Heads Up, America: The Elephant In The Room (Mr Fish)
Monday, June 18, 2012
Sunday, June 17, 2012
In Motion
Laughing, Fit To Bust
The Greek drama is more critical to the West. It's a straight up-or-down vote on agreeing to accept Austerity policies which EU fiscal conservatives (and politicians like Angela Merkel, specifically) have imposed on Eurozone countries as the price for receiving billions in loans to prop up their banks and then their economies.
Merkel and other believers in a common vision of a united Europe are committed to Austerity. It's what they believe is the only method to burn away excess debt, balance the books, and come out the other side in better economic condition than any other nations on the planet. They are forced by their own beliefs to double-down; the future of their political parties are at stake, not to mention their own: Angela doesn't want to go the way of Sarkozy, and neither does her CDU Partei want to lose power to the SPD.
However, proof of Austerity's failure won't stop with Greece. Spain, Portugal and Italy are all teetering on the edge (the Spanish have just "accepted" arranging for new loans from the ECB). Each will face new rounds of bank bailouts, new loans to "calm the markets", new loans to support more bond issues. And with each new round, their governments will have to agree to more budget cuts, more control of their national economies handed over to others.
But it won't work. Five years of Austerity has not and will not produce economic growth -- jobs -- which is what's desperately needed to escape what seems fated to occur. The cycle of more loans from the ECB or the European Stability Fund can't continue indefinitely. There just isn't enough money in the world to keep pouring into the black hole of debt.
Some kind of implosion (a shrinking of the Eurozone and the political EU to a few core countries, or the complete collapse of the Euro, followed by an international restructuring of currency exchange and a run on the Markets) is the only probable result. If it isn't triggered as a result of ballot box action in Greece this weekend, it will happen later. And the only question is, How bad will it become?
In Egypt, it's an even more volatile situation. The Revolution that played out (on CNN, the BBC or Al-Jazeera for Americans) in Tarhir Square in Cairo was a mass uprising against decades of corruption and repression. All facets of Egyptian society -- liberal, secular; religious conservatives and fundamentalists -- were united for a time.
That ended when Murbarak left office. Egypt's Military Council is still a caretaker government. The Parliamentary elections from the spring were effectively nullified this past week by the country's Supreme Court, and the voting for President of Egypt this weekend is a Morton's Fork -- a Murbarak appointee on one hand, and an Islamist who is precisely what you think he is on the other.
This election is as much about divisions in the culture being played out as anything, and should the Islamist be elected then Israel has one more serious concern beyond the possibility of a nuclear Iran -- and the rest of the world will be forced to deal with a national government that accepts Al-Qaeda as legitimate spokesmen for a movement to unify the Islamic world. Nothing good will come of that.
But secular liberals feel betrayed as well. What is their choice; to vote for a representative of the deposed, despised regime? Or for someone who they feel will impose Sharia law on the country and roll back decades of democratic process?
What will happen? We'll all get to see. Welcome to living through history -- something we believed we had outdistanced. Our technology, and the belief that we had all learned from the past, that modern politicians were wise and our modern political institutions would prevent financial collapse and regional or world war.
There is no expiration date on human avarice and hubris -- which is why we're here, now -- and no known antidote, either. Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire and Göethe must be looking down on us and laughing, fit to bust.
MEHR: The Krug Man weighs in:
SKYWALKER: Can You see what will happen to them?When in doubt, quote a hand puppet: Greece and the Egyptians have gone to the polls this week in two sets of circumstances that are pivotal for the regions involved (the Eurozone, and the Middle East), and through them the rest of the world.
YODA: Difficult to say. Always in motion is the future.
Star Wars: "Episode Five; The Empire Strikes Back" (1980)
The Greek drama is more critical to the West. It's a straight up-or-down vote on agreeing to accept Austerity policies which EU fiscal conservatives (and politicians like Angela Merkel, specifically) have imposed on Eurozone countries as the price for receiving billions in loans to prop up their banks and then their economies.
Merkel and other believers in a common vision of a united Europe are committed to Austerity. It's what they believe is the only method to burn away excess debt, balance the books, and come out the other side in better economic condition than any other nations on the planet. They are forced by their own beliefs to double-down; the future of their political parties are at stake, not to mention their own: Angela doesn't want to go the way of Sarkozy, and neither does her CDU Partei want to lose power to the SPD.
However, proof of Austerity's failure won't stop with Greece. Spain, Portugal and Italy are all teetering on the edge (the Spanish have just "accepted" arranging for new loans from the ECB). Each will face new rounds of bank bailouts, new loans to "calm the markets", new loans to support more bond issues. And with each new round, their governments will have to agree to more budget cuts, more control of their national economies handed over to others.
But it won't work. Five years of Austerity has not and will not produce economic growth -- jobs -- which is what's desperately needed to escape what seems fated to occur. The cycle of more loans from the ECB or the European Stability Fund can't continue indefinitely. There just isn't enough money in the world to keep pouring into the black hole of debt.
Some kind of implosion (a shrinking of the Eurozone and the political EU to a few core countries, or the complete collapse of the Euro, followed by an international restructuring of currency exchange and a run on the Markets) is the only probable result. If it isn't triggered as a result of ballot box action in Greece this weekend, it will happen later. And the only question is, How bad will it become?
In Egypt, it's an even more volatile situation. The Revolution that played out (on CNN, the BBC or Al-Jazeera for Americans) in Tarhir Square in Cairo was a mass uprising against decades of corruption and repression. All facets of Egyptian society -- liberal, secular; religious conservatives and fundamentalists -- were united for a time.
That ended when Murbarak left office. Egypt's Military Council is still a caretaker government. The Parliamentary elections from the spring were effectively nullified this past week by the country's Supreme Court, and the voting for President of Egypt this weekend is a Morton's Fork -- a Murbarak appointee on one hand, and an Islamist who is precisely what you think he is on the other.
This election is as much about divisions in the culture being played out as anything, and should the Islamist be elected then Israel has one more serious concern beyond the possibility of a nuclear Iran -- and the rest of the world will be forced to deal with a national government that accepts Al-Qaeda as legitimate spokesmen for a movement to unify the Islamic world. Nothing good will come of that.
But secular liberals feel betrayed as well. What is their choice; to vote for a representative of the deposed, despised regime? Or for someone who they feel will impose Sharia law on the country and roll back decades of democratic process?
What will happen? We'll all get to see. Welcome to living through history -- something we believed we had outdistanced. Our technology, and the belief that we had all learned from the past, that modern politicians were wise and our modern political institutions would prevent financial collapse and regional or world war.
There is no expiration date on human avarice and hubris -- which is why we're here, now -- and no known antidote, either. Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire and Göethe must be looking down on us and laughing, fit to bust.
MEHR: The Krug Man weighs in:
June 17, 2012, 2:41 pmAny Questions?
And Then What?
So it appears that the governing coalition in Greece has pulled out a narrow victory — winning only a minority of votes, but getting a narrow majority in the parliament thanks to the 50-seat bonus New Democracy gets for coming in first.
So they will now have the ability to continue pursuing an unworkable policy. Yay!
Joe Wiesenthal tells us that there’s a meme in Greece to the effect that Syriza didn’t really want to win, because it would rather see the current government flail some more. Conversely, establishment types should actually be dismayed by this outcome: if current policies fail completely, which seems almost a given, and Greece exits the euro anyway, which seems highly likely, the entire Greek center will end up discredited; better, in a way, to be able to blame the radicals.
And I gather I’m not the only one thinking along these lines...
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Reprint Heaven: Bad, Hot Chicken Does Just What You Like, Baby: B&D Burger King
(This, reprinted from July, 2009: An Item Of Interest for stray readers of IBWMW, and the super-intelligent Parakeet who reads this blog and is reportedly into KFC-Style Porn.)
SUBMIT: Madison Avenue Does You Up Right, Honey
Chicken: Tasty; Breaded -- Spicy... The Kind Men Like.
I don't know what to say about this. It isn't like I haven't gone to those sites, you know, with those girls, doing a 'live show' for an unknown number of men (and women), all online at the same time and all of them doing the same thing. More or less. A large number of people have done so, internationally; whether they'll admit it is another question. But that's nobody's business...
Now, Burger King -- the people who gave you the Plastic King Who Looks Like Lil' Boots Bush, Only With A Beard, present "Chicken The Way You Want It": The Objectivization-Of-Women Chicken, porn-site parody. You navigate from BK's main website by clicking a button, labeled "Subservient Chicken".
[I'm advised that the link to the original site above is broken. It was active two months ago -- meaning that people had continued to dial in and give commands to the big chicken nearly three years after that particular advertising campaign was complete.
[The, uh, flavor of the original site (which tastes just like Chicken) has been preserved for posterity (and the super-intelligent Parakeet), by going right here. Enjoy.]
You're presented with what looks like the standard, Internet-porn 'Live-Hot-Cam-Action' setup: A cheesy living room, bad furniture, tract-home ceilings with sparkly bits in the spray-stucco... and a giant Chicken wearing a garter belt and stockings.
You type in a 'request', enter it, and the Chicken, uh... does what you want it to do. I'm all yours, baby; oh yeah... yeah... Just tell me what you want, sugar; oh, uh-huh; want me to turn around? Like this...? Oooo...
You get the drift. What this has to do with the sale of Chicken Bosom sandwiches is anyone's guess, but it's clear Burger King isn't trying to solicit Camille Paglia's business. And, there's the aspect of linking a recognizable food purveyor with the concept of live internet porn.
I mean, it's conceivable that some dimwit, who spends an inordinate amount of time and money online at Kink watching Mistress Tammy, could become confused (Burger King = Action), which unconsciously prompts an erection every time he goes into their Food Station -- presumably, to eat, which could make for some humorous moments as you're standing in line in front of him. Or, you know, not.
And, If you go to their companion parody on Star Trek, you can attend Starfleet training to prevent Klingons (the Plastic Bush-With-A-Beard Burger King) physically attacking trainees to steal their Star Trek™ collector's glasses.
I got as far as watching the Burger Klingon attempt to give an unsuspecting Starfleet cadet an Atomic Wedgie by putting his hand down the back of the dude's pants, before becoming creeped out in a way you can only describe to your therapist. If you don't have one, when you're done watching you will need to get one. Or, take a quick shower. Trust me.
I've tried to imagine the minds that would dream up this kind of stuff, and have decided it would be -- well, me, given slightly different Life Choices. My other guess is that four 22-year-old guys ("Creative Directors") thought these sites up after doing Tequila body shots off Scarlett Johannsen (hey; she's easy that way. I do that whenever I see her, along with half the guys I know), and reminiscing about how great things were at their Frat during their six years as undergraduates. Maybe seven.
Funny? Well, ha ha; yes. But, together with things like Little Bernie Madoff, it's one more proof that Western Civilization™ as we know it is over. It's Over.
No, no; don't fight it. Here comes the Apocalypse, dude. Just... just turn out the lights; we're done.
And just leave the bucket of KFC extra-crispy. Okay? Bye.
SUBMIT: Madison Avenue Does You Up Right, Honey
Chicken: Tasty; Breaded -- Spicy... The Kind Men Like.
I don't know what to say about this. It isn't like I haven't gone to those sites, you know, with those girls, doing a 'live show' for an unknown number of men (and women), all online at the same time and all of them doing the same thing. More or less. A large number of people have done so, internationally; whether they'll admit it is another question. But that's nobody's business...
Now, Burger King -- the people who gave you the Plastic King Who Looks Like Lil' Boots Bush, Only With A Beard, present "Chicken The Way You Want It": The Objectivization-Of-
[I'm advised that the link to the original site above is broken. It was active two months ago -- meaning that people had continued to dial in and give commands to the big chicken nearly three years after that particular advertising campaign was complete.
[The, uh, flavor of the original site (which tastes just like Chicken) has been preserved for posterity (and the super-intelligent Parakeet), by going right here. Enjoy.]
You're presented with what looks like the standard, Internet-porn 'Live-Hot-Cam-Action' setup: A cheesy living room, bad furniture, tract-home ceilings with sparkly bits in the spray-stucco... and a giant Chicken wearing a garter belt and stockings.
You type in a 'request', enter it, and the Chicken, uh... does what you want it to do. I'm all yours, baby; oh yeah... yeah... Just tell me what you want, sugar; oh, uh-huh; want me to turn around? Like this...? Oooo...
You get the drift. What this has to do with the sale of Chicken Bosom sandwiches is anyone's guess, but it's clear Burger King isn't trying to solicit Camille Paglia's business. And, there's the aspect of linking a recognizable food purveyor with the concept of live internet porn.
I mean, it's conceivable that some dimwit, who spends an inordinate amount of time and money online at Kink watching Mistress Tammy, could become confused (Burger King = Action), which unconsciously prompts an erection every time he goes into their Food Station -- presumably, to eat, which could make for some humorous moments as you're standing in line in front of him. Or, you know, not.
And, If you go to their companion parody on Star Trek, you can attend Starfleet training to prevent Klingons (the Plastic Bush-With-A-Beard Burger King) physically attacking trainees to steal their Star Trek™ collector's glasses.
I got as far as watching the Burger Klingon attempt to give an unsuspecting Starfleet cadet an Atomic Wedgie by putting his hand down the back of the dude's pants, before becoming creeped out in a way you can only describe to your therapist. If you don't have one, when you're done watching you will need to get one. Or, take a quick shower. Trust me.
I've tried to imagine the minds that would dream up this kind of stuff, and have decided it would be -- well, me, given slightly different Life Choices. My other guess is that four 22-year-old guys ("Creative Directors") thought these sites up after doing Tequila body shots off Scarlett Johannsen (hey; she's easy that way. I do that whenever I see her, along with half the guys I know), and reminiscing about how great things were at their Frat during their six years as undergraduates. Maybe seven.
Funny? Well, ha ha; yes. But, together with things like Little Bernie Madoff, it's one more proof that Western Civilization™ as we know it is over. It's Over.
No, no; don't fight it. Here comes the Apocalypse, dude. Just... just turn out the lights; we're done.
And just leave the bucket of KFC extra-crispy. Okay? Bye.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Reprint Heaven: It's The Money, Honey; But You Knew That
(Today, a buffoon from Phuku Carlson's Fox Newsy/Truthy - backed website interrupted the President several times during a news conference at the White House -- effectively heckling him.
(But, hey; as Lard Boy, self-proclaimed 'intellectual engine' of the Right, tells us, "We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government". And as Mr. Trump suggests, the President is an illegitimate leader.
And any idiot in the mode of Carlson, Breitbart, O'Keefe or their surrogates, all yearning for the brass ring of "fame" and the chance to move up in line on the Gravy Train in that little town on the Potomac... well, they don't feel the need to justify their behaviors. They're Patriots; don't you know.
(And, at an event in Ohio yesterday (both Obama and Mitzy were speaking in the state), the Mitt Romney campaign bus circled the area of the Obama event, its driver honking the horn as the President spoke; another kind of interruption.
(It was an act, like that of the stupid clown -- whatever his name was; no one remembers -- who shouted "You Lie!" at Obama during a SOTU address, about aggression and disruption. It was a way of manufacturing news and creating a particular kind of controversy where none was needed.
(It was announced yesterday that -- thanks to the Citizens United decision by the Scalia Court -- a Romney PAC will receive a $10 million-dollar donation from yet another right-wing billionaire. And we can expect the Rethug campaign of 2012 will be not be a real, adult and public discussion about ideals that America has desperately needed for over a decade.
(Instead, the GOP campaign will be one long series of interruptions, of misdirection and invented news, and a constant barrage well-financed negative ads spun to keep the Obama campaign off-balance, forcing them to spend money and time swatting at flies. It will be a campaign of racist innuendo, of lies repeated over and over.
(The Rethugs won't treat America's adult voting population with anything but barely-disguised condescension and contempt -- much as Little Rupert treats his media 'consumers'. This presidential campaign, from the Right, will resemble Brownshirts shouting down leftist candidates attempting to speak in Weimar Germany: The Triumph Of The Strong. It will end with the majority of citizens dominated even further by The Oligarch Class.
(So, expect more "pranks", more hecklers, even Nixon-style 'dirty tricks'. A pudgy frat boy with temporary press White House credentials shouting at the President, or a campaign bus horn blown to draw attention away from Obama, is just the beginning.
(And the Thugs expect the Democrats to lie down and take it -- because they think the Left is composed of nothing but punks.
(With all this in mind, here's a reprint from April of 2010.)
Doesn't Know Much About History, Doesn't Care
Nasty, Greedy Little Man (Photo: I Spit On News Corp.)
When reasonable people have disagreement over issues, even passionate disagreement, it's possible both sides can make an attempt to retain a basic, innate respect for their humanity -- a recognition that "we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children's futures; and we are all mortal".
I think about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Two men whose arguments and writings, more than any of the American Revolutionaries, shaped the creation of an entirely new order of representative government. They became the closest of friends, then the most bitter antagonists -- two men who could not have been more opposed to each other professionally or personally (You think politics during the Nixon, Reagan or Clinton years were crazy? Do some reading).
It took a long time, but they slowly picked up the threads of their old friendship. And when Adams, the crusty old Federalist, lay dying on July 4, 1826, his last words were, "Yet Thomas Jefferson survives"... not knowing that the author of most of the Declaration Of Independence had passed away hours before.
American politics has always involved some of our worst -- and best -- instincts. But the (probably intellectual) notion borrowed from our British roots about politeness and "Seemly public discourse... as an edification to all who observe" has all but disappeared.
Politics is now more theater than it has ever been -- and as a method of evoking raw passions to carry a debate, it looks more like the psychology of advertising than trying to find a national consensus over serious public issues... exactly the problem facing the American Revolutionaries in the late 18th Century.
24 Hours A Day: Alarm, Anxiety, Fantasy -- With Commercials
And, because getting more and more is the new religion, a media industry has evolved with essentially a 'Yellow Journalism' business model which thrives on creating conflict, division, sensation and 'controversy', so that they can sell things.
This means much of what they broadcast are untruths: They lie. Period.
Little Rupert Murdoch is the current Citizen Kane of Right-Wing media. He's a conservative, but a pragmatist, too: He just wants to make more, and if somehow being more Progressive would bring more profit, that might be News Corporation's intellectual position.
But Little Rupert's not personally disposed to be Liberal, and he likes spewing crap for his team. He thinks of people as stupid, gullible, and worse (if he didn't, Little Rupert wouldn't treat his 'consumers' that way). And, he likes media people who are like him -- Rightist, but "at the end of the day" don't give two hoots about telling people the truth, or the politics: Show Me The Fookin' Money, Mate.
It's why he's let The Simpsons run for ten-plus years; not because it was a groundbreaking animated program, or embodies generally decent values -- but because Viewers = Higher Ad Buy Rates.
Ben Frumin at Talking Points Memo reported that Fox News'Liar Rightist Shill News Commentator guy Glenn Beck doesn't say the things he says and cries because he cares deeply about politics, or about the United States of America; or about other human beings (if he did in a real way, his message would probably be very different).
As Frumin Reported, And As Beck Says, "He's an entertainer"
A new profile in Forbes states that Beck "insists that he is not political":
" 'I could give a flying crap about the political process'. Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. 'We [i.e., Fox] are an entertainment company,' Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. "
Frumin goes on to note that, according to Forbes, Mercury Radio Arts, Beck's own company "(which Forbes dubs "Glenn Beck Inc."), reported $32 million" in revenue in the 12-month period ending March 1st, and which Forbes and Frumin list as
* $13 million a year from books and magazines;
* $10 million from radio syndication;
* $4 million from a newsletter, GlennBeck.com, and merchandise;
* $3 million from speaking engagement fees;
* $2 million income as a News Commentator at Fox 'News'
Beck and Fox, Hannity, Lard Boy, Loofah O'Reilly and Mikey Wiener; and Rightist 'commentators' and propaganda outlets, are coming under increasing scrutiny for regularly using escalating, violent rhetoric, which are considered contributing factors in a rising number of violent right-wing incidents.
You can't immerse right-wing nut jobs in a bath of Fox 'News' and battery acid for 24 hours a day, and not anticipate that one or more of them will just start killing people.
One example -- just today, anobese amazingly fat right-wing Texan named Larry Worth was arrested by the FBI for placing 36 pipe bombs in Post Office Boxes around the country. A friend of Worth's told local reporters that the man "sat around watching Fox all day, and getting angry".
Larry Worth, Who Looks Disturbingly Like Someone I Work With
(Photo: Smith Co., Texas; via TPMMuckraker, April 8, 2010)
People like Lard Boy and Beck enjoy being virtually untouchable. They can say, even do, almost anything. They enjoy being the people who create and channel the fear of their audiences into anger -- and they enjoy the power that gives them in Rightist circles. But it's not about serious political principles; it's an act. It's about ego, and about personal enrichment.
Limbaugh said in 2009, "First and foremost, I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest audience possible so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” Then he added -- as if he had to after a rare moment of honesty -- "But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."
Obligatory Cute Animal Photo In Middle Of Social Discourse
The 'intellectual engine' comment is part of the act; Limbaugh displays no intellect in his vaudeville. His career is about ego, and about money; the remark about "confiscatory ad[vertising] rates" says it all. People like Lard Boy want it (as Grace Slick once famously sang) "fat, and round", and they want it for themselves. Politics are just a means to that end. And Blimpy did get fat, and round.
This government is governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government. -- Rush Limbaugh, January 9, 2010
The real indicator of their lack of commitment to any ideas or principles appears when their listeners begin to act on the anger which the Becks and Lard Boys work day after day to manufacture. When a militia group is taken down, when nut cases call Progressive or Liberal elected officials to threaten them; when physicians and nurses at family planning clinics are harassed and their homes firebombed; when the number of credible threats to an African-American President rises substantially...
When these things happen, the Becks or Limbaughs don't stand proudly behind their work. They don't talk about being 'Culture Warriors', revolutionaries, and take responsibility for their role in creating and enciting violence against a government they keep shouting is illegitimate and evil.
All Part Of The Game; It's Even On Nintendo
Like every bully ever born, when it's possible they could be punished for their behavior -- or when it might affect their cash flow -- suddenly they become subdued, polite. Then, people like O'Reilly or Beck don't claim to be 'news commentators', or 'journalists'. They're not even savvy businesspersons.
Suddenly, they claim to be only simple entertainers -- and entertainers can't be held accountable if what they say is taken seriously, right? It's the fault of those crazy persons who do those violent things. It's really someone else's fault.
Always someone else's fault.
(But, hey; as Lard Boy, self-proclaimed 'intellectual engine' of the Right, tells us, "We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government". And as Mr. Trump suggests, the President is an illegitimate leader.
And any idiot in the mode of Carlson, Breitbart, O'Keefe or their surrogates, all yearning for the brass ring of "fame" and the chance to move up in line on the Gravy Train in that little town on the Potomac... well, they don't feel the need to justify their behaviors. They're Patriots; don't you know.
(And, at an event in Ohio yesterday (both Obama and Mitzy were speaking in the state), the Mitt Romney campaign bus circled the area of the Obama event, its driver honking the horn as the President spoke; another kind of interruption.
(It was an act, like that of the stupid clown -- whatever his name was; no one remembers -- who shouted "You Lie!" at Obama during a SOTU address, about aggression and disruption. It was a way of manufacturing news and creating a particular kind of controversy where none was needed.
(It was announced yesterday that -- thanks to the Citizens United decision by the Scalia Court -- a Romney PAC will receive a $10 million-dollar donation from yet another right-wing billionaire. And we can expect the Rethug campaign of 2012 will be not be a real, adult and public discussion about ideals that America has desperately needed for over a decade.
(Instead, the GOP campaign will be one long series of interruptions, of misdirection and invented news, and a constant barrage well-financed negative ads spun to keep the Obama campaign off-balance, forcing them to spend money and time swatting at flies. It will be a campaign of racist innuendo, of lies repeated over and over.
(The Rethugs won't treat America's adult voting population with anything but barely-disguised condescension and contempt -- much as Little Rupert treats his media 'consumers'. This presidential campaign, from the Right, will resemble Brownshirts shouting down leftist candidates attempting to speak in Weimar Germany: The Triumph Of The Strong. It will end with the majority of citizens dominated even further by The Oligarch Class.
(So, expect more "pranks", more hecklers, even Nixon-style 'dirty tricks'. A pudgy frat boy with temporary press White House credentials shouting at the President, or a campaign bus horn blown to draw attention away from Obama, is just the beginning.
(And the Thugs expect the Democrats to lie down and take it -- because they think the Left is composed of nothing but punks.
(With all this in mind, here's a reprint from April of 2010.)
Doesn't Know Much About History, Doesn't Care
Nasty, Greedy Little Man (Photo: I Spit On News Corp.)
When reasonable people have disagreement over issues, even passionate disagreement, it's possible both sides can make an attempt to retain a basic, innate respect for their humanity -- a recognition that "we all breathe the same air; we all cherish our children's futures; and we are all mortal".
I think about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Two men whose arguments and writings, more than any of the American Revolutionaries, shaped the creation of an entirely new order of representative government. They became the closest of friends, then the most bitter antagonists -- two men who could not have been more opposed to each other professionally or personally (You think politics during the Nixon, Reagan or Clinton years were crazy? Do some reading).
It took a long time, but they slowly picked up the threads of their old friendship. And when Adams, the crusty old Federalist, lay dying on July 4, 1826, his last words were, "Yet Thomas Jefferson survives"... not knowing that the author of most of the Declaration Of Independence had passed away hours before.
American politics has always involved some of our worst -- and best -- instincts. But the (probably intellectual) notion borrowed from our British roots about politeness and "Seemly public discourse... as an edification to all who observe" has all but disappeared.
Politics is now more theater than it has ever been -- and as a method of evoking raw passions to carry a debate, it looks more like the psychology of advertising than trying to find a national consensus over serious public issues... exactly the problem facing the American Revolutionaries in the late 18th Century.
24 Hours A Day: Alarm, Anxiety, Fantasy -- With Commercials
And, because getting more and more is the new religion, a media industry has evolved with essentially a 'Yellow Journalism' business model which thrives on creating conflict, division, sensation and 'controversy', so that they can sell things.
This means much of what they broadcast are untruths: They lie. Period.
Little Rupert Murdoch is the current Citizen Kane of Right-Wing media. He's a conservative, but a pragmatist, too: He just wants to make more, and if somehow being more Progressive would bring more profit, that might be News Corporation's intellectual position.
But Little Rupert's not personally disposed to be Liberal, and he likes spewing crap for his team. He thinks of people as stupid, gullible, and worse (if he didn't, Little Rupert wouldn't treat his 'consumers' that way). And, he likes media people who are like him -- Rightist, but "at the end of the day" don't give two hoots about telling people the truth, or the politics: Show Me The Fookin' Money, Mate.
It's why he's let The Simpsons run for ten-plus years; not because it was a groundbreaking animated program, or embodies generally decent values -- but because Viewers = Higher Ad Buy Rates.
Ben Frumin at Talking Points Memo reported that Fox News'
As Frumin Reported, And As Beck Says, "He's an entertainer"
A new profile in Forbes states that Beck "insists that he is not political":
" 'I could give a flying crap about the political process'. Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. 'We [i.e., Fox] are an entertainment company,' Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. "
Frumin goes on to note that, according to Forbes, Mercury Radio Arts, Beck's own company "(which Forbes dubs "Glenn Beck Inc."), reported $32 million" in revenue in the 12-month period ending March 1st, and which Forbes and Frumin list as
* $13 million a year from books and magazines;
* $10 million from radio syndication;
* $4 million from a newsletter, GlennBeck.com, and merchandise;
* $3 million from speaking engagement fees;
* $2 million income as a News Commentator at Fox 'News'
Beck and Fox, Hannity, Lard Boy, Loofah O'Reilly and Mikey Wiener; and Rightist 'commentators' and propaganda outlets, are coming under increasing scrutiny for regularly using escalating, violent rhetoric, which are considered contributing factors in a rising number of violent right-wing incidents.
You can't immerse right-wing nut jobs in a bath of Fox 'News' and battery acid for 24 hours a day, and not anticipate that one or more of them will just start killing people.
One example -- just today, an
Larry Worth, Who Looks Disturbingly Like Someone I Work With
(Photo: Smith Co., Texas; via TPMMuckraker, April 8, 2010)
People like Lard Boy and Beck enjoy being virtually untouchable. They can say, even do, almost anything. They enjoy being the people who create and channel the fear of their audiences into anger -- and they enjoy the power that gives them in Rightist circles. But it's not about serious political principles; it's an act. It's about ego, and about personal enrichment.
Limbaugh said in 2009, "First and foremost, I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest audience possible so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” Then he added -- as if he had to after a rare moment of honesty -- "But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."
Obligatory Cute Animal Photo In Middle Of Social Discourse
The 'intellectual engine' comment is part of the act; Limbaugh displays no intellect in his vaudeville. His career is about ego, and about money; the remark about "confiscatory ad[vertising] rates" says it all. People like Lard Boy want it (as Grace Slick once famously sang) "fat, and round", and they want it for themselves. Politics are just a means to that end. And Blimpy did get fat, and round.
This government is governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government. -- Rush Limbaugh, January 9, 2010
The real indicator of their lack of commitment to any ideas or principles appears when their listeners begin to act on the anger which the Becks and Lard Boys work day after day to manufacture. When a militia group is taken down, when nut cases call Progressive or Liberal elected officials to threaten them; when physicians and nurses at family planning clinics are harassed and their homes firebombed; when the number of credible threats to an African-American President rises substantially...
When these things happen, the Becks or Limbaughs don't stand proudly behind their work. They don't talk about being 'Culture Warriors', revolutionaries, and take responsibility for their role in creating and enciting violence against a government they keep shouting is illegitimate and evil.
All Part Of The Game; It's Even On Nintendo
Like every bully ever born, when it's possible they could be punished for their behavior -- or when it might affect their cash flow -- suddenly they become subdued, polite. Then, people like O'Reilly or Beck don't claim to be 'news commentators', or 'journalists'. They're not even savvy businesspersons.
Suddenly, they claim to be only simple entertainers -- and entertainers can't be held accountable if what they say is taken seriously, right? It's the fault of those crazy persons who do those violent things. It's really someone else's fault.
Always someone else's fault.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Elegy
Ray Bradbury (1921 - 2012)
As the planet Venus made a rare transit across the face of the sun last week, Ray Bradbury died in California. Past ninety, having suffered a stroke thirteen years ago which left him with significant mobility issues, he was still making public appearances and writing; The New Yorker just printed his last published work in their June 4 edition, an article entitled "Take Me Home".
They'll recognize his name but few will have his books on their Nooks or Kindles unless it was, you know, "assigned reading". And Stephenson or Gibson or Wallace are just way better writers than, you know, those fifties guys anyway...
And, who really has time to read; I mean, you know? they'll ask, riding on busses or walking on the street, eyes down at the screens of their iPod Touches or Androids, ear-buds already in place, thumbs tapping to move seamlessly between texting (u wanna + rully m so shur) and queuing up that Rihanna - Pitbull dance mix they'd downloaded (luv way u lie + so cool).
Remote as some event before the Industrial Revolution -- stuff that old guy wrote, yeah; whatever -- Bradbury's name evokes only a faint ripple in their consciousness. And yeah i gotta get a dress + we goin club 2nite go 2 H&M w/me...
I'm not using these images, and the sarcasm that goes with them, to be The Barking Dog (Ya goddamn know-nothin' kids, get off my lawn !!), but to underline Bradbury's passing with obvious irony: His work described the web of our 21st century post-modern, consumerist, technological world very well, over fifty years before it arrived.
I encountered Bradbury almost by accident. Frequently ill as a boy, I was given large numbers of library books and left alone to read in bed. This was a classic moment: Parent goes to library; asks librarian, "What do you have for a nine-year-old who reads at a high level for his age?"; and instead of being fobbed off with 'Boy's Own Adventure Stories' or something similar is handed Brabdury's Martian Chronicles; that kind of moment.
It was classic for me, too. While I knew the standard Carnegie Library in our small town, which was only four blocks from my house (built, coincidentally enough, just a short time before Bradbury was born in 1921), until being handed a pile of library books (Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky was in there; so was Sherlock Holmes and Robert Louis Stevenson), I only knew it as a place with... well, lots of books in it.
But after, I made the connection between the world inside these novels, and the library. In that, I understood this place for what it was -- a vault of dreams; a sage on the top of a mountain -- whatever you wanted to know could be inside, and usually was; and ultimately, it was a refuge and a second home when my first one wasn't so good.
I could run there, or be home again, in less than five minutes. When I hear the word, "library" today, that building is what I see in memory: A building in soft, tan brick, with cast ceramic tile details and Corinthian columns, like hundreds of other Carnegie libraries built across America, and a large oak tree (well, most trees look large to an eight-year-old) beside it, on a streetcorner near the center of our small town.
The fiction stacks were left and right off the main entrance; in the center was the glass-fronted librarian's office and a small area for 'special collections' and adults-only fiction (yes, you could read Lady Chatterly's Lover or 'Tropic Of Cancer'; but you had to be an adult, and you had to ask for it). I spent hundreds of hours in the gently enforced quiet of that relatively small building, sitting at a heavy wooden table identical to those in every Carnegie Library, exploring other worlds, places, times and ideas -- and escaping from my own.
The next book of Bradbury's I found was Dandelion Wine, his story of a boy, Douglas Spaulding, living through his last green Illinois summer, before a dawning adolescent awareness begins to overwhelm the perceptions of childhood. Bradbury's themes of light and dark magic that lives in ordinary moments (themes which would appear later in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dark Carnival); and an overarcing sense of nostalgia, of change and loss waiting just up ahead which Douglas feels all through that summer.
I read that book at exactly the right time, for me; I tie my desire to write anything (including this post in this unknown little blog) back to the doors Bradbury opened with that novel. Dandelion Wine was my first experience of reading something which spoke directly to me, made a powerful connection between experience and emotions I hadn't been able to express, in a story written by a complete stranger. It was deep, personal and archetypal, my introduction to the power of language.
(And I can add: Don't believe anyone who tells you that words on a page are just that -- illusions, insignificant and unimportant; or, that they affect no one and nothing in the real world. All of that is utterly, manifestly untrue.)
I had no idea, at the beginning of the 1960's, that this was Bradbury's own elegy to his own last childhood summer: In the early Thirties of The Great Depression, his family was forced to move west from Illinois to Los Angeles as his father, a telephone company lineman, looked for work. Dandelion Wine grew out of short works that moved around similar themes, as did The Martian Chronicles.
Bradbury grew up in the Golden Age of pulp fiction, when some of America's greatest popular novelists were publishing pieces for half-a-cent per word before beginning to write full novels. The Iowa Writers School at ISU was a promise of the future and the writers' workshops of the WPA had only just begun.
Bradbury believed in his apprehension, his vision, of the world. and kept writing (as an old girlfriend once noted, "Persistence Overcomes Resistance"). With effort, and luck, he succeeded -- and was able to continue writing for over sixty years.
After Dandelion Wine, the next Bradbury book to grab me and spin me around was his classic, written before Dandelion. It's the single work that will guarantee Bradbury's name will enter an English-language pantheon of dystopian fiction, like 1984 and Brave New World, which disturbingly seems to have predicted aspects of the future: Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451.
I have an image of a twelve-year-old Bradbury, as deeply in love with the idea of books and libraries as I would be later, transplanted from Illinois to a much drier and smaller Los Angeles than exists today, watching a newsreel in a darkened movie theater in April or May of 1933. FDR had just begun his first term; in Germany, books banned by the nazi New Order were being publicly burned.
I have a feeling that those images affected Bradbury on a visceral level; for him, during his entire life, books were very nearly living things, and the sight of Brownshirts torching them must have been horrific. Years later, when trying to find an image for his disgust and fear over the era of McCarthy and the HUAC Committee (which targeted Hollywood, specifically, and writers, generally), he began describing a future society where any printed record of imagination and the past is illegal -- and at some point, the images of what had happened in Germany in April, 1933 resurfaced.
Fahrenheit 451, and its firemen dispatched to burn instead of putting out fires, is really a novella. It isn't a long work; not as long as Orwell's vision (published in 1949), and definitely shorter than Aldous Huxley's genetically-controlled future (published in 1932). Its genesis was a short story entitled "Bright Phoenix", which Bradbury wrote in 1947 (but not published until 1963).
He returned to the theme of a society burning books in earnest through another short story published in Galaxy Fiction in 1950, "The Fireman". Bradbury expanded it into a novella-length book, and it was published as Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper ignites and burns, in 1953 (For those who believe books are just one more "investment opportunity", only 50,000 copies of that first edition were printed, and fewer than twenty thousand are known to exist).
Again, for me, the book had a significant impact -- and again, it was a case of reading something at the right time. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Fahrenheit crystallized what was a developing sense of questioning authority and popular delusions of crowds. When Truffaut's film version of the novel appeared in 1966, I was slightly disappointed that it didn't more closely resemble the book (Bradbury initially didn't care for it either; but I have a copy of it in my DVD library, and Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack is on my iPod).
That isn't an unusual occurrence in any pre-adolescent kid -- but in America of the early-to-mid 1960's, conformity and political orthodoxy weren't just axiomatic, they were mandatory. I lived near a large military installation; my father was an employee of the Federal government (the Department Of Justice, no less). The fear of being painted as a 'Red', the social stigma of being in any way different meant everything you think it does, and everything now pictured in films or teevee dramas about that era (It was different to live through it; history always is. Trust me).
One thing connecting with Ray Bradbury did for me was impart a love of books -- a blessing, mostly, but a curse when you have to move. I had owned Bradbury's books as paperbacks first, then started buying hardback editions in High school; a later edition of Fahrenheit 451 was the second 'actual' book I ever purchased (the first was Crichton's The Andromeda Strain) for what was a considerable sum for a book, then -- $5.00 -- and I still have it.
I also still have the things which reading the man's work gave me. There's an old Buddhist notion that when you need a teacher, they appear; you have to be willing to recognize and accept them. I encountered Bradbury's work at specific times when I needed what they had to give. Their impact was profound, then, and they opened other perspectives on the world: Right things at the right time.
I'm grateful for that. Wherever Ray is, Now He Knows What We Do Not. While I don't necessarily subscribe to a specific notion of an Afterlife, I hope that where he is that it's summer, and green; and that at some point he and his Grandfather will launch Fire Balloons into a soft dark sky, things of light and color and wonder, rising above the trees.
As the planet Venus made a rare transit across the face of the sun last week, Ray Bradbury died in California. Past ninety, having suffered a stroke thirteen years ago which left him with significant mobility issues, he was still making public appearances and writing; The New Yorker just printed his last published work in their June 4 edition, an article entitled "Take Me Home".
I would [listen] to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July... it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.For most persons whose relation to culture is primarily visual and electronic, Bradbury's name will be a footnote in an online literature course -- Currents In 20th Century American Pop Fiction, or some similar title which use test questions like, "Did works by classic authors Danielle Steele and Jacqueline Susann have an effect on popular television series like 'Dallas', or 'Falcon Crest'? Discuss."
Even at that age, I was beginning to perceive the endings of things... I had already lost my grandfather, who went away for good when I was five. I remember him so well: the two of us on the lawn in front of the porch, with twenty relatives for an audience, and the paper balloon held between us for a final moment, filled with warm exhalations, ready to go.
...I helped take the red-white-and-blue tissue out of the box and watched as Grandpa lit a little cup of dry straw that hung beneath it. Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside.
But I could not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside. Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a gentle nod of his head, did I at last let the balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across the night among the stars.
They'll recognize his name but few will have his books on their Nooks or Kindles unless it was, you know, "assigned reading". And Stephenson or Gibson or Wallace are just way better writers than, you know, those fifties guys anyway...
And, who really has time to read; I mean, you know? they'll ask, riding on busses or walking on the street, eyes down at the screens of their iPod Touches or Androids, ear-buds already in place, thumbs tapping to move seamlessly between texting (u wanna + rully m so shur) and queuing up that Rihanna - Pitbull dance mix they'd downloaded (luv way u lie + so cool).
Remote as some event before the Industrial Revolution -- stuff that old guy wrote, yeah; whatever -- Bradbury's name evokes only a faint ripple in their consciousness. And yeah i gotta get a dress + we goin club 2nite go 2 H&M w/me...
I'm not using these images, and the sarcasm that goes with them, to be The Barking Dog (Ya goddamn know-nothin' kids, get off my lawn !!), but to underline Bradbury's passing with obvious irony: His work described the web of our 21st century post-modern, consumerist, technological world very well, over fifty years before it arrived.
I encountered Bradbury almost by accident. Frequently ill as a boy, I was given large numbers of library books and left alone to read in bed. This was a classic moment: Parent goes to library; asks librarian, "What do you have for a nine-year-old who reads at a high level for his age?"; and instead of being fobbed off with 'Boy's Own Adventure Stories' or something similar is handed Brabdury's Martian Chronicles; that kind of moment.
It was classic for me, too. While I knew the standard Carnegie Library in our small town, which was only four blocks from my house (built, coincidentally enough, just a short time before Bradbury was born in 1921), until being handed a pile of library books (Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky was in there; so was Sherlock Holmes and Robert Louis Stevenson), I only knew it as a place with... well, lots of books in it.
But after, I made the connection between the world inside these novels, and the library. In that, I understood this place for what it was -- a vault of dreams; a sage on the top of a mountain -- whatever you wanted to know could be inside, and usually was; and ultimately, it was a refuge and a second home when my first one wasn't so good.
I could run there, or be home again, in less than five minutes. When I hear the word, "library" today, that building is what I see in memory: A building in soft, tan brick, with cast ceramic tile details and Corinthian columns, like hundreds of other Carnegie libraries built across America, and a large oak tree (well, most trees look large to an eight-year-old) beside it, on a streetcorner near the center of our small town.
The fiction stacks were left and right off the main entrance; in the center was the glass-fronted librarian's office and a small area for 'special collections' and adults-only fiction (yes, you could read Lady Chatterly's Lover or 'Tropic Of Cancer'; but you had to be an adult, and you had to ask for it). I spent hundreds of hours in the gently enforced quiet of that relatively small building, sitting at a heavy wooden table identical to those in every Carnegie Library, exploring other worlds, places, times and ideas -- and escaping from my own.
The next book of Bradbury's I found was Dandelion Wine, his story of a boy, Douglas Spaulding, living through his last green Illinois summer, before a dawning adolescent awareness begins to overwhelm the perceptions of childhood. Bradbury's themes of light and dark magic that lives in ordinary moments (themes which would appear later in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dark Carnival); and an overarcing sense of nostalgia, of change and loss waiting just up ahead which Douglas feels all through that summer.
I read that book at exactly the right time, for me; I tie my desire to write anything (including this post in this unknown little blog) back to the doors Bradbury opened with that novel. Dandelion Wine was my first experience of reading something which spoke directly to me, made a powerful connection between experience and emotions I hadn't been able to express, in a story written by a complete stranger. It was deep, personal and archetypal, my introduction to the power of language.
(And I can add: Don't believe anyone who tells you that words on a page are just that -- illusions, insignificant and unimportant; or, that they affect no one and nothing in the real world. All of that is utterly, manifestly untrue.)
I had no idea, at the beginning of the 1960's, that this was Bradbury's own elegy to his own last childhood summer: In the early Thirties of The Great Depression, his family was forced to move west from Illinois to Los Angeles as his father, a telephone company lineman, looked for work. Dandelion Wine grew out of short works that moved around similar themes, as did The Martian Chronicles.
Fourteen-Year-Old Ray And Marlene Dietrich:
A Fan Photo Taken Outside The Paramount Lot,
Hollywood, 1935 (New York Times)
Bradbury grew up in the Golden Age of pulp fiction, when some of America's greatest popular novelists were publishing pieces for half-a-cent per word before beginning to write full novels. The Iowa Writers School at ISU was a promise of the future and the writers' workshops of the WPA had only just begun.
Bradbury believed in his apprehension, his vision, of the world. and kept writing (as an old girlfriend once noted, "Persistence Overcomes Resistance"). With effort, and luck, he succeeded -- and was able to continue writing for over sixty years.
After Dandelion Wine, the next Bradbury book to grab me and spin me around was his classic, written before Dandelion. It's the single work that will guarantee Bradbury's name will enter an English-language pantheon of dystopian fiction, like 1984 and Brave New World, which disturbingly seems to have predicted aspects of the future: Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451.
Oskar Werner As Montag, Julie Christie As
Linda / Clarisse, In Francois Truffaut's
1967 Adaptation Of Bradbury's Novel (MGM)
I have an image of a twelve-year-old Bradbury, as deeply in love with the idea of books and libraries as I would be later, transplanted from Illinois to a much drier and smaller Los Angeles than exists today, watching a newsreel in a darkened movie theater in April or May of 1933. FDR had just begun his first term; in Germany, books banned by the nazi New Order were being publicly burned.
I have a feeling that those images affected Bradbury on a visceral level; for him, during his entire life, books were very nearly living things, and the sight of Brownshirts torching them must have been horrific. Years later, when trying to find an image for his disgust and fear over the era of McCarthy and the HUAC Committee (which targeted Hollywood, specifically, and writers, generally), he began describing a future society where any printed record of imagination and the past is illegal -- and at some point, the images of what had happened in Germany in April, 1933 resurfaced.
Fahrenheit 451, and its firemen dispatched to burn instead of putting out fires, is really a novella. It isn't a long work; not as long as Orwell's vision (published in 1949), and definitely shorter than Aldous Huxley's genetically-controlled future (published in 1932). Its genesis was a short story entitled "Bright Phoenix", which Bradbury wrote in 1947 (but not published until 1963).
He returned to the theme of a society burning books in earnest through another short story published in Galaxy Fiction in 1950, "The Fireman". Bradbury expanded it into a novella-length book, and it was published as Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper ignites and burns, in 1953 (For those who believe books are just one more "investment opportunity", only 50,000 copies of that first edition were printed, and fewer than twenty thousand are known to exist).
Again, for me, the book had a significant impact -- and again, it was a case of reading something at the right time. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Fahrenheit crystallized what was a developing sense of questioning authority and popular delusions of crowds. When Truffaut's film version of the novel appeared in 1966, I was slightly disappointed that it didn't more closely resemble the book (Bradbury initially didn't care for it either; but I have a copy of it in my DVD library, and Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack is on my iPod).
That isn't an unusual occurrence in any pre-adolescent kid -- but in America of the early-to-mid 1960's, conformity and political orthodoxy weren't just axiomatic, they were mandatory. I lived near a large military installation; my father was an employee of the Federal government (the Department Of Justice, no less). The fear of being painted as a 'Red', the social stigma of being in any way different meant everything you think it does, and everything now pictured in films or teevee dramas about that era (It was different to live through it; history always is. Trust me).
One thing connecting with Ray Bradbury did for me was impart a love of books -- a blessing, mostly, but a curse when you have to move. I had owned Bradbury's books as paperbacks first, then started buying hardback editions in High school; a later edition of Fahrenheit 451 was the second 'actual' book I ever purchased (the first was Crichton's The Andromeda Strain) for what was a considerable sum for a book, then -- $5.00 -- and I still have it.
I also still have the things which reading the man's work gave me. There's an old Buddhist notion that when you need a teacher, they appear; you have to be willing to recognize and accept them. I encountered Bradbury's work at specific times when I needed what they had to give. Their impact was profound, then, and they opened other perspectives on the world: Right things at the right time.
I'm grateful for that. Wherever Ray is, Now He Knows What We Do Not. While I don't necessarily subscribe to a specific notion of an Afterlife, I hope that where he is that it's summer, and green; and that at some point he and his Grandfather will launch Fire Balloons into a soft dark sky, things of light and color and wonder, rising above the trees.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
No Soup For You
Nothing Fails Like Epic Failure!
Benny Bernanke shambled into a Congressional hearing today and said that the recovery was "modest" and would continue, and that he was really an lizard-like alien from Off The Earth.
He added that the Federal Reserve had no plans to do absolutely nothing by way of Quantitative Easing III to stimulate the economy, and make the sitting President more electable than the Rich Empty-Head Suit running against him.
Benny Bernanke shambled into a Congressional hearing today and said that the recovery was "modest" and would continue, and that he was really an lizard-like alien from Off The Earth.
He added that the Federal Reserve had no plans to do absolutely nothing by way of Quantitative Easing III to stimulate the economy, and make the sitting President more electable than the Rich Empty-Head Suit running against him.
Mr. Bernanke told a Congressional committee on Thursday that the Fed had not yet concluded that growth was slowing, nor that new measures to stimulate the economy were warranted. The Fed’s policy-making committee meets in two weeks.Surprisingly little interest. Says it all, doesn't it?
“Economic growth appears poised to continue at a moderate pace over coming quarters, supported in part byrunning the presses at the Bureau Of Printing 24 hours a dayan accommodative monetary policy,” Mr. Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee, an assessment that on its surface was little changed from his last public remarks on the state of the economy in late April.
Beneath the surface of that forecast, however, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed was confused. The government estimated that employers added only 69,000 jobs in May, a marked slowdown from the reported pace earlier in the year. But other economic indicators show a relatively steady, if lackluster, expansion...
Republicans ... pressed repeatedly for Mr. Bernanke to make a clear commitment that the Fed would take no further action to stimulate growth.
Obligatory Cute Small Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Ogg Ogg
Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican, asked Mr. Bernanke to ... “take a third round of quantitative easing off the table.”
Democrats, by contrast, inquired politely after the Fed’s plans and showed surprisingly little interest in pressing the Fed for new measures to increase growth.
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat, made the nearest approach, calling on the Fed to act forcefully, but she did not ask Mr. Bernanke to commit to such a course of action, nor to explain why he has not done so.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Random Barking
Wisconsin And Beyond
The Secret Ingredient™ Saving America's Future
In advance of the Wisconsin recall election results (I predict Gauleiter Walker will very probably hold on by the narrowest of margins, but hope I'm proven wrong) and the Transit Of Venus (no, not the sequel to That Book by Miller), I find myself lying passively on my Dog Rug, and growling.
It's not much of a secret tothe three people and the superintelligent parakeet those reading this blog that I'm not a happy Dog. Some of that is personal, and some of it just the State O' The Nation and the World.
Nassim Taleb is a successful stock trader and commentator; his book The Black Swan is still widely read, and he's about to launch another book, Antifragile, arguing that for the average citizen in an industrialized society, "as you consume more data, and the ratio of noise to signal increases, the less you know what’s going on and the more inadvertent trouble you are likely to cause."
Taleb, as quoted in this excerpt, appears to argue that access to too much information has pushed us from 'equitable' humans into aggravated neurotics.
I disagree, at least in part. One of our problems (and, this is just one Dog's opinion) may lie in many people (and by that I mean Americans, principally) never having developed much ability in discrimination: The ability to analyze different sources, some offering contradictory or competing information, and determine a conclusion based on logic and experience.
This becomes complicated, aber natürlich, if the most accessible sources of information in a society are edited, sensationalized, delivered at a sixth-grade reading level, or are profoundly influenced by political or religious ideology. If your information sources are limited to, say, the LittleGoebbels Rupert Network or The Lard Boy Radio hour, or the barkings of Mikey Wiener... if you live in Wisconsin the chances are high you'll be voting for Little Scotty Walker today.
Last night on PBS' News Hour, one of the editors at The Progressive (founded in Wisconsin during the Robert LaFollette era at the turn of the last century) made the observation that what Walker had done to the state was not a response to its fiscal issues, but to turn Wisconsin into a testing ground for socioeconomic theory of the political Right -- an example and a template for taking over other state governments, and in particular to break a state's labor unions.
The editor also made the observation that what's happened in Wisconsin over the past two years was simple fate: It all could have happened somewhere else, the union-busting and vote rigging and corruption, backed by Brownshirt Republicans and their Tea Partei allies. It happened in Wisconsin because the timing was right; that's all.
The intent of the Right is to dominate, brutalize and control what they perceive as a world dominated by vicious godless Leftists. They fantasize about a hard, bloody struggle to "win back" America for the Gipper and Jesus. The editor didn't say this, but she didn't have to. It's what the Right in this country has been taught to want by the carnival barkers who lead them. They believe in the myth of their victimhood.
The editor didn't say precisely that -- but she added that what's happened in Wisconsin is another escalation in the cultural war between America's Progressive Left and the Xtian-dominated Right; and no matter what the results of the Recall, it was one more step towards... well, who knows what.
So, in advance of today's results, I thought I'd make an egotistical observation and quote myself, from August of last year:
The Secret Ingredient™ Saving America's Future
In advance of the Wisconsin recall election results (I predict Gauleiter Walker will very probably hold on by the narrowest of margins, but hope I'm proven wrong) and the Transit Of Venus (no, not the sequel to That Book by Miller), I find myself lying passively on my Dog Rug, and growling.
It's not much of a secret to
Nassim Taleb is a successful stock trader and commentator; his book The Black Swan is still widely read, and he's about to launch another book, Antifragile, arguing that for the average citizen in an industrialized society, "as you consume more data, and the ratio of noise to signal increases, the less you know what’s going on and the more inadvertent trouble you are likely to cause."
Taleb, as quoted in this excerpt, appears to argue that access to too much information has pushed us from 'equitable' humans into aggravated neurotics.
I disagree, at least in part. One of our problems (and, this is just one Dog's opinion) may lie in many people (and by that I mean Americans, principally) never having developed much ability in discrimination: The ability to analyze different sources, some offering contradictory or competing information, and determine a conclusion based on logic and experience.
This becomes complicated, aber natürlich, if the most accessible sources of information in a society are edited, sensationalized, delivered at a sixth-grade reading level, or are profoundly influenced by political or religious ideology. If your information sources are limited to, say, the Little
Last night on PBS' News Hour, one of the editors at The Progressive (founded in Wisconsin during the Robert LaFollette era at the turn of the last century) made the observation that what Walker had done to the state was not a response to its fiscal issues, but to turn Wisconsin into a testing ground for socioeconomic theory of the political Right -- an example and a template for taking over other state governments, and in particular to break a state's labor unions.
The editor also made the observation that what's happened in Wisconsin over the past two years was simple fate: It all could have happened somewhere else, the union-busting and vote rigging and corruption, backed by Brownshirt Republicans and their Tea Partei allies. It happened in Wisconsin because the timing was right; that's all.
The intent of the Right is to dominate, brutalize and control what they perceive as a world dominated by vicious godless Leftists. They fantasize about a hard, bloody struggle to "win back" America for the Gipper and Jesus. The editor didn't say this, but she didn't have to. It's what the Right in this country has been taught to want by the carnival barkers who lead them. They believe in the myth of their victimhood.
The editor didn't say precisely that -- but she added that what's happened in Wisconsin is another escalation in the cultural war between America's Progressive Left and the Xtian-dominated Right; and no matter what the results of the Recall, it was one more step towards... well, who knows what.
So, in advance of today's results, I thought I'd make an egotistical observation and quote myself, from August of last year:
Barbara Tuchman's 1966 book, The Proud Tower, is a history primarily of Europe in the two decades before the First World War; Chapter 6 is entitled, "Neroism Is In The Air" -- a comment by the French pacifist and critic, Romain Rolland, about what he perceived as Europe's then-cultural preoccupation with violence and unease, coupled with complacency, and which he saw as a recipe for destruction, strongman rule, and disaster.This is what makes me lie on my rug and growl, with the occasional soft bark. More polarization and division will lead to... what, exactly? But even with the major streams of information available to us being badly distorted and overly-commercialized, we can sense it won't be pretty.
In art and politics, culture and commonplace belief, Europe in the last years of peace before August, 1914, was speeding towards... something. No one knew what it was, but people felt it, like a wind that picks up ahead of a thunderstorm: You can see a peculiar light, the darkened and clotted sky, and smell the dust and the ozone. Even the deaf and the blind can tell something is coming.
Europe in these days is full of signs and portends, too. So is the Middle East. So is our own country. The so-called 'Arab Spring' (gone in the media, now, when the images of masses of people in the streets become tiring to Western eyes)' the mass riots across the UK over the past two weeks; the fact that one (and as of tomorrow, two) self-declared evangelical christians are declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination; the bizarre shadow-play of the fake debt ceiling crisis manufactured by Rightist Tea Partei bullies which led to S&P's downgrading of U.S. sovereign debt and a $1.5 Trillion dollar loss in the U.S. stock markets in the past five days.
I don't know what you're feeling, but you don't have to be a Dog to see the clouds in the sky, and smell the ozone; Neroism is in the air. But few people are paying any attention, even though everyone knows something is desperately wrong. That common wisdom screams to be heard that things are incredibly out of balance; that jobs are what people need, not forced Austerity; and we must have cooperation rather than the vicious, tribal idiocy that has poisoned our national discourse for almost twenty-five years.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Morton's Fork
Siting on the sofa
On a Sunday afternoon;
Goin' to the candidates' debate
Laugh about it, shout about it,
When you've got to choose;
Either way you look at it, you lose
-- Simon and Garfunkel, "Mrs. Robinson" (1968)
(Cartoon: Mr Fish, Now A Regular Contributor In The Nation)
When the practice of politics becomes little more than deciding the color of posters advertising candidates, both of whose actual policies benefit a ruling elite, the question in America is not, How did we come to this?, but "Whaddaya talkin' about? Ahhh, go live in France, ya cheese monkey."
Right.
Friday, June 1, 2012
I'm Your Love Rhino
Random Barking Fun: Just Add Absurdum
If we're lucky, this is what happens when we ruminate on our lives or news of the day which always seems to be sensationalized and grim: We focus, for no particular reason, on a thing that appears trivial... but as we keep rolling the Thing around in our heads (an advertisement; a line from a movie; the piano piece from the soundtrack of season 1 of In Treatment) it allows us to stop focusing on the darker side of reality.
In the banal repetition of something we can't shake, we're reminded of how absurdly important we think so many things, and ourselves, are -- of how the world is both at once; profoundly important, and ridiculous. And somehow, we regain our sense of humor and our balance. For a while.
Love Rhino: Click For Larger Image; It's Easy And Fun! (© Berke Breathed)
For me, this morning, it was the term "Love Rhino", from the finely tuned mind of Berkley Breathed, cartoonist and humorist who created Bloom County and "Outland", and Opus the Penguin, one of my favorite characters in the history of American comic strips (an equal First with Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes; but that's another story).
Opus: Click For Larger Image; It's Easy And Fun! (© Berke Breathed)
I was disappointed when Breathed decided to wind BC down in the early 1990's; it was as if the kid next door, whom you depended on to show you the Funny Side of things, told you he was moving away with his family.
For the past week, I've been either focused on my Witless Employ™ or the never-ending stream of not-so-good news; I was simply tired of it. And into my partially-empty Dog Brain came an image of that specific Bloom County strip, and the phrase, "Love Rhino". I couldn't get the phrase out of my head, but the rest of the day was tolerably, absurdly all right.
In the short run, what appears trivial may not save our life -- but in the long run it can make life easier to take. It's one meaning of humor.
Thanks, Berke.
If we're lucky, this is what happens when we ruminate on our lives or news of the day which always seems to be sensationalized and grim: We focus, for no particular reason, on a thing that appears trivial... but as we keep rolling the Thing around in our heads (an advertisement; a line from a movie; the piano piece from the soundtrack of season 1 of In Treatment) it allows us to stop focusing on the darker side of reality.
In the banal repetition of something we can't shake, we're reminded of how absurdly important we think so many things, and ourselves, are -- of how the world is both at once; profoundly important, and ridiculous. And somehow, we regain our sense of humor and our balance. For a while.
Love Rhino: Click For Larger Image; It's Easy And Fun! (© Berke Breathed)
For me, this morning, it was the term "Love Rhino", from the finely tuned mind of Berkley Breathed, cartoonist and humorist who created Bloom County and "Outland", and Opus the Penguin, one of my favorite characters in the history of American comic strips (an equal First with Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes; but that's another story).
Opus: Click For Larger Image; It's Easy And Fun! (© Berke Breathed)
I was disappointed when Breathed decided to wind BC down in the early 1990's; it was as if the kid next door, whom you depended on to show you the Funny Side of things, told you he was moving away with his family.
For the past week, I've been either focused on my Witless Employ™ or the never-ending stream of not-so-good news; I was simply tired of it. And into my partially-empty Dog Brain came an image of that specific Bloom County strip, and the phrase, "Love Rhino". I couldn't get the phrase out of my head, but the rest of the day was tolerably, absurdly all right.
In the short run, what appears trivial may not save our life -- but in the long run it can make life easier to take. It's one meaning of humor.
Thanks, Berke.
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