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.