There’s a Big Brother Inside Every Blogger

In her current post, Leslie asks a reasonable, provocative, and long overdue question: Are Bloggers "Citizen Journalists"?  It’s the kind of honest question that demands some honest soul-searching.

Are we citizen journalists in the same sense as an actual journalist?  Are we hired or self-appointed, amateurs or experts, investigators or merely camp followers?  Do we practice the same standards of journalistic integrity as we expect from a professional?  Or have we merely become part of a noisy rabble indistinguishable from those whom we criticize?

The Internet has been an empowering (some will say 'democratizing') force in the world. More than any medium in human history, the World Wide Web is truly the culmination of Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village. It connects us to commentary, ideas, and newfound friends.  It shapes our perceptions and self-conceptions, enables saints and sinners, empowers reformers and terrorists alike. Have we let the Internet go to our heads? As McLuhan foresaw:

“[As] our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”

Does McLuhan refer to the internalization of a dreaded États-Unis Big Brother or the object formation of Big Brother within ourselves?

The Internet has certainly made us more opinionated.  It turns bloggers into instant subject matter experts, justified or not. It has transformed us into pundits, self-appointed guardians of the public trust, snoops and voyeurs, saboteurs and trolls.  It amplifies narcissism and reduces humility to obsolescence. As the Internet connects the Global Village, it has not necessarily homogenized and unified us.  Sometimes it leaves us more fractured than before.

I should talk. Your intrepid Octopus has been as opinionated and predatory as any creature above or below the waves.  Nevertheless, with a hat tip to Leslie, I think we owe ourselves an honest conversation.

Facebookin' III

Hmmm... I don't know if this is a good sign. I mucked with one idiot, and it's like Lays potato chips.


Somebody break it to me gently. Am I in danger of becoming a Facebook troll?

(Click to embiggen.)

GOPers Outraged That The Reverend Barack Hussein Obama Didn't Thank God and Lead The Nation In Thanks To The Christian God During The Rev. Obama's Radio Address

ZOMG! 

The Horror! 

President and Priest/Minister/Mullah-in Chief Barack Obama didn't invoke God's/Allah's/Yaweh's/Xenu's,/Vishnu's name when he gave his radio address for Thanksgiving 2011! 

That unGod president blasphemer needs to be hounded and stoned (hmmmm) out of office for not carrying out his Constitutional duty by thanking the Christianists' god and blessing us all like little Tiny Tim did in "A Christmas Carol" [remember that? Heart-warming, huh?], and making the sign of the Padre, Figlio, Spiritus Sanctus, Flying Spaghetti Monster all over One Nation, Sotto Dio, Indivisible and Invisible and Keeping US Safe from every DFH and godless Commie Atheist. Awmayn.

The Atheists Are Coming!  And it's the unGod Obama's fault.  Floods and pestilence, ice capades all over the land. Tornedos, hurricanes, Black Friday, frogs, locusts, and Teh Gaii! teaching our kids how to make tofurkey in our schools!

I DON'T WANT TO LIVE ON THIS PLANET ANYMORE!

All because unGod Obama didn't thank God and ask her to keep us in the name of the Something, Something, and the Something, and every other Everything that the god- afraiding religionists want Obama to do in the name of the Constitution and where it says--COMMANDS--Mr. unGod Obama to lead us in prayer always, always he...yes and...  thought well...as well him as another and then [we ]asked him with our eyes to ask again yes...and then he asked us would [we]...yes to say yes...yes...and yes [we] said yes [we] will Yes...We...Can...Yes"  Ohmayn.

Here is an exerpt of Mr. Obama's OFFICIAL Thanksgiving Day Proclamation for 2011:


"In times of adversity and times of plenty, we have lifted our hearts by giving humble thanks for the blessings we have received and for those who bring meaning to our lives. Today, let us offer gratitude to our men and women in uniform for their many sacrifices, and keep in our thoughts the families who save an empty seat at the table for a loved one stationed in harm’s way. And as members of our American family make do with less, let us rededicate ourselves to our friends and fellow citizens in need of a helping hand.

As we gather in our communities and in our homes, around the table or near the hearth, we give thanks to each other and to God for the many kindnesses and comforts that grace our lives. Let us pause to recount the simple gifts that sustain us, and resolve to pay them forward in the year to come.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Thursday, November 24, 2011, as a National Day of Thanksgiving. I encourage the people of the United States to come together — whether in our homes, places of worship, community centers, or any place of fellowship for friends and neighbors — to give thanks for all we have received in the past year, to express appreciation to those whose lives enrich our own, and to share our bounty with others.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this sixteenth day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand eleven, and of the independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-sixth.

War and Efficiency: Unintended Consequences?

A Facebook friend posted a link to a news story about the use of drones (unmanned aircraft) in warfare, War By Remote Control: Drones Make It Easy.

Warfare used to be a bloody, up close affair. Men killed other men. Death was instantaneous for many and serious wounds eventually resulted in death for most others. 

Now, war is too much like a video game. We have improved our methods of killing; invented weapons that can do maximum damage to other human beings from a great physical distance and left us able to distance ourselves emotionally from an enemy that is a blip on a screen. We can kill people whose faces we never see; we no longer have to wait until we see the whites of their eyes to fire on them. There is no sense of connection that the enemy breathes, loves, and lives just as we do, nothing to make us question war itself.  We've made it so much easier to kill and so much easier to wash our hands of that killing. Ironic that in a nation that prides itself on being Christian, we've collectively become Pontius Pilate.

For today's Americans, who haven't had a modern war on American soil, war is a distant entity, brought home only when the wounded men and women, now saved due to advances in modern medicine, return to their families. The rest of us feel momentary sympathy for the wounded vets who return missing body parts and who are emotionally battered and damaged, but we forget them pretty soon. When we lie down in our beds, there are no drones flying  in the dark over our heads.

Vietnam was the last war (technically a police action) that we had to fully feel and experience. The media was filled with Vietnam. We knew that the average age of the soldiers in Vietnam was 19. We knew how many died each day. We saw their flag draped coffins on the evening news. A lot of us didn't like war and we protested against it. We flashed peace symbols, sang protest songs, and marched in solidarity against  not just the Vietnam War, but any war.

We have lost the urgency to prevent war or to put an end to existing wars. Our collective conscience has become as removed from the horrors of war as the remote mechanisms that we use to fight wars. War should be messy and painful. It should make us lose sleep at night. War must be atrocious enough to repulse us, to make us be willing to go to any means necessary to put an end to warfare. The automation of efficient killing makes it far easier to engage in warfare and that's the problem.

The Idiots of England

George Bernard Shaw is famously quoted as saying "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." (Similar quotes were made by Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell and Dylan Thomas, but probably not Winston Churchill.)

Fortunately for international relations, though, the two countries do share a common bond: stupidity.

Yes, there is abject idiocy in the country of Shaw, Russell, Wilde, Thomas, Churchill, and even William Shakespeare (who wrote his own plays, no matter what they tell in the movies) and Francis Bacon (who did not write Shakepeare's plays, regardless).

I suppose it should have been obvious: after all, Rupert Murdoch is from Australia, and David Duke was born in Oklahoma. And both countries were settled by the British, so we have to get it from somewhere, right?

(Understand that, in Australia's case, I'm using a loose definition of "settled" which includes "being sent in chains." You know, the same way that Africans "settled" America...)

The latest bit of idiocy that I've come across was, in fact, on Facebook. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my purpose for Facebook isn't so much as social network, as it is refrigerator magnet - I stick random pictures and videos up there, just because it gives me some place to store them that costs me nothing.

(I understand that there are people who use specialized sites like Pinterest for these purposes, but not me. I'm a maverick like that.)

Which means that if it isn't at the top of my home page, it isn't likely that I'll see most people's posts. So this has probably been around for a while, and I just haven't seen it. But now I have.

(Don't squint - transcription below.)



(Technically, I didn't need to block out her picture, because it wasn't a picture of her. But it was a copyrighted Disney image, so it's probably safest.)

What that said was (block pasted, to preserve the fascinating capitalization, spelling and punctuation):

racist to sing ba ba black sheep so now its ba ba rainbow sheep, racist to wear a poppy so even the england football team didnt wear them, racist to say christmas so now its happy holidays yet its not racist to celebrate eid, not racist to burn the st georges cross and not racist to take over our country. this is ENGLAND, dont like it? manchester airport, terminal 2... toodle fucking pip! Putt this as your status if you believe in true english rights

I, of course, had to reply - I can be an ass sometimes. But since it isn't my country, I had to actually research some of the issues.

A lot of it is just basic rhetoric: "true english rights," "take over our country," the Happy Holidays vs Merry Christmas crap (that's not "racist," it's just being polite to the 31% non-Christian Brits).

I thought the "yet its not racist to celebrate eid" was cute. Not only is it fundamentally wrong (it isn't racist to celebrate Xmas, either major Eid festival, or Chanukah - it's just rude to jam your religion in other people's face), but it also has overtones of "Scary Brown People!" So it's stupid twice.

Quick note: for those of you who don't know, "Eid" is the Arabic word for "festival," and is most commonly used in the West to refer to Eid ul-Fitr ("Festival of Breaking the Fast"), held at the end of Ramadan, or Eid al-Adha ("Festival of the Sacrifice," or Greater Eid), celebrating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to God (essentially the same story from the Old Testament, in Genesis 22).

But really, there are three major points.

1. racist to sing ba ba black sheep so now its ba ba rainbow sheep

This is an urban legend that crops up every so often, which is traditionally overblown by the right-wing press (even today). It's also inevitably shown to be complete bollocks (the publication of which is, after all, a Murdoch tradition).

2. racist to wear a poppy so even the england football team didnt wear them

On November 11, (Remembrance Day, once called Armistice Day), it's traditional in Britain to memorialize the fallen of WWI by wearing a poppy (it dates back to the John McCrae poem "In Flanders Fields - "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row"); a lot of veteran's groups use it as a fund-raising theme.

This year, the British teams were going to wear embroidered poppies on their uniforms for a Remembrance Day match against Spain, and the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) intervened. As they have approval over uniform design, they felt it "would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardizing the neutrality of football."

It had nothing to do with racism. Quite the opposite - it was all about keeping everybody as one big happy international family.

Of course, the really funny thing is that the whole "england football team didnt wear them" complaint didn't happen. FIFA agreed to allow black armbands, with poppies.

3. not racist to burn the st georges cross

Well, no, it isn't. Just rude and an overreaction.

You can find a lot of stories about Muslims burning the St George's cross (many of them badly sourced, oddly enough) in response to British actions they object to. And some of the stories might even be true. Doesn't make it racist.

See, the St George's cross (which, some of you might be aware, isn't the flag of England) is viewed in the Muslim world as a symbol of the Crusades. And, gee, who can fault them for that? That period seems much closer to the people of the modern Middle East than it used to, thanks to the actions of George II (or as many of us called him, Dubya).

So, it's good to know that it isn't just America which stands in danger of spiraling down the drain of ignorance and hatred. The Brits have these issues, too. I guess I'm relieved.

Or maybe not.

Intelligent life discovered on Earth

Proof.

This week's santorum stain

Apparently, Rick Santorum has lost all sense of irony. (Some of us already knew that, but Frothy likes to go and prove it again every so often.)

Remember, Google fans - always use that first link there, whenever you talk about the former senator. It's only the right thing to do...

Right Wing Watch notes that Frothy made the following distinction between sharia law and the way he would run the country.

Now, unlike Islam where the higher law and civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law.

Our civil laws have to ... and that's why, with the issue of abortion, as long as abortion is "legal" - at least according to the Supreme Court, "legal" in this country - we will never have rest because that law does not comport with God's law which says that all life has value, all life is created by [God,] I knew you in the womb.

And as long as there is a discordance between the two, there will be agitation.

Aside from him making the same tired anti-choice arguments yet again, let's contemplate what he just said about sacred and secular laws.

(And yes, I'm going to ignore the fact that he just called Islam a "higher law." I'm too classy a guy to go for the cheap joke like that, bitches...)

com·port /kəmˈpôrt/ v
1. Conduct oneself; behave.
2. Accord with; agree with.

See, in Islamic countries, the church and the state are the same. But in Frothyland, the state just has to do what the church wants...

...no, wait. That can't be it...

...in Frothyland, the state just has to agree with the church in every... no, wait a minute...

Ok, OK, I got it.

In Islamic countries, the church and the state are the same. In Frothy's fevered imaginings, the state merely has to look like the church! See? It's simple!

All that lube, and Frothy still can't pull his head out of his ass.

Nothing Informs Better Than Fox News (With an Update by Octopus)

Please take the title of this post at face value with no derision or mockery intended. According to a recent PublicMind Poll from Fairleigh Dickenson University (FDU), Some News Leaves People Knowing Less than those who consume no news at all.

The poll tested consumers’ knowledge of recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Syria and found a disturbing pattern of wrong answers by news source. Here is what the poll tested:  Did the people of Egypt successfully topple the regime of Hosni Mubarak? The highest percentage of correct answers came from listeners of NPR at 68%.  Lowest on the scale were viewers of Fox News at 49%.

According to Dan Cassino, a political science professor at FDU and an analyst for the poll: “The [poll] results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

These results come as no surprise. On July 25, 2010, I posted this commentary, A Contest of Madmen for the Primacy of the Sewer, which covered similar findings from The Center for Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.  In all studies thus far, Fox News ranks at the bottom of the heap. Of course, few of us need a poll to confirm what we know intuitively: Fox News is not a news source but merely a ratings engine with only one purpose: To deliver maximum audience share for the Murdoch propaganda machine.

For a more detailed account on the sorry state of contemporary journalism, please have a look at the original post (which includes an important historical observation by Bloggingdino).


Wednesday Update:
(Pls. see comments below): "Not if one maintains an active mind."

If any visitors to this forum are implying – even in jest – that any writers or readers of this community have “inactive” minds, think again!  Our minds are NOT inactive!  Nor uninformed!  Nor unwashed!  If this is your implication, then consider me a very pissed off cephalopod. PAY ATTENTION because I will not repeat this again:

Fox News is the #1 purveyor of PARTISAN HATE SPEECH in America today. Fevered hysteria and conspiratorial fear mongering on national television are not harmless. For years, Fox News gave Glenn Beck a national audience, and this is what partisan hate speech has wrought (all have active links to original sources):

Man Shoots Two California Highway Patrol Officers:

Accused Gunman Acknowledges Influence of Glenn Beck

Three Pittsburgh Police Officers Ambushed and Killed:

Gunman Posted Glenn Beck Video on White Supremacist Website

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened Senator Murray:

Glenn Beck Cast Spell on Accused Man, Says Family

Federal Prison for Man Who Threatened House Speaker Pelosi:

Mother of Accused Man Blames Fox News

Glenn Beck Fans Target Legendary Scholar with Death Threats

Death Threats Against League of Women Voters Linked to Glenn Beck

Murders, shooting sprees, domestic terrorism, private citizens hiding in fear, infamous intimidations and provocations broadcast on national television - all linked to Fox News!

After the shooting rampage in Tucson that left six people dead and thirteen injured, including Congresswoman Giffords, Fox News President Roger Ailes offered this appeal for civility: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.”

More bullshit!  Nothing has changed. Week after week, Fox News churns out a constant sludge of partisan hate speech from verbal abusers such as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy, and his son, Peter Doocy, as examples.

How quickly we forget these lessons of history. How the language of eradication and elimination (i.e. characterizing people as diseased, as vermin, as traitors, as a scourge) has led to genocide, pogroms, murder, and violence. The poisoned atmosphere unleashed by Fox News means any citizen - Democrat, Centrist, or Republican - can be slandered in public and targeted for persecution. Furthermore, these messages reach unhinged misfits who are most likely to act on impulse, and events have shown that violent rhetoric leads to violent acts. There is no plausible deniability that can exonerate Fox News.

Furthermore, when toxic television threatens public safety, it concerns everyone. Even prominent Republicans are alarmed:

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:

“[Glenn Beck] such people do terrible damage”

Former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner: 

“the role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality”

National correspondent for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:

“a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling”

Partisan hate speech is not free speech. Nor entertainment. Nor funny.  For all reasons cited above, gratuitous liberal bashing - even implied - is unacceptable here.   If anything, perhaps the partisan biases of certain readers have blinded them to these outrageous abuses of the public airwaves.  As the saying goes:  No news is good news - and far better news than Fox News.

The Republican War on Thanksgiving

In 1621, after the difficult, unrelenting labor of starting a colony, the Pilgrims, using planting techniques taught to them by the native Wampanoag tribe, celebrated their first successful harvest with a feast, which they shared with their native American neighbors (who we later almost wiped out, there being only about 400 survivors sixty years later, following King Philip's War).

This is the most important, most truly American holiday (the Canadians have a similar observance, but they're just our little northern clones anyway, right?). It's a day of forgiveness, a day when families travel from across the country to get together, eat our traditional meal, celebrate our mutual heritage, and nestle securely in the bosom of warmth and family.

Except, perhaps, for this year.

Because of the Republican insistence on "Free Market" capitalism and a winner-take-all mentality, now, with record unemployment around the country, the cost of the Thanksgiving meal is rising faster than inflation.

With the current annual inflation rate of 3.5%, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner has risen 13%, and the cost of getting together with family and friends has increased even more than that.

The average airfare for travel to the top 10 most popular destinations in the U.S. for Nov. 23 to Nov. 27 has jumped 11% over last year, according to an analysis by Orbitz, one of the nation’s busiest travel websites. That means the average round-trip ticket for Thanksgiving rose to $373 from about $340.

Flights to New York for the holiday will rise the most, jumping 20% over last year, with an average round-trip price of $342, according to Orbitz. Round-trip flights to Los Angeles will increase 12% to $429, according to the travel website...

You won’t escape the higher prices by driving: Gas prices reached the highest levels ever in the week prior to Thanksgiving, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California. The average price of self-serve regular gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was $3.82 a gallon last week, 66 cents higher than the same time last year.

With one in three Americans living at or below the poverty line, the GOP is trying to ensure that they cannot celebrate their own heritage. The Republican Party is trying to ensure that an Ayn Rand dystopia, with the richest living in luxury off the sweat of the working poor, is the model for American society.

The Republicans are trying to destroy Thanksgiving! And they're doing it in subtle ways, as well! The Christmas decorations, celebrating their dreams of commerce and overindulgence, come out earlier every year; the Christmas carols are already playing in all the stores; and the conservative-controlled media beats the drum, insisting that shopkeepers must say "Merry Christmas" instead of the more open, accepting "Happy Holidays," as if Thanksgiving didn't matter in the slightest!

This Republican War on Thanksgiving must be stopped! We must stride into the stores and demand that the carols be cancelled! "Turn off that crap! It's not even Thanksgiving!"

Websites are springing up devoted to bringing back our national holiday from the brink of extinction. We must support them; we must also support retailers like Nordstrom, who insist on celebrating each holiday in turn, and not skipping over the ones that can't be exploited by the greedy, and venal, and unamerican!

We must ask where the Thanksgiving displays are, and why they are overshadowed by some obese Germanic troll in a red suit! We must write letters to store owners, corporations, and our Congressfolk, demanding the return of our national holiday!

Radical conservatives must be stopped from destoying our heritage!



Please note: this is intended for satirical purposes only, and if you're stupid enough to take it seriously, you probably fall for that "War on Christmas" crap too, don't you?

Pérák, the two Jiří's and the Nazis

No politics today. It isn't always about politics.

I was randomly hopping around the internet this morning, just following links as I ate breakfast, and happened across a blog (Monkey Muck - I'm not even clear what led me to it, but somebody out there linked to him), where he'd dug up a little piece of animation history.

It was May, 1945. The Germans, who hadn't run a particularly peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia to begin with, had gotten their noses bloody in the Prague Uprising, which ended in a stalemate, and both sides declared a ceasefire that lasted all of a day before the Soviet troops rolled through the country two days after "Victory in Europe Day," expelling the last of the Nazi troops.

(Yes, that's a simplified look at a long, bloody struggle. There was also no way that the people of Czechoslovakia could know about the ensuing weirdness of the next almost-half-a-century. That's just the least you need to know for perspective.)

Very few people in the West have heard of Jiří Brdečka, but he was a writer and illustrator (you might have heard of Limonádový Joe ("Lemonade Joe"), a series of short stories (occasionally gathered into book form and later adapted as a play), which was made into a movie in 1964, a parody of old-time westerns which reputedly numbered Henry Fonda among its fans and was considered something of a cult classic among Czechs for many years.

(Proponents of the run-on sentence regard me as a master of the craft.)

I'm not sure when they first met, but after the war ended, Brdečka got together with Jiří Trnka (an illustrator and puppeteer), and they would later set up Studio Bratři v triku, the leading producer of Czech animation for decades. The studio logo shows three boys, possibly a reference to the two Jiří's and Eduard Hofman, a writer/director they worked with.

(Bratři v triku is commonly translated as "Brothers in T-shirts," possibly because of the logo. But technically, it's "Brothers in Tricks," and "tricks" (or "trick films") was also a term used to refer to animation at the time. God, I love trivia.)

Of the two Jiří's, I think Jiří Trnka is the more interesting. Considered the founding father of Czech animation, he had worked as a illustrator for Melantrich, a Czech-language publishing house in Prague (named after yet a third Jiří, a Czech Renaissance printer named Jiří Melantrich of Aventino).

As a child, Trnka had carved and sculpted puppets out of wood, to stage shows for his friends. Later, around the same time that he was hired by Melantrich, he started a puppet theater, which closed down with the start of WWII. And later in life, when he found himself uncomfortable with traditional animation, Trnka changed his focus to the medium which gained him some measure of world-wide fame, animated puppetry, mostly stop-motion.

He's been called the "Walt Disney Of The East, although where Disney made films for children and families, Trnka aimed his work at an adult audience.

But this work is before all that. The war had ended, the country was trying to rebuild, and the two Jiří's had gotten together to fill a niche that few other people were considering: animation.

Without a studio, without much backing, they produced a handful of short films together as an experiment, and one of them was Pérák a SS (alternately translated as "Perak and the SS," "The Springman and the SS," and occasionally "The Chimney Sweep").



Pérák the Spring Man was an folktale in WWII Prague, a man who could... well, he could jump. Over trains, walls and small buildings. Much like Victorian England's Spring-Heel Jack (only without the varying descriptions making him into a monster, with burning red eyes, fangs, wings, or whatever). Pérák was just a man. Who jumped.

Czech media would later often retcon him into a superhero, but he started out as just an urban legend of a bouncy guy, who sprang out of alleys and startled people. (It was a simpler time.)

The cartoon was easily on a par with other animated shorts of the period (it was 15 years after Steamboat Willie, and it didn't have a lush feel of Max Fleischer's later work, but aside from the black and white nature of Pérák, compare it even to the current output on Cartoon Network, or any of the 700 Disney channels). And it managed to combine the resentment of a conquered people to their oppressors, with the light-hearted, somewhat fantastical world of the animated Everyman.

(Yes, I can do "pedantic" when I want to. I just don't feel like it too often.)

All in all, it's a cute piece of history that definitely deserves a wider audience.

“Step out of Line, the Man Come and Take You Away”: UC Davis, OWS and Pepper Spray

You know, I have mixed feelings about demonstrations generally – we’ve had some grand protests and protest movements over the decades, and we’ve had some confused, anarchic gatherings that may have done at least as much harm as good.  I leave aside the question as to the precise degree of good the “OWS” movement is doing.  But it seems to me that some of the police tactics that are being used to stop these people, who are in the main clearly not oriented towards threats and violence, are WAY out of line.  Witness the video in the article referenced by this link: UC Davis Police Pepper-Spray Students. It looks to me as if pepper spray is used there not to neutralize a threat but rather to engage in crowd control or just to remove protesters who have been deemed inconvenient. 

Well, damn it all, democracy is always mighty inconvenient for certain authority figures and plutocrats, and at times it’s a hassle for all of us.  But you don’t spray pepper solution into young people’s eyes because you’ve simply become impatient and want them out of the way – that treatment should be reserved for out-of-control, violent and threatening offenders whom you judge can’t safely be taken down by other means.  If they needed to move a small number of uncooperative college students, how hard would it have been for the police simply to cart them off without temporarily blinding them first, and making a big show of it at that?  Were they really expecting to be set upon violently by a few college kids?  I rather doubt it.
 
The statements made by the UC Davis spokesperson quoted in the article seem to me remarkably wrong-headed as well; for example: “…. In these budget times, we shouldn't use resources that should be going to our core academic mission going to a tent city.”  Lord!  Not only is that pretty poor English for a “spokesperson,” but I suggest that if the university had hired someone for a million dollars a day to ruin their reputation, they couldn’t have done better than that statement .  Okay, spokesperson, I think we get the point: again, democracy is unruly and damned inconvenient, and to top it off, it’s EXPENSIVE!  I say, “deal with it”: the alternatives are a great deal worse.  Do we really need to quote that famous line by Winnie Churchill about the relative value of democratic rule? 

Perhaps we do – an awful lot of people in positions of authority appear to have grown fiendishly impatient with any form of democratic expression other than apathy or simple assent.  So here goes, in close paraphrase: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms of government.”

Finally, where is the voice of President Obama on this business of using harsh police tactics against democratic expression?  I would like to hear him address the issue and take a stand against such tactics, if he hasn’t done so already.  This is an area where the so-called Bully Pulpit needs to be used and used effectively.  Not to do so in a timely manner, I suggest, will ally him in many voters’ minds with tactics that should appear jaw-droppingly inappropriate when they happen on the watch of a Democratic administration, or indeed any genuinely American administration.

Octopy Wall Street

Octopus attended an Occupy rally yesterday, and here is my report.

A Gakuso and Chikuzenbiwa Moment (by Octopus)

The Gakuso and Chikuzenbiwa are classical Japanese stringed instruments that had been in my family for two generations. Recently, I donated my collection to the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Flori-DUH. Having moved an average of once every two years since I acquired these instruments, I decided to give them a permanent home where they will be restored, maintained, and perhaps even played once again by a visiting Japanese master.

Both instruments are old and delicate. The Koto (Gakuso), with its ivory and tortoise shell inlay, originated in late 1800s; and the Biwa (Chikuzenbiwa), with its rare and precious silkscreen representation of a dragon, is vintage 1600s:

Koto (aka Gakuso)

Biwa (aka Chikunzenbiwa)

Here is what the Koto sounds like:





And here is what the Biwa sounds like:





The Morikami is located at 4000 Morikami Park Road , Delray Beach, Fl 33446, (telephone 561-495-0233). If you visit the museum, please be sure to look up our esteemed Captain Fogg. If you ask him nicely, he may even take you by boat to visit me far beyond the Gulf Stream.

Providing a Quality Public Education Isn't Optional

A friend on Facebook, let's call him Mr. Smith, stated that he doesn't "...support paying for other kids schooling..." as he has no kids.

I like Mr. Smith, but he is so wrong. Naturally, I decided to persuade him of his error in thought. It didn't work, but I put up a hell of a persuasive argument.

An educated populace benefits the growth of the society. We pay taxes to maintain the whole of society. No taxes, then no roads, law enforcement, traffic signals, public buildings, fire departments--the list is lengthy. We don't get to choose where our taxes are spent. I've never been arrested nor a victim of a crime, if I follow Mr. Smith's line of thought, I should not have to support law enforcement. If one lives in society then one must support the functioning of that society. Not wanting your taxes to support education because you don't have any children is a libertarian notion whether one likes that label or not. Btw, I don't have any children either.

We pay for educating all children so that there will be a competent workforce to maintain the infrastructure that promotes the functioning of society. We pay for educating all children because poverty and marginalization are engendered by the lack of an education. We pay for educating all children because the mind needs nurturing as much as does the body.

Mr. Smith argues that if your child attends a private school, you also should be spared from paying taxes to support public education. However, no one has to pay taxes and private school education. It's a choice you make and it doesn't mean that you get to abdicate your responsibility to pay local taxes.

Generally, property and some sales taxes go to paying for public education, which is financed primarily by the individual states. Federal funding goes to Title 1 programs for children from low-wealth families, the free and reduced price lunch program, and to support some of the programs for children with disabilities who are identified as such under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA.

The voucher movement bases its premise on the notion that they should receive vouchers equivalent to the Per Pupil Expenditure (PPE) that a state spends to educate students. The theory behind it is that the parents pay taxes but their children don't attend public school so they should get their money back in the form of vouchers. The amount of the vouchers would actually exceed the amount paid in taxes as education funding is provided not only from the money collected from property taxes and sales tax. Corporate taxes, fines collected in court cases, parking fines, and revenues from other sources all go into the state general fund, which in turn funds public education in that state.

PPE for the states ranges from a low of $6,000 in Utah to a high of $15,000 in Vermont in the most recent comparison of 50 states and the District of Columbia from the EPE Research Center's Education Counts Database. The national average for PPE is just under $10,000. Those who support vouchers are asking to be paid amounts equal to the PPE in their state because they don't believe that they should have to support public education as their darlings aren't in public school.

There are constant complaints on Facebook and in general about the lack of comprehension on the part of the American public when it comes to politics and government. Knowledge of core civics is so poor that there were folks on FB who questioned why President Obama didn't just pardon Troy Davis, who was convicted in a state court of committing murder in violation of state law. Such a pardon is not within the powers of the office of the President. Compared to other comparable countries and some that we consider far less developed than the U.S., our students show mediocre performance  in math and science, and notoriously score poorly on standardized tests in U.S. History. (Test your knowledge of U.S. History by answering questions from the tests administered to students in grades 4, 8, and 12.)

Our public education system needs to be improved and held accountable. Check the education levels of any state prison and you will find a disproportionate number of inmates who never graduated from high school. Federal prisons are a bit different as they are filled with white collar criminals who have degrees but lack ethics. We continue to allow massive numbers of students to crash land between the cracks at our own peril. I'd prefer to have my taxes go to support public education; in the long run it's less costly than continuing to pay to maintain prisons (which also are supported with our taxes). We pay to support public education because we know that a poorly educated populace will be a future drain on the society rather than functional contributors to the growth and well-being of society.  Providing a quality public education for every child benefits all members of society. (See, The Effect of Education on Crime, October 2003.)

We cannot afford to entertain the notion that some of us are less responsible than others for contributing financial support to public education. It's both shortsighted and selfish.

It's Saturday. November 12.

Well, Veteran's Day is over. We go back to ignoring them again, right?

Veterans account for a troubling 20 percent of our nation’s suicides, according to national figures. This means that every day in the United States, an average of 18 veterans take their own lives – or about one every 80 minutes.

About 27 percent of Oregon’s suicides are veterans.

From 2005 to 2010, active service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours...

Post Traumatic Stress may occur in those who experience or witness intense violence, serious accidents, or life-threatening events. It can make people feel angry, hopeless, fearful, horrified, and overwhelmed. Post Traumatic Stress is treatable.

Many veterans and active military balk at seeking help through traditional channels due to fear of negative career impact, the stigma of perceived weakness among their peers and frustration with red tape. Left untreated, the challenges can intensify as they feel more isolated.

It's a Tax!

The War on Christmas, like the 'Black Friday' sales, began early this year. Faced with the growing difficulty of explaining how paying the Bush Administrations bills makes Obama a spendthrift and how asking for a smaller stimulus package makes him more reckless than Bush while all the time being a communist, Mau-Mau, Fascist, do-nothing tyrant, the need for ever more idiotic distraction generates the need to elevate even more mole-hills to Himalayan proportions. So this year, it's no longer about how that Muslim Obama and those damned Jews and atheists are at war with Christmas, it's about how that damned tax-tyrant Obama is making us pay more for it ( and costing us jobs. ) Welcome to the new act in the Republican circus: the Christmas Tree Tax.

The Christmas Tree Promotion, Research and Information Order, which was first proposed during the administration of President George W. Bush in response to the yapping of agricultural lobbyist Christmas Tree Promotion Now, gave the President authority to add a 15 cent charge to every tree to be used to advertise and promote Christmas trees. The government will not use these funds, the Christmas tree growers will use the money collected from retailers to promote further sales with the intention, or excuse that increased sales will more than offset the cost. It's kind of a capitalist idea, Republican style -- you know, like the $80 million-a-year beef promotion order imposed during the Reagan administration, or the $8 million-a-year peanut promotion order imposed during the Bush administration. But we're not talking about St Ronald or St George, we're talking about that anti-colonial Kenyan/Indonesian killer of African Christians who hates Christmas and white people.

It's a TAX! scream the headlines and the banshee bloggers. How can we expect anyone to hear the whisper of "it's capitalism" from the rational rest of us? Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax, howls the headline at The Foundry, the blustery blog of the Heritage Foundation hammering out their daily dumps of hammered, beaten, twisted and red hot baloney. Will there be another headline informing us that the President reconsidered the Bush program and cancelled it?

WHO’S THE (reproduction) BOSS?

I watched in dread as the Personhood group tried to ram their sharia-like legislation down the throats of the Mississippi citizenry. Thankfully, there are enough sane people in Mississippi to vote down the proposal. Imagine a law that would allow the local government to control your reproductive status right down to the type of birth control you use! This is America! We don’t do things like that here! Or do we?

Years ago I became aware of just such a shocking law that was on the books of more than 30 states, including my own state of North Carolina where it stayed on the books until 1973.

I am talking about eugenics laws that many states and countries (most notably Germany) adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. The law allowed a board to approve the forced sterilization of any man, woman or child (some as young as 9 years old) deemed to be mentally deficient or overly promiscuous. In North Carolina alone nearly 8000 sterilizations took place.

In the beginning these sterilizations were aimed at poor white women but this would change after WWII when the focus was shifted to black citizens. Forced sterilization became the silent shame – victims didn’t want to disclose their mutilation for fear they would be branded retarded or slutty. Many signed the consent forms or had relatives who did without understanding exactly what they were signing or in response to threats of punishment.

Girls who were raped and victims of incest were frequent targets. The stories of their abuse at the hands of the state are shocking and heartbreaking and they suffered in silence for years. Many died taking their shameful secret to their graves.

But they are not all gone yet and some states including North Carolina are forming committees to find living victims who will hopefully get some compensation although they can never get back the lost years of parenthood they never knew or the self esteem and joy lost forever.

Many are finally giving voice to the horror committed against them. They are standing up and telling their stories with family and friends at their side, giving them the courage to finally speak. Janice Black is just one of many whose tragic stories are coming to light. You can read about her HERE. She was one of the last victims. And Elaine Riddick, HERE.

We women have long been targets of practices meant to marginalize our existence and take control of our bodies. We have defeated eugenics laws and anti abortion laws but each year it seems some supposedly well meaning group of folks (usually made up of religious fanatics and predominately men) try to take control of our bodies in some sick, sadistic way.

We owe it to Janice and Elaine and all the others whose names we will never know to keep fighting back and NEVER EVER allow any group, panel, state or country that much control over our bodies.

As a post script let me add that we need to remember our sisters in other countries who are being subjected to mutilations, rapes, slavery and other forms of torture and forced captivity. They need our voice to cry out for the justice they deserve but are unable to do so themselves for fear of reprisals against them and their children.

Welcome, "Rational" Nation!

If you've been reading our comment section, you've probably noticed that we have a new troll hanging around: the ironically-named Rational Nation. And I think we should all welcome new readers, even dissenting voices who might not have a particularly firm grasp on reality - maybe a dose of logic and kindness could bring him into the light. (Not likely, but, you now, keep a good thought...)

But anyone who knows me (a statistically insignificant number of people) will tell you that I'll give anybody a chance to make ignorant statements, if only because I'm more than happy to find new targets to point and laugh at.

After all, as I pointed out before:

You're just like all the other Birchers loving on Ron Paul. You're always out there looking for somebody to hate - the next Great Satan. Because if you can focus everybody's eyes on the bad guy over there, you can rob them blind over here.

Communists, Muslims - you don't care. And you don't mind if great evil is committed in the name of Good - as long as it matches your personal definition of "good," anyway.

It's actually sad, watching petty, insecure people make claim to a knowledge of "the Big Picture." You pretend to be rational and logical, but ignore truths when they're right in front of you.

Here, for example, you even used this link to bolster your claim that "6% of Muslims are extremist," while ignoring one important fact: you got it completely ass-backwards.

The statistic cited there only said that 6% of extremists are Muslim. The other 94% aren't, and the threat of Muslim terrorists is being overblown.

Go read it again. You were faced with the truth, and you either ignored it, lied about it, or just got it completely wrong. Just like you do with almost every other subject.

Like I said, your name must be meant ironically, right?

And of course, RatNat is a devout worshiper at the altar of Ayn Rand, who was a stunningly bad writer. I think Gore Vidal said it best, though.

This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the ‘freedom is slavery’ sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her ‘philosophy,’ but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the ‘welfare’ state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.
[...]
Though Miss Rand’s grasp of logic is uncertain, she does realize that to make even a modicum of sense she must change all the terms. Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

Ayn Rand’s "philosophy" is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous...

So, you're welcome to hang out, just don't muck up the carpet.

About Last Night

Here is a recap of last night’s election and referendum results:

Ohio - Voters overturned Governor Kasich’s bill that stripped public sector employees of their collective bargain rights. Margin: 61 to 39 percent.

Mississippi – Voters rejected a referendum that would have conferred legal personhood status to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Margin: 57 to 43 percent. In Mississippi, you will no longer order scrambled “unborn chicks” for breakfast or call senior citizens “undead corpses.”

Main – Voters reinstated the right to register on election day, thus giving Governor Paul LePage a resounding defeat. Margin: 60 to 40 percent.

Arizona – Voters recalled state Senate Leader Russell Pearce, the architect of Arizona’s controversial anti-immigrant law. Margin: 52.4 to 45.4 percent. After January, the former Senator will have more time to mow his own lawn and wash his own laundry.

Georgia – Voters struck down long-standing blue laws that banned Sunday alcohol sales. Henceforth and forevermore, the Bible Belters will have one more path for finding Jesus.

North Carolina – voters gave Democrats a clean sweep of mayoral races in Greensboro and Charlotte (the city that will host the 2012 Democratic National Convention). Voters also sent a clear message to the Wake County School Board, returning majority control to the Democrats. Last year, the Republican controlled school board scrapped a decade-old busing plan that kept the local schools desegregated. This was a high-profile election due to the influence of outside money from the Koch-funded PAC, Americans for Prosperity.

Do these election returns represent a swing of the political pendulum? Is the infatuation with fatuous fatheads finally over?  Hardly!  Not all news last night was good news.  In Virginia, the Democrats lost more ground.

An old Octopus Proverb:  Change does not come from hope.  Rather, as creatures of habit and complacency, human beings change only when motivated by excruciating pain. Virginians, it seems, have a higher pain threshold due in no small part to their proximity to Washington DC.

Update:  Voter turnouts were far higher last night compared to election cycle 2010 - double in some contests.  If there is one lesson to be learned from these results, high voter turnout marginalizes the lunatic fringe and makes a difference.  Never, never stay away from the polls - vote, vote, vote!

Elective Dictatorship or Leadership?

Ron Paul, I like you - I really do. I like it when you denounce our military adventurism and imperial urges. I share your distaste for prosecuting harmless, consensual acts and I don't think either of us like having a government dictate morality according to some chosen religious standards.

I couldn't agree more that we need to keep the governmental nose out of our personal choices that don't infringe on other people's rights. I think we have an inherent right to be left alone too, but when you assert that that same government can force a woman to continue a pregnancy I find it inconsistent. When you proclaim that President Obama is overstepping his presidential powers by taking action to end a dangerous drug shortage, I'm confused. I'm disappointed. Market forces alone aren't going to induce drug companies to make unprofitable products that some people need to stay alive and if they eventually do, it won't be soon enough for someone's mother or sister or child. There are times when the the noli me tangere market approach does not serve the public interest and times when human life is more important than the sanctity of inflexible doctrine.

Yes, I agree that our government was designed to move slowly, for inaction to be the default action as you said yesterday. I even agree that there is an invisible hand in the market, but I cannot understand how you can ignore the sometimes dire consequences of such slow moving or inert systems in a world that moves at a rate inconceivable in 1789.

Sure, eventually drug shortages will tend to rectify because of market forces. 'Tend to' and 'eventually' are expensive words however and the price is often paid in death and suffering. A car tends to steer itself in a straight line, but you know, sometimes someone has to grab the wheel if staying alive is a consideration.

I have to ask you how much needless death and suffering are you willing to force us all to endure to gild the vision of a withered and minimal state where things move only by themselves and the making of money is the only test of righteousness?

Dictatorship? Seriously? Isn't that a bit like calling the guy who pulls your kid out of a well a kidnapper because he didn't apply to Congress in advance through proper channels?

I believe in Democracy as much as you do and perhaps more. I mistrust radical change and I lean toward Libertarianism in many things, but unlike you, I do not belief in faith over fact. If there is a plague, if a dam breaks -- if that asteroid that passed close to us this morning had landed in Texas, I want someone to grab the steering wheel without having his hands tied by doctrines soaked in the tea of Utopian visions.

I have to ask "why now?" Were you as firm in protest of our previous president's extra-legal activities? The signing statements, the treaty breaking, the torture, the illegal search and seizure and surveillance? The wars that have killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed millions of lives and wasted trillions of dollars? Of course you didn't approve and neither did I, but there is a difference between an asteroid and a sand grain. Are we really confusing necessary course corrections with wanton disrespect for law, due process and freedom?

Why now? Or are you just jumping on the Obama Bashing Band Wagon because you're more of a loyal Republican and less interested in doing what needs to be done before too many people die than you'd like to admit?

All I Wanted Was to Catch Up On The News

When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling

My visit to the twilight zone started with a story in the Arts section of the Washington Post. A cleaning woman in Germany did a really good job scrubbing the discoloration off a rubber trough. However, there was a slight problem. The rubber trough was a part of a modern sculpture entitled "When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling." The sculpture, by deceased artist Martin Kippenberger, was worth $1.1 million. A reasonable price, after all the artist is dead. The dirt that she worked so hard to remove was actually a patina that had been carefully applied by hand.

I admit that I'm not bowled over by a lot of contemporary art. I can see why the cleaning woman thought that perhaps the trough was just an item needing cleaning. I have an old rubber pan that I use to store gardening hand tools. I'm thinking that I should paint it, surround it with a wooden frame, and offer it to the Guggenheim.

I progressed further into the twilight zone while watching ABC's Nightline after the 11:00 pm news. There was a segment on a sport with which I had no familiarity. It seems that there are parts of our country where mutton bustin' is a beloved family-oriented activity. The Nightline link to the story isn't available yet but wonder of wonders, when I searched the term mutton bustin', Google found 214,000 results in 0.15 seconds.

Take one child under the age of six and weighing less than 60 pounds, strap him or her into a child sized protective vest, add a helmet, then place the child on the back of a 180 pound sheep. Guess what? Sheep aren't naturally fond of playing horsey so they begin to run really fast and try to throw off the rider. The average rider lasts 6 to 8 seconds. 

On Nightline, some of the riders were as young as three-years-old. You may ask yourself why would a parent put their little darling on the back of a sheep for a wild ride that ends with said child falling off and eating a pile of dirt? The mothers and fathers explained that they wanted their children to be tough and it's a great precursor to bull riding. Perhaps you know a toddler with whom you would like to share this bonding activity.


I left the twilight zone and landed in the outer limits while watching the Jimmy Kimmel Show following Nightline. Herman Cain needs to hire some reliable handlers; his current crew may not have his best interests at heart. I'm no fan of Cain, but even I wouldn't have suggested that he accept Kimmel's invitation to be a guest on his show. Yep, that's right, the same Herman Cain whose fourth accuser had come out of the woodwork to declare that he stuck his hand up her dress and tried to push her face into his crotch. Kimmel began the show with the interview clip showing the alleged victim and her lawyer, the ubiquitous Gloria Allred. The Cain interview consisted of double entendres, suggestive jokes, bawdy laughter, and Kimmel encouraging Cain to be ever more outrageous. I did learn one useful thing--Cain's wife is a registered Democrat. Explains why she has been mostly absent from his campaign trail.

Deadbeats

Story here

What the Hell is this?

It's Sunday, so it seems like the appropriate time to consider the concept of hell. The fundies like to bring it up all the time: "you don't agree with us, you're going to burn," usually leaving the postscript, "...and I'm going to enjoy it," unstated.

Now, the Hebrews (you know, the guys with the Old Testament) didn't go in for the idea of hell much. In Daniel 12:2, you get something vaguely similar to the traditional Christian idea, but not quite.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

So, not a lot of torment, but there's guilt (an emotion some might call the foundation of Judaism).

If the ancient Jews talked about it at all, they usually referred to Sheol, which is the place where all the dead, good and bad, hung out.

However, they did give us one other word: Gehenna, which is derived from the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, or "the Valley of Hinnom." It was a garbage dump outside Jerusalem. There was always a fire there, because you burned your garbage, and it was also referred to a few times (2 Chron. 28:3, for instance) as a place where some various pagan types sacrificed children.

If you go to the original Greek, the New Testament describes Hell with three words:

• Hades (taken from the Greek god of the same name), which was pretty much like the Jewish idea of Sheol


• Gehenna was sometimes used as a place to toss the bodies who "died in sin" for a quick cremation. So the term Gehenna in the New Testament became a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after they died (or, more technically, after the Resurrection of Jesus, which they've been promising for 2 millenia now).


• Tartarus is used once, in II Peter 2:4 - Pete stole the idea from the Greeks, where it was the place where their gods put the titans after they rebelled. So Pete grabbed that idea and ran with it.

  For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment

In 1999, Pope John Paul II tried to go back to the friendlier idea of the ancient Hebrews, and said that "more than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy."

Unfortunately for the pope's attempt to make Christianity all warm and fuzzy, the New Testament is littered with descriptions of the dead being toasted: the potentially drug-induced Revelations, for example, gives us this.

...and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books... And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelations 20:12-15)

John the Revelator also gave us the most boring version of an afterlife ever - following Jesus around to sing about how great he is. Apparently, Jesus is too lazy to stick his own affirmations everywhere on Post-it notes like normal people.

(And incidentally, that description of heaven, found in Revelations 14:1-5, is where the Jehovah's Witnesses get the idea that only 144,000 people are going to Heaven. In case you were wondering.)

Christianity needs Hell, despite how counterintuitive the idea is with a religion that claims to have a loving god. Because, when you can't actually torture and kill people who don't believe in your personal flavor of religion (although god knows they've tried that, too), you need to have some kind of punishment to hold over their heads. And the fear of a place where no witnesses have ever returned is an easy fix for them.

(OK, admittedly there are some people who claim to have been to have been there, but they never seem to visit the gift shop and bring back souvenirs.)

Octopi Wall Street!

h/t/ Pharyngula

Kudos to our favorite eight-armed cephalapod!

Shame on Cain

That's right, Mr. Cain, you're a victim, but I doubt we can agree about what you're the victim of. If you bumble and fumble and contradict yourself about political stances in some strange pantomime of someone who might have reasonable solutions to real problems rather than doggy treats thrown to the barking mob: if you elected to join the minstrel show hoping to win over the racists and rednecks with a little soft shoe and a big grin: if you thought slashing jobs at a pizza chain made you eligible to tell us how to run the world, why sure, you're your own victim but most of us are too tired of it to be saintly and forgive you.

But a "high tech lynching?" Don't make me laugh, and besides Clarance Thomas made that trope a dopey joke a long time ago. You're just the rude, crude and blatantly phoney burlesque of a candidate to dress up accusations of sexual harassment in stylish credibility and denying things we know that you know or breaking into a song isn't going to convince mama that those porn mags under your mattress belonged to someone else. Talking about lynching in this context is like digging up all the real victims and lynching them again.

Comcast is a criminal enterprise: Octopus is off grid