The Daily Doubter

Latest discount book buys

2012-02-14T10:37:00.002-05:00

Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (hc) by Garry Wills for 4 dollars.

An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (hc) edited by Lewis Lapham for 10 dollars and fifty cents.

Quote of the day

2012-02-08T22:08:00.003-05:00

"Who the [expletive] is Saul Alinsky?" - Bill Maher

See also the Media Matters comparison of Saul Alinsky and the bogeyman "Saul Alinsky" who only exists in the imaginations of movement conservative media figures.

Trivia of the day

2012-02-07T19:59:00.003-05:00

Question: How many times has The Daily Doubter been cited in print?

Answer: Twice.

Once in Zay Smith's Quick Takes column for the Chicago Sun-Times and a second time in The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right by Arthur Goldwag which was released today. (The email quoted in this post is the one that made it into the book.)

To give one a flavor of the book, a great excerpt of The New Hate can be read at the Atlantic.

Possibly my favorite line in a book review ever

2012-02-07T08:25:00.003-05:00

David Frum has written a critical response to the latest effort of David Brooks to promote the work of Charles Murray.

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees.

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.
The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

That last line perfectly captures how absurd this focusing on Piven or Alinsky or ACORN as the root of all evil in America has been.

Quote of the day

2012-02-02T09:07:00.002-05:00

"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian." - Diderot, The Encyplopedie

Allen West's eliminationist message

2012-01-30T12:08:00.005-05:00

Via Hullabaloo

This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

What really demonstrates just how demented the Republican party has become is that this belief in how un-American the Obama administration and Democrats is is a reaction to a Democratic party which has implemented what a few decades ago were Republican ideas (e.g. a health care plan which was previously advocated by the conservative Heritage Foundation.)

Don't mess with the Muppets

2012-01-30T10:44:00.001-05:00

Via Media Matters

Despondent

2012-01-27T23:41:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago the manager of one of the local tv news stations gave an editorial (he's the only one who ever gives editorials, almost always some rant derivative from the bowels of AM radio) excusing marines urinating on dead corpses, saying that they deserve a slap on the wrist at best and that everyone who hasn't fought in a war needs to shut up about it.

It really pains me that this is what is being broadcast to my community as news - and I just haven't felt like blogging much lately.

Excerpt of the day

2012-01-18T20:24:00.002-05:00

From Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

"The opponents of the New Deal, backed and funded by the business elite, announced that President Roosevelt had permitted communists to infiltrate the government and government-funded programs, such as the Federal Theatre Project. And that project was the first target of the Dies Committee, led by Texas Democrat Martin Dies. The theatre project was denounced in a series of hearings in August and November 1938. The Dies committee eventually became HUAC. [Hallie] Flanagan [head of the Federal Theatre Project] was asked about an article she had written titled "A Theatre is Born," in which she described the enthusiasm of the federal theaters as having "a certain Marlowesque madness."

"You are quoting from this Marlowe," observed Alabama representative Joseph Starnes from the committee. "Is he a Communist?"

The room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh," Flanagan remembered. "Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so prejudged us that even the classics were 'communistic.' I said, 'I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.'"

"Tell us who this Marlowe is, so we can get the proper references, because that is all we want to do," Starnes said.

"Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare," Flanagan answered.

By 1939 the theatre project was killed.

Republican audience boos the Golden Rule

2012-01-17T18:51:00.003-05:00

During a Republican presidential candidate debate last night in South Carolina, Ron Paul (R-Texas) got boos from the audience when he suggested that the United States should apply the Golden Rule to its foreign policy.

The Guardian provides fuller context with an extended clip and notes that this comment from Paul was a follow-up to his belief that the U.S. could have (and should have if possible) captured Osama bin Laden rather than assassinate him.

Ron Paul was also booed when he attempted to explain why the US did not need secretly to enter Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Paul pointed out that the US had managed to capture Saddam Hussein alive, and that the Iraqi government had put him on trial. The line did not go down well with the audience or his Republican rivals.

and

Here's the transcript of Ron Paul's comments, after being asked about his opposition to the US assassination of Osama bin Laden:

There is proper procedures rather than digging bigger holes for ourselves. That's what we have been doing in the Middle East, digging bigger and bigger holes for ourselves and it's so hard for us to get out of that mess. And we have a long ways to go. We are still in Iraq and that's getting worse and we are not leaving Afghanistan and the American people are sick and tired of it, 80% of the American people want us out of there. I am just suggesting that we work within the rule of law. Like only going to war when you declare the law.

Given the probability that many of those Republican voters who booed identify themselves as Christians, one might wonder if they experience any cognitive dissonance at booing what is supposed to be one of their bedrock moral precepts.

Three hours with Chris Hedges

2012-01-12T22:16:00.005-05:00

Pulitzer prise winning journalist Chris Hedges has become one of the most acute critics of America's corporate and imperial state, writing fiery and blistering columns that express the indignation and outrage at the dismantlement of our democratic institutions that is almost entirely absent from mainstream media discourse.

Which I why I would recommend taking advantage of the opportunity presented by C-Span2's BookTV to watch and listen to his three hour discussion of his books for In Depth, which can be viewed online at the link.

[Blogger's Note: I haven't gotten far enough into the video to see what Hedges has to say about his book I Don't Believe in Atheists, but would note that I had some issues with that particular work.]

Say what?

2012-01-12T21:24:00.002-05:00

"I don’t get involved in politics." - Glenn Beck

Heard this self-delusional statement today while listening to Thomas Frank talk to Amy Goodman for Democracy Now. The following exchange takes place after Goodman plays audio of Beck saying he's not into politics, into endorsing candidates, but that Rick Santorum may be the next George Washington and will be able to resist the great urge to become a dictator. An urge, apparently, that only Santorum can resist.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Glenn Beck. Talk about the significance of Glenn Beck, forced off of Fox. You’re talking about the comeback of the right and the significance of the role he plays, the role the Koch brothers play.

THOMAS FRANK: Well, those are some of the biggest actors in what I’m talking about here. But I just wanted—I was struck by what Glenn Beck was saying there, that whenever you listen to him, even if it’s a short snippet like that, there’s always this incredible sense of dread that hangs over every sentence he utters. He said that, you know, the temptation for the next president to not turn over the reins of power back to the public is going to be great? What is he talking about? Dictatorship? That’s like—that’s—and Santorum is the one guy in America that can resist the urge to become a dictator? I don’t—I don’t get things like that. I mean, I do get it. I just finished writing a whole book about it.

There is a way that Glenn Beck really caught the cultural sensibility of 2009 and 2010, you know, this very unlikely—the first time I ever tuned him in, in 2008, he was on CNN at the time, and I was—you know, I had the same reaction to him that I just had when you brought up Rick Santorum. It’s like, how could this be? You know? Who would hire this man to be on television? It just seemed preposterous to me. And he really caught the wave in 2009, that when the—after the thing that really—you know, the economy fell apart in 2008, and you had the government stepping in with the enormous bailouts, you know, this completely unaccountable just spending of taxpayers’ money to get their Wall Street buddies off the hook, you know, stand the banks back up and let them go back to their—and this was—this was a shocking moment. You know, it’s the kind—I say in the book that it was the sort of moment that crushes the faith of a nation, you know? And Glenn Beck was there with this very dark vision that he has where things are always, you know, we’re on the verge of tyranny, there’s conspiracies everywhere. And there he was with this trademark vision of his, and it really seemed to catch the public mood in those days. And so, in my mind, he was one of the most important figures in the comeback of the right, because he really gave the—you know, if you would go to Tea Party rallies in those days, and I went to a bunch of them in order to write the book, the language you would always hear from the podium and the theories you would hear from the podium, the peculiar ideas, the visions of history that you would hear from the podium, were all recycled stuff from the Glenn Beck program. He was really the—he was really the one with the ideas.

Will Bunch noticed the same thing, with Beck being the backbone of the conservative backlash, in his own book on the subject.

Indeed, if you've read Beck books, listened to his radio show and watched his tv show the last couple of years, you'll know that he's dedicated his media fiefdom to being a political activist with the dedicated goal of mainstreaming the fringes of American paranoia. Presumably, if you're a critic of Beck and have followed him you're aware of that; if you're a fan then you apparently have a tremendous capacity to compartmentalize: to take him seriously when he says he's not involved in politics yet to show up at his 9/12 rallies with the plan of taking back your country from "them."

To think of Beck as someone who doesn't get involved in politics requires to forget the role he has played in politics the last couple of years.

Baleful quote of the day

2012-01-11T18:24:00.002-05:00

"We live in a country where law professors advocate torturing and murdering people ... people are then duly tortured and murdered per their official and unofficial recommendations, and there are no subsequent legal or even professional consequences to anyone involved in any aspect of these proceedings." - Paul Campos

Remember the good old days of wage slavery?

2012-01-09T22:17:00.008-05:00

Historian Rick Pearlstein noticed the other day Rick Santorum waxing nostalgic for those halcyon days when his own grandfather was a wage slave:

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it "by far the best speech Tuesday night." Santorum's address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called "freedom." A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family's one-time economic privation. It wasn't off the cuff. "As you know," he said, "I do not speak from notes, but there's a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I'm going to read them as I wrote them." And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: "because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them." He came because—why else?—he loved freedom.

[...]

"He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them."

Let us dwell on that. Grandpa Santorum lived in a company town where he was paid in "scrip" in lieu of cash. That means what his grandson calls "freedom" was, well and truly, something more like slavery.

Pearlstein goes on to note the irony of Santorum relating a story of his grandfather becoming a wage slave in order to sell free market fundamentalism to voters when it was government regulation that did more to give workers like his grandfather freedom than the "free reign of property."

The key point, and one that is not likely to find an effective messenger in Democrats beholden to the same wealth that Republicans are, is "that sometimes—frequently—it takes government to establish liberty where none existed before."

Beck still has Nazi Tourette's

2012-01-06T21:14:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I did a little intermural travel and visited AM radio world, particularly the Glenn Beck radio show. I was met by Beck informing me that President Obama is a dictator and is installing a dictatorship. Enough of that. I turned the radio off.

A hour or so later I tuned back in. Beck was describing his family Christmas in which he and family gave each other books about the Holocaust. Apparently, in the universe that Beck inhabits - some kind of Philip K. Dick if-he-was-a-member-of-the-John-Birch-Society type universe - reading books about what the Nazis did to Jews prepares one to understand what is currently happening in America because of progressives.

In fact, Beck was particularly enthusiastic about How Do You Kill a Million People? because it is "one of the best explanations of what we're facing right now in the country."

Beck then did his trademark incoherent denial of what he just said, claiming that he's not calling Obama a Nazi, just that progressivism is the disease and that Newt Gingrich is just as bad. (FYI, in Beck-world, Newt Gingrich is a leftist).

Whether or not Beck believes his own nonsense, I can not tell. But what I wonder is: does his audience have some sort of memory deficit? Surely I'm not the only one who can hear such a denial and recall, say, this

The "Final Chapter" of Glenn Beck's Fox News run kicked off Friday with Beck warning that a plot to "collapse the system," "redistribute the wealth," and create an Obama-centered empire was based on a willingness to kill "25 million Americans."

Like Lewis Black said, Beck has Nazi Tourette's.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Quote of the day

2012-01-06T00:29:00.003-05:00

"I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things" - Ecclesiastes 7:25

This quote appears on the back cover of the hard cover edition of A.C. Grayling's The Reason of Things: Living With Philosophy.

How I'm starting 2012

2012-01-02T08:53:00.003-05:00

[Blogger's Note: I posted this exact message last year, but I see no reason to change it.]

I took The Life You Can Save pledge to donate an appropriate amount - the site has a built in calculator that considers your income and provides you with a target figure - to charity.

I dare you to watch Peter Singer's lecture on his book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty - and see if you can resist the urge to donate, too.

Here is a clip:

Michelle Bachmann: Liar for Jesus

2011-12-28T21:37:00.005-05:00

You may recall that the Obama administration, citing the same sort of "common sense" rhetoric that the Bush administration used to use to rationalize political decisions at odds with the science of an issue, recently overruled the FDA to prevent making Plan B pill an over-the-counter product available to those under 17 years of age.

Obama defended the decision of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, saying that she "could not be confident that a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drug store would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteriers be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect."

Nevermind the nonsense of that response given the science the FDA based its decision on has already found that Plan B does not pose a health risk to minors. Let's look as what Michelle Bachman had to say in response to this at an anti-abortion group sponsored GOP presidential candidate town-hall last night.

Each of the candidates, who spoke separately and took a couple of questions each, took the same hard-line position. The differences were on the margins. Bachmann distinguished herself with her dishonesty, claiming at one point that Obama is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.” (Obama, of course, recently overrode an FDA recommendation to make emergency contraception available over the counter for all ages, infuriating women’s-health activists.)

Wow. Three staggering lies in one: 1)Plan B prevents pregnancy, it is not an abortifacient. 2)President Obama's administration blocked Plan B access to minors 3)President Obama defended that decision on the grounds that Plan B shouldn't be available to minors on the bubblegum aisle.

Really. The magnitude and audacity of this dishonesty is overwhelming - what can one even say to this, say to the fundamentalist base Bachmann is speaking to that has so worked itself into an alternate universe that it tolerates such lies as a virtue - and worse - accepts them as a truth more accurate than reality?

How ironic that a self-professed Christian who cries persecution that the Ten Commandments aren't featured in public schools and courtrooms can't seem to remember the injunction against bearing false witness.

Transposed hate

2011-12-22T21:47:00.003-05:00

I've written numerous posts over the years here arguing that often the derogatory rhetoric directed towards "liberals" by movement conservatives looks and sounds like more obviously prejudicial hate rhetoric of the past; that this is part the result of parallel thinking, part meme evolution which finds a more socially acceptable target for hate.

I now have a perfect example of exactly what I've been talking about.

In at least three instances, Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website has used an image connected to a Nazi-era German magazine noted for anti-Semitic cartoons and pro-Hitler leanings.

At that Media Matters link you will see that what Big Journalism did was post a slightly modified version of an anti-Semitic cartoon from a 1942 issue of a pro-Nazi magazine. In the original art, the American news press is depicted as being controlled by a giant Jewish figure (complete with a Star of David tie and a hook nose). In the Big Journalism version the Star of David has been removed,the nose has been straightened out, and the the phrase "Media Bias" appears on the figure's shirt.

Let's take a moment to look at the response from Big Journalism's editor, in which she asserts that there was no anti-Semitic intent in the cartoon and that it was taken down at the request of one of Breitbart's editors when he suspected it was a recycled anti-Jewish cartoon.

This misses a more interesting point: the users of the doctored image were attempting to spread the same prejudice towards Liberals that the original pro-Nazi German cartoonist was trying to spread towards Jews. That their new hate can be so easily transposed on old hate of the past is quite remarkable.

Speaking of which, I don't believe I have yet to plug Arthur Goldwag's next book, The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right. Dealing with this subject in depth, it will be out Feb. 7th and has gotten great advance reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly.

See here and here for sample excerpts.

[Disclosure: I've been informed that this blog is mentioned in the book.]

Good environmental news: new mercury and toxins regulations

2011-12-22T21:23:00.002-05:00

Dave Roberts at Grist writes

Wednesday, at long last, the EPA unveiled its new rule covering mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

Anyone who pays attention to green news will have spent the last two years hearing a torrent of stories about EPA rules and the political fights over them. It can get tedious. After a certain point even my eyes glaze over, and I'm paid to follow this stuff.

But this one is a Big Deal. It's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made. Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.

Despite being deeply troubled by some of this administration's recent actions degrading scientific integrity for political reasons (see here for example) I must credit it for these new standards.

Credit where credit is due

2011-12-19T22:37:00.004-05:00

From The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb

Consider ... what [John Philoponus (AD c.490 - c.530)] had to say about Aristotle's assertion that unsupported bodies fall towards the earth with a speed that is proportional to their weight - i.e., that heavy things fall faster than light ones:

But this is completely erroneous, and our view may be corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the ration of the weights, but that the difference in time is a very small one.
Philoponus' own theory of falling bodies was not quite right, but the experiment he describes here (which does at least refute Aristotle's view) was heralded as a momentous scientific breakthrough when it was repeated in the seventeenth century. Nowadays the experiment is traditionally credited to Galileo, who lived more than 1,000 years later than Philoponus (and who knew his works well.)

Newt for dictator (to save the Republic!)

2011-12-19T21:56:00.003-05:00

Steve Benen

Just so we’re clear, this week, a leading presidential candidate articulated his belief that, if elected, he might (1) eliminate courts he doesn’t like; (2) ignore court rulings he doesn’t like; and (3) take judges into custody if he disapproves of their legal analyses.

I hope it’s unnecessary to note that Gingrich’s vision is stark raving mad.

I’ll just conclude with this observation: Newt Gingrich believes Barack Obama is a wild-eyed fanatic, guided by an extremist ideology, hell bent on overseeing a radical overhaul of the American system of government.

The irony is rich.

I call it depressing - and a sad reflection of how poorly major news media is serving this country.

Anaximander of Miletus as First Scientist

2011-12-16T11:36:00.003-05:00

Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American writes

Modern science is a vast activity which has many fathers. Many could be named “the first scientist,” and I am sure you have your favorite one. By focusing on Anaximander, I wish to illustrate and emphasize one characteristic of scientific thinking that is even more fundamental, I believe, than Galileo’s introduction of modern experimentation, or Newton’s dynamical laws, or even Ptolemy and Ipparchus’ predictive mathematical astronomy or Aristotle’s keen observation of nature. What Anaximander started is the process of questioning common knowledge in depth, subverting the shared vision of the world, and proposing a novel conceptual structure for understanding reality. Observed from the particular perspective of a scientist of today, the ideas of Anaximander acquire a new sense, and the immensity of their legacy becomes evident.

Anaximander lived 26 centuries ago in Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of modern Turkey. He understood a surprising number of facts that we consider obvious today, but which had taken humanity millennia to figure out. Foremost, he is the one that first realized (and who was able to convince the world) that the Earth is not lying on something else (columns, turtles, an ocean, earth down forever), bur rather it floats free in space. The sky is not just above our heads: it is all around us, including under our feet.

Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, called this idea “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.”

There is much more at the link explaining why Rovelli considers Anaximander to be exemplary of the core of the scientific endeavor ("the process of questioning common knowledge in depth ... and proposing novel re-conceptualizations of the world"; "a deep acceptance of our persisting uncertainty, and our vast ignorance").

Rovelli covers the topic in even greater depth in his newly released book The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy.

As an aside, note that Rovelli draws a link between the birth of science and democracy

[S]cience started precisely at the same time when democracy was being born. Anaximander was a contemporary of Solon, who wrote the first democratic constitution in Athens. Anaximander’s Miletus was part of the Ionian league, whose delegates met in the Panionium sanctuary: perhaps the first parliament in the history of humanity. At the very same time when they get rid of kings and emperors, people started looking the world with new eyes and discovered something very new about it. The idea that common decisions are better found in an open discussion where everybody can listen to others and is ready to change his (and, later, her) mind was born together with the idea that we can increase our knowledge by observing, discussing and by changing our minds about the world. Democracy and science are close sisters.

Timothy Ferris argued a similar point in his excellent The Science of Liberty, but focused on the modern birth of democracy at around the time of the scientific revolution.

Bill O'Reilly's crybaby conservatism

2011-12-10T22:10:00.010-05:00

One of the character defects that seems to be nearly universal to many of the conservative media stars that dominate Fox News and AM radio is an ability to be brutally mean-spirited and vicious towards others, only to then turn around when called on it or when someone responds in kind and cry about how mean and unfair and hateful that person or category (e.g. "liberals") is.

Witness Bill O'Reilly, who routinely sends out slimeball producers to stalk and confront people going about their normal business, like when he had Jesse Waters stake our Amanda Terkel's apartment, follow her several hours across state lines, then start questioning her after she checked into a hotel; or when Jesse Waters confronted a judge in a gas station, then stuck his foot in the judge's car door in an attempt to prevent him from driving off. (In both instances, O'Reilly and partners were dishonest.)

So imagine what Bill O'Reilly's reaction was when he walked out of a hotel in D.C. and was approached by an Occupy Wall Street protester with a camera asking him if he attended a Newt Gingrich fundraiser. O'Reilly shoved his umbrella into the guy's face, then he tried to have him arrested by White House police. Then he went on his tv show and complained that if he had punched the protester like he wanted to he would have been charged for assault. My favorite part, though, is O'Reilly asserting that had the person identified himself before asking the question he would have been glad to respond.

So O'Reilly is perfectly fine with sending his minions out to interrupt people's lives and put them in extremely uncomfortable situations, but when someone tries to ask him a single question after accidentally coming across him (as opposed to the deliberate stalking that O'Reilly's team engages in) he considers it a criminal threat to himself and laments that the law doesn't enable him to physically assault the individual.

I actually do sympathize with O'Reilly's fear that some random person could come up to him and do him harm. I detest the tactics of paparazzi and believe the protester who approached O'Reilly could (and should) have identified himself and asked O'Reilly if he minded being asked a question and/or filmed - to which O'Reilly almost certainly would have said yes. (Or would have done the same exact thing, regardless, I'm guessing.)

But what bothers me is O'Reilly's own inability to take the feelings he has about being confronted and extend them to others put in a similar situation by his own crew. In other words, to empathize and exercise the Golden Rule which a self-proclaimed Christian like O'Reilly is supposed to hold as the bedrock foundation of his ethics.

More Bizarro Change

2011-12-07T22:48:00.006-05:00

Obama administration continues Bush administration policy of Plan B restrictions for political, not scientific, reasons

In 2005, Susan Wood resigned her job as the top women’s-health official at the FDA, claiming that the agency’s refusal to allow over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception was the result of political pressure by the Bush administration. “The decision, which left women of all ages without appropriate and timely access to emergency contraception, was a clear rejection of recommendations that had been based on extensive review and evaluation of the pertinent data,” she wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This controversy was constantly cited in feminist indictments of the previous president. It was usually mentioned in critiques of Bush’s ideological, anti-empirical approach to science. That’s why women’s-health advocates and other progressives were so shocked yesterday when the Obama administration overruled an FDA recommendation to expand over-the-counter access to Plan B One-Step, a type of morning-after pill.

Quote of the day

2011-12-07T12:15:00.002-05:00

"Plato's invention of Atlantis was so vivid that scholars and lunatics have looked for it ever since." - Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Garry Wills reviews Doonesbury

2011-12-05T00:03:00.003-05:00

Somehow it had escaped my notice until now that the eminent historian Gary Wills wrote a review of one of my all-time favorite comic strips - Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury"- in The New York Review of Books for 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective celebrating four decades of the strip. (Also see Slate's 40th anniversary celebration.)

An excerpt

There have been other comic strips that dealt with politics, but they did so sporadically, and as one-trick diversions—Al Capp satirizing the welfare state with his schmoos, Walt Kelly turning Senator Joseph McCarthy into Simple J. Malarkey—but Trudeau has reflected on politics at a depth and with a breadth no one else has achieved. No wonder he won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a comic strip (in 1975). When Nixon bombed Cambodia without telling Congress that he was invading another country, Trudeau sent his terrorist character Phred to the bomb site. When he sees a couple standing American Gothic–style before a leveled museum, he asks if this happened during the secret bombing of Cambodia. The man says it was no secret. “I said ‘Look Martha, here come the bombs.’” Nothing could say more succinctly that many of our national security secrets are not meant to deceive the enemy, but to keep Congress and the American people in the dark about what our government is doing in our name. (I liked this strip so well that I asked Trudeau for the original, and it now hangs on my wall.)

Over and over Trudeau pinpoints governmental absurdities. After Mike and a friend have discussed the casualties of the Iraq war, in a strip that ran in 2005, they wonder if the dead cause any anguish in the President. The last panel shows voices coming from the White House in the night. Laura asks, “What’s wrong, dear?” and Bush answers, “It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.” Another strip shows a soldier coming home. His wife asks who that is arriving with him. He says it is the terrorist following him home, as Bush had claimed they would.

Blog interrupted

2011-12-04T22:44:00.005-05:00

I've been working much overtime recently, which has been good for my pocket, terrible for my neglected blog. I have however, finished Glenn Greenwald's Liberty and Justice for Some and drafted out an outline of notes for a review which I hope to write as soon as my batteries recharge.

I also have my 2010 Book of the Year pick (I know, inexcusably late) which I've drafted up but have found many excuses to hold off on finishing that I would like to have up soon.

Those two items and another post about Rush Limbaugh and another about what really bothered me about President Obama's response to Donald Trump's bitherism are in the pipeline. I may end up working a good deal more overtime before the end of the year, however.

In the meanwhile, I can whole-heartedly recommend NOVA's The Fabric of the Cosmos series. Very well done; entertaining and inspiring.

I can also note that if you have a mobile device that you read texts on and have not already downloaded a Google books app, you may want to add that, as I've been able to find a couple of e-texts that I had been having difficulty locating. Namely: Justice in War Time by Bertrand Russell, The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, and An Historical and Critical Dictionary by Pierre Bayle.

Rush Limbaugh's Other-World

2011-12-01T22:23:00.003-05:00

As I turned on Rush Limbaugh's radio program today - randomly - I was met by Limbaugh saying that liberals have been openly advocating communism for two decades now and that Barack Obama wants to be re-elected so that he can install a communist regime.

I'm not sure how to respond, as having never visited this parallel, alternate dimension Earth that Limbaugh broadcasts from, I'm not really in a position to comment.

On this Earth, however

A new report shows that despite a campaign pledge to get lobbyists out of Washington, the Obama White House has weakened regulation in favor of corporate interests more than the Bush administration. The study, "Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Public Health, Worker Safety, and the Environment,” examines more than a thousand meetings that took place over a decade between lobbyists and a little known regulatory office, then checks to see how proposed rules were weakened to accommodate industry requests. It found the Obama White House changed rules 76 percent of the time, while Bush changed them just 64 percent of the time. EPA rules were changed at a significantly higher rate — 84 percent.

And the President Obama on this Earth kept in key financial positions in his administration the men responsible for this

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

Richard Nixon versus Richard Nixon

2011-11-22T18:14:00.003-05:00

From "What Happened to America?" (1967) by Richard Nixon

Our teachers, preachers, and politicians have gone too far in advocating the idea that each individual should determine what laws are good and what laws are bad, and that he then should obey the law he likes and disobey the law he dislikes.

From the May 19, 1977 Frost/Nixon interview

FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

Nixon: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

[...]

Frost: The point is: the dividing line is the president's judgment?

Nixon: Yes ...

Baleful quote of the day

2011-11-19T18:15:00.000-05:00

"[W]hen did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?" - James Fallows

Update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

2011-11-16T22:17:00.002-05:00

Today's addition to the New American Newspeak Dictionary is:

Lawfully coerce: illegally torture

Via the Washington Post's liar torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen

The corporate response to Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-16T15:32:00.001-05:00

From Chris Hedges

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

"Justice" in the land of Forward Looking Hope and Change

2011-11-13T22:31:00.001-05:00

From Truthout (via Greenwald)

"We're a party to the Convention Against Torture and clearly we tortured people," Davis said, angrily. "There is an affirmative duty under the convention to investigate and prosecute. It doesn't say when it's convenient or when you get around to it or if it's not politically detrimental to your administration. It says it's a duty. And it also says, in addition to prosecuting people that were tortured the person that is the victim has to have a right to compensation and the Obama administration refuses to investigate and prosecute the allegations of torture. But when the victims go to court to try and get civil remedies they're entitled to under the Convention Against Torture the Obama administration asserts the state secrets privilege to knock them out of court."

Quote of the day

2011-11-06T09:07:00.001-05:00

"Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Trivia of the day

2011-11-03T16:18:00.002-04:00

Question: Who coined the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief?"

Answer: Samuel Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817)

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Latest discount book buys

2011-10-29T20:23:00.003-04:00

Perelandra (pb) by C.S. Lewis for 50 cents.

The People's Doonesbury: Notes from Underfoot (hc) by Gary Trudeau for 1 dollar.

The Doonesbury Chronicles (hc) by Gary Trudeau for 1 dollar.

Quote of the day

2011-10-29T20:16:00.003-04:00

"[L]iberty ... cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Behold, the Horrors of the New Deal

2011-10-26T13:06:00.002-04:00

From The New Deal: A Modern History (via Slate)

The New Deal physically reshaped the country. To this day, Americans still rely on its works for transportation, electricity, flood control, housing, and community amenities. The output of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, represents a magnificent bequest to later generations. The WPA produced, among many other projects, 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings built, rebuilt, or expanded. Among the latter were 41,300 schools.

And just this afternoon I turned on Rush Limbaugh to hear him saying that liberalism is destructive.

The history of philosophy

2011-10-24T10:00:00.002-04:00

It has come to my attention that for some reason I have failed to forward The Atheologian's recommendation of Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast.

Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of Western philosophy, "without any gaps." Beginning with the earliest ancient thinkers, the series will look at the ideas and lives of the major philosophers (eventually covering in detail such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant) as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.

I've been listening for a year now and Adamson is 51 episodes into the project, just recently having gotten to Aristotle.

This really is a fantastic podcast - interesting and informative. Anyone with a remote interest in philosophy who isn't already following should start catching up.

Adamson has provided an invaluable resource: a convenient way to learn the history of philosophy in twenty minute or so intervals. In terms of digestible informational value, I would rank this podcast up with Bertrand Russell's masterpiece History of Western Philosophy, to give you an idea of the level of admiration I have for it.

Retconning history

2011-10-23T20:53:00.005-04:00

From About.com entry Retcon

Definition: This term has become more and more used in the world of comic books. A retcon is when a later writer changes the history of a comic book to accommodate their own storyline. The more comic books continue, especially in the case of Marvel and DC, the more history current writers have to wade through. Many feel that it is easier to change the continuity than to have to deal with it.

Listening to the Chris Mooney Point of Inquiry interview of Rick Perlstein about leading Republican figures inventing their own versions of history, I could think of no better way to describe their cartoonish historical revisions than as comic book style retcons.

For example, it is easier to change the continuity to accommodate one's own storyline than to have to deal with it. Instead of coming to terms with the overwhelming consilience of evidence for evolution, David Barton simply cites the authority of the Founding Fathers and claims, contrary to reality, that Thomas Paine said that creation science (something that did not exist at the time) should be taught in the classroom instead of evolution (a theory that would not be presented for nearly another 70 to 80 years). Easier, but intellectually corrupt.

The sad part - that Perlstein addresses in the interview - is that media outlets, out of a false sense of balance, now tend to treat such claims as having merit by virtue of their being presented rather than treating them as the obvious nonsense they are.

Baleful quote of the day

2011-10-20T09:13:00.002-04:00

"Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts." - Glenn Greenwald, commenting on the killing of a 16-year-old (among others) by a U.S. drone strike

The end of an era

2011-10-19T16:27:00.007-04:00

Since this blog started back in '05, one of the topics I've blogged the most about has been cable news pundits, particularly Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and how antithetical to the things I value as a humanist they are. (See here for an early example.)

Haunted by Neal Postman's ghost and looking to save money I have canceled my cable subscription, so (for the time being at least) I will no longer be able to watch these programs as I did before.

This isn't much of a change, however, in that I had already mostly quit watching these shows, anyway. I feel I may have reached my saturation point after years of regular viewing. With the two years of insanity that was the Glenn Beck program on Fox News, it may take quite some time before my batteries are recharged enough to feel like ever doing such a thing again.

Hopefully, this will give me more time to spend with my book collection, which will in turn lead to better blogging (once I get back to blogging) more in line with the original intent of the blog (doubting humanist and all that.)

Quote of the day

2011-10-17T07:13:00.000-04:00

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity." - Lord Acton, Lord Acton and His Circle

Excerpt of the day

2011-10-14T20:47:00.003-04:00

From The End of America by Naomi Wolf

"Could what happened to Maher Arar happen to a U.S. citizen? Chaplain James Yee was arrested and investigated on suspicion of "espionage and possibly treason" on September 10, 2003. It is not widely reported that he had also spoken up on behalf of better treatment for the detainees in Guantanamo. Military officials claimed that Yee had classified documents that included diagrams of cells at Guantanamo and lists of detainees. He was also said to have "ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.]."

Chaplain Yee was taken to a navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and interrogated. He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for seventy-six days; he was forbidden mail, television, or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. He was demonized on TV, radio, and the internet and accused of being an operative in "a supposed spy ring that aimed to pass secrets to al-Qaeda from suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo ... Court papers said he would be charged with espionage, spying, aiding the enemy, mutiny or sedition, and disobeying an order." Chaplain Yee, born in New Jersey and raised a Lutheran before converted to Islam, was baffled at the accusations. His lawyers were told he could face execution. Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee. But the government said it did so to avoid making its sensitive evidence public, not because Yee is innocent.

Yee was released - but charged with what looked like punitive "Mickey Mouse" charges: "adultery, lying to investigators and two counts of downloading porn." In the presence of his humiliated wife and his 4-year-old daughter, military prosecutors compelled Navy Lt. Karyn Wallace to testify about their extramarital affair. The military rarely prosecutes adultery. The government never presented the evidence on which it based its first accusations against Yee. But after Yee was set free, he was placed "under a new Army order not to talk about his ordeal in any way that might be seen as critical to the military." If he says anything negative about what happened to him, he faces further prosecution.

Yee has since been released from his gag order.

A book that should be read

2011-10-08T10:23:00.008-04:00

I've been busy (again) finding reasons not to blog, but am taking a moment to remind you of what I anticipate to be one of the most important political books coming out this year - Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald - and that it is coming out later this month.

Given the recent news that the CIA will face no consequences for illegally destroying evidence of torture and conspiring to hide both the crimes of torture and withholding/destruction of evidence, while more and more Americans find themselves falling victim to the prison-industrial complex, this remains a book on a subject that is long overdue.

On phony victimization

2011-10-02T23:08:00.003-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

In the Name of the Fodder

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

GOP - Special Victims Unit

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

A prototypical example of why I dislike President Reagan

2011-09-29T23:40:00.002-04:00

From On the Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, as a matter of fact, you note in the film a kind of proto-McDonald's story in a story about a telephone booth that President Ronald Reagan recounts.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: In California a man was using a public telephone booth to place a call. An alleged drunk driver careened down the street, lost control of her car and crashed into the phone booth. It’s no surprise that the injured man sued, but you might be startled to hear whom he sued, the telephone company and associated firms. That's right.

SUSAN SALADOFF: The telephone booth was in a very dangerous place and it had been hit several times. And the telephone company had never properly fixed the door, so even though he was trying to get out he couldn't get out until he was hit in the booth. He lost his leg. And so, it wasn’t a real - a real joke the way President Reagan had portrayed it.

Of course, I also detest the corporate propaganda campaigns that Saladoff has documented (see the link.)

Why he wasn't a communist

2011-09-26T22:34:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure why, but it wasn't until about a year ago that the work of the great Czech writer Karel Capek escaped the periphery of my knowledge (as the popularizer of the term "robot") and found itself on my kindle in the form of R.U.R. and The War with Newts. (Unfortunately, neither of those works are available for the dollar price that I found them at a year ago.)

And it wasn't until today that Capek's deeply warm and humane 1924 essay "Why I am not a Communist" came to my attention. I found it interesting - having known that Capek had satirized the Nazis but not having been aware he'd seen through the pretenses of the Communist leaders of his day so early - and present the link to whomever might also not have heard of it.

I have already said that real poverty is no institution but a disaster. You can reverse all orders but you will not prevent human beings from strokes of bad luck, from sickness, from the suffering of hunger and cold, from the need of a helpful hand. Do whatever you like, disaster presents human beings with a moral, not a social task. The language of communism is hard; it does not talk of the values of sympathy, willingness, help and human solidarity; it says with self-confidence that it is not sentimental. But this lack of sentimentality is the worst thing for me, since I am just as sentimental as any maid, as any fool, as any decent person is; only rogues and demagogues are not sentimental. Apart from sentimental reasons you will not hand a glass of water to your neighbor; rational motives will not even bring you to help and raise a person who has slipped.

Quote of the day

2011-09-24T15:01:00.002-04:00

"That is how crazy we remain today. Attacking a civilian population from the air, with or without warning, with or without a declaration of war, has become for most of us simply one more symbol, like the Liberty Bell, of national pride." - Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse than Death

Rosen on NPR and the act of "he said, she said" reporting

2011-09-22T22:34:00.005-04:00

Jay Rosen defines "he said, she said" reporting thus:

“He said, she said” journalism means…

There’s a public dispute.
The dispute makes news.
No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

A few weeks ago, Rosen listened to a NPR report on new licensing restrictions for abortion clinics in Kansas, in which critics asserted the regulations were an attempt to drive the clinics out of business and proponents claimed they were common sense public health practices, while NPR didn't make an effort to evaluate either set of claims.

And then he wrote a thoughtful post about it, well worth reading and considering.

Quote of the day

2011-09-17T14:53:00.002-04:00

"There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity." - Isaac Asimov, I.Asimov: A Memoir

Kindle book deals or: speaking of Vonnegut ...

2011-09-09T01:08:00.006-04:00

Serendipity! I get annoyed by a Fox News guest ignorantly citing Kurt Vonnegut to buttress his politics back in June, but wait until September to get around to writing a post about it, in which I note my appreciation of Vonnegut's books, then a day later I see that Amazon Kindle is offering 18 of his books through September 28 for four dollars.

I have read fifteen of his works and have enjoyed every one of those reads, but if you have not read any of his works before, I would have to say that Slaughterhouse Five* (his most important/famous novel), Breakfast of Champions, and maybe Cat's Cradle are the ones I would start with.

There's also the recently launched Kindle Daily Deal which is fairly self-explanatory: it features a different book from a different genre everday at a discounted price ranging from a dollar to three or four dollars.

And, finally, thanks to the tip from Sheldon, there is Dean Baker's The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive for a dollar which can also be found for free in pdf format. Baker describes the book, here.

*I must note that Vonnegut unfortunately relied on the figures of Holocaust denier David Irving to inflate the number of dead in Dresden from Allied firebombing - a central event in the novel - from around 25,000 to 140,000. Although it is unlikely that Vonnegut would have realized what Irving's true intentions were, even after it came to light (thanks largely to the work of Deborah Lipstadt) that Irving was an anti-Semitic liar, Vonneut for whatever reason stuck to the original false figures in his book.

In Bizarro World (aka Fox News), Orwell and Vonnegut warned us about big government liberals

2011-09-08T00:51:00.005-04:00

Ok, we have an AM radio host on Fox News saying that liberals who support government regulations and such are "the people that George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut warned us about."

Now look here: George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut were both socialists, so it's certainly absurd to be trying to turn them into props for movement conservatism.

The people in George Orwell's dystopian literature that he warned us about were not those who seek to implement environmental regulations on the amount of pollution that can be dumped into our water or air, nor were they those who think that restaurants should disclose the calorie contents of their food and such; they were, broadly speaking, totalitarians who ruled by oppression in the name of fighting an ever-present intangible enemy.

I can kind of see what the guest, Chris Plante, was getting at, however. Being an AM radio movement conservative, his picture of "a boot stamping on a human face — forever" is something like the government not allowing Fast Food to seduce children with toys into eating unhealthy food. Me, personally, am more concerned with, say, the government starting a forever-war against an intangible enemy ("terror") and then abrogating civil liberties (torture, mass surveillance, habeus corpus roll-back...) in the name of that war, but that's just me.

The Vonnegut thing, though, that really bothers me. Checking Amazon's author page (my books are still in storage) I can count 15 books by Kurt Vonnegut that I have read. I'm guessing Chris Plante has read close to zero.

Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. You will find no greater, richer source of humanist fiction than Vonnegut, in my opinion. If you've ever noticed my sometimes habit of starting a paragraph with "Look:" or "Listen:" or ending a post with "And so it goes" and such, those are small little tributes to Vonnegut. So this is a roundabout way of my saying that I'm somewhat famliar with Kurt Vonnegut's work.

Chris Plante has no business trying to make the man who could write something like this into a mouthpiece for his AM radio worldview:

One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

Characters in Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus and Deadeye Dick are named after Debs. Jailbird, the most recent book of his I've read and actually have a copy on hand, has this epigraph:

Help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.

-Nicoloa Sacco (1891-1927) in his last letter to his thirteen-year old son, Dante, August 18, 1927, three days before his execution in Charleston Prison, Boston, Massachusetts. "Bartolo" was Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927), who died the same night in the same electric chair, the invention of a dentist. So di and even more forgotten man, Celestino Madeiros (1894-1927), who confessed to the crime of which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, even while his own conviction for another murder was being appealed. Madeiros was a notorious criminal, who behaved unselfishly at the end.

Later, the protagonist laments

I thought now about Sacco and Vanzetti. When I was young, I believed that the story of their martyrdom would cause an irresistible mania for justice to the common people to spread throughout the world. Does anybody know or care who they are anymore?

No.

I have no opinion of Sacco and Vanzetti, but mention this to give you an idea of where Vonnegut's political sympathies lie.* It's beside the point, however. What Vonnegut wrote about was not totalitaranism, as was the case with Orwell, but about the follies of human nature and striving to find meaning and getting by in a capricious world.**

Et cetera.

*Previously, Fox demonstrated it was aware of Vonnegut's politics, which is likely why it trashed him the day after he died.
**Vonnegut's fiction did contain some dystopian elements, such as in Player Piano, but that novel certainly doesn't make Plante's point, given that Vonnegut was making a point about what he perceived as the dehumanizing aspects of industrial capitalism.

More change you can't believe in

2011-09-07T23:20:00.007-04:00

Recycled in full from Al Gore's blog

On Friday afternoon, as brave and committed activists continued their non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House in protest of the tar sands pipeline that would lead to a massive increase in global warming pollution, President Obama ordered the EPA to abandon its pursuit of new curbs on emissions that worsens disease-causing smog in US cities. Earlier this year, the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that the levels of pollution now permitted -- put in place by the Bush-Cheney administration-- are “not legally defensible.” Those very same rules have now been embraced by the Obama White House.

Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.

President Obama's directive is apparently illegal - and Gore isn't correct - this decision by the Obama administration will result in more pollution being allowed than the policy that the Bush administration had proposed.

The current 8-hour ozone standard of 84 ppb dates back to 1997. During the GW Bush Administration, EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) recommended in 2006 and 2007 the standard be reduced to 60-70 ppb based on evidence of serious health harm to children and those with respiratory disease at higher levels. But in 2008, the GW Bush Administration ignored CASAC's recommendation and proposed a 75 ppb for ozone.

When President Obama took office, however, this change was put on hold presumably for one more in line with the CASAC's recommendation and protective of public health. Now three years later, the 1997 standard of 84 ppb remains in place and the Obama Administration is telling us it will be several more years before a more health protective standard will be proposed. I choked when I read this in professor McGarity's piece:

"Americans living in cities - where ozone pollution is at its worst - will be left in worse shape than they would have been had the inadequate Bush Administration standard gone into effect."
With that legacy ahead of her, I agree with professor McGarity, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson should either defy the President's order, or resign.

I find myself more and more in agreement with Chris Hedges that "We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president. "

My fantasy is for people who plan to vote for President Obama to instead write in "Eugene V. Debs" instead. At least then that might get the point across.

The Washington Post doesn't understand journalism

2011-09-07T20:31:00.005-04:00

Either that or it just doesn't care if its employees practice it.

Why else is George Will allowed to continue to write columns about global warming that make claims that are false? As I've said before, an op-ed is not a fact free zone. Just because an article appears in the Editorial section does not mean that the author can make assertions that are factually false, nor can those falsehoods be excused as "opinion."

When George Will says:

For Jon Huntsman: You, who preen about having cornered the market on good manners, recently tweeted, "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." Call you sarcastic. In the 1970s, would you have trusted scientists predicting calamity from global cooling? Are scientists a cohort without a sociology -- uniquely homogenous and unanimous, without factions or interests and impervious to peer pressures or the agendas of funding agencies? Are the hundreds of scientists who are skeptical that human activities are increasing global temperatures not really scientists?

He is spreading misinformation that has already been demonstrated false. There never was a global cooling scare in the scientific literature, and there is widespread consensus, now, in the scientific literature that man-made activities are increasing global temperatures. And "the agendas of funding agencies": please.

I was of the idea that a newspaper is in the business of informing its audience. Yet that is not what the Washington Post does everytime it lets George Will write a column on a subject that he is grossly uninformed about and uses reasoning parallel to that of the Creationist to invent his own version of reality.

The Post should be embarrased. But I suppose if you can champion torture, what's a little climate denial?

Quote of the day

2011-09-06T12:32:00.002-04:00

"Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself." - Isaac Asimov, I.Asimov: A Memoir

Excerpt of the day

2011-09-05T22:06:00.003-04:00

From Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

"I was not doing nothing, Trevise. I was studying the Guardian Robots' minds, and trying to learn how to handle them."

"I know that's what you were doing. At least you said you were at the time. I just don't see the sense of it. Why handle the minds when you were perfectly capable of destroying them - as you finally did?"

"Do you think it is so easy to destroy an intelligent being?"

Trevise's lips twisted into an expression of distaste. "Come, Bliss. An intelligent being? It was just a robot."

"Just a robot?" A little passion entered her voice. "That's the argument always. Just. Just! Why should the Solarian, Bander, have hesitated to kill us? We were just human beings without transducers. Why should there be an hesitation about leaving Fallom to its fate? It was just a Solarian, and an immature specimen at that. If you start dismissing anyone or anything you want to do away with as just a this or just a that, you can destroy anything you wish. There are always categories you can find for them."

"A serious matter"

2011-09-03T08:29:00.008-04:00

The other day one of the daytime hosts of CNN HLN said that when they came back from break they'd be discussing a serious matter. What might that be? People making fun of Disney tv star Demi Lovato's weight on Twitter after she made an appearance at an MTV awards show.

Look: An eating disorder (which Lovata had) and people harassing someone with one over their weight is a serious matter. For the person involved and their friends and family. It's not "a serious matter" for a national "news" network. It's gossip.

A serious matter for a news network might be something like this

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

Of course, that CNN HLN is not actually a news network but rather a tabloid that specializes in celebrity gossip and sensationalized crimes featuring attractive young white females is not exactly a secret.

But it's not as if the other networks are much better. (I would highly recommend following up the preceeding link with this post by Jay Rosen on the whys of broken political coverage.)

Quote of the day

2011-08-31T15:26:00.009-04:00

"War between civilised States is both wicked and foolish, and it will not cease until either the wickedness or the folly is understood by those who direct the policy of nations." - Bertrand Russell, Justice in War Time

Quote of the day

2011-08-30T21:55:00.002-04:00

'It's amazing, though it shouldn't be, to see the former vice-president of the United States arguing that the government still should be torturing people, and that torture is one of the things he's proudest of. I think the worst thing about the Obama administration's "looking forward" doctrine is that it virtually guarantees that torture will happen again--perhaps even under the very next administration.' - Ta-Nehisi Coates

via Greenwald

Reality has no impact on the shameless liars who rule our discourse

2011-08-29T21:52:00.003-04:00

A while back I lamented that we live in a mendocracy where there is practically no political consequence for lying; indeed, that lying, or bullshitting, is one of the most profitable things one can do in our country to achieve media stardom. As part of that post I noted how insanely frustrating it is that no matter what level of rebuttal the lies of global warming deniers receive, they continue to tell the same lies without shame.

I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to once again note the democracy eroding effects of getting citizens to engage civically on false beliefs. Mother Jones also features a lengthy article about the so-called "Climategate" incident in which a criminally manufactured faux controversy has become part of an axiomatic faith for conservatives that man-made global warming is a hoax and a conspiracy. Again, I cut to the key point:

SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers' work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia (PDF) found that some had turned down "reasonable requests for information" and had, at times, been "unhelpful and defensive." It noted "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."

But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of people who believe that the world is warming has fallen 14 points from its 2008 high, according to polling (PDF). Gallup's annual poll in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans said they believe that fears of global warming "are generally exaggerated"—the highest figure since pollsters began asking that question in 1997.

Most significant, however, has been the long-term hardening of the political divide on the issue. In 1997, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who believed in climate change was nearly the same—47 percent and 46 percent, respectively. By March 2010, 66 percent of Democrats and only 31 percent of Republicans agreed that global warming was already occurring. Half of the new House GOP members flatly deny that the planet is warming, and only four say they accept the science of climate change.

Since then another inquiry - ANOTHER INDEPENDENT INQUIRY - by the National Science Foundation has found no scientific misconduct.

And on this very day, anyone who happened to be watching Fox "News" this afternoon was witness to a collection of political hacks saying that the science supporting AGW is dubious (it is not), that Al Gore is not well informed about climate science (where he's one of the most informed non-scientists on the planet), and the CRU emails demonstrate that climate scientists were fabricating evidence (which they were not.)

Of course, we have a fair and balanced press that doesn't see fit to call out these liars as liars, or bullshit as bullshit.

Quote of the day

2011-08-28T08:36:00.001-04:00

"The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiocy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception, and apprehension, are at an end. It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist so soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other." - Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism

I'll be back

2011-08-27T20:33:00.002-04:00

I'll be moving back into my home at the end of next week (for certain.) Regular blogging will start back then with two long overdue posts going up at the start of next week.

In the meantime I'll be trying to do some quick catch-up posts.

Quote of the day

2011-08-04T13:22:00.002-04:00

'Dear NYT: the Christian right theory that Nazism was a primarily gay movement isn't "disputed," it's bullshit.' - Michelle Goldberg

Excerpt of the day

2011-07-30T15:16:00.007-04:00

'As we watched from the playground, amid the monkey bars, the school principal told the young crowd, "No students were here on that day, but this did not save them. Over 1300 of your former classmates died that day. Now you are 780 in number. Look around you and imagine all of you plus 500 of your brothers and sisters perishing." My own daughter was barely out of elementary school so tears filled my eyes. Indeed, the death toll of children from this one school eclipsed by more than a thousand the total number of Japanese military personnel killed in Nagasaki that day. The school also lost twenty-eight of its forty-two teachers.' - Greg Mitchell, ATOMIC COVER-UP: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made

Latest discount book buy

2011-07-30T15:09:00.006-04:00

Other People's Money And How the Bankers Use It (pb) by Louis Brandeis for 2 dollars.

Of course, if I had realized that there is a 1 dollar kindle version, I would have gone with that.

Quote of the day

2011-07-24T10:56:00.000-04:00

"I have a message to those who attacked us. A message from the whole of Norway. You won’t destroy us. You won't destroy our democracy. We are a small but proud nation. No one can bomb us to silence. No one can scare us from being Norway." - Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

Kindle book sale through July 27

2011-07-22T22:43:00.004-04:00

The Atheologian points out that through July 27, Amazon is having a bargain Kindle sale of 900 plus books.

Amazon.com is having another big sale on select Kindle books. I have already tweeted the most important titles, but they deserve as much exposure as possible, so here are the ones I bought:

Loftus: The Christian Delusion $2.99
Stenger: The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning $3.99
ibn Warraq: Why I Am Not a Muslim $1.99
Pickover: Archimedes to Hawking $1.99
Jones: The Quantum Ten $1.99
Stenger: Timeless Reality $0.99

I can vouch for Why I Am Not a Muslim and Archimedes to Hawking, both of which I have on my bookshelf; although I have not done more that skim and browse the latter, I have read numerous other books written by Pickover and find him to be one of the best popularizers of science. It is difficult to read something by Pickover and not end up wanting to go read something else to satisfy an intellectual curiousity that he has piqued - and from what I've already read of A to H, this certainly seems to be a book that will be true to that form.

In addition to the books that The Atheologian has spotted, I've found some other books of note on the list that I can recommend from previous readings:

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley $1.99

Adams vs. Jefferson : The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling $1.99

Longitude by Dava Sobel $2.99 (Which I've discussed previously.)

Given the pleasure I got from reading the Ferling book above, I am pleased to find that his John Adams: A Life is also on sale for $1.99.

And finally, also courtesy of The Atheologian, the free sampler Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture, which collects articles about superheroes from the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series.

Callahan reviews Jesus Potter Harry Christ

2011-07-22T21:34:00.005-04:00

I previously passed along some information about a book comparing the literary similarities between Jesus Christ and Harry Potter, a book which is now out, available in both a print and a (fairly priced) Kindle edition.

Tim Callahan reviews Jesus Potter Harry Christ in this week's eSkeptic, ultimately giving this recommendation:

Whether or not one agrees with Murphy’s ultimate position, and whether or not one agrees with his arguments that Jesus was entirely (rather than mostly) mythic, Jesus Potter Harry Christ is well worth wading through, and wade through it one must, simply because of the sheer mass and volume of evidence the author provides. Make this a book whose pages you dog-ear for further reference and second readings.

How much longer?

2011-07-22T21:26:00.003-04:00

I am still waiting on work on my home to be finished and still have most of my things (including my computer) in storage. I have been told that it should be another week until the work is complete, but given that I had expected to be back home at least a month ago, I haven't got my hopes up.

So the light blogging will continue until then.

Latest adventures in discount book buying

2011-07-13T15:05:00.003-04:00

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future (hc) by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum for 1 dollar.

Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (hc) by Samantha Power for 3 dollars.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (pb) by Jon Krakauer for 50 cents.

A patriot's Fourth of July reader

2011-07-04T21:51:00.003-04:00

Every July 4th I re-read "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," a speech given by Frederick Douglass when he was asked to contribute to a celebration of the Declaration of Independence on July 5th, 1852.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

I don't believe any speech better embodies the spirit of patriotism, nor honors the principles of the Declaration of Independence better; yet it is almost entirely negative and critical. Did Frederick Douglass "hate America?"

It's important to remember this manner of honoring the 4th of July: especially so in a United States that lets torturers walk free while whistleblowers are persecuted.

The morality at play in the Manning persecution is mangled beyond belief. It's perfectly conventional wisdom that the war in Iraq was an act of profoundly unjust destruction, yet normal, psychologically healthy people are expected to passively accept that there should be no consequences for those responsible (a well-intentioned policy mistake), while one of the very few people to risk his life and liberty to stop it and similar acts is demonized as a mentally ill criminal. Similarly, the numerous acts of corruption, deceit and criminality Manning allegedly exposed are ignored or even sanctioned, while the only punished criminal is -- as usual -- the one who courageously brought those acts to light. Meanwhile, Americans love to cheer for the Arab Spring rebellions -- look at those inspiring people standing up to their evil dictators and demanding freedom -- yet the American government officials who propped up those dictators for decades and helped suppress those revolts, including the ones currently in power, are treated as dignified statesmen, while a person who actually exposed those tyrants and played at least some role in triggering those inspiring revolts (Manning) rots in a prison after enduring 10 months of deeply inhumane treatment.

There's no doubt that it's illegal for a member of the military to leak classified or secret documents -- just as there was no doubt about the illegality of Daniel Ellsberg's leaks, or a whole slew of other acts of civil disobedience we consider noble. The fact that an act is legal does not mean it is just, and conversely, that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust. Many people enjoy hearing themselves condemn the acts of tyrants and imperial forces in the world. If the allegations against him are true, Bradley Manning knowingly risked his liberty to take action against those acts, in the hope of exposing those responsible and triggering worldwide reforms. It's hard to dispute that these leaks achieved exactly that, but even if they hadn't, his conduct is profoundly commendable, and the world needs far more, not fewer, Bradley Mannings.

Or, as Henry David Thoreau put it:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislation? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Baleful quote of the day

2011-06-30T23:10:00.001-04:00

'A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.' - Chris Hedges, "Lies Become Truths"

Did Washington D.C. eat Barack Obama's soul?

2011-06-29T11:23:00.014-04:00

Circumstances have conspired to keep me from returning to regular blogging, which has prevented me from covering the continuing habit of President Obama to do things that Senator and candidate Obama was previously opposed to. Hopefully, anyone reading this blog is already following Glenn Greenwald's blog, as he has been covering this topic already.

But if you have not been following along, this article - via Greenwald's twitter feed - perfectly epitomizes the pattern of betrayal that has become the Obama presidency.

In Barack Obama's rise to national prominence, when he criticized the Bush Administration for its false claims about WMDs in Iraq, its torture of detainees, and its illegal program of spying on American citizens without warrants, he owed a particular debt of gratitude to a New York Times national security reporter. In a series of scoops as impressive as any amassed during the War on Terrorism, James Risen reported in 2004 that the CIA failed to tell President Bush about relatives of Iraqi scientists who swore that the country had abandoned its weapons program; the same year, he was first to reveal that the CIA was waterboarding detainees in Iraq; and in 2005, he broke the Pulitzer Prize winning story about the secret NSA spying program.

These scoops so embarrassed and angered the Bush Administration that some of its senior members wanted Risen to end up in jail. They never managed to make that happen. But President Obama might. He once found obvious value in Risen's investigative journalism. Its work that would've been impossible to produce without confidential sources and an ability to credibly promise that he'd never reveal their identities. But no matter. The Obama Administration is now demanding that Risen reveal his source for a 2006 scoop about CIA missteps in Iran. If he refuses to cooperate, which is his plan, he faces the possibility of jail time.

This is the sort of thing that makes me hope that Mr. Obama becomes a one term president. Yes, the Republican presidential candidates are worse; but if we continue to elect persons who feel at liberty to break campaign vows, to grant immunity to criminals while persecuting the journalists who exposed the malfeasance, how can we expect so see any different result?

[President Obama] might not be in the White House today if the Bush Administration would've succeeded in keeping all its secrets: the torture, the detainee deaths, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the spying on Americans, the faulty pre-war intelligence in Iraq, and all the rest. One would expect Obama of all people to see the value in Risen's reporting - the real ways in which he has helped to preserve civil liberties, American freedom, and accountability in government - and to weigh that against the national security implications of reporting in 2006 on a bungled CIA effort that happened way back in the year 2000.

Instead, a president who once championed whistle-blowers has adopted Cheney's view, and as Glenn Greenwald puts it, "the Obama administration appears on the verge of fulfilling Dick Cheney's nefarious wish beyond what even Cheney could achieve." All this while failing to prosecute the much more serious Bush era illegal acts that Risen has uncovered in his reporting.

The sad reality is that the institution of the presidency is now set in such a manner that it seems to guarantee that we will have presidents who behave as presidents should not behave.

A couple more Kindle sales to consider

2011-06-28T12:25:00.002-04:00

In addition to the fantastic deal you can still take advantage of regarding Daniel Goldhagen's latest book, Mark Vuletic - who apparently can read at the same pace as Johhny 5 from Short Circuit - has spotted several other bargain priced Kindle books:

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal for $1.79

The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker for $2.99

In Republican Gomorrah, Blumenthal examines the history of the Christian right, how it captured the Republican party, and the personality defects of some of its leading figures. Before I read the book, I was sold on it by Frank Schaeffer's review, so I'll simply let that link do my talking for me.

I have not read The Language Instinct, but I have read several other of Pinker's works, including The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature; his works are always deeply engaging, lucid, and richly humanistic - I consider Pinker one of the best science popularizers around.

Quote of the day

2011-06-27T13:35:00.002-04:00

"It requires little effort to condemn the Nazis. Moral outrage comes cheaply. It is more difficult, and surely more valuable, to address those features of the human condition that precipitated the tragedy." - David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others

Today's discount book purchase

2011-06-21T13:04:00.002-04:00

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It) (hc) by William Poundstone for one dollar.

The persecuted rich

2011-06-20T14:34:00.012-04:00

Today, I have twice been reminded of the vast suffering of the wealthy in America, victims of the communist forces that have seized control of the United States (at least that's what I've learned from AM radio and Fox News).

First, I turned on the tv and saw Jenna Bush Hager reduced to working as a reporter for NBC's Today show. Obviously, being the daughter of a president, the granddaughter of a president, and the great-granddaughter of a senator qualifies Hager for a job as a correspondent with a news program, especially over those who are educated and trained as journalists and have years of experience in the news business, but it is a terrible shame seeing her and other such American royalty forced to such base labor.

Secondly, I read this article at the Washington Post (h/t Jim Lippard), in which I see that the communists who run everything are now whining about how their employers salaries go up and up and up while theirs declines.

Even Lenin would blush at the terrible persecution that America's beleaguered corporate class suffers.

American press corps saves the Republic

2011-06-16T22:00:00.010-04:00

As anyone who has turned on a tv, the internet, radio, or read a newspaper over the last several weeks knows, the United States of America has been in a state of crisis, with our democracy hanging in the balance.

But thanks to the American news media, those civic minded journalist avatars of liberty and freedom, our long dark national nightmare has come to an end. That is correct, worry no more, America: Rep. Anthony Weiner has resigned after having accidentally publically sent a lewd photograph of himself in boxer briefs to one of his twitter followers and then having it become national news that he has had cyber-sex relations with women who are not his wife.

Democracy is saved.

America may be a country which lets war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, torture, and the illegal mass surveillance of its citizens go freely about their business; where the President can wage illegal wars in which bombs, missiles, and bullets end human lives, but we will not tolerate an elected official doing something in his personal life that may be of interest to TMZ or the National Enquirer.

Anti-American extremist Glenn Greenwald had written of Weiner:

Can one even imagine how much different -- and better -- our political culture would be if our establishment media devoted even a fraction of the critical scrutiny and adversarial energy it devoted to the Weiner matter to things that actually matter? But that won't happen, because the people who comprise that press corps, with rare exception, are both incapable of focusing on things that matter and uninterested in doing so. Talking about shirtless pictures and expressing outrage about private sexual behavior -- like some angry, chattering soap opera fan furious that one of their best-known characters cheated -- is about the limit of their abilities and their function. And doing so is so easy, so fun, so self-justifying, and so exciting in that evasively tingly sort of way.

Like what Greenwald? Like the context of why Anthony Weiner was being hounded by conservative bloggers for months leading up to their uncovering and disclosing his twitter cyber relations, that being his calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from healthcare decisions because of conflicts of interest.

Or maybe the allegation from a former CIA official that the Bush 43 White House requested that he dig up damaging information on Iraq war critic Juan Cole by illegally spying on him and Cole's response that "It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest."

Or how about the FCC commissioner approving the merger of NBC and Comcast then leaping into a job with Comcast as a lobbyist?

Our watchdog press will not be distracted by such trivialities.

The most heartwarming aspect of this Weiner scandal has been watching the media rehabilitation of pathological liar Andrew Breitbart (who once tried to get climate scientist James Hansen killed by the government) as a credible source of "news."

As we all know, lewd conduct in one's personal life is far more grave a concern, far mor indicative of the democratic spirit in a nation, than how casually it tolerates members of its pundit class advocating political murder.

Quote of the day

2011-06-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

"There are many ways to improve the current welfare program ... Considering welfare recipients lazy, government money-hoarding second-class citizens is not one of them." - Michael De Dora

But don't blame Beck for inspiring violence ...

2011-06-13T22:06:00.003-04:00

From Glenn Beck's show today:

Did you catch that? That was Glenn Beck, after a few minutes of conspiracy-mongering, pointing to photographs of President Obama and Cass Sunstein as reasons to own a gun.

From Democracy Now (Oct. 12, 2010)

JOHN HAMILTON: I think this is one of the most important points, that, no, Glenn Beck doesn’t advocate explicitly for violence, but in Byron Williams’s mind, Glenn Beck gives you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.

BYRON WILLIAMS: You know, I’ll tell you. Beck is going to deny everything about violent approach, deny everything about conspiracies, but he’ll give you every reason to believe in it. He is protecting himself, and you can’t blame him for that. So, I understand what he’s doing.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Byron Williams, recorded by you in the Santa Rita Jail. Go on with what he’s saying.

JOHN HAMILTON: I think Dana Milbank of the Washington Post put it best. He has a compendium of Glenn Beck quotes. Here is some of the rhetoric that you’ll hear on Glenn Beck’s radio program or see on his TV show: “The war is just beginning," "Shoot me in the head if they try to change our government," "You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head," "The other side is attacking," "There is a coup going on," "Grab a torch," "Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers," "They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.” I mean, these are quotes, and I could go on. I mean, there’s any number of these from Glenn Beck.

So, I think we have to ask ourselves, if this is the level of discourse on the Glenn Beck program, and if the statements about, for example, George Soros, you know, starting the Tides Foundation thirty-five years ago, which wasn’t the case, or that he’s laundering money through “his” Tides Foundation, when he’s given less than five percent of the funds, of the foundation’s total funding, those two things in tandem beg the question, does Glenn Beck bear culpability for the actions of his audience?

Legal or ultimate culpability, no. An ethical and intellectual culpability, a culpability of personal responsibility for normalizing and encouraging paranoid hate, very much so.

Byron Williams was arrested and accused of plotting to kill ACLU workers and Tides Foundation employees.

Justice as unspeak

2011-06-07T23:43:00.011-04:00

One of the posts that I had hoped to write but have not been able to get to is a response to the death of Bin Laden, with one of the key points being how disturbing I find it that Bin Laden's killing has been described - and is accepted - as justice. The reasoning being similar to that which I expressed before when the same was said about the death of al-Zarqawi (a killing which appears to me to be more legitimate than Bin Laden's, whom I believe could have been apprehended):

In the video you will notice that President Bush says that Al-Zarqawi has been brought to justice. He has not been brought to justice, he was killed. This may have been, and for all I know, most probably was the only way to stop the horrors being committed by al-Zarqawi, but killing him has nothing to do with justice. Bringing him to justice would have meant having him stand trial for his crimes against humanity, holding him accountable before a court of law. That is the concept of justice that the civilized world has adopted. The other is punitive and vengeful - the Biblical conception of justice - and we know that for much of time that the Biblical conception of justice dominated Western society, society was not just, but unjust.

I am pleased to see that I need not bother writing that portion of such a future post, because Steven Poole, author of Unspeak, has already addressed it and come to much the same conclusion.

Responding to President Obama's claim that "justice" had been done by Bin Laden's death, Poole writes

It is worth pausing to admire Obama’s masterful rhetorical conflation here of two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest. This has to be the sense invoked in Obama’s reference to the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice. In this spatial metaphor, justice is a place: implicitly, a courtroom, or at least a cell with the promise of process. (Or even, in extremis, Guantánamo Bay, still not closed, where indefinite “detention” or imprisonment is Unspeakily palliated with the expectation of some kind of tribunal.) To bring someone to justice is to put them in a place where they will be answerable for their alleged crimes. To be answerable in this sense, it helps to be alive.

But it is quite another sense of “justice” — meaning a fair result, regardless of the means by which it was achieved — that is functioning in Obama’s next use of the word: the quasi-legal judgment that justice was done. On what sorts of occasion do we actually say that justice was done? Not, I suppose, at the conclusion of a trial (when it might be claimed, instead, that justice was served); rather, after some other event, away from any courtroom, that we perceive as rightful punishment (or reward) for the sins (or virtues) of the individual under consideration. (Compare poetic justice.) The claim that justice was done appeals, then, to a kind of Old Testament or Wild West notion of just deserts. What, after all, happened between the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice and the claim that justice was done? Well, Bin Laden was killed. He was not, after all, brought to justice. Instead, justice (in its familiar guise as American bombs and bullets) was brought to him.

In case you were wondering

2011-06-07T23:34:00.002-04:00

You may have noticed that I'm still far behind on my posting. As renovation continues on my home, I currently have my computer and all but about five of my books in storage. On top of that, last month I was busy taking a course for work that required reading a textbook over a three week period on top of homework, training, testing and such. I've been busy.

I'll get back on schedule eventually ...

A fantastic book deal

2011-06-02T14:44:00.004-04:00

I just noticed that Daniel J. Goldhagen's Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the ongoing Assault on Humanity - a book I previously spotlighted - is only $2.60 for the Kindle edition. For a book that has 672 pages, that is practically a steal.

Most recent discount book buy

2011-05-30T21:25:00.004-04:00

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (hc) by Jane Mayer for three dollars.

I've already read this before but did not own a copy. Given that I consider this one of the most important books to have been written during the Bush administration and how well researched it is, having a copy for my bookshelf was a no-brainer.

High praise for Dawkins

2011-05-26T11:41:00.004-04:00

Over at Slate, A.C. Grayling, the philosopher who edited the vast history of secular western literature to create a humanist bible, 'singles out five titles that, in their various ways, provide useful perspectives "on how to live a satisfying and morally good life."'

One of the five listed is The Greatest Show on Eath: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins. It was included because it is an excellent book explaining the development of life on Earth by evolution; I'm not sure Grayling could have given Dawkins higher praise than including him among Aristotle and J.S. Mill as seminal reading for living a good life without god(s).

Having previously read a third of the book (still waiting for a chance to finish the rest of it) I can attest that it is supremely engaging and well written. The most entertaining and informative book on the subject that I have encountered, with a close possible second being The Ancestor's Tale, also by Dawkins.

A perfect example of why I despise (some) movement conservatives so very, very much

2011-05-20T18:16:00.006-04:00

"I never cease to be amazed by the right-wing's ability to - in unison - decide that a previously uncontroversial position is now anathema" - Anonymous Liberal

"The point of departure for permanent status negotiations to realize this vision seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent." - George W. Bush, Jan 12, 2008

A contiguous Palestinian state, based upon 1967 borders, has been the basis of US policy and a proposed peace solution in the Middle East for decades. As indicated by the above statement by President Bush, there was nothing controversial about the position. When President Bush made that statement prominent media conservatives did not declare that Israel would soon cease to exist, that America had "thrown Israel under a bus" or that the the 1967 borders were "indefensible" and "Auschwitz borders" tantamount to the forced genocide of the Israeli populace.

But when a black Democratic president with the middle name "Hussein" said nearly the same thing:

We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

American right-wing media react with mass, immediate faux hysteria.

Limbaugh: Obama Urged Israel To "Destroy Itself" And "Submit Its People To Potential Genocide." On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh said of Obama's speech: "What kind of president urges a country to destroy itself and submit its people to potential genocide?" [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 5/19/11, via Media Matters]

CNN's Dana Loesch: Obama "Sided With Terrorists." During her KFTK radio show, CNN contributor Dana Loesch claimed that in his Middle East speech Obama "sided with terrorists" and "people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to exist." [KFTK, The Dana Show, 5/19/11, via Media Matters]

Beck: Obama's Policy On Israel Ends With "The Destruction Of Israel" And "The Western Way Of Life." ...

Geller: Obama's Middle East Policy Is "Obama's Final Solution." In a May 19 post to her Atlas Shrugs blog on President Obama's Middle East speech, Pamela Geller wrote that Obama was dooming Israel to "Auschwitz borders" and "Obama's final solution."

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that "President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus." I don't recall Romney saying the same of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when he proposed the same plan.

Always setting the bar in terms of mindless dissemination of dishonest partisan propaganda, Steve Doocy of Fox "News" falsely asserted that President Obama is the first United States president to call for a peace solution based upon the 1967 borders.

The speech is also being characterized as taking sides with the Palestinians, when in reality the general plan has widespread Jewish support.

Yet it's not this derangement and dishonesty that is the most frustrating, but that these individuals continue to exist comfortably in our political media because our press generally does not have the stomach to call the deranged and the dishonest deranged and dishonest.

And so it goes.

Quote of the day

2011-05-19T12:07:00.003-04:00

"My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles." - Matthew Alexander

Alexander is the former military interrogator who led a team that gained the intelligence necessary to find al Zarqawi; I previously reviewed his book on the subject, here.

Quote of the day

2011-05-15T19:16:00.007-04:00

"Ayn Rand is essentially the L. Ron Hubbard of American conservatism." - Michael Stafford

h/t Ebert (via Lippard)

And now I get it

2011-05-13T14:01:00.003-04:00

Whenever Keith Olbermann would refer to Glenn Beck as Glenn "Lonesome Rhodes" Beck on his show Countdown I knew that Olbermann was making some kind of pop culture reference, but never bothered to look up what exactly he was alluding to. But thanks to a recommendation from Spocko, I now get it.

The reference is to Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith in his film debut A Face in the Crowd (1957). The movie is about the rise and fall of a radio-then-television star who uses folksy charm, false sincerity,zany energy, and every-man wisdom to cynically sell commercial products and reactionary politics. Rhodes starts out as mostly an entertainer, but as he realizes he can use his show as a vehicle for wielding influence, he becomes drunk with power. Eventually, he is undone by his own power-mad hubris and contempt for the very people that he pretends to be a champion of. (Sound familiar?)

If you are only familiar with Andy Griffith from his role as Sheriff Taylor, then his brilliant performance alone is worth seeing the movie for. And on top of that, the movie itself still provides relevant commentary on the way that demagogues function within our media culture.

That being said, there are some key differences between Beck and Rhodes. First, Rhodes shoots to the top because of his own natural ability to draw an audience. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in Common Nonsense, Beck, however, failed in market after market and only was catapulted to stardom after media deregulation (signed into law by President Clinton) allowed his employer Clear Channel to gobble up radio markets, thus eliminating Beck's marketplace competitors.

Secondly, while Rhodes had a mean streak, he was careful (for the most part) to not reveal it to his audience. Beck, on the other hand, frequently lets his audience see just how rotten he really is.

Completely baffled

2011-05-13T13:28:00.006-04:00

I'm logging onto my blog today - just now - and see my most recent post about having finally seen A Face in the Crowd is now missing. Entirely: not even the Google cache of it appears.

I am at a complete loss to understand how this happened. The post was up last night when I went to bed. Now it's gone.

I suppose I'll try to rewrite it later today if I can muster the energy. This is somewhat frustrating.

Update: Using a combination of memory and Google's search feature (a tedious process), I was able to recreate my original post. We'll see if it remains this time.

Most recent discount books buys

2011-05-10T21:39:00.002-04:00

Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (pb) by Stephen Jay Gould - $0.50

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (hc) by Mark Bowen - $1.00

Coming of Age in the Milky Way (hc) by Timothy Ferris - $1.00

Cruel and Unsual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (hc) by Mark Crispin Miller - $1.00

Pretty soon I will need to start culling my book collection; in other words, donating books I can live without back to the library. I'm running out of space.

Quote of the day

2011-05-10T09:16:00.001-04:00

From The Good Book

The books that help most are those that prompt most thought.
The virtue of books is to be readable.
There is no frigate like a book to take us to lands far away.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

Proverbs 22: 9 - 12

Humanist Genesis

2011-05-08T20:52:00.002-04:00

From The Good Book: A Humanist Bible (Genesis, Chapter 1) made by A.C. Grayling

9. So all things are gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time,

10. And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,

11. And can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is humankind.

Have they no decency?

2011-05-04T19:11:00.003-04:00

A while back I noted how atrocious it was for Glenn Beck to posit a deranged conspiracy theory that Rachel Carson - one of the founders of the environmental movement - campaigned against DDT because she secretly wanted to reduce the global human population.

This is malicious pure rotten hate that Beck is spreading. He is saying that everyone that doesn't share his deranged, delusional world view are totalitarian monsters. (You can see that Beck is full of it regarding DDT by taking a look through the archive of posts at Deltoid on DDT.) Really, how dare he defame Carson like this? Saying that a dead woman who can no longer defend herself wanted to kill people to reduce the human population and came up with a secret plot to get DDT banned to accomplish that goal. That's just so utterly despicable.

That's the sort of evil slander that is on a level with the Protocols of Zion. And just as New World Order conspiracy helps the anti-semite manufacture a world that justifies his bigotry, Beck's DDT conspiracy helps him manufacture a world that justifies his anti-environmentalist bigotry.

The thing is that it's not just Beck who engages in this sort of despicable defamation: there are entire organizations that have taken to calling Rachel Carson a mass murderer.

As Oreskes and Conway (2010, Chapter 7) document in detail, since 2007 the right-wing and libertarian organizations are calling Rachel Carson a mass-murderer. What? Did they even read about her life? This shy, humble scientist a mass murderer? Their “reasoning”: because her work led to the banning of DDT, thousands of Africans died of malaria, which might not have happened if DDT were available to them. I won’t rehash the entire ill-informed and crazy, convoluted thinking of these people, since Oreskes and Conway (2010) have done it already. The reality of the whole argument is that even if DDT had not been banned, its use would have stopped anyway because insects had evolved resistance to it. DDT was already being phased out at the time of the ban, and other pesticides that worked better and didn’t damage too many harmless animals were being used instead—because DDT didn’t work! If, as these people propose, DDT had been sprayed across the waterways of Africa, it would not have saved any lives whatsoever because of the evolution of resistance. In fact, many other pesticides that have since been used over the years are now useless because insect pests (especially mosquitoes) evolve resistance so quickly. Yet these people manage to distort history as badly as any Holocaust-denier[s]—except instead of trying to exonerate the Nazis of genocide, they turn Rachel Carson into a mass murderer.

Such strange revisionist thinking wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it were not so common in the public discourse these days.

What enrages me is that in our mendocracy persons who engage in this sort of behavior get to be media stars and can so easily inject their ideological propaganda into the mainstream.

In the meantime ... book spotlights

2011-05-02T22:17:00.004-04:00

Things are a bit hectic again for me (just gave up on the drafting of a post in response to bin Laden's death that I'll have to shelve for a few days or so) but I do have time for a couple of book spotlights:

Via his new twitter feed, Mark Vuletic of The Atheologian recommends a book that I had not heard of previously, but now have a copy of: Atheism in Pagan Antiquity by A.B. Drachmann. You can have a copy, too, if so inclined, as the book is public domain and available in several e-text formats (e.g. Kindle or iBooks).

Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law. Just saw the title and thought it looked interesting.

The Good Book: A Humanist Bible made by A.C. Grayling. I am anxiously awaiting my copy of this one. Here Grayling has used some of the same tactics of editing that went into the canonization of the Bible in order to create a similarly structured text but comprised of secular writings that span the history of humanist thought in civilization. As the New York Times review put it

At first, “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible” (Walker & Company, $35) looks like the Bible that Christians believe in, politicians take oaths on and the Gideons put in hotel rooms. It is divided into books like Genesis, Lamentations and Proverbs. Each book is organized into chapters and verses. It is written in the stately cadences that signal the presence of important, godly matters.

Begin to read, however, and you immediately see that God is not present. Instead, there are uncredited quotations from Aristotle, Darwin, Swift, Voltaire and hundreds more pre-Christian, anti-Christian or indifferent-to-Christian thinkers, assembled into an alternative genealogy of nature, human origins and ethics. Here are history and wisdom, without the divine attribution.

Grayling has mixed in some of his own writings, too, and you will need to make use of Google in order to discover the original sources of the rest; a choice that I believe that Grayling made not merely because it mirrors the way that the Bible is a collection of writings by uncredited authors but because it encourages an active engagement with the material, setting a curious reader on a path of intellectual discovery.

To get an idea of the book's humanist charm, one need only follow the book's twitter feed or go straight to this page which provides brief excerpts of the text. A sample:

It has been well said that we should contemplate what the great did in the past, not just out of curiosity but to educate ourselves for the present. Nobility and moral beauty have an active attraction, and invite all who live in later times to nobility again; not by imitation alone, but by stimulating thought about how to live, out of bare contemplation of how some of the great once lived. Acts 1: 1- 3

A new way to read a book

2011-05-01T19:47:00.006-04:00

If you own an iPad (or enjoy reading on an iPhone or iPod Touch) then I highly recommend downloading the newly released - and for a limited time, lowly priced at $5 - iTunes app version of Al Gore's Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

The Our Choice app redefines the reading experience, creating an interactive multimedia resource comprised of "animations, interactive info-graphics, pictures, audio, text, an hour of documentary video and more." Being able to easily and quickly zip around the material with a literal swipe of the finger is quite an enjoyable experience.

Not to mention that the book is an excellent, informative resource, providing invaluable insight into what might possibly be the greatest challenge facing humanity today.

And to further motivate you to give the app a try: Gore is "donating 100% of the proceeds I would otherwise receive to the Alliance for Climate Protection," an organization he founded with the purpose of raising awareness about the threat of global warming to humanity.

Words vs. actions: Barack Obama edition

2011-04-30T00:10:00.004-04:00

Words

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Actions

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee says the White House has threatened to exclude the paper from pooled coverage of its Bay Area events because it posted a video of last week’s protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama. The footage — shot by Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci — shows a group of protesters interrupting Obama with a song complaining about the administration’s treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning.

The San Francisco event last week was “in a public place with hundreds of people,” Bushee said. The White House policy regarding video, he said, “is objectionable and just is not in sync with how reporters are doing their jobs these days.”

He also said the White House rules are “not in the spirit of what the Obama administration is trying to project” in its claims to be the most transparent administration ever.

There is a reason the administration does not want video posted of citizens protesting the unjust treatment (bordering on torture) of Bradley Manning, who has been held in confinement (aka prison) for about a year despite not being convicted of a crime: It's more difficult to hold a political prisoner - which is pretty much what Manning is at this point - when the public's attention is drawn.

After all, democracy dies behind closed doors.

Mendocracy: rule by liars

2011-04-26T16:58:00.005-04:00

'When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes "uncivil" to call out liars, lying becomes free.' - Rick Pearlstein

'There is but one thing of real value - to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men' - Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

Over at Mother Jones, Rick Pearlstein has written a short history of what he perceives to be the rise of unaccountable political lying. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the key part I'd like to focus on:

[R]ight-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence—that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs—the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

That a significant political movement, existing in a realm of near total fabrication, dominates the political discourse of the United States is one of the primary things that I have blogged about for the last five years. It is beyond frustrating, well into the realm of maddening. With all due respect to the Emperor, he didn't have to live in the midst of Fox "News" and Rush Limbaugh, or the "liberal" institutions which defend them.

Take for example, this: some conservative media outlets have attacked President Obama for not issuing a proclamation recognizing Easter (Link 1, link 2, link 3). This is another example in the never-ending stream of manufactured bullshit that comes from such outlets; there is no controversy. Presidents do not and have not issued proclamations for Easter. The only point of this pseudo-news created by Fox Nation is to depict President Obama as a foreign, unChristian other, in other words, a somewhat naked appeal to prejudice and bigotry.

In the first link, you get a fantastic example of the rotten core of the mendocracy Pearlstein has identified. Intellectual cretin Sean Hannity leading a panel consisting of a Republican strategist, a slimeball plutocrat Democrat, and a Democratic strategist who formerly advocated illegally murdering Julian Assange, all agreeing that this was an oversight on the part of President Obama.

The consequences of the ease with which liars, bullshitters, and their enablers exist within our political and media culture has significant, deleterious effects on our country. For example, two thirds of Republicans - at a national level - are unsure that President Obama is a citizen. This is indicative of a collective, national derangement. And at the same time, Donald Trump has been getting much media attention and polling well as a leading Republican presidential candidate, simply by opportunistically saying the sort of ridiculous, racist conspiracy nonsense (Obama not a citizen, didn't write Dreams of my Father, didn't have the grades to get into college, etc.) that in a more sane world would get him vaulted out of the spotlight, not into it. And I think this kind of dissemination of stupid ignorance has something to do with Trump's conspiracy-baiting.

There is no end to examples of the process Pearlstein describes. Witness here, for example, for a perfect example of Pearlstein's mendocracy in action.

I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to once again note the democracy eroding effects of getting citizens to engage civically on false beliefs. Mother Jones also features a lengthy article about the so-called "Climategate" incident in which a criminally manufactured faux controversy has become part of an axiomatic faith for conservatives that man-made global warming is a hoax and a conspiracy. Again, I cut to the key point:

SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers' work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia (PDF) found that some had turned down "reasonable requests for information" and had, at times, been "unhelpful and defensive." It noted "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."

But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of people who believe that the world is warming has fallen 14 points from its 2008 high, according to polling (PDF). Gallup's annual poll in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans said they believe that fears of global warming "are generally exaggerated"—the highest figure since pollsters began asking that question in 1997.

Most significant, however, has been the long-term hardening of the political divide on the issue. In 1997, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who believed in climate change was nearly the same—47 percent and 46 percent, respectively. By March 2010, 66 percent of Democrats and only 31 percent of Republicans agreed that global warming was already occurring. Half of the new House GOP members flatly deny that the planet is warming, and only four say they accept the science of climate change.

Meanwhile

Scarce water supplies in the western US will probably dwindle further as a result of climate change, causing problems for millions in the region, a government report has said.