LYSISTRATA REVISITED

LYSISTRATA: We're going to save you, my good man.

MAGISTRATE: But if I don't want to be saved?

LYSISTRATA: Why, all the more reason!!

The feud inside Kenya’s fragile coalition government has taken an ominous turn as women’s groups have threatened a weeklong sex strike to force the president and prime minister to end their impasse. According to Rukia Subow, chairwoman of the organizers, sex is the great equalizer:

"We have looked at all issues which can bring people to talk and we have seen that sex is the answer," Subow said. "It does not know tribe, it does not have a (political) party and it happens in the lowest households."

As expected, the men disagree. Here is how Kenyan legislator, David Musila, characterizes the strike:

"It is a shame that these women can make such a statement.  First of all, in my view, it is un-African [my bold], and these are some of the things in Africa we don't talk openly about, sex in front of children, and so on.  And therefore, I think they are misguided and in any case, who is going to supervise and see that the boycott is implemented?  It is just rubbish," Musila said.

The women, of course, have covered their bases.  The group intends to pay prostitutes to cease work and join the strike.

Asses of Evil

"They understand I’m not like no politician they have looked at, ever."

I'm not so sure, but I am sure that if Neal Horsley were running as a Democrat, the blowhards would be in ecstasy and the blogs would be brimming over with hilarity enough to last for years and years of giggling.

Horsley, after all, admits to having had sex with a mule.

“You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually”

says the Georgia Creator's Rights Party gubernatorial candidate. That's the TCRP or T-Crap for short. Of course Neal is all grown up now and that's why his family hates him and he's almost killed his son and he publishes the names of doctors who perform abortions and crosses them off as they are murdered and is willing to start another civil war so that Georgia can secede and overturn Roe Vs. Wade even if it costs the life of his child - or yours.

Is this what's left at the bottom of the barrel the GOP has drank from all these years or is this just a Georgia thang?

“I contend this is really about people’s ability to believe in God. When it comes to that place, when your’re talking about God’s plan to protect himself, then the lives of people become, really, almost irrelevant… in the degree that they result in Him being glorified. That’s the nature of the truth”

says the very Christian Horsley. That's the nature of a scared, vulnerable and weak God who needs to protect himself no matter who gets killed in the process. Glory is important, people are irrelevant and if you don't believe in Horsley's God, then you're irrelevant.

I suspect Neal isn't the sole bat in the Religious Right's belfry. I suspect Sarah Palin is just as bonkers but more reluctant to open her personal can of batshit gumbo to a public viewing.

To be sure Horsely is a long-shot candidate even in the Bible Belt, but with careful handling and sufficient rabble-rousing, there is no reason he can't go far. Just how far he does go will be interesting to observe as a measure of the post-Obama fundamentalist world that continues to lower the bar in their desperate game of Limbo.

WHEN TROLLS ATTACK!

Our own (O)CT(O)PUS has brought this subject to light here at the Swash Zone as well as posting in the comments of several other blogs. There is a long, heated comment thread over at Pam’s place The Oracular Opinion but I can’t figure out how to post there so I thought I’d just weigh in on the subject as a post – just because I can.

Some commenters missed the point and went on to attack others. Some commenters took other comments to be a personal attack and some commenters are just trolls, stirring the pot and wreaking further havoc.

There are blogs I simply don’t bother with anymore because the comment section has become a playground for infantile bullies, hiding in the dark in their computer rooms, gleefully typing profane and disturbing comments/threats/insults.

But the larger question remains; are some of these trolls dangerous and should we be taking their threats more seriously?

I, for one, have no problem with someone using their blog to engage trolls and do whatever they want at their place. I understand that some people view trolls as harmless gnats. If I am uncomfortable or disgusted, I’ll exercise my right to not visit.

But 8pus has a very credible point in suggesting that not all trolls are benign. And he has cited some recent examples, including the woman who so viciously attacked the girl on MYSPACE, she committed suicide. And when I saw this woman being arrested I was horrified at her lack of repentance. It seems she believes she bears no responsibility for what happened! This is not a benign troll but a sick, sick individual.

Yes, in our internet anonymity we can bring forth our alter egos and to coin an old phrase, “let it all hang out” but should we not remain responsible for our words and deeds? In this Information Age, internet stalkers can be potentially very dangerous and any escalation on their part should be taken very seriously.

So while I respect the rights of others to operate their blogs as they see fit, I do hope that visitors will respect our comment policy. I think most of us are capable of recognizing the difference between heated debate with the occasional snarky comment as opposed to outright trollish diatribe.

The final word here goes to (O)CT(O)PUS:

“The Internet is an amazing tool for research and idea exchange, but there are always folks who abuse a good thing … who use it to harass, humiliate, stalk, and victimize other bloggers as if the Internet were a giant phantasmagoria for self-amusement by masochists and sadists … or a medium for narcissists and character disturbed folks who do not know how to manage their anger.”

Waiting for Ann

Oh goody! The Republicans on the Supreme court have handed down another victory to the Republicans here on Earth who think we need to punish people who say "indecent" things like "shit" and yet want to "move on" when it comes to punishing people for lesser indecencies like torturing suspects to death.

Now any minute now, Ann Coulter will be calling for these "activist judges" to be poisoned, won't she? After all, if it's Communism (or Fascism on alternate Tuesdays) to let a 3% tax cut expire and Fascist censorship to restore the Fairness Doctrine, how bad must it be to allow Federal censorship over broadcast TV? Any minute now, I'm sure. Ann and Godot -- any time now.

Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania

Extra - Extra

"Sources" are talking again and they assure us that Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania will leave the Republican Party and become a Democrat. That's good news in terms of giving the Democrats a filibuster proof majority, assuming that Al Franken gets seated before his term runs out.

Bombs or Buicks?

My hypocrisy detector burned out on overload ages ago, so I can't really tell whether the idea that preserving jobs at GM and Chrysler is an outrageous example of Democratic overspending while eliminating a smaller number of jobs producing weapons systems designed for all-out war with the Soviet Union is an equal and opposite outrage -- even though the overall military budget will increase by $20 billion and even though the plan to halt production of the F-22 super fighter and the C-17 cargo carrier come from George Bush's former secretary of Defense.

It's getting harder to be partisan when the perceived difference between spending and cutting, big and small government no longer relates to the actual budget -- unless, of course, you just cover your eyes and ears and pick a side.

Of course there's a difference between pouring money into consumer products, the use and maintenance of which creates further jobs and into products that create shock and awe and a lot of debris, but if there's any discussion of that, the noise of the turf wars between the military and private sectors may be drowning it out.

The defense industry is trying to hang on to its share of the gravy train, says The Washington Post today.

"Why, they ask, would President Obama push hundreds of billions in stimulus spending to create jobs only to propose weapons cuts that would eliminate tens of thousands of them?"

Maybe because building more jets not only takes money away from systems we need more of, like armored vehicles and armored soldiers, but because every Chevy built supports not manufacturers of the car; of tires and batteries and spark plugs and glass and paint and steel : it supports not only dealers, mechanics, salesmen, gas stations and all the businesses drivers patronize, but it supports every business that needs to transport people and goods and that means virtually all of them. More money travels more places, through more hands and at a higher velocity and that's exactly what we need to save our sabotaged economy.

But that's just my opinion which hardly counts because I can only vote and I only have one voice to complain with and I don't have the $175 million or so the defense industry spends on contributions and lobbying. I don't have Rupert Murdoch's billions behind me or a huge, underground staff of spammers and swift-boaters and seditious talk radio gasbags hoping to profit from further chaos and collapse.

Am I wrong to expect nothing but the worst?

Is it just me...

...or is holding a politically partisan and divisive protest in DC on the the weekend of 9/11 a really bad idea?

09.12.09 National Taxpayer Protest | The Tea Party Movement Goes to Capitol Hill

Those involved in planning and promoting this--and everyone who attends--should be ashamed of themselves for exploiting the memories of those who were affected by the 9/11 attacks, for partisan gain.

Navy Seals in the sea of slander

I didn't have a chance to write about it last week. I've been out of town, but even before the rare glow from the successful recapture of the Maersk Alabama and the astonishing rescue of her captain had a chance to wear off by itself, the letter appeared in my in-box. It was signed by Admiral Lou Sarosdy saying that he had it on good authority from Navy SEALS that the rescue had been delayed, and almost didn't occur at all because of the dithering and interference from that weak, incompetent, Nancy-boy in the White House. It had been forwarded to me from someone who does a lot of this sort of thing and believes each and every screed that lights up his screen. He appended a tirade about the weakness of Presidents and about how we need Teddy Roosevelt back again, perhaps to start another war to sell newspapers.

I had my suspicions, as constantly referring to the pirates as "raggies" stinks as though it were intended for the bottom of the barrel audience, so I wrote to Snopes.com, who at that point had nothing on it. After a couple of days research on their part, It turns out that Sorosdy retired 27 years ago, denies having said anything like it and insists he doesn't even know any Navy Seals. Wouldn't you know it, I soon got another copy which now assures me that it came :

"From a Marine that lives just outside Coronado where the Seals train. He uses the Coronado Officers’ club."

Seamlessly we segue from the Admiral to some guy in a bar who heard it from some other guy who heard it from a Navy SEAL.

"Having spoken to some SEAL pals yesterday and asking why this thing dragged out for 4 days, I got the following:

1. BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation."

I'll spare you the rest because of course it's a lie and probably was constructed in the same basement chamber of horrors where most of the Republican propaganda of the last decade was sewn together like Frankenstein's monster. All reputable sources deny all the claims, of course, but I'm sure the bulk of the recipients will still go on and on about "weakness" and how we need exuberant and gratuitous aggression against all "raggies" just like good old Teddy would do.

It never ends and it never fails to find a sympathetic audience. Walking through a hotel lobby this weekend, I glimpsed Fox News on a giant screen, "Obama is increasing the size of the Federal Government" crawled across the bottom. Later, in the car, John McCain told us that there was an element of political revenge involved in prosecuting torturers. It never ends and if firefighters were Democrats, Fox would tell us every day how much private property had been ruined by pouring water on it while extolling the virtues of smaller fire departments, with smaller hoses filled with less water under lower pressure. While we're at it, let's privatize it and give the contract to Halliburton.

Hey, did I tell you about the e-mail I got from Jesus saying he's not coming back until we waterboard everyone at Fox News?

THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION

I have long been interested in epidemiology and tend to follow disease epidemics as they unfold. For other Stephen King readers out there, the new flu epidemic affecting Mexico and the southwestern US will be eerily reminiscent of “Captain Trips” from The Stand.

So, a unique strain of swine flu that combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans has killed dozens and sickened thousands in Mexico causing the government to close schools, museums and other public buildings.

"We are very, very concerned," World Health Organization spokesman Thomas Abraham said. "We have what appears to be a novel virus and it has spread from human to human ... It's all hands on deck at the moment."
It might already be too late to contain the outbreak, a prominent U.S. pandemic flu expert said late Friday.
"Given how quickly flu can spread around the globe, if these are the first signs of a pandemic, then there are probably cases incubating around the world already", said Dr. Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota.

So far eight people in the US have also caught this flu but no one here has died. The disturbing aspect of this flu is that those who have died have been young people and adults. One of the problems with the flu is that each year a new strain travels the globe causing worldwide pandemics. Whether these outbreaks are large and devastating or less significant usually depends on what type of flu people have been exposed to in the past.

The more virulent strains seem to be swine flus. As a young woman of 21, I nearly died from a strain of swine flu that originated in Asia. I had been quite healthy prior to my illness but ended up out of work for four months. I had a year old baby at the time and my mother and mother-in-law (neither of whom got the flu) took turns caring for him.

CDC officials described the virus as having a unique combination of gene segments not seen before in people or pigs. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia. It may be completely new, or it may have been around for a while and was only detected now through improved testing and surveillance, CDC officials said.

The most devastating flu epidemic in modern times was the pandemic of 1918-1919. In the two years that this flu ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected and it was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It has long been suspected that this “Spanish flu” was a strain of swine flu.

The news story can be found HERE. And if anyone is interested, you can visit your local library for the books “The Hot Zone” and “The Coming Plague.”

While many focus their fears on things like missles and terrorists, what if the real threat to is not even visible to the naked eye?

Tough guy Ed Rollins

Well what can we expect Ed Rollins to say when he tries to make a case for Barak Obama's weakness? After all Rollins can't make much of a case for anything but "toughness" in the Reagan administration he worked for or indeed the party he's long been part of. Not that he will get specific about Reagans testicularity, because if a Democrat had "cut and run" in Lebanon, Ed would still be howling about his effeminate weakness. But one can't take Ed for anything but a low key polemicist, an Ann Coulter without the filed teeth, a Lower fat Limbaugh with less gas content. It's all theater; all a continuing part of the fear mongering the humiliated GOP has been using to make us feel good about giving up freedom and prosperity and distract us from the abject failure of all its promises.

So Barak Obama wants to be loved, says Mr. Rollins. Horrors!

"He wants to be loved passionately and daily"

he writes for CNN.com as though he could know. As though he learned of the presidents innermost dreams through pillow talk: as though he weren't building yet another straw man, stuffed with pot-pourri and dressed in lace panties.

"He wants to be loved by the Democrats on the Hill and even the Republicans who have still not given him any love." (despite many having voted for him)

"He wants to be loved by the Europeans who have made a career out of badmouthing U.S. presidents and their policies."

which is Ed's way of placing the blame for calling them all Terrorist supporters of the Axis of Evil because they didn't agree about our false assurances about Iraq on them rather than on George Bush's glaring weakness of character.

"The real example of searching for love in all the wrong places was last week's lovefest south of the border when, in effect, he appeared to be hugging Castro, Ortega and Chavez who have spent their lives fighting everything the United States stands for."

continues the puffed up patriot, twirling his baton, wacing his flag, wishing you could believe that George Bush's Chavez handshake was fundamentally different than Obama's Chavez handshake which, to a prejudiced eye appeared to be a "love fest" and that these banana republic leaders were, by dint of socialistic ambitions "fighting against everything the United States Stands for." The very nerve of showing basic respect instead of making threats! The very weakness of decency and dignity!

Perhaps they do fight against some of the things we stand for, in their own countries, Like Ronald Reagan's death Squads and the fuedalism of foreign corporations, but as a threat to the security and way of life of our republic, they can't do the kind of damage that's been done by Rollins' party, nor are all the things we've been standing for, like torture, military aggression, supression of dissent and bombing the bejusus out of innocent civilians, all that worth defending. I hate to mention it, but Jesus lost his life fighting against many things we've wasted time standing for, nor did he think love was such a terrible and weak thing.

Still Obama should court respect, says Ed, meaning fear. He should just spit on these spic bastards and tell them in no uncertain terms just how many bombs we could drop on their miserable citizens just for voting against our wishes, like we did in Veet-nam. Fear is what we want, not love: grovelling, abject submission to the will of the American President, through fear.

Now of course appealing to the basest sentiments of the public with slander and libel and a smorgasbord of false accusations as the Republicans have done, is really all about wanting to be loved; only it's more pure by virtue of its dishonesty and hostility.

Consider the torture memos. Obama was weak fo releasing them: weak for allowing the Justice Department to decide who to go after and sorst of all, he looks weak, says Ed, to both the people who wanted to hide the information and the people who are our for Republican blood.
Weak if he does, weak if he doesn't. In fact the courage to ignore the passion of either mob must be weakness, right?

"Weakness is the death knell for a president. With 1,366 days to go before this term is up, Obama's got to get tougher or he will be viewed as a personality who reads well from a teleprompter."

So Ed is already partying like it's 2012 and he's trotting out that shibboleth about telepromters to prove his comfort with the most childish and idiotic of his party's giggling points. Pretty weak Ed, I'm sorry to have to say it.

But that's what America liked about Kommander Guy Bush and Reagan - toughness - reading tough words written for him by arm chair belligerants like Ed. I just wish someone would define the concept well enough to differentiate it from pandering, from intransigence, stupidity, dishonesty, unwillingness to learn -- even to make peace.

I just wish politicians like Ed Rollins could explain to me why it's wrong to expose atrocities rather than be grateful to the perpetrators who have allowed us 1200 some odd days of not being attacked by a dozen or so saboteurs -- and why being so pants-wetting fearful justifies taking our freedom, respect, dignity and prosperity away while he whimpers about Obama being weak.

Dishonesty is strength

Dick Cheney is a man of short declarative sentences. He packs a lot of venom and a lot of mendacity into each one.

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which he’s gone to Europe and seemed to apologize profusely, been to Mexico and seemed to apologize there,” said Cheney to Raw Story's David Edwards. “The world out there, both our friends and foes, will be quick to take advantage of that… I don’t think we’ve got much to apologize for."

"Seemed to" shouldn't slip past the reader unnoticed, since it's an attempt to elevate a convenient assumption to the point where his baseless argument can pivot on it. To be equally as curt and declarative: Cheney lies. It didn't seem so to me or to those who listened to all the words, rather than the tendentious extracts wrapped in tactical opinion we got from Republican sources.

It doesn't seem beyond the pale to recognize that swaggering "kiss my ass you dirty wogs -- I'm AMERICA" foreign policy that has been the joy of the thundering classes who see the world as ungrateful and arrogant for wanting some measure of independence. It doesn't seem like an unqualified, abject and grovelling approach when Obama says we haven't been fair to the world all the time either. It sounds, in fact, like honesty and of course to the man of the perpetually undisclosed location, who keeps his lunch and shopping list in a vault, that's a sign of "weakness."

It's "weak" to disclose that we tortured people to death and lied about it. It's weak to shake hands with Chavez, says Cheney -- but only if a Democrat does it -- and of course any sign of honesty, humanity or willingness to promote peace that does not depend on unqualified, abject and grovelling acceptance of American Empire can be a fatal weakness.

I have trouble understanding the level of fear Cheney lives with; the kind of fear that drove him and his puppets to military aggression, pathological secrecy and a domestic paranoia that led him to think the suppression of civil rights and constitutional law is "nothing to apologize for." It's harder to understand than starting a war on false pretenses for his own profit.

Paranoia: the feeling that even our friends will take advantage of us if we're not unrelenting in our refusal to admit mistakes and uncompromising in our rage for dominion; law, morality, truth and justice notwithstanding. Quite an opinion and what better place to discuss it than with Sean Hannity and what better audience than the people who still watch Fox News and who are sure to fail to notice just how Cheney and his party equate ganging up on a new administration in time of extreme crisis as patriotism, but of course these are the people who accused the Democrats of caving in to terrorism in 2001 even after they voted unanimously to support George W. Bush.

Accepting the consequences of your actions is so unmanly.

LETS GO VIRAL (WITH A MONDAY UPDATE)

You are invited to steal this picture. Drag and drop it to your desktop. Share it with friends. Post it on your blog if you are as annoyed as I am with Tempest in a Tea Bag Day.  All rights are hereby waived.

Our national debt is currently $11 trillion dollars.  Deficit spending by three, successive Republican administrations accounts for $9 trillion of the total … a whopping 82%.  Tempest in a Tea Bag Day is a deception whose real agenda is to blame GOP transgressions on Democrats and obstruct plans to fix our economy.

Nine out of 11 trillion dollars in total!  What an interesting ratio.  It reminds me of another 9/11, but undoubtedly any reference to the terrorist attack of 9/11 would surely offend (although the insinuation is damn tempting).

So go ahead: Steal this picture, post it, and go viral.

MONDAY UPDATE:
A special thanks to our friends and colleagues who supported this effort during the weekend: Brain Rage, Captain Fogg, TAO, Green Eagle, Shaw Kenawe, Generik Brand, and others too numerous name here.  Our friend, The Deranged Leftwing Baker, went even further by adding this graph to embellish the above:

(Double click to enlarge; back button to return)

Sometimes a clever cartoon makes a complex topic even simpler and more dramatic:

Ban the Assault weapons!

If the movement spreads, we may be faced with a movement to ban Jedi-style "assault flashlights" in the United States. After all with some 400,000 or more people in the UK declaring themselves to be Jedi we just have to ban something.

Meanwhile Barak Obama has re-affirmed his support of banning "military style" weapons, which are ordinary rifles that look like the real military rifles that have been banned since 1934 but are not. The plan is to keep Americans from the lookalikes so that Mexico won't have a problem with the real thing. Doesn't make sense to me, but I haven't had my morning loco-weed yet. Perhaps we have to evoke the scary drug-war straw man once again to obscure the lack of evidence that the previous ban had any effect whatever on crime in the US. Evidence to the convinced, after all, is like garlic to a vampire and so must not be talked about.

"The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons--anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun--can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons."

-Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988-

Sugarman, although he is a licensed gun dealer himself and should know better, seems to have pioneered the tautological term " assault weapon" and admits to using it solely for it's ability to deceive the public, not for reasons of honesty. The concern that police departments are "outgunned" can only be seen as fictitious propaganda (I'm trying not to call it a lie, since I'm such a nice person) when we note that even the tiny town of Jasper, Florida, population 1795, with its seven man police force equips every police car with top of the line fully automatic military weapons: machine guns.

Yesterday, in the affluent nearby community of Palm City, Florida, a woman home alone was assaulted by a man who used a shotgun to blow open her back door. Somehow she managed to use the family .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol to wound and drive off the assailant, who is now in custody. That pistol of course fires a more powerful bullet than the semi-auto 9mm Uzi "assault weapon" the banners would like to ban and has the same rate of fire. Still, we don't call it an "assault weapon" since it doesn't look like one. Pass me the loco-weed please.

Even better: we don't call a shotgun an assault weapon either even though it was used in an assault. Any way, the woman is alive, thanks to her "defense weapon" and the "shoot the Avon lady law" that was passed in 2006 over the hysterical objections of the anti-gun lobby. So far, none of our Avon ladies are missing and Mrs. Russo is still alive.

What's in a name? asked Juliet. In magic-thinking America: apparently a great deal, and unlike the immutable rose, the same firearm can be different things. Whether it's an assault weapon or a self-defense weapon has nothing to do with the weapon or its use, yet we think of one as much deadlier because people are spending a great deal of money making us think that way. Too bad our president has given them his large ear.

Good riddance!

And don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Sounds like Texas pretty-boy governor Rick Perry has been smoking too much of that Republican tea and thinks he's intimidating the USA by reminding us that Texas could just secede from the Union if they wanted to. So much for the great depth of that passionate "patriotism" that wafted out of that state like a bad smell during the Bush years. Of course they'll round up their long horn cattle and the attendant bullshit only if

“. . . Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”

Indeed, who knows -- maybe a bit of sanity and representational Democracy for the rest of us?

Washington thumbing it's nose means restoring the top tax bracket to far, far below its historical levels and giving a tax break to 95% of us -- if you speak Republican. "Texas is a very unique place" he says. It is: too unique to remain part of the US.

"In God we trust"

said Sam the pretend plumber Wurzelbacher to a demented Michigan crowd yesterday.

"Say that too loud in some parts of America and you will be shot. It’s terrible." A terrible lie would be closer to the truth. I have and you won't be and no one ever has been. Hardly anyone cares these days.

What they do care about is the failure of deregulation and massive tax breaks for the really rich to do anything but bring on catastrophe. What they do care about is the betrayal of all of us by the Republicans. Could it be that there's something in all this tea other than a misunderstood and misapplied metaphor? Such flights from reality into mass hysteria usually stand out in history books as markers for events we wish never happened, but if there's any meaning to this repudiation of the blind patriotism traditional with the far right and hysteria about the deficit spending that's been the core of Republican practical economics since Reagan I don't think it's anything but an attempt to take by mob action what they couldn't keep by democratic means. It's proof that the new Right is the old Confederacy without the slaves. This isn't anything like the destruction of tea at Boston harbor, it's like the shots fired at Fort Sumter 148 years ago this week.

So while the third string intellectuals dance about the funny farm with their little tea bags and their big lies trying to distract us from reality, the corporate media continue that American tradition of fomenting war to sell papers and try to distract from the truth by balancing sanity with sedition and dementia.

NATIONAL (IRRATIONAL) TEA BAG DAY

Today is the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Today is also National Tea Bag Day, a protest movement against … what? Taxes? Federal spending? Bigger government?  One of my blogging friends may or may not be carrying his tea bags today, but big government is definitely on his mind. In a recent post on Why Government Expands, Open Minded Republican writes:

Largely, it really doesn't matter whether people believe in large government or not, because it will always expand regardless (…) The answer is much simpler and harder to address. People are elected to 'do something'. For the purposes of this discussion, what they are elected to do is irrelevant. It is the 'do something' itself that matters.

Fair enough. Had the article contained the usual partisan attack clichés about “tax and spend liberals,” I would have rejoined: Republican administrations incurred $9 of the $11 trillion in sovereign debt … squandered away a trillion dollar budget surplus … and started the Iraq war on borrowed money.  But Open Minded Republican framed his hypothesis in non-partisan terms. Have we progressed to the point where we can hold a reasonable and civil conversation without recrimination? Octopus should mind his manners, and readers may ignore these remarks.

Lets look at the merits of OMR’s hypothesis. The premise that government expands regardless of which party is in charge misses a point. In essence, OMR makes the expansion of government appear as if this were a naturally occurring phenomenon … like the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang. In other words, OMR offers an entropy model as a fig leaf for polite discussion. Does a fig leaf constitute a viable hypothesis? There is nothing self-evident about the expansion of the Universe or government. Herein resides a problem of logic called the mystification fallacy, as defined by Octopus:

No matter how intelligent we think we are, or how diligent our method of inquiry, there will always be events and situations we do not understand. One response is to attribute supernatural or mystical causes to phenomena that are beyond understanding. Perhaps some events are truly random. Nevertheless, to assert that something is unknowable is to halt all inquiry, whether the thing is knowable or not. In every academic discipline, there is always an article of faith that states: Everything is potentially knowable.

To rephrase the question, can we describe big government adequately in terms of spending, or deficits, or public debt as a percentage of GDP as if these were phenomena lacking cause and effect?

Perhaps the expansion of government has multiple causes depending upon where one looks. Sometimes government expands to mobilize for war or in times of economic turmoil. There are times when government spending is a natural consequence of prosperity, when tax receipts rise along with expectations, and strategic decisions are made about the future direction of the nation. No doubt, earmarks deserve a sentence or two, since there will always be stakeholders competing for a share of the public pie.

When our attention should be focused on the economy, is there a hidden card tucked inside the sleeve of OMR's argument? In other words, trickle-down versus trickle-up?

Every recession replays the same old drama. Business sheds workers when sales revenues decline. Nervous consumers spend less on goods and services … causing business to lay-off more workers. As fear cascades through the economy, the rate of contraction quickens and deepens. For this recession, the stats are grim: unemployment has risen 8.5%, the economy has contracted 6.5%, equity markets are off 40%, and credit has all but disappeared. Bottom line: when businesses and consumers can no longer bear the load, the stimulus of last resort is the federal government.

What are our policy options? Spend trillions of dollars on a stimulus plan, or lose the same trillions in falling tax revenues? Yes, that’s right. Local, state, and federal government will spend or lose trillions either way.  Stimulus spending will increase public debt; doing nothing will accelerate the rate of economic decline. Given this Hobson’s choice, one wonders why we are even having a debate.

Yesterday, President Obama tried to address these concerns in a speech that deserved far more press attention. On the subject of bank bailouts, he says:

… whether we like it or not, history has shown repeatedly that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again, they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months -- years of low growth, years of low job creation, years of low investment, all of which cost these nations far more than a course of bold, upfront action.

On the subject of direct rebates to taxpayers, President Obama says:

… the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that's a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.

Finally, he speaks about strategic policies to secure a better future:

Number one, new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation, not reckless risk-taking; number two, new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; number three, new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and new industries; number four, new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and number five, new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations.

Under the last administration, national debt doubled from 5.5 to 11 trillion dollars; yet, we have nothing to show for it. We still have a crumbling infrastructure, a broken healthcare system, and no national energy policy to make us energy independent. But we do have National Tempest in a Tea Bag Day for every Joe the Dumber who thinks he will someday make mega-millions, tax-exempt and Heaven-sent. Meanwhile, my “open minded” Republican friend wants to start a conversation without starting an argument. I welcome this conversation. Now, what do you want to talk about?

I'm Worth Zillions

I am such a lucky woman. I have won the lottery over & over & over & over again. Reportedly - I am worth zillions! AND - what's more amazing still about my good fortune is that I keep winning the SAME two lotteries - REPEATEDLY! Is this even possible?! Mathematically? Statistically? I wonder! What is the probability that an anonymously squidly woman lurking in the ocean depths of the US could win the British & Irish lotteries multiple days of each week???!!!! Sometimes one each per day!!

So this all has me pondering . . . why aren't I winning any other national lotteries? Like in my own country? Gee - might it be because other countries actually require that you enter a lottery to win it?

Or . . . maybe its just that other national lotteries do not know the mysterious electronic pathway through the atmosphere that leads to my gmail spam box.

Maybe?

It's safe for rabbits - for now

Whew! What a relief. I expected, now that we have a wuss in the white house who thinks this isn't a "Christian nation,"that the Liberal/atheist/fascist/Marxist pansies would begin the assault on Easter I've been expecting for so long. After all, no one would attempt to make Christianity illegal and leave Easter intact.

But it didn't happen. We held a small party for friends on my boat and passers-by wished us a happy Easter and a happy holiday in equal numbers and not a single shot was fired. This morning, I can see two of the long eared symbols of Jesus crazing on my front lawn oblivious to the danger of Constitutional law. No more skulking down back alleys, collar turned up.

Maybe I shouldn't stop worrying though. Even though it's quiet on all fronts of the war, maybe it's too quiet.

Fox and its victims

One of our local solons has scrawled his opinion in the local paper that President Obama is a failure because while engaged in "befriending our enemies" and leading us toward Marxism, Socialism and Fascism in a manner so obvious that anyone who doesn't agree "hates America," he has "no answer for anything -- as is illustrated by having no solution for the piracy problem.

I don't watch Fox News, because I don't support villainy and sedition, so I don't know whether they have covered the US Navy's recapture of the Maersk Alabama from pirates. Yes, the American captain is still a hostage and that's because Obama is too cowardly to be dropped on board the pirate vessel with cutlass and pistol while growling ARRRRRR through the knife in his clenched teeth -- just like Reagan would do if this whole thing were a 1950's B movie. None the less, the US Navy is there despite Obama's pants-wetting cowardice, and reinforcements, including a counter-piracy task force, are on the way.

Meanwhile the wine-besotted surrender monkeys from France have successfully stormed another vessel freeing 4 hostages and killing the pirates. One hostage was killed. A multinational force is assembling in the region as a response to the increase in Somali piracy, but of course "Obama has no answer." Obvious to the Fox poisoned as well, is the fact that Obama has no answer to anything because he hasn't yet undone the damage done by the pirates George Bush sponsored on Wall Street and in the lending industry. It must be cowardice of course, unless it's the Marxist/Socialist/Fascist/Muslim extremist thing. Perhaps it's his cowardice that prevents him from continuing the "Kiss my ass you wog or we'll blow you all to hell" diplomacy, which in Foxspeak means cozying up to our enemies.

"Changes have been made" say a good share of the letter writing peanut gallery and if we don't see the danger we need to wake up. I suppose that means to tune in to all the warnings from Blowhardia on the radio and suck up the toxic twittering of Fox. Unlike the Kommanderguy, Obama is "surrounded by criminals." The end is nigh.

So anyway, the Kingdom of God has not arrived with Barak Obama; something that was not, pace the quick brownshirt Fox, expected by his supporters -- but that's enough to dub him a failure. He's certainly received enough mockery in his first steps down the Via Dolorosa to make Fox's cynical comparison compelling. Of course Jesus was surrounded by criminals and actually was a socialist in the extreme, but the irony -- all irony is lost on the ignorant army of the American Right. The stupid will be with us longer than will be the poor so we might as well accept it, but if only we didn't have the plutocratic pseudo-populists in Fox's clothing to make them the enemy of all things true and just.

Up to our knees in Santorum

"Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions"

says former (hurray!) Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum in a Philadelphia Enquirer editorial titled The Elephant in the Room. Of course the problem with any elephant in the room is not that it's difficult to notice, but that the room tends to fill up with shit rather rapidly.

Of course nothing helped Santorum be convinced of anything, he's just, like any elephant, looking for whatever fodder he can find so that he can, as elephants do, digest it and turn it to dung. Conviction is what you call the straw you're grasping at when you're afraid of drowning.

The fact that president Obama told the French we can sometimes come across as arrogant is a simple statement of truth. We can -- and Santorum certainly illustrates it by pointing out how the French owe us their freedom, while ignoring that we owe the French the same debt. Of course only such an elephant's ass as he would require the French to grovel and eat up such merde as we feel fit to excrete -- and in perpetuity. His own arrogance would be a model for the Sun King.

Of course he fails to note that Obama also called Europeans arrogant as well, which renders the former Senators "convincing evidence" nugatory as well as dishonest. But what "values and traditions" is Santy talking about here other than arrogance itself if Obama is admitting that yes, we can be perceived as overbearing and pushy?

Actually I'm getting tired of treating this man's shit as worthy of comment -- as though he weren't a tin-horn blowhard without the wit or talent to do anything but cut bait for the Republican dementia mongers. You're an elephant's asshole Santorum; you and the Fox you rode in on.

A Gesture Well-Intended

Last week I was given a pink rose – individually wrapped in cellophane. It didn’t look wilted but it didn’t look exactly vibrant either. And the same could be said of the giver & the rose’s symbolic gesture.

It was the day of my annual post-40 rite of passage – my mammogram. After my yearly, teeth-grittingly uncomfortable procedure, I re-clothed & headed for the exit of the clinic. As I was headed out the door, the receptionist called out – "oh wait – here." In distracted fashion she aimed the rose in my direction & called out for the next patient – her focus now attending to other business. As I made my way out of the clinic I thought – oh – a rose. A pink rose. What should I do with it? Not being a flower person I felt awkward. Could I stick it in my purse? But then it might not be seen. Should it be seen? Would I be causing offense to the “cause?” Is this my badge of . . . hope? . . . courage? . . . what? And, did I want everyone I saw to know I’d just had a mammogram evidenced by my being saddled with a pink rose?

PINK has become the color of breast cancer. Pink ribbon stickers on car bumpers, pink packaging in grocery stores proclaiming which products donate to the cause. All of this pinkness is wonderful – it has raised awareness about a major health issue. It has helped to raise money for research. Yes – all of this is great.

But this recent rose ceremony has given me pause.

Am I beginning to sound cynical? I do not mean to be. But I guess that is the whole point of this post. I was so puzzled by this ceremonial lack of ceremony of a symbol - & its efficacy. When do symbols begin to lose their symbol-ness? And, when they do – should we switch to new symbols that resonate more strongly? When does a well-intended gesture, such as mammogram clinics giving out pink roses – become just a routine gesture that becomes, well, just a gesture?

We Americans are infamous for overdoing things to the point of rendering them meaningless. Call it a cultural idiosyncrasy of ours, I guess. But may we please not do so to symbols, to causes, to gestures – that still SHOULD resonate with a sense of urgency.

And as for my pink rose – I am sincerely grateful to the person who initiated the idea - originally. No doubt with heartfelt good intentions. However – the manner in which my rose was bestowed upon me was that of an office worker fulfilling a duty. And she did. She saw that I got my rose. And – in her defense – if I had to give women pink roses all day everyday while tending to a myriad of other duties – I’d probably become a bit mechanical, ceremonially, myself.

Not with a bang. . .

. . . But a twitter.

An e-mail from my Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) informs me today that he will begin twittering and NASA has announced that Astronaut in training Mike Massimino will be doing the same. They're drawing a line that I will not cross.

I mean, I still have some pride in being adult and being able to read without moving my lips and able to follow something longer than 140 words without my thoughts wandering toward the need for iPodal noise injection and wiggling in my seat. What's next, the congressional record spelled out letter by letter on alphabet blocks by a fuzzy, green sock puppet? Three body orbital mechanics brought to you by the letter N?

Sure I'm interested in what Nelson has to say and I am interested in space technology -- but. Haven't we had 8 years of the dumbing down of everything already? OK, so maybe it's not quite how the world ends, but it sure looks like the way adulthood ends and as far as I'm concerned, NASA and Nelson and all the other bird brains can twitter this, for all I care.

When trolls attack

"How's the hope and change thing working out for you, moron?" reads the comment. If you're a blogger outside the red tribe, you're used to this sort of thing. You're used to the cut and paste pop culture snark bombs: how's the _____ working out, I don't think so, Hello, etc. Of course trying to rule while wearing only the hollow crown of cynicism only exposes the nakedness and weakness of someone who has to rely on mimicking sitcom characters to simulate insight or wit; and of course the smartest people around are called morons more often than the rest of us; far more often than actual morons are. It's a fact.

Of course if you look back at every post I've made in the last few years, you'll not find a single "hope and change"slogan. In fact if you have the patience and stomach to read all or part of it, you'll note that I'm most consistently a doom and gloom nihilist with no hope for or expectation of change, unless it be decay. Still, I'm sure the armchair assassin thinks he really scored and perhaps he's getting his 5$ per post bonus from the GOP to boot. There's nothing to be done really and as I said, I'm a nihilist and a pessimist; I expect no better from my fellow apes.

If I did, I would have to feel insulted by the assumption that I was stupid enough to think a new president -- any new president -- could reverse the damage of decades in two months: two months of sabotage and opposition by people who ran the ship aground and pay sticky-fingered troglodytes to ask how the hope and change is going for us. Need we ask how the election went for them? or how the supply side, zero regulation market thing is going? Those tax breaks for Wall Street tycoons making you rich? Hello! I don't think so!

“I’M GLAD YOU DIDN’T SNEEZE”

Today marks the anniversary of the assignation of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968. Dr King had traveled far on the civil rights road but he knew the struggle was far from over.
In fact, his last speech to the sanitation workers of Memphis on the eve of his death is peppered with references to his own premonitions.

The most recognizable excerpt of that speech:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Of course, he was receiving multiple threats daily and had already been attacked on several occasions. Given the violent history of the equal rights struggle in America, it really would not have taken much in the way of clairvoyance to know how tenuous his hold on life really was.

But there is an excerpt from his speech that night that doesn’t usually get coverage and I’d like to rectify that here because in it lies a message of hope and love that can never be stabbed or shot or strangled away:

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood--that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And Dr King, so touched by this simple message went on to say:

"And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."

Imagine all the events that might NOT have happened had Dr King sneezed. Sometimes it's the small, seemingly insignificant things in life that have the greatest impact. Dr King, I'm also glad you didn't sneeze.

Information Overload?

Kathleen Parker's column yesterday was about how we're exposed to too much information. In it, she notes that "the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data" in 2006. "[T]hat's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes [emphasis mine]."

This is, of course, truly astonishing. I tend to believe that humans are pretty adaptable - impressively capable of parsing the constant barrage of information - but information overload has been shown to...well...make us dumber. Parker continues:

[...] brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we're not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime. (If you have to schedule relaxation, is it still relaxing?)

Daydreaming, we used to call it. Ask any creative person where they got their best ideas and they'll say, "Dunno. Just came to me out of the blue." If you're looking for Eureka -- as in the Aha! moment -- you probably won't find it while following David Gregory's Tweets. Or checking Facebook to see who might be "friending" whom. Or whose status has been updated. George Orwell is . . . More likely, the ideas that save the world will present themselves in the shower or while we're sweeping the front stoop. What the world needs now isn't more, but less. The alternative to mindless activities for the mindful is turning out to be not a less-informed nation but a dumber one.

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

I certainly don't want my IQ to drop 10 points. So, what are your thoughts on this? Are we exposed to too much information? Clearly there is an astonishing amount of it out there, but is that necessarily bad? Can we, if we choose, ignore the plethora of needless information while still being able to quickly summon that which is useful? What does this mean for future generations more dependent on this network of knowledge?

Der Flughaven

The average flight delay at FKI is 30 hours longer than next worst airport and the customer service help line connects you to a hat store in Stuttgart, but that's just a minor criticism of Prague's Franz Kafka International Airport. Corridors end in the middle of nowhere and you're likely to spend an eternity in the security check, or should I say Czech.

No, I'm not making it up. You can't make this stuff up, unless you actually are Kafka and of course you couldn't pick a better name for the labyrinthine, frustrating and surreal airport. Czech it out and maybe next time JFK won't seem quite so bad!



And for heaven's sake, don't put FKI on your itinerary on April 1st!