Earth Hour - another Sunday sermon

By Capt. Fogg

"The amount of power that's saved during that time is not really what it's about,"

I would imagine so, since it's quite an insignificant amount.

"What it is meant to be about is showing what can happen when people come together."

Is the explanation of the hour-long turning off of lights on monuments and many countries around the world given by Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley. In other words it's a feel-good gesture that lets people who prefer making gestures to making a difference, like the countless other "awareness raising" parties of all sorts.

Mass delusion, witch hunts, lynch mobs and riots, of course are other examples of what can happen when people come together. I think we need much more and much different solutions.

Might I suggest that working together toward a purpose is what we need and that such things require objectivity, education and a lot of money. Since most of the rapid increase in power consumption around the world is both the cause and effect of raising the standard of living of the suffering poor, it all sounds a bit smug for the haves of the world to be having a parade of Liberal virtue by perhaps not driving the Hummer for an hour or turning off some lights and partying in the dark. It's the kind of smugness that one sees in those swooning over some imaginary romantic and bucolic world where everyone farms with manure and mules and the bugs, crows and fungus don't eat two thirds of the crops. A world where people somehow find something "seasonal and local" and "organic" and not "processed" even in in the desert and tundra and the mountains instead of the often fatal malnutrition and disease our ancestors suffered until Clarence Birdseye, mechanical refrigeration and the steam locomotive saved us from goiters, pellagra, scurvy, hunger and a diet of boiled turnips every winter.

In the real world, billions would starve in short order without the technology that scares us so much, but maybe that wouldn't count because they'd be in Africa and places like that where we wouldn't have to smell it or catch Cholera and we'd have like soooo much fun raising awareness about it by having gala parties where the servants would pass around empty Hors d'œuvre trays for an hour.

It's not that I'm against making some sacrifices or investing in public transportation or supplementing fossil fuel burning with wind and geothermal and hydroelectric power -- or even the newer, smaller, cheaper and safer nuclear plants now on the drawing boards -- quite the opposite. I'm all for heavy investment in research and development -- and paying for it with public revenue because private investment for such long range goals just doesn't happen on it's own. For an example, look at how much of today's digital world is the direct result of the tax and spend space program of the 50's and 60's.

No, what irks me is the neo-Luddite loathing for technology: the very technology we need to save us from Malthusian doom. It's usually the product of some scientific outcast publishing a alarmist book and convincing a lot of simpering young and uneducated celebrities that nature isn't a Hobbesean nightmare, that everything we improve our lives with from electric light to refrigeration to cell phones is going to bring that nature crashing down -- killing the bees with mysterious "cell phone rays" for instance and filling the world with unspecified "toxins" and radioactive vapours.

It's people like Bill Maher telling us our food is killing us even as we live longer and longer -- that we wouldn't have disease to cure if only we didn't eat corn products. It's celebrity scientists like Woody Harrelson telling us telling us not to cook our food. It's charlatans with their magnetic bracelets "tuned to natural frequencies" and pieces of magic duct tape that suck the "toxins" from our feet. It's the ancient and universal practice of blaming everything, every disease, disaster and disorder on witches, made new again.

This kind of "awareness" doesn't need raising, what needs raising is technology: understanding of it, awareness of it, investment in it -- the skill and will in developing and applying it. Please consider our hirsute relatives with thumbs on their feet and remember that it's the ability to produce and utilize energy that stands between us and squalor, privation and the nasty, brutish, disease filled, parasite ridden and short lives we used to share with the animals.

The great circle of stupid

By Capt. Fogg

"An appeals court has ruled that anyone involved in an extramarital affair can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison."

Or so says the Eagle Forum run by Rod Parsley, President and Founder of World Harvest Church in Ohio. Actually it's more likely that Judge William Murphy of the Michigan Court of Appeals was indulging in a bit of reductio ad absurdem in order to mock the obvious venality of the prosecution -- and in this case, the absurdity of the Michigan law is apparent without much reduction.

It's all about one Lloyd Waltonen who gave a cocktail waitress prescription drugs in exchange for sex and was charged with criminal sexual conduct, a felony, although the sex was consensual.

Of course those charges were dismissed, but on appeal The Michigan Attorney General, Mike Cox (I'm not making that up) in an effort to ruin Waltonen's life in any way he could, dredged up some statute stating that any sexual activity committed during the same time as a felony constitutes criminal sexual conduct. Since adultery is a felony in Michigan, (I'm not making this up) he technically could get life in prison for consensual sex, although that's never happened and never likely will unless of course we allow demented parasitic vermin like Parsley to get involved with the judicial process. (More on that later)

So what was apparently a disgusted judge trying to make a fool of the hypocritical and hyperventilating Mr. Cox, (who as you would expect of a moralizing Republican, has admitted to an adulterous and hence felonious relationship himself,) might as well have a target tattooed on his forehead.

All of this staged display of irony of course, has escaped not only the resident and hairy-palmed hand of God at The Center For Moral Clarity, the World Harvest Church and the Eagle Forum, but Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell's nominee for the Alaska Judiciary Council, Don Haase of Valdez. Haase, (he pronounces it Haze, but we won't go there this time) loves the idea of arresting people for obeying his religious laws, and why, you might ask? Premarital sex should be outlawed because it could "cause violence" and "spread disease," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. To his credit, he's either not quite as crazy as Parsley or perhaps less credit worthy, he's just trying to sound sane long enough to be confirmed, because while he doesn't claim that adultery or pre-marital sex should be a felony, he thinks it should be a crime.

Haase of course is a past president of Eagle Forum Alaska, a blog that advocates for what it calls conservative principles much like those of Medieval Europe. So we've come as close to full circle as we can while talking about idiots and madmen with no regard for freedom or the US constitution. We've come full circle from a secular liberal democracy and the counsel of intelligent and reasonable men as well.

Connect the dots

So, let me see if I've got this straight. 100 years ago today, in lower Manhattan, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people (a third of the people working in the building) who couldn't escape a ten-story factory because the owners, in an effort to prevent theft, had locked the exit doors.

Because there were no unions to protect their rights or ensure workplace safety, the employees who died were often underage, worked twelve to sixteen hour days, six days a week, and earned less than $2 a day.

Out of that two dollars, they had to pay the owners for the needles, thread and electricity they needed to do their jobs. And they could be fired for any reason, including missing a day of work or talking to the person working next to them. Or joining a union.

In fact, unions were under assault. Literally: with clubs, knives, guns and dogs - until a quarter of a century later, when the Wagner Act was passed, supporting unions and collective bargaining.

Oh, and 15 years before the fire, the National Guard was sent into the Homestead Steel Works to break up a strike by steelworkers. Just so you know.

But, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. That was 100 years ago today. Happy Birthday.

One hundred days ago today, a fire in a Bangladesh sweatshop killed dozens of people and injured over a hundred more. To prevent theft, the doors had been padlocked shut by the owners,

That was, as I said, 100 days ago today.

The workers in Bangladesh are among the lowest-paid in the world, and frequently die because of workplace safety, which isn't enforced by anyone. Like, say, a union.

This was one of two manufacturing plants run by the Hameem Group, who makes clothing for the Gap, Wrangler, JC Penney, Target, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Osh Kosh B'Gosh.

Oshkosh B'Gosh. Founded in 1895 - three years after the Homestead Steel Strike. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Last month in Wisconsin (85 miles southwest of Oshkosh), Governor Scott Walker was mobilizing the Wisconsin National Guard, in case unions protested his attempts to destroy collective bargaining rights. In the course of the next few weeks, that same Governor Walker, outraged because striking workers were occupying his Imperial Palace the Wisconsin State Capital Building, had doors locked and windows bolted shut to keep strikers from getting food.

Initial reports that the windows were welded shut proved to be merely rumors. There are, however, pictures of the new bolts preventing the windows from opening.

So, locking people inside a building with a sporadic record of safety inspections. Because he's trying to bust unions.

Quick test: what have we learned in the last century?
A. Jack.
B. Shit.

The Sound and the Fury

by Capt. Fogg

I'd just signed clear with 5N7M in Nigeria and my spectrum scope showed a big pileup on 20 meters in the area reserved for extra class phone operation, so I tuned in expecting some rare DX station everyone was trying to work. I wish I hadn't. I didn't hear dozens of stations shouting their call letters trying to be heard on the other side of the planet, what I heard is what passes for political discussion these days.

"Well whaddaya think of a president who thinks he's a dictator and ignores the constitution"

"you mean Bush?"

"No, I mean Oh-Bah-Ma! Thinks he can declare war all by himself. At least with Bush both times he got permission from congress -- this guy thinks he's a DICTATOR"

"Ahhhh, come on. . ."

"That's an impeachable offense! That's Treason!"

Of course I'm editing here. There were too many voices stepping on each other to include it all or even to call it a discussion, but that's American politics in all its unsound and furious ignorance.

Actually the War Powers Act requires that the president notify congress within 48 hours, which of course was exactly what happened. Whether or not that will filter down to the terminally Foxed and all those so desperate to portray Obama as everything Bush was and worse, I don't know, but where there's a will to hate, there's always a way to hate. As much as facts might contradict the idiot rage, they have as much a chance to bust the pileup as a 2 Watt QRP rig with a Buddipole.

The ‘DSM Constant' of American Politics

By Octopus

This is more afterthought than post because I had promised myself a blogging break of 6 to 8 weeks. My reason for taking a hiatus: I am moving to new quarters and need time off to pack up my clamshells and move to a new reef. Regardless, I still scan the blogosphere and respond to articles that catch my fancy. Such as this one from Swash Zone Emeritus tnlib who writes: Letter to a whiny young Democrat, based on this column by Mark Morford:

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment and refuse to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he lured you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?

Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.

I am not in a position to single out “whiny young Democrats” for special derision because, after all, they did give President Obama an electoral victory in 2008 (for which I am eternally grateful). And while I do consider Fire Doggers a whiny and bratty bunch, I do not necessarily consider them young.

I do not have a handle on who stayed away from the polls. Conventional wisdom states: Mid term elections are always “off” years, and this was known in advance. I recall what David Axelrod said even before the inauguration. Axelrod expected substantial mid term losses, which he cited as good reason for pushing the most contentious legislation first – such as healthcare reform – while the President still held Congressional majorities.

Perhaps there is misplaced blame going around. Do you blame bratty young Democrats who did not go to the polls, or do you blame voters who did and enabled idiots and proto-fascists to win elections?  Let me rephrase the question: Do you blame bystanders at the crime scene or the mugger in handcuffs?

Case in point:  Paul LePage won the Maine governorship with a mere 38% of the vote. I consider 38% the DSM Constant of American politics – the anxiety-addled rabble, oppositional-defiant bagheads, and obsessive hand-wringing reactionaries whose repetition compulsions cause them to repeat the same self-defeating behaviors and elect the same psychopaths who brought everyone to ruin in the first place.

I should also point out that the USA has always been a “half savage” country where politics runs on high octane sleaze.  Nevertheless, point taken.  Perhaps next time, voters will be more motivated to counteract the DSM Constant by going to the polls.

Cry Havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the disaster, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

In GOP we trust

By Capt. Fogg

There are a few things that seem to be endless about the American Lie Machine and its quest to rephrase our founding principles, rewrite our documents and refashion us into the government by divine right the colonists left behind. The endless assault on the First Amendment is one of them.

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sponsored a bill to make "In God We Trust" the official motto on the United States of America, giving unlawful support to an unspecified, but intentionally Christian God and allowing and encouraging the carving of religious credos into the stone of our institutions and establishing state Theism contrary to the letter and intent of the US Constitution. He was troubled by a pattern of omitting God from the nation's heritage, said he. Could a talking snake be any more devious? Of course omitting God is not the same thing as preventing state recognition of Forbes' god and that's the forbidden and worm eaten fruit we're being offered and that some of us are deluded and befuddled enough to bite into.

"There is a small minority who believes America does not have the right to trust in God, who believes the United States should not affirm trust in God, and who actively seek to remove any recognition of that trust,"

But the writers of the constitution weren't a small minority and had no intention whatever of forbidding the free exercise of religion by citizens -- only of forbidding the government officially to recognize any religion, sect, denomination or cult as preferred. But as I said, it's devious. There is nothing in our laws and no credible movement to prevent any American from trusting in any God or gods or principles or making statements to that effect -- or from ignoring them. There is the First Amendment to prevent the government from doing so.

Although Republicans are notorious for portraying the government as an alien force, separate from the people and their interests, it's interesting to see how in this instance, they're quite willing to see the people and the government as congruent or identical because equivocation is the armature about which is built this grotesque idol. But of course not paying for you to engrave your God on the wall I paid for isn't a rejection of anything but the government's right to do so, which is the precise intent of our constitution. There is no official God or official gods in the United States, no official belief -- and this legislation furthers only the intent to create one.

Forbes claims that the resolution is meant to affirm the importance of God in the heritage of the United States, but refuses to address the question of who the "we" are. If he's talking about the people as people, perhaps he's right, at least in the sense of a majority of them, but to a good number of Americans for whom the right to be irreligious, atheistic or pagan is protected, this resolution is an exclusion act. There is no me in that we.

Small minority? I'm not so sure, what with the penalties attendant to disbelief and doubt and unsanctioned belief, but so what? A small minority of Americans are of African descent or Jewish decent or indigenous descent or Chinese descent and the triumph of our democracy is to protect their rights, their numbers notwithstanding. I might say that a large minority of Republicans are asserting that intellectual minorities don't have the same rights when it comes to private thought and this mumbling against "small minorities" is nothing but an attempt to marginalize intellectual non-conformism.

In God We Trust isn't all that historical anyway. Although some, but not all US coins have had it stamped on them since about 1864 as part of the attempt to give a boost to the unpopular war, the motto only became "official" in 1956, shortly after the Knights of Columbus and other religious lobbyists convinced Dwight Eisenhower it would help give Americans another reason to hate and fear Communism.

The first appearance of "In God is our trust" was in Francis Key's poem, later set to an old drinking song and made into an anthem which didn't become official until the 1930's, by which time there wasn't much left of Jefferson's bones to be furiously gyrating in his coffin. That he would do so is of course contested by the plethora of Church funded revisionist historians like All About History who make statements saying President Thomas Jefferson wrote,

"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time" and "Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are of God?"

which words, of course, Jefferson never spoke or wrote. Perhaps you can see why the GOP stands against public education, science and history -- and for the Christian Bible and Christian government. Perhaps somewhere, the shade of Galileo is wryly smiling and George III, Rex Dei Gratia is giggling because the long upward climb to freedom is sliding back into the reeking sump from which it emerged.

Fox News has learned. . .

By Capt. Fogg

No they haven't.

Alex Jones' Prison Planet website is the kind of place you expect to find very right wing viewpoints and so when I find agreement that Fox News lies, I feel good about it. It gives me a defense when people behind the Fox curtain accuse me of being a far-left Commie/Liberal liar, which seems to be the best they can do, considering all the evidence that Fox is indeed a lie factory and propaganda machine -- more than just simply being affiliated with and a sponsor of the GOP.

"The latest example comes from Fox News, who completely manufactured the claim that Gaddafi was using western journalists as human shields to prevent fighter jets from bombing his compound,"

writes blog editor Paul Joseph Watson today.

In a piece entitled, EXCLUSIVE: Libyans Use Journalists as Human Shields, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel wrote, says Watson:

“An attack on the compound of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on Sunday had to be curtailed because of journalists nearby, Fox News has learned.”

But there’s a problem, he says. One of the CNN journalists supposedly used by Gaddafi as a human shield subsequently appeared on CNN and labeled the claim,

“Outrageous and absolutely hypocritical. The idea that we were some kind of human shields is nuts,” CNN international correspondent Nic Robertson told Wolf Blitzer.

"Fox News has proven itself to be a complete tool of the US military-industrial complex. Nothing it now reports about the attack on Libya can ever be trusted."

says Prison Planet, QED -- and who can dispute it?

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

News bombards my brain from TV, radio, emails, tweets, Facebook, and yes, even from the newspaper. Money to state colleges in Pennsylvania, money to Medicaid recipients, money to public broadcasting, money to the National Writing Project, and money to hundreds of other basic programs, all now lie under a legislative axe.

The National Writing Project is one of the many cuts that made my stomach curdle. In America we give teachers too few tools, too few opportunities for genuine professional development, too few opportunities to be part of a meaningful collegial organization. The National Writing Project (NWP) has provided all of the above and more for thousands of teachers, yet in order to appear fiscally prudent, legislators have cut funding to this most valuable organization.

An old family expression, “That was penny wise and pound foolish,” can easily be applied to such an egregious action as cutting funding to NWP. Many of the projects teachers collaborate on through the NWP are volunteer projects. For a project to be accepted by NWP, a teacher must demonstrate the capacity of the project to provide benefit to a wide range of students. Therefore, many students nationwide benefit from teacher research and project development and collaborations of NWP teacher leaders for discount rates.

For over thirty years NWP’s cost-effective, wide range, productive investment in our education system was valued. Legislators, from Congress up to the President, need to ignore the “slash-the-budget-taxes-don’t-do-any-good” fad and find the courage to raise taxes for programs, like the National Writing Project, that work.

Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road …

By Octopus

(This post started as a comment in response to three fine articles by our esteemed colleagues, Sheria, Nameless Cynic, and Shaw Kenawe. The subject is important enough to merit more commentary.)

Three decades ago, political scientist Theodore J. Lowi authored a ‘themed’ textbook titled, American Government: Incomplete Conquest. Although it received little attention at the time, its main ideas have special relevance today:

If the first problem facing our cave-dwelling forbearers was survival, the second, according to Lowi, was government.  No matter how enlightened any form of government appears in theory, all governments have a primordial mean streak, an instinct to lash out and violate their own laws and principles - especially in times of war or national emergency.  Consider the suspension of habeas corpus  during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans  during World War II, and the concept of eminent domain, as examples. Make no mistake. All governments reserve the right to violate your rights or confiscate your property.  Furthermore, no matter whom you elect, someone will control your life; and your choice at the ballot box is a choice between competing visions of governance.

This weekend, I watched an interview of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels on MSNBC - keeping these ideas of Theodore Lowi in mind.  Here is the gist of Daniels: A Chicken Little argument on deficits and spending framed as existential threats to freedom and prosperity. When the interviewer suggested a moratorium on social issues, Daniels invoked the words of Ronald Reagan: “Results, not rhetoric.”

Daniels gave a sky-is-falling, no compromise, non-negotiable performance that embodies his vision of authoritarian control.  It is the same script followed by GOP governors in Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, among others.  Between the lines, there is a master strategy at work framed long ago in the shadowy backrooms of GOP think tanks.

A Chicken Little argument is a coin with two sides. The side facing up is the fear factor warning of dire consequences and demanding urgent action. The facedown side masks the intent behind the fear: To preclude an open and honest debate and stifle dissent. In other words, when the sky is falling, there is no time to discuss the legitimacy of the claim.

On closer examination, is the sky actually falling? If the state of emergency is about the state of the budget, why are fiscal conservatives pushing a radical social agenda such as this? Which comes first: Chicken Little’s eggs or the almighty dollar?

H/T to Shaw Kenawe for this Joel Pett cartoon

In retrospect, we know the union-busting controversy in Wisconsin is not about budgets. We know Governor Walker’s predecessor forecast a $121.4 million budget surplus. We know Walker created a bogus shortfall by giving tax breaks to employers at levels far too low to spur real job growth (source). A classic Republican tactic, Walker eviscerated tax revenues as an excuse to gut a traditional Democratic power base.

In due course, Wisconsin Republicans forced union-busting provisions through the state legislature by stripping them from the budget bill, thus sidestepping a quorum requirement. This tactic exposed the deception behind the rhetoric:  Union-busting does not balance state budgets … confirmed by none other than Wisconsin GOP Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald in this astonishing admission:

If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.

As Lowi reminds us, citizens go to the polls to choose between competing visions of governance, and freedom is in the eye of the beholder.

Let us put naivety aside as we consider the rivalry between Democrats and Republicans. If the contest seems asymmetrical to us, it is because the GOP conducts politics with a primordial mean streak as if it were a sovereign entity engaged in actual war.  No longer a contest between rivals, politics has devolved into a contest to win by any and all means necessary (even in violation of democratic principles); and the weapons of partisan warfare are fear, deceit, pandering, legislative chicanery, and ruthless guerilla assaults against the assets of the opposition party.

Consider the asymmetry between union busting and the Citizens United decision. If Citizens United opened the door to unlimited corporate funding of political speech, events in Wisconsin have closed the door on union funding for Democrats. All told, union busting, Gonzo-gate, voter caging, voter ID cards, and the smear of Acorn are manifestations of a GOP master plan to eliminate traditional bases of Democratic support.

In theory, true democracy is predicated on choice, and choice connotes a policy debate between rivals. If one party, however, employs ruthless tactics to cripple the opposition beyond viability, what we have left is essentially a one party system with only token opposition. In other words: A democracy in name only. Wisconsin is where the GOP changed the dynamics of democratic engagement from contest to conquest. Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road to fascism.

Resources for political action:

1. Contribute to Act Blue
2. Join Working America, an advocacy group for non-union members who support the labor movement.
3. National Conference of State Legislatures: Recall Information Page
4. Website to Recall the Republican Eight
5. Website to Recall Scott Walker