Drill until we drop

Perhaps a society such as ours has as finite a lifespan as the individuals it's composed of and I think I'm seeing the kind of memory loss and dementia in the American public that we associate with extreme old age. The aged body sometimes can't absorb sustenance very well and neither can the American public assimilate the things that make a capable and dynamic Democracy possible. a large part of our population, for instance, seems to think that the huge environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico means that we need to do more of what made it happen and in the same careless, unregulated way. Presumably a number of those live far inland and don't like seafood or care that the Earth is becoming less livable because these are still the "end times," but not all of them. Some just think that as long as their immediate, short term needs are met, the rest of the world can go to hell, and so it goes.

A recent poll shows that despite the total lack of evidence and the extreme unlikeliness of the scenario, nine or ten percent of Americans do believe Limbaugh's idiotic proposition that it was the "enviros" behind the drilling platform explosion, but the scary part is that 22% are "unsure." Amongst self-identified Conservatives, the number jumps to 44% who believe it was sabotage by liberals. The evidence to the contrary is out there, the evidence for it isn't out there, so either 31% are unable to assimilate it by reason of dementia or have no interest in the survival of the USA as we think we know it -- or Like many aged people, they've given up and are simply wandering in a senile, paranoid daze of denialism looking for their lost youth and vigor.

"Perhaps most surprisingly 21% of voters said the spill made them more likely to support offshore drilling,"

said Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen. 55% of Americans polled after the disaster began, still supported offshore drilling, according to the same poll.

Am I pushing this too far? Is this really only more of what America has been doing since its beginning? We are, after all a nation that is happy to continue its war on drugs and embargoes on foreign countries that cause more harm than good; a nation that has had to struggle tooth and nail to overcome our vicious habits. Most of all we're a nation that always waits for a calamity before doing anything. What I'm afraid of is that this time the calamity we're waiting for won't come until we're a nation incapable of taking care of ourselves but a nation with a huge Army.

Teh Great Wall-Off Mexico

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. So when John McCain ignores the overwhelming empirical evidence of human history and insists that massive federal spending on a barrier will work this time, you know he's lost his mind.

Also: I'm trying to win a Netroots Nation scholarship, and all you have to do to help is click a couple of times.

Fear and Trembling in the Court

OK, so now I'm worried. I was willing to make some excuses for Obama's new support of offshore drilling; blaming it on previous administrations' infiltration of oil men into the department of energy and the drowning of environmental regulations, but if what I'm hearing about Elena Kagan is even partly true, I'm worried that we're going to have a more dangerous court, more friendly toward unfettered Presidential powers and willing to cut a wider swath through the law to root out nebulous, ever shifting devils and their agents -- making any accusation, any suspicion a de facto conviction without representation, without trial, without appeal: in some cases without anyone even knowing about it.

"Battlefield Law", said she to Lindsay Graham last year, should be applied to anyone we have a feeling is financing Al Qaeda and one's rights should not be read to anyone that might be construed to be a "terrorist" despite the lack of any real definition of what a terrorist might be. Vague definitions and accusations of shadowy connections leading to indefinite detentions without due process? Why have a court at all if we're no longer a civilized nation but a band of warriors on a worldwide battlefield?

Attorney General Eric Holder said on ABC's This Week Sunday, that even US citizens don't need to be read their rights if they're suspected of being involved in terrorism. Suspected is the key word here and in a time when everyone seems to be suspected every time they board an airplane, it's a scary word.

“I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception." Chopping a piece out of the Bill of Rights is “one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do – to come up with a proposal that is both Constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

I think it's worth mentioning that the most recent attempts at terrorist acts were hardly impeded by the reading of rights as the terrified terrorists , one of whose gonads had just been blow off, spilled their guts as fast as they could get the words out and when we're happy to torture people so thoroughly their testimony becomes invalid, what's going to change if we tell them they have any rights at all -- which, practically speaking, they don't. I'm afraid we don't either. It's certainly harder not to cry when reading about our forefathers' noble ideals about all mankind being endowed with inalienable rights when we're told that's just too risky these days.
It's always been risky and taking that risk has been one of our valid claims to greatness.

The last thing I expected or wanted from the President in the way of restocking the Court was another battlefield lawyer, supporting the degradation of our most basic American traditions and laws from gutless cowardice. We have more to fear from fear of terrorism, it seems, than from terrorism itself. At a time when the very concept of a government is so frightening to so many, I would have expected a selection with a more obvious commitment to taking the risk of Liberty and willing to face saboteurs without sabotaging our own freedom.

Poisoning Pigeons In The Park

By Nance

Monday scares me.  I'm one of the little people who doesn't understand the Stock Market, who has no business involved with it, but who finds her financial future, and thus the quality of her old age, bound up with and terrorized by that fickle, convoluted, unnatural, hair-trigger, Frankenstein creation of our infatuation with the promise that money makes money.

Monday might be a second chance to make a wise move with what I now pitifully still refer to as my portfolio; I was too paralyzed by fear in the summer of 2008 to know whether to hold 'em or fold 'em.  The pressure is on to be a little smarter this time around, following the past week's sharp declines and Thursday's petrifying plunge...except that being smarter seems even less possible, even more past hope now.  The only economic constants I've detected in recent years are that some folks will make money in wild market fluctuations and that I will probably be among their dupes.  I don't feel one bit smarter or better able to decide whether to stay in or get out.

I've assumed that somebody knows what happened last Thursday and what is likely to happen on Wall Street next week, but reading up on it today has just made an ass out of u and me.  Theories abound:  it's Greece and the bail-out implications for the EU; it was sabotage by _______ (fill in the blank with your favorite conspirator, party, lobby, or disgruntled fan of Blankfein); it was the bad news about unemployment rates hidden under the good news about job creation; or, most detached and cruel of all, a fat finger.  In the online money journals and news sources, I've encountered psychotic word salads that only leave me more confounded.  Take this example from The LATimes:

"We were in the midst of a pullback, we needed one, we got one," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at New York-based brokerage house Avalon Partners Inc. Cardillo said the choppy trading after such a drastic decline likely signals the market trying to find a bottom.

Stocks have been on a nearly uninterrupted upward path since March of last year, when indexes hit 12-year lows. Analysts have been predicting a correction for months, only to see the market bounce back after brief periods of decline.

Long-term market watchers actually welcome occasional pullbacks in stocks, saying that gives investors opportunities to pick up shares at bargain prices.

"We had the earthquake, we're now in the midst of getting the aftershocks," said Steven Goldman, chief market strategist for Weeden & Co. in Greenwich, Conn. "When the market's so close to new highs, it's difficult to have rallies. But when you're down 10 or 12 percent from recent highs, we can deal with uncertainty better."

Did Cardillo and Goldman say here that they welcomed this week's dizzying descent because it lets those in the know feel in control? I am too far down the Rabbit Hole, now; I'm having the same kind of vertigo I get when I try to read a prospectus. I'd just begun to think that the prognosticators who pointed to the DOW line graph as proof that the bad times were behind us might be right. That'll learn me. Again.

In a conversation I had sometime in July or August of '08 with an acquaintance who professed financial smarts, I declared that I was so disheartened by the market's unrelenting drop, I didn't think I could bear to stay invested.  His response was, "Well, what do you think you're going to do with it, put it in a jar under the bed?"  That was ridicule, in case you missed it.  Another wag told me, "Oh, yes, cash is king now!"  And, still another, "This is the time to put every penny you can put your hands on into stocks!"  And, "It's all gambling. You should never invest what you can't afford to lose."

Here's a sure bet: there will be abundant and worthless advice available on Monday. My worthless advice: stock up on Mason Jars.  The smart money will be on the insiders at the expense of an entire class made up of vulnerable retirees and retiree hopefuls like you and me who were only hoping for peanuts on the dollar. They toy with us and our measly, hard-earned savings.  It'll be as easy for them to take what's left of our nest eggs as...um, trying to avoid cliches, as easy as...I draw a blank.  Jeez, why does this Tom Lehrer song come to mind?

Bossa Nova Bomb?

I struggle to understand why Brazil needs nuclear submarines. It's a country where the interior is extremely difficult to penetrate or control and where the coastal cities have horrifying slums controlled by gangs and where poverty is rampant. How real is the threat of invasion? How real is the desire to be the alpha dog of South America?

Of course one benefit of having nuclear powered subs is that the military can impose secrecy on the fissionable materials it stockpiles as fuel and in that secrecy can use it to make nuclear weapons. There are indications that this is just what they're doing or are about to do, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressing irritation at the US monopoly on nuclear weapons in South America and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

So why the hell does Brazil, it's recovering economy notwithstanding, need the Bomb? I suppose it's because it simply feels it can -- and with the US busy chasing its own tail, hell bent on self-destruction and anarchy, who is to say it can't?

Audacity

We're all aware that one of the rhetorical games people use to portray political opponents negatively is to call them name callers. A skillful user can frame any kind of protest as a hatefest and in our time, when the most vociferous denunciation of the sin of homosexuality seems to come from people who hire male prostitutes, it's not surprising that the angriest political protesters spend more time accusing others of the sin of anger. So the people out in the streets flaunting weapons and sometimes vicious signs make it a point to take offense at those "hate-filled" liberals who like to point out not only the misspellings, the sometimes amusing disparity between facts and their beliefs and often vicious rhetoric. "Look at the way they call us 'Teabaggers'" say the offended parties, foam on their lips still fresh from calling the President a Communist, Kenyan, Maoist disciple of Adolph Hitler. "Liberals are having a field day of hate."

What will they call me for pointing out that they were the first to use that silly term themselves? Jay Nordinger writing for the National Review Online has to admit it, but can't do it without repeating the calumny -- those liberal extremists like Rachel Maddow are nasty, childish name callers -- never mind that we "patriots" started calling them Nazis and Communists years ago for valid criticism of the Republican Administration: baby killers! Grandmother killers! America haters! Terrorist supporters! They should be more respectful or at least neutral.

Sure, there's name calling and there's name calling. Massive tax cuts intended to boost the economy were just that a few years ago, but now they're irresponsible and massive debt increases according to "Tea party patriots" ( to use the term that Nordinger insists we should use if we really were fair minded) and aren't I just a nasty name caller for pointing out the stunning hypocrisy? Isn't this just a hate site for publishing that? No, the Liberal Media like the National Review, controls the discourse and that is why it's become so nasty. By Liberal Media of course, I mean those terrorist sympathizers and Trotzkyites who want to grab your guns and turn your children Gay.

I'd hate to play poker with such people. It's more than just Botox that enables the propagandists and media manipulators and their candidates to say such things with straight faces. So when the Republican candidate for the Governorship of Florida comes on the air last night and with the flippant demeanor of someone explaining to preschoolers that fish swim and birds fly, tells us that "Obama thinks that more government is the solution to all problems."

I have to be in awe of his training, self control -- the sheer dishonesty of his audacity. As he was speaking, of course, one of our time's greatest ecological disasters was and is poisoning vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico and soon to poison a good part of the Atlantic ocean and all the sea life -- and all the result of taking government mandated safeguards out of the equation: the sum total of the Bush energy policy as written by BP and Exxon and Halliburton. When BP drills elsewhere in that oh so socialist world, they have to use a device that would have prevented this spill, but thanks to core Republican policy they got to save $500,000 and cost us untold billions. God only knows what the final cost of this disaster will be or how many decades it will take for the Gulf to begin to recover.

But there you are, I'm indulging in "hate" again when I should listen to Rush and accept that man made disaster is "natural" and after all, oil is part of nature and it's a liquid just like water and nature itself wants the oil cartel to make billions and billions and billions -- far more than it wants us to be healthy and prosper. I do try, but as they tell me I'm a liberalcommiefascist, it can't be easy to rid myself of that ugly old hate and go along with the flow.

"Hey Fun Boys, Get a Room!"

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Adios for a week (Don't worry, things can always get worse)

By Arthurstone

I’m as fervent a capitalist as anyone. That said I am not afraid of government (though I’m mindful of its endless inefficiencies) nor am I in thrall to the idea of self-correcting, efficient markets. When they ‘correct,’ it costs me a lot of money. Their ‘efficiencies’ add to the number of crackheads in my neighborhood. The co-mingling of ‘laissez-faire’ capitalists and government is a hideous mutation well described by Naomi Klein in ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and now playing out in Greece and soon to come to a theatre near you in Spain, Portugal and other EU countries who have chosen to put the interests of their citizens ahead of predatory bankers, investors and global enterprises as encouraged by the good old US of A.

Pre-natal care and maternity leave? Labor unions? Workplace safety rules? Pensions? Universal medical care? Comprehensive and accessible educational opportunities? Support for the arts? Investment in infrastructure? Environmental concern? Affirmative action? All expensive and all hindrances to unfettered capitalism and the enormous benefit to the most predatory, greedy and selfish members of our society which accrues through unethical (if not illegal) investor practices, credit swaps, short selling, TARP and other bail-outs we fund in lieu of spending on the common good.

And while we’re at it let’s not neglect that grand daddy of all American obsessions. The great American pastime itself. The thing we never seem to tire of nor ever seem not to be able to afford:

War!

There’s always time and treasure to devote to ‘defending’ out interests. That defending our interests currently takes place several thousand miles from our borders and involves ‘enemies’ who have not attacked us is beside the point and not without historical precedence. While it’s the Afghans and Iraqis turn in the barrel this go round don’t forget that in last century it was Filipinos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Iranians and a host of others who paid the price for having the audacity to question our ‘national interests’. Interestingly enough, our ‘national interests’ so often seem to require satisfaction within the borders of other sovereign states. Such is the burden we must bear. Empire never did come cheap.

My business has suffered the past couple of years. I own and operate an art gallery dealing in contemporary painting and sculpture. No one knows better than I how ‘unnecessary’ what I do actually is. Compared to bankers bundling toxic mortgages, computer whizzes counting keystrokes and inventing new pop-up ads and methods of tracking me in real time and marketers turning every lifted toilet lid I encounter into an advertisement, I’m keenly aware of the insignificance of my contribution. The impulse to tell a story, paint a picture, write a song, carve a block of wood or throw a pot is interesting in a puny way but pales in comparison to the far more important impulse to ‘earn’ vast sums of money.

And I’m okay with that.

So Sunday morning my lovely wife Marianne and I are off to Akumal on the Yucatan peninsula for a week of reading, cycling, snorkeling, sunning and eating. It’s my gift to Marianne on her birthday. Measured strictly in financial terms, probably, I can’t really afford to go right now. Business is at the same level as it was in 1994, the third year of operation. And it’s a real struggle right now. But I figure I can’t afford not to go. My Father died last year, Mother the year before. We all ended on good terms and one wise thing (among a great many) Mother told me was to enjoy this while I can. And I still can. I’m 58, healthy and have a little saved up. In the great scheme of things, I’m essentially a lottery winner compared to so many far less fortunate.

And I choose not to let the bastards whining, kvetching, complaining and mewling about our current state in the US get me down. Most of us (and certainly many of those making the most noise) have far more than our share and are, through the accident of our birth, among the luckiest people on the planet.

It’s a big world out there and we as Americans too often forget that simple fact.

FOUR DEAD IN O- HIO

I wanted to get this posted yesterday. Unfortunately, I had to contend with another episode of a slipped lumbar disc which causes much pain and requires chemical intervention that leaves me a bit fuzzy – not a good time to post to a public forum. So, here I am, a day late, but better late than never.

May 4, 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of this tragic event that would change the course of history of this nation and of my generation. While most of us continued to support peaceful protest and organized civil disobedience, the violence perpetrated against unarmed college students by fellow Americans would spawn a more violent subculture that would include the formation of Black Panthers and Weather Underground.

For anyone too young to remember this event, there was a protest organized at Kent State University; not unlike similar protests taking place at college campuses across the country. The protest was in response to then President Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia, thus escalating the war in Asia. In the days leading up to the May 4th protest, there had been an incident in town which involved breaking of windows and starting a fire. It was determined that only a few participants were Kent students; mostly the crowd had been townies and bikers. On May 4th the students gathered on school grounds in a central location. The governor declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. Soon, four college students would lay dead, all unarmed, all shot with deadly precision. Not just an attempt to simply stop them; they were all kill shots.

Watching the news that day as the black and white images were repeatedly broadcast, there was a sense of horror and disbelief – “They’re killing us for speaking out!” It was the point where a generation collectively concluded that “our” government wasn’t ours at all. They became the enemy.

I find it interesting that those today who would call Bill Ayers a terrorist are some of the same people encouraging police and military to refuse any order to shoot at other Americans and have vowed to take up arms if such a thing were to occur. I wonder how they cannot see the ironic contradiction of their own words. I imagine they would spin the scene in Ohio in 1970 as different because those kids were loud, angry hippies as opposed to loud, angry, “moral, Christian, patriots”.

As Americans, we have the right to peacefully assemble and protest. As human beings, we have a duty to peacefully assemble and protest unfair laws and practices which would probably be referred to as civil disobedience. (Think Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle).

What Americans do NOT have a right to do is murder or incarcerate or oppress any person or group that does not agree with them. Change comes slowly, sometimes painfully, but usually, in hindsight, the changes are good. To those who believe they have a right to violent actions to enforce their beliefs – you are wrong. You are as wrong now as those fringe groups from the 70s were wrong then.

And this is why:

THE DEAD

Jeffrey Glenn Miller; shot through the mouth - killed instantly
Allison B. Krause; fatal left chest wound - died later that day
William Knox Schroeder; fatal chest wound - died almost an hour later in hospital while waiting for surgery
Sandra Lee Scheuer; fatal neck wound - died a few minutes later from loss of blood

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,

We're finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio.

(lyrics by Neil Young)

Soldiers aren't the only people who have paid the ultimate price for freedom.

Joe the Dumber

Senator Joe Lieberman is a cheap, pandering whore without a principle in his head and without much concern for history. Instead of being able to come up with some means to combat and prevent acts of terrorism, he's still looking for ways to make a criminal organization into a superpower complete with Army, Navy, Air Force and probably nuclear missiles. Any one working for a foreign terrorist organization should be stripped of his rights as a citizen. He doesn't bother to clarify whether that's before or after a fair trial, but I suspect the whole idea of a fair trial is anathema to his sort of Neanderthal conservatism. What an idiotic response to a failed truck bomb: attack the cornerstone of American liberty.

I wonder if he stops to contemplate how the Jews of Europe were suddenly deemed by the German government as being agents of a hostile foreign power and stripped of citizenship -- allowing the confiscation of their property and their exile to death camps.

No, someone willing to kill hundreds of people at random in Times Square is going to be deterred by a subsequent withdrawal of his citizenship? The shade of Mohammad Atta is laughing in Hell. What about domestic terrorist/murderer Tim McVeigh? Oh, that's OK, he wasn't working for foreigners.

What does Lieberman hope to accomplish other than to give hope to the barbarian Right that we can do as we like to anyone who isn't a citizen? God only gave rights to Americans, you see.

Whether he doesn't bother to or doesn't have the brain power to dismiss that worthless gesture of idiot rage is something not worth speculating on, but it's obvious that Joe Lieberman is all about Joe Lieberman trying to get attention by once again trying to rattle the cage of the ignorati instead of adding anything worthwhile to an important effort.