential allies, rather than as trusted friends. Unqualified support for Democrats got them where they are today, which is screwed just about every time an issue important to the unions comes up.

Still, it's a hopeful sign. Democrats thinking this is good for them need to think again - while there was an alliance between Democrats and unions at the state level, the national Democrats stayed strictly out of it. They aren't any more friendly to unions than Republicans these days.

The second bit of good news is that the Mississippi referendum to make zygotes into people has failed:

Mississippi would have become the first state to define a fertilized egg as a person, a measure which was aimed at outlawing abortion in the state but, opponents contended, would have led to all kinds of unintended consequences.

In the end, those concerns won out in a strongly anti-abortion state. The amendment trailed 59 percent to 41 percent with more than half of precincts reporting. The Associated Press has said it will fail.

Anti-abortion ‘personhood’ amendment fails in Mississippi

What's interesting is this paragraph from Aaron Blake's report:

The measure earned the support of both Republicans and Democrats in Mississippi — including both of the major parties’ nominees for governor — but some of them hesitated to support it, including outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour (R).

Anti-abortion ‘personhood’ amendment fails in Mississippi

Democrats haven't been doing jack to help women at the national level, and at least in Mississippi it appears that local Democrats want to emulate that record. One of the leading Democratic candidates in Mississippi, the nominee for governor, supported this travesty, and the outgoing Republican governor had problems with it.

Yet it will go down to defeat by a wide margin, in one of the most conservative states in the country.

Tell me again why they're worse than Republicans?

I'll vote for Democrats who actually fight for and represent progressive values. Those who don't can count on my voting for someone else. I'm not voting for the lesser of two evils any longer.

What people should take from this is that doing anything else just ends up as more of the same.

It's The Same All Over

2011-11-08T21:47:00.000-08:00

Caption: A 250 meter-resolution image of the El Hierro undersea eruptions taken by NASA's MODIS satellite on Nov. 6, 2011.

Image credit: NASA/MODIS

Not much to report that I can see regarding the El Hierro event that is still, thankfully, not a full-blown volcanic eruption. I did find this little gem, though, in the live blog from Earthquake Report:

Update 08/11 – 21:20 UTC - The La Restinga Webcam story (continued) :

Joke Volta has called this evening Mr. Atilano, the webcam owner and got a totally different story than the person who “tweeted” that the President of El Hierro prohibited the use of the webcam.

Mr. Atilano said (unfortunately too late) that the president story was total nonsense. A typical rumor who starts to live his own live and was probably a setup by political opponents of Alpidio Armas.

He said the real reason is simply TOO MUCH VISITORS. In only 1 hour the webcam had more than 350000 visitors! Mr. Atilano said that they are working on a solution. A stronger server and more traffic capacity may solve the problem tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

It had been reported, via Twitter naturally, that the Spanish government was trying to keep a lid on this so that tourists wouldn't be scared to visit the Canary Islands. The actual explanation was a good deal more prosaic - what was an Internet connection mostly used by a few scientists and hobbyists was suddenly inundated with connection requests, and it stopped working. That, of course, didn't stop people from spreading a story that fit with their own prejudices and/or self interest.

Which, I think, just goes to show that politicians can be opportunistic little assholes just about anywhere, and people can be credulous morons when someone tells them something they're inclined to believe.

Another Good Reason To Stop Watching Television

2011-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

If you remember fondly those days of yore when the Emergency Broadcast System was tested back during the Cold War, your government has heard you:

The national Emergency Alert System is an alert and warning system that can be activated by the President, if needed, to provide information to the American public during emergencies. NOAA’s National Weather Service, governors, and state and local emergency authorities also use parts of the system to issue more localized emergency alerts. The test is an important exercise in ensuring that the system is effective in communicating critical information to the public in the event of a real national emergency. It is a critical communications tool that can provide alerts, warning and information rapidly across multiple television and radio platforms.

Our top priority is to make sure that all members of the public know that this test is coming up – and that it is just a test. For most of us, this test will look and sound very similar to the local tests of the Emergency Alert System that we often see on TV or hear on the radio.

Help Us Spread the Word – On November 9, “This is Just a Test”

At about 2PM EST Wednesday, November 9, our televisions and radios will stop doing whatever they were doing, and do something else. What will it look and sound like if it's working correctly? Well, I'm not sure, and that's not because I neglected to read the description:

What will people hear and see during the test?

On November 9, the public will hear a message indicating that “This is a test.” The audio message will be the same for both radio and television. However, the image on the screen and the text/crawl at the top of television screen may not be the same for all viewers. When the EAS test is over, regular programming will resume.

Announcing First Nationwide EAS Test

There you are then. You've been warned. Now carry on.

Profiles In Fierce Advocacy: Sometimes The Mikes Are On When You're Saying What You Think

2011-11-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

Caption: A wireless microphone and a small office/home router - everything you need to get someone else's careless mutterings on the Internet.

Image credit: Wesley Fryer

Oh my. Just saw this at Al Jazeera:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, a "liar" in a conversation with his US counterpart, Barack Obama, accidentally broadcast to journalists at last week's G20 summit in the French resort of Cannes.

"I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar," Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on.

Reporters in a separate location listened in to a simultaneous translation as Obama responded, according to a French interpreter: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you."

France's Sarkozy called Netanyahu 'a liar'

Yet President Fierce Advocate seems to bend to Netanyahu's will whenever there's a conflict between our interests and those of Netanyahu and his band of thieving warmongers. I'd have written "Israel's interests", but I really don't think that's the case. The best thing for Israel right now would be to be persuaded to make peace with its neighbors, and learn to cooperate with them rather than shell them.

Politicians will eventually learn to never say anything they're actually thinking when there are microphones in evidence that they can't control. That will be a sad day, because then we'll have fewer ways of showing just what hypocrites they are.

Interesting and Disturbing Happenings In The Canary Islands

2011-11-07T23:18:00.000-08:00

Caption The north side of El Hierro Island in the Canary chain, about a year ago.

Image credit: Mataparda/Flickr

Unbeknown to me, it would seem there's been a very interesting volcanic eruption going on in the Canary Islands, as the U.K. Guardian reports:

Homes have been evacuated and roads closed on the southern-most Canary Island following a government-issued warning about a possible volcanic eruption.

The southern tip of El Hierro was shaken by a 4.3-magnitude quake late on Saturday as an underwater volcano just off the coast started spewing matter some 60ft into the air.

The island, which has 500 volcanic cones, has experienced more than 10,000 tremors in the past four months.

Renewed fears of an eruption came as vast quantities of magma - the molten rock from just under the earth's crust - began bubbling into the sea off the port of La Restinga.

Ready to blow? Homes evacuated on Canary Island as underwater volcano spews molten rock 60ft into the air

The Associated Press reports that some of the debris has been accompanied by a foul smell. There are some folks in the area live blogging for Earthquake Report, and this is how they describe it:

Update 06/11 – 21:34 UTC :

Raymond is still at his (safe) viewpoint position and says that he is smelling a faint sulfurous odor. He isn’t seeing the Jacuzzi in the dark, but he hopes to see the red glow of the magma later at night as he sees that the harmonic tremor is still saturated and as the earthquake activity has increased again.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

That's not the worst news when it comes to gases, though:

Update 06/11 – 21:57 UTC :

PEVOLCA confirms a further increase in carbon dioxide emissions in El Hierro (see also Patrick Allard comment just below). The emission of CO2 is one of the parameters of a volcanic eruption precursors but has to be assessed jointly with others, such as deformation and seismicity depth

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

The news on the seismicity depth front isn't looking terribly good. There was this a little later:

Update 07/11 – 09:28 UTC :

- Reader Marco Schaapherder just told us that we might not have seen a shift in earthquake depth since midnight. He was right! Magma may have found his way up a few more km, as the focal depths are getting up to 14 km now.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

Which I take to mean that magma is getting closer to the surface. That's probably why people are being evacuated.

Let me just stress that even the experts seem to be unsure what all this means, and I'm not even close to being an expert. This is why everyone is jumpy in that part of the world right now, though.

Dana Hunter passed on via e-mail that this might end up being what's called a Surtseyan eruption, which is the name used to describe an eruption that happens in shallow water. Since the activity noted so far has been occurring out at sea, that seems like a reasonable expectation. That probably would be better than having some eruption on land. As the quote from the Guardian mentioned, El Hierro is riddled with volcanic cones, so you'd have to think that an eruption on dry land is at least a possibility.

For those of us who aren't in harm's way, there are some other interesting tidbits, in the form of rocks like this one:

Image credit: NHArq

According to the caption at the Image credit link, it floats. It's probably pumice, with some rhyolite embedded in it (the silvery crystals). I've never seen anything quite like it before.

Geoscience Professor Erik Klemetti, a columnist at Wired, comments:

There are also some new images of the floating pyroclastic chunks that have been coughed up during this eruption – and they continue to look as strange as they sound (see below) with a mixture of light rhyolite/phonolite that is highly vesicular (filled with bubbles) and dark basalt/basanite (that is also full of bubbles). There is an unsubstantiated report of a “big rock” being ejected from the eruption, but no image (or size) so far.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

At the moment, the harmonic tremors are subsiding a bit, but that isn't necessarily a good sign. Hopefully, this will turn out to be something other than a full-blown eruption, and everyone who has had to evacuate can go back to their homes soon.

(h/t to Expat, who e-mailed me a link to the Earthquake Report live blog.)

UPDATE: It looks like maybe the harmonic tremors haven't subsided after all. The problem may be that the seismic chart the Earthquake Report bloggers were using isn't quite as reliable as it could be:

Update 08/11 – 08:32 UTC :

IGN and Graphics rescaling
Caption: (by Cujo359) This is the chart this quote refers to. Note that about midway the blue strip chart seems to change. To the left its peak values are clearly off the scale, and past the center line to the right they are visible. That's what they mean by rescaling.

- When discussing the activity with Raymond during the night, he hard a hard time believing that the harmonic tremor decreased seriously (see update 07/11 – 23:59).
- He did not detect any serious change while i reported this (of course it was dark and he was reflecting the explosion vibrations he felt)
- I was unable to confirm him that it was a real decrease because the graphics we use are coming from the IGN website and IGN NEVER REPORTS RESCALING the graph. Most of the time it can be seen by white spaces or blue lines in the seismograms and harmonic tremor graphs, but at the time of reporting no visible change was detected. Since midnight it is obvious that the scale was adapted a number of times. We request @ IGN that they will indicate the rescaling actions in a separate log.

El Hierro Volcano (Canary Islands)

I use the word "reliable" advisedly here. When a graph is suddenly rescaled like this with no notation to indicate this has been done, it's easy to misinterpret. If you can't be sure what you're looking at, that makes the interpretation of that data unreliable.

To make a long story short, it appears there has been no real change in harmonic tremors in the last day or so. So maybe they don't need to be quite so jittery as they were a couple of hours ago.

How Many More Generals Must Go?

2011-11-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

Caption: Major General Peter Fuller in happier days, designing new helmets for the Army.

Image credit: U.S. Army

I missed this development Friday, and as James Ala notes, that is probably by design:

US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk:

Major General Peter Fuller, a top US commander in Afghanistan, has been relieved of his duties after criticising the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
Not only is Afghanistan the graveyard of Empires; it is fast becoming the graveyard of loose-lipped generals. First General McChrystal, now Major General Fuller have died from foot-in-mouth disease. There is something very wrong with this mission to make two flag officers go off the deep end.
...
Sidebar: This was a very nasty dirty deed done dirt cheep; real graveyard stuff. It popped up on the google machine around 21:30 Pacific Daylight Time on a Friday[.]

US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk

The military, even ours, is anything but a democratic institution. There are good reasons for that. As we learned in the McChrystal fiasco, any officer who publicly criticizes a policy he's in the act of implementing is likely to have his career come to a resounding halt. Major General Fuller must have known this when he said what he did to Politico.

Our Afghanistan policy has been wrongheaded for a long time. It has only gotten worse since President Obama took over. There is no point in applying more force to the situation. The Afghan people are going to have to sort this out on their own. They probably never trusted us, and after ten years of bloodshed, they certainly don't now.

In the interest of not letting this one go quietly in the night, I pass it along...

Afterword: While I worked in the defense industry for a long time, I never worked with or for Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier, MGEN Fuller's previous post, nor have I met him.

UPDATE: Corrected the link for James Ala's article. It had originally pointed to the Guardian article that James was quoting.