The Warrior Myth

We've been totally socked in here for a week with North Dakota temperatures and ice on the uphill side of the drive way. I'm going to the store in a few minutes, first time out since the snow. It's been an interesting week for news and sports, with the remarkable Michael Wolff book exploding into the news about the same moment as the NFL Wildcard Week and last night the College Championship in Division I, between two SEC teams who were ranked in the top five for the whole season, and provided a great ending to the drama that is the football season, even ending in overtime, which is as complex an idea at the college level as the NASCAR system of choosing a season champion. Every fall I try to avert my eyes, but, dammit, football is an engaging sport when it's well played and well coached.

Perhaps it's a lesson the the human trait that captures us all: denial. One way or the other, we all practice denial, over and over. Denial is the sort-of answer to another feature of being human: seeing the future. The cats and dogs, pigs and cattle, do not see the future. They live bravely. Bravery is in some ways easier when practiced in ignorance. The rubber is hitting the road when it comes to dangerous and permanent brain injuries and the game of football. The denial skills are also being honed.

On Sunday the Carolina Panther quarterback Cam Newton, an incredibly athletic and talented quarterback, was hit in the head on a forceful tackle near the end of the game. He was for a time unable to stand, and then had to return to his knees as he tried to make his way to the sidelines. Once on the bench, he was evaluated and deemed still able to play. In the interim the Panther backup make a rather pathetic effort to run one play. It was obvious that if Newton could not return the Panthers would almost certainly lose. In the end they lost anyway.

I watch the sports talk shows. Michael Wilbon, on his half hour with Tony Kornheiser, argued that the NFL could not allow an injury situation such as Newton's to determine the outcome of the game. The problem was that the athletes were basically warriors. If they could stand and make their way back to the field, that's what they would do. That's what they wanted to do. As is actually known as a fact, most athletes will lie to doctors, telling them that they are ok and capable of returning to play, even when the facts are different, or even if as is the case with brain injuries, a person cannot actually know, at the time of the injury, whether they can or should return to the fray.

So here's a story: https://thinkprogress.org/ncaa-concussion-lawsuit-c0e543a0636c/

There was another game during the Wildcard weekend, Buffalo versus Jacksonville. Both teams were inept. Very close to the end, the Buffalo quarterback, Tyrod Taylor, was knocked out on the field. After several minutes he was assisted to the sidelines, and did not return. The Bills lost.

The only remarks I have heard about this game was that it was the worst of the four games. Neither quarterback was capable, neither could complete many passes, neither team could score. The final score was Jacksonville's one touchdown, the winning score. Taylor never completed a touchdown all day. No one that I heard ever even reported on Taylor's injuries. Perhaps since he was inept, the injuries didn't matter enough to make the news.

There used to be a sociological thesis that we developed sports to help avoid war.

Have you noticed how many ads involve actors with prosthetic legs since the advent of the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. It's almost like there's this fresh new group of Americans who have this neat, unique feature, a prosthetic leg. It might even help them run better.

Maybe Wilbon should be more consistent. So what if you have a broken leg. Get the fuck out there, soldier.

Easter 2016, Play "The Fields of Erin" Again, Tommy Boy

We're back at the tail-end of winter again today, with a cold hard rain that's eating some more driveway at the same moment that the dogwoods are leafing out and the grass down in the field is about ready for the first spring mowing, which means probably buying a new mower battery, since I didn't last year. There's not much to do outside today, but we might need a little fire in the stove eventually. Next Sunday we'll be up at Martinsville again, watching the colorful race cars go round and round again, soaking in the pure noise of it.

Unlike in past years, there will be no rush back to get to work on time, Monday morning, April 4. The place I've worked for a good while now decided last month to close permanently, the effect of a depressed world-wide scrap steel market showing no signs at all of rebound, a drop last year from $8.50 per hundred pounds for scrap steel down to $2.00 in November. About four-fifths of our customers thought that since the scrap steel they had wasn't going anywheres, they'd just wait the downturn out. Instead they waited the company out. People keep coming to the window--these are usually elderly folks--asking where they can sell their aluminum cans after we're gone. Damn if I know. It's another little blow to the life of being elderly and poor though. People figure they'll make little bits extra, here and there. Ten pounds of aluminum cans, that's worth a whole $3.50 right now, down from $5.00 but still something. You can take the cans to the county recycle center, but you don't get paid anything for that.

I'm elderly and at least not rich myself. It was in some ways great to have a steady job. You could go to the store and buy decent coffee and now and then a good six of IPA. You could keep a spare vehicle if you needed it, even if it was a '91 F-150. There's stuff about that one that's getting a little iffy, and I already paid once last year to fix some kind of gas leak, and now I'm smelling a little gas again, and the clutch fluid seems to be leaking somewheres as well. The days of just paying for it are closing fast, as Bishop Pike said to Ernest Borgnine. Time keeps on. Next Friday, April 1st, it's over. We need a banner. "That's all, Folks." They ran that on the marquee at the drive-in after it departed. This was before the new Food Lion.

Our state, my state all my life, has made international headlines this past week by passing a safe to be a prejudiced bigot law. The governor immediately signed it, after an "emergency" session of the Legislature jumped into action. Some approving lady was quoted on WRAL-TV as saying "God made men and women, period." It's just like climate change. You can "deny" anything. It's a human affliction: "we" can vote for Nader. Right now the far right has seized NC. They think they can make anything happen, including running time backwards to about 1954, but not including some President Eisenhower or his sensible tax-structure. Our poor voters even ratified a bond-issue supported by our current government, when it was obvious that anything they supported, anything at all, was a gift to the rich and connected no matter what the headlines made it out to be. The goal of these people is basically, no more public anything.

One of the worst parts of our current political situation is the utter and rank failure of the whole main-stream media, NPR and PBS included, to actually cover the election in any meaningful way. A fascist at least in spirit (he actually quotes Il Duce fer gawds sake) leads the field of Republicans, and the other guy is a racist, and no one says anything much. Perhaps, if Trump does manage to "win" the fall election, some salt and pepper guy in a black suit and shiny black wingtips will drop by and explain that, in fact, things are not and haven't been for a long time what they have seemed from the "outside." That would be a kind of optimistic conclusion, wouldn't it. We saw glimpses of this "truth," what has been called "deep politics," during the '60s. Everything isn't explained by "lone nuts," that's just a kind of place holder for "who knows?" This week Chris Matthews is to interview Mr. Trump. I might watch. Will it be a half-hour of incomplete sentences, back and forth? Can even Matthews, whose whole method involves talking over and interrupting, work with a man who is even more expert at the same method and adds the extra wrinkle of the never ending non sequitor? Matthews won't be bitch-slapping Jonathan Capehart, as he was last week when Capehart tried to defend something or other.

The good news is, every comments section I read is filled with lines like "Of course I'll vote for Hillary in the fall." I don't read comment sections in main stream media or right wing sites, there's that too. And I did see a comment worth wondering about. Why is it that here in the US "red" has become the color of the right, with blue meaning "sane." We used to call the deluded "reds," back in the day. Passing strange. Does the arc of history bend towards justice, or just keep bending left? One time long ago I drove around Indianapolis twice in the middle of the night, with the rest of the band asleep. We did get back to NC at the end of the trip. At that time Jesse Helms was our senator, and Jim Hunt was the governor. That might be a hopeful fact of history, although it was Jim Hunt and not Helms who invented the "super-delegate."

(P.S.) I had initially thought to center this feux on the absurd spectacle of Senator Lindsey Graham on the Trevor Noah show. Noah quoted Mr. Graham (the "Honorable") to Mr. Graham viz his recent remarks on Senator Cruz, that you could murder him on the Senate floor and not be convicted. True "party man," Graham just laughed. Surely, surely! there is at least one other choice for Mr. Graham. Mr. Cruz would be at least equally disastrous for the United States if he were elected, as Mr. Trump. There are actually reasonable arguments that he would be even worse. Yet Graham, senior senator from South Carolina, prosecutor long ago of Mr. Clinton, could only laugh and twitch. There was no courage in the man at all.

Saturday Stuff Again

Beyond the patently doctrinaire position that unions are intrinsically bad, I have no idea why Republicans are going after not only Teachers Unions, but even the basic perks of the profession. In NC it's one of many planks in the Legislature's coffin--the one they're hard at work building for what once was a reasonable way of life in a southern state. Tenure has got to go. Currently the Legislature and our Republican governor are trying to "bargain" (i.e. pronounce) with teachers who are apparently leaving the state in droves--more pay they say, but no more tenure. It's become a national theme, and made worse because for some reason Obama's first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has joined some group attacking the concept. Last night Neil Cavuto said at one point "we've got to rein these teachers in," referring to tenure. Later, interviewing an articulate real teacher who is also in one of the national Teachers Unions, he proceeded to harangue and diminish her, never letting her finish a sentence and eventually closing with some dippy remark that amounted to, "well, it was nice having such a perky lady as you on the show." Her basic point, which only got out between his ceaseless interruptions: "we want due process." This is essentially what tenure amounts to.

Apparently it's too much for people who's model of employee/employer relationship is that of Ronald Reagan: "I paid for this microphone." In NC you can get hired for no reason, and fired for no reason either. Over a long long time teachers have worked to improve such a dismal situation, and for good reason. Teachers have to talk about real things, and sometimes parents and school boards don't want that to happen. If teachers have tenure it is at least more difficult to remove the, as it were, squeaky wheels. But public schools are part of what once was viewed as the public good. These days the Republican view is that there is no such thing.

Instead, at every turn Republicans state and nationwide are toiling to replace government programs and institutions with some privatized semblance which, they claim against all evidence to the contrary, will yield even a more perfect common good. This myth serves the true but masked agenda--lower and lower taxes on the people who pay for the candidates, who are then further and further free to make more and more minimally taxed money. A teacher with tenure might at least point this state of affairs out to her civics students. If she was a good enough teacher to get the point across to those kids not already so closed-minded as to reject her out of hand and report her to the thought police I mean. Our current state head of finance, Art Pope--a right-wing oligarch who deserves to be on the list with the Koch brothers, though since he's made his money on dime stores catering mostly to poor people, and not energy, he can't be quite in their wealth league--told the public yesterday that they'd have to choose between teacher's assistants in the early grades, or paying for Medicaid. What he didn't say was that the granite foundation on which Republican governance is now resting is, No Raising Taxes, Ever.

This has been the generational trick that the Reaganites have played on America. The public has been convinced that taxes are bad, and that failures of government due to lack of funding are only proof that government is incapable. The great circle continues to advance. At the top, the rich get much much richer, all the while complaining of their shrinking tax burden. Someone has responded to the no tax crowd with a apt rejoinder: "Taxes pay for civilization." The shrieking billionaires mostly drown out this obvious common sense, and Fox runs more hours of pornographic violence, errrm, "ultimate" fighting. The Rude Pundit should do a post on that cultural phenomenon, on which Ms Colter remains strangely silent whilst inveigling against futbol.

Here's a tiny story in yesterday's paper.

Washington -- The government wants to dramatically reduce the allowable height of potentially thousands of buildings near airports around the country--a proposal that is drawing fire from real estate developers and members of Congress who say it will hurt property values.

The Federal Aviation Administration proposal, supported by airports and airlines, is driven by encroaching development that limits safe flight paths for planes that might lose power in an engine during takeoff.

Well why should these federal agencies have the last word anyways? Surely the calculus of the Invisible Hand will show that in a world where there are a few more plane crashes, the extra money made by developers will still create a greater good. Just run it through the John Stuart Mill formula, or ask Mr. Romney. It works out to a percentage of 47/53, more or less.

And rein those unruly teachers in.

Update: Lance Mannion has noticed the same thing viz this attack on teachers. Here's his post:

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2014/06/the-little-professor.html

Here's a small piece of Mannion's point, but you should read the whole piece:

This is part and parcel with their general belief that people’s only reason for existing is to create wealth and in that endeavor everybody, except them, is interchangeable and disposable. But it fits with a more general contempt for teachers as not very smart or ambitious types who take on the job for the summers off, the over-indulgent benefits, and the guarantee that no matter how incompetent they are they won’t be fired. Maybe the best of them go into it because they’re sentimentalists who “love kids” and believe “the children are our future” but that’s a sign they aren’t really serious grownups.

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,” right?

To which somebody has rejoined:

“Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, tell teachers how to do their jobs.”

Twelfth Month

The grinding mendacity of the Republicans has become boring and absurd, and, I keep hoping, so obvious to my fellow Americans that they will start to react negatively to all of it. Last night I watched an hilarious bit of the Dobbs show on Fox. He was talking to two "experts" concerning the effort to reduce tensions with Iran, prefacing the segment with critical quotes from Henry Kissinger and George Schultz (remember them?--you're more or less as old as me then). His experts were Judith Miller, disgraced shill of the Bush Administration and Scooter Libby, and Professor Walid Phares. Dobbs quoted the Schultz/Kissinger remarks, expecting Miller and Phares to jump in with hobbed nailed boots.

They didn't, even when Dobbs paraphrased the Kissinger comments as "two adults correcting rash and not too intelligent adolescents at play in the White House." Here's the segment:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/lou-dobbs-tonight/index.html#/v/2890839022001

As you can see for yourself, Dobbs was unable to brow-beat his own "experts" into a full-on attack of what is clearly a very circumscribed and modest effort by the United States State Department to make some headway with Iran on the issue of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Even when he resorts to what must be his nuclear rhetorical weapon: "bloody hell!" Ms Miller remains firm. "Let's wait and see," she responds. That is exactly the Administration's modest position.

Later, of course, we found Mr. O'Reilly brow-beating Alan Colmes on the health care reform issue. Nothing's changed over there. Out of a group including O'Reilly, Krauthammer, and one of the many blonde newsreaders of Fox (who might as well wear Hooters teeshirts to work, since this is exactly their function in the Fox system), only Colmes opined that it was too early to know how the health insurance reform was going to play out. O'Reilly even invoked numbers: "but you're in the minority here, four to one." Colmes refrained from pointing out that this was exactly his horrible function at Fox--a Washington General along with Juan Williams, forever being dribbled into the opposite basket by louts and girls with Hooter teeshirts.

Maybe Ms. Miller feels the same way. She once, after all, was an esteemed member of the press corps of the New York Times. But in that moment with Dobbs, she stood her ground, and was articulate. It was a small, hopeful sign, and I looked out into the darkness at the Cone, lit once again in our now-annual Xmas Rite. So what if we can't have an indoor Christmas Tree with 5 cats living here. We have the Cone.

Whilst the Vandals Occupied Themselves

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1014414250/coastal-voices-an-oral-history-of-the-outer-banks

Click the link. Nice little project. It was slated to get funding from the National Park Service. This is one of the problems sensible people face. So many holes in the dike of sanity, with the id-driven zombie hoard on the other side of the barrier armed with drills and steel spikes, three shifts of 'em, poking and drilling and punching, driven by something so deep they have no idea of what drives them forward.

Down here in NC I think the people who for some reason started out as Republicans think it's not fair that the Democratic Party got all the loot for so long. Maybe that's how it looks, from the outside, just rampant looting. Get in, get connected, make the deals, retire with a highway named after you. When the vandals broke through here in NC they simply brushed aside all the rules and laws that stood in their way. Fracking is money, so hell with those annoying ecological tests, get 'er done. Over in Raleigh at the State Fair, which was the small dominion of the North Carolina Secretary of Agriculture for ever and ever, the Democrats had a deal with the James Strates Shows for ever and ever. I'd see the train parked on a siding when I'd go to the Fair as a kid. "James E Strates" written on every car. They hauled the rides and stuff from Fair to Fair. Now they got a new company doing the gig, hired by the Republicans. This year a ride fell down. The owner is in jail in Raleigh, dressed in stripes and cuffed for his initial appearance. Three people fell some 30 feet, condition unknown at this time. Paper said the ride owner had a cocaine conviction in Ohio in 1997. Sleuth reporters, on the case. Course every story on the WRAL website comes with "left-leaning Democrat claims...." in the lead. If only they could discover a left-leaning feature to the Vortex Thrill Ride. "Yep, it war shore leaning left jes afore it fell down, yep, I sez to the little missus, that looks kindly left-leaning."

The Legislature banned the words "sea-level rise" as their small step towards stemming the tide and the warming trend we've initiated with our fancy-dancy industrial revolution. There will be no further studies in North Carolina. As for such projects as an oral history of the outer banks, well, it's hard to see such details from the roof of Mr. Romney's house, and anybody who has to go out in a little boat and haul crab pots for a living is prima facie one of the Forty Seven Percent. Anyways, it'll all be underwater in 50 years, but don't tell anybody I told you so. That'd be illegal.

If you want to consider more sanity, go find Rachel Maddow's show for October 29 and watch the opening segment, about Hurricane Sandy and how they just barely kept the Harlem River from flooding all the East Side subway lines. The scientists predicted the flood within three inches; that is, there was just three inches to spare on the eight foot plywood dam when the storm rolled in. That's pretty good science if you ask me. It won't make some legislator any money though.

But It's Pink

Here's the big story of the morning:

http://www.ibtimes.com/my-first-rifle-maker-crickett-rifles-deletes-website-after-accidental-death-2-year-old-caroline#

Here's the lede: Crickett Firearms, the brand that produces the “My First Rifle” line of guns designed for youth shooters, has pulled all its websites offline in the aftermath of a shooting last week in which a 5-year-old Kentuckian, who had been given a Crickett rifle as a gift, fatally shot his 2-year-old sister.

Mother Jones covered the event a couple of days ago: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/crickett-rifle-marketing-kids

Here's a pic captured from that MoJo story, which was from the now deleted website of Keystone Sporting Arms:



In the Washington Post story on the shooting, Keystone Sporting Arms, which makes these weapons for children, was reported as starting out as a company of 4 employees, and as succeeding in its niche market to the point that it now employs some 70 persons.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/authorities-2-year-old-kentucky-girl-accidentally-shot-killed-by-5-year-old-brother/2013/04/30/c1832fee-b206-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Here's where the tragedy happened (from the Post story):



This week some jackass from National Review argued that gun legislation was not fair, because it was imposing "Chicago's problems" on the innocent people of Indiana. Why should all these freedom-loving, hard-working, gun-owning citizens in "rural American" have their life-styles affected by the sordid doings of mostly "different" people who live for whatever crazy perverted reason in our big cities. The Kentucky newspaper who covered the shooting quoted a local DA who more or less said the same thing when he noted that "these things hardly ever happen down here." Doghouse Riley, in his astute analysis of the story, did the math: Let's holster the self-congratulations, Your Honor. The population of Cumberland county in 2011 was 6,832. That gives a death by gun rate of 0.0037%. In 2011 New York City's was 0.0072%.

Here's Riley's piece: http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2013/05/lahrs.html

The lawyer for the people who make and market the guns said this wasn't the time to get into a discussion of gun laws--that would just be exploiting the grief of the family. Charges might or might not be filed. In Riley's comments, someone suggested that the 2-year-old should, obviously, have had a weapon to protect herself.

If you look at the success story of Keystone Arms through the rose-colored glasses Mr. Romney offered all of us back last November, what you see is nothing less than the glory of Capitalism at work. A near majority of our U.S. Senators told us during and after the vote on the pitiful little background check legislation that was quashed that even that bit of effort towards sanity was enough to endanger our Second Amendment Freedom. Obviously, or at least most likely, the background check law would not have stopped the Crickett from being introduced into that household in Kentucky. I'd guess Fox News will shortly be on the case, defending Keystone Fire Arms, Inc.

Here's my long-range question though. If we're going to run our business like this, why in the world should we have an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Would you trust "these people" with your life? They can't even look out for their own children.

Hey, wait a minute, Pilgrim. "These People?" That's us! Yep. And while we try to look sanely at but one small moment of life and death, here in NC our legislative Republican leaders have removed to the ALEC convention (at their own expense they report, nothing to see here). There they will learn what new legislation to craft, in order to further disarm any remaining abilities to resist their coming Kochian Order. They're of course fine with the "Second Amendment Solution." But good luck with that pink popgun if a serious issue with authority happens to come up.

As I've said here before, consider the film "Harlan County, USA." That brave mother with the .38 Special in her bra does not win the day. The day is won by lawyers in New York, far far away from rural America. Keystone Arms will be back in business, because America's Business is Business.

Maybe the truth is, we're all laboring under the false illusion that "progress" is actually possible. Via Kim Morgan's Gunshots Tumblr pages:



This was back in the '50s, when the "true" Americans were entirely in charge, and now and again lynched people who crossed the line. At least mom's not drunk, like William Burroughs.

Monday Update.

You'd think this Keystone Arms Company would be a little concerned, in some way or another, by the terrible tragedy to which their cute little "kid's rifle" contributed. I guess you'd be wrong. Here's what the header at the top of their website says at the moment:

DUE TO THE RECENT EVENTS IN CONNETICUT WE ARE BACK LOGGED ON OUR ORDERS, PLEASE BEAR WITH US DURING THIS TIME, IT WILL TAKE US TIME TO PROCESS ORDERS. WE ARE CURRENTLY OUT OF ALL OUR AR15 PARTS. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVIENENCE THIS CAUSES PEOPLE BUT THIS IS OUT OF OUR CONTROL. (www.keystonearms.com) [sic]

I clicked around on their site for a bit. Here's a pretty neat bit of info, found under the category "Machine Gun Parts."
In fact, this is the whole "Machine Gun Parts" page, at the moment:

Machine Gun Parts
ALL NFA RULES APPLY

Under NO circumstances will any Machine Gun Parts be sent to the state of Washington
1917-A1/1919-A4/A6

BAR 1918

Bren .303 Cal
Galil

Lewis Gun

M-2 Browning .50 Cal
M-60

MG-34

MG-42

The NRA logo is displayed proudly on the home page, from whence I captured it:



I would presume that this implies that the NRA is behind Keystone Firearms Company. I display the logo here only to prove that it was present on the Keystone site on Monday, 5/6/13.

Earlier in the day I checked our local news website (WRAL.com) for further news concerning the Kentucky tragedy and or the Keystone Firearms Company. WRAL reported nothing new. It's old hat to the media already. That's why Keystone is back in bidness. For them, "events in Connecticut" are just a nuisance, and events in Kentucky are entirely below the event horizon. Mitt Romney would no doubt be durn proud.

And the town where the events occurred apparently stands four-square behind Keystone Arms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/us/kentucky-town-rejects-girls-gun-death-as-a-symbol.html?hp&_r=4&

Or at least two fascists who live there do, since their response to media coverage was to slug the cameraman and threaten the writer. Joe Hill, meet Mussolini, as alive as you and me, alive as you and me.

_______________________________

CORRECTION! As Mr. Yothers pointed out to me in a comment, I have confused two different Pennsylvania Arms companies in this post. There is a Keystone Sporting Arms company, of Milton, PA, which markets the children's rifles, one of which was the weapon in the tragedy in Kentucky, and there is also a Keystone Arms Company, of Matamoros, PA, which sells various kinds of firearms and parts thereof, including parts for "antique" machine guns which they name on their machine gun parts page, which I copied above. Whatever you might think about selling machine gun parts, it's not identical to selling pink kid-sized rifles that look like toys. I appreciate Mr. Yothers' interest in factuality and his comment.

Who Are They?

I'll start today by enshrining forever the following brilliant post (and read its brilliant comments as well) by Mr. Edroso:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2013/04/smart-ass.html

Ok, you see how Taranto did that, right. The commenters did, over and over, if you're not yet sure. (I'll bet you are.)
So this is a guy, James Taranto, who has a terrific job being a paid columnist for the Wall Street Journal. That's pretty remarkable. A very major member of the mainstream national press pays this man to write this column!

People like Taranto have sadly been elected to run my state, North Carolina. The Republicans now control the whole Legislature, both houses, and the Governorship. They are, pretty much en masse, as self-certain, arrogant, and (as clearly proved in Edroso's comments), appallingly stupid, as Mr. Taranto. Yet, like him, they are all making great salaries, and on the state taxpayer's dime no less in the case of the NC Legislature, hard at work making North Carolina as big a laughingstock as some of our "sisters" to the south and west. This past week, some 14 of our legislators signed on to a bill creating a North Carolina State Religion. The bill has apparently died a-borning, proving that there is yet some small mercy sprinkled in the aether, like pine pollen at the start of Spring. Still, they put it out there, to the extent that even Ms. Maddow (bless her heart) took the time to notice us all the way up in New York, and to put up pictures of the Fab Fourteen, one of 'em being the head of the State Senate.

I'm starting to think we ought to go back and look at some ancient history.



This is how it was in North Carolina when I was a kid, in the 1950s. My dad and I took a train trip from Raleigh to Denver in 1950. When we left Raleigh we left from the White Waiting Room. If I got a drink of water there, it was from the White Water Fountain. In the early '50s Jesse Helms ran a successful campaign for some guy named Willis Smith, who was running for US Senator against the former Chancellor of UNC, Frank Porter Graham. Later in the decade, Republican President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect small children who were in the process of integrating the Little Rock school system (in a very token kinda way). The General who "won" World War II was then pretty much reviled as a "Communist" in these parts. Our own Legislature, then solidly Democratic, devised something called the Pearsall Plan*, which aimed to postpone school integration in North Carolina by possibly generations through a process of calculated tokenism, minimalism designed by lawyers. The logic was rather as Taranto's, above. You can look it up if you like. It forever disgraces North Carolina, but eventually it passed away, and by the early 1970s (!!) North Carolina public schools were pretty much integrated de jure at least.

*[Here's a description of the Pearsall Plan:
http://ncpedia.org/pearsall-plan
Note other remarkable features of its context, such as the racial makeup of the commission. Of course, 16 whites, 3 blacks! And by the way, another achievement of our current Legislature is the repeal of the just recently passed NC Racial Justice Act. Ain't nobody here but us chickens.]

Of course it took all that time, work, even blood, the slog of the late '50s through the mid-'60s, the murders of many earnest people trying simply to make things better, fairer, the beatings of many more, and then just when there was some sort of corner finally being turned, a Voting Rights Act, A Public Acomodations Law. Why of course there was the Vietnam War, and the "Southern Strategy." And Mr. Helms was still slogging on too, and got elected by North Carolina to the US Senate in 1972, where he stayed nearly as long as Strom Thurman, Thurman surely being an invented character, somebody Vonnegut thought up, or Doctorow, as amazing as South Carolina's current wonderboy, Mr. Sanford.

Here in NC we joke that we are the valley of humility between two mountains of conceit. Apparently we are in the midst of continental uplift. Virginia and South Carolina may have closed their public schools to thwart integration, but we're looking at establishing the Religion of North Carolina. No doubt it'll be more or less Baptist.



This is what it took, over and over and over again, to get from White Waiting Room to the goddam Vietnam War. This is the cavalcade of History, and how American Representative Democracy often operates.

Apparently the fires of discontent amongst the North Carolina racists and bigots and generally dumbass smoldered unquenched, from the moment they took those White Only signs down, till today, 60 years later more or less. Our Legislature toils at the work, their sleeves rolled up. So far amongst other things we've reneged on a contract with the City of Raleigh concerning a valuable state property, to the consternation of even the CEO of the communications company that long ago gave Jesse Helms a home and a platform. On the energy front, fracking is now welcome in NC, no further questions asked. Being considered: more weapons in schools for safety, less early voting time, less time for voter registration, a new voter-i.d. law, a slick law which would penalize parents of students voting where they attend school with higher taxes, stricter laws concerning abortion and a new law which would require those seeking a divorce to wait two years and attend forced counseling sessions. Last year, even before our elections, we passed a state constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage.

For that matter, I've had "serious" conversations with people, on bulletin boards devoted to NC issues, who maintain with all the gravity of a Supreme Court Justice that the American Civil War changed absolutely nothing, that slavery is still just as "legal" as it ever was, that everything since Lincoln is unconstitutional. That's the long view. Possibly Justice Scalia agrees?

So who are these people? "American Fascists," that's as good a term as any. They have a whole TV network now, and that same network carries the most popular sports in the country as well: NASCAR, NFL, Major League Baseball. In our state, the most popular college team, UNC, can be found on "Rush Radio." While you're waiting for the game, might as well suck up a dose or two of Pure-T Hate complements of Rush hissef, or any of the others they feature.

I read this week that there's an ammunition shortage due to panic buying across the country. That's voting by gawd. We may be watching the destruction of a united country, state by state, into fiefdoms. Where's the feds when state after state pass trumped up building codes designed specifically to make a woman's health clinic close down? Go check the upstairs bafroom, Junior, Uncle Sam's been a mighty long time, and there's water dripping through the dining room ceiling. The constitutional law geniuses have had decades to work on their nifty arguments, and Mr. LaPierre can get up on your TV and pontificate as long as he wants, and no one even responds with the obvious: Hey didn't that DA and his wife down in Texas carry weapons, and weren't they expecting trouble?"

It don't look good. Tomorrow I'm going up to Martinsville and watch the millionaires zoom around the Paper Clip, beating up their expensive gas guzzlers for 500 laps. I might even take off my ear protection and mainline the power. I'll be wearing #18. He's due. Hopefully Kyle won't start talking politics at some point. He's a race car driver fer gawd's sake.

The pundits say Mr. Obama still aches to find some deep compromise point with these people, some way to cut the Gorgon's Knot. It's certainly the generic hope of any politician of true good will. It's what Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman hoped. As we're seeing day by day here in NC, these people are not of good will. Never was. Never will be.

Hannity Just Keeps On Digging

On the drive home today I picked up a tad of Hannity's malarkey, after a fairly long musical interlude due to some kind of problem with the satellite. I was hoping maybe Mr. Obama has just pressed some button and shot the fucker down, but apparently not. As he said the other day, he's not a dictator or a despot, just President.

Hannity was talking with former Congressman and highly successful I'm sure black conservative J.C. Watts, about how the sequester really hadn't had any consequences, so haha, it's just like the millennium, Y2K all over again. It's hard work. The right needs to convince everyone that these cuts don't make any difference. It's like whispering to boiling frogs. Meanwhile, in the real world, Charlie Pierce writes the following today at his Esquire Politics Blog (which you can click to off my links any time you want, and you should do that frequently:


Everyday Miracles
By Charles P. Pierce
at 4:45PM

Anyone who had Mississippi in the In What State Will A Cure For AIDS Be Found? Pool may stand to win an awful lot of money.

The infant underwent remission of HIV infection after receiving antiretroviral therapy, or ART, within 30 hours of birth. Medications used were Zidovudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine. A series of tests showed progressively diminishing viral presence in the infant's blood until it reached undetectable levels 29 days after birth. Gay switched Nevirapine with Kaletra for long-term therapy. The infant remained on antiviral drugs until 18 months of age, then became hard to follow up with for a while and stopped treatment. Ten months after discontinuation of treatment, the child underwent repeated standard blood tests, none of which detected HIV presence in the blood. "At that point the mom admitted that she had not been giving the medicine for several months, and I expected the baby's viral load to have gone back up," Gay said. "But, when we drew the test we got back still an undetectable viral load. That was a surprise to me."

As is obvious, a program like the one in which this infant was treated requires a great deal of time and effort and, yes, money -- and even then, the infant in question fell off the radar for a while. This money, for Mississipi and everywhere else, of course, is presently being held hostage in Sequesterland.

Laboratories at major universities and medical centers are already laying off scientists, even before the latest round of cuts is scheduled to take effect. And local public health officials, hit by years of cutbacks, are scaling back immunization campaigns and other efforts to track and control infectious diseases. "They are doing cuts on top of cuts on top of cuts," said Eric Hoffman, director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children's National Medical Center in Washington. Hoffman's labs have had to delay several major projects, including new research into muscular dystrophy in children.

But we're going to keep the carried-interest deduction, so it's all good. Our great-grandchildren are going to disown us entirely and claim we are an extinct species, like the Neanderthal.

As usual, Hannity and his employers assume that each individual loss and wound will only be noticed by a very tiny minority of us. For the rest of us, things are pretty much as they were Saturday. It's an incremental assault, small bits of the boat go missing, but the water's still "down there."

You have to wonder how long this is going to take, and how much will be lost. Those two guys looking at the test tube? They might have to shut it down and get jobs doing something else. That green stuff they're looking at will get flushed or otherwise destroyed, along with whatever information it might contain. That might just be really too bad, possibly even for Mr. Hannity, and that tiny cellular oddity he hasn't even noticed developing where the sun don't shine. Just sayin'.

I Wouldn't Eat That If I Were You

[probably Amanita jacksonii, photographed 8/4/12, Chatham Co., NC]

Someone told me that the "body" of a mushroom is huge, sometimes extending underground for several acres. What we see of the creature is just the moment when it puts up mushrooms. Seems like the critter I photoed yesterday is definitely part of a family--there are several rows of these guys, separated by probably at least a hundred feet, in the woods near the house. We've had a good deal of rain, and very hot temperatures. Yesterday it was just barely at a level where I felt like weedeating some in the late afternoon--fighting back a bit of the jungle. I was still wet by the end, but I didn't find any ticks on me--a definite improvement over early this summer--only a couple of little bites on my leg, maybe chiggers or whatever... nothing horrible.

We saw a little antlered deer in the yard yesterday. I should have taken a pic of that. The kitties watched it with extreme seriousness from the window--as much seriousness as they watched a moth this morning.

The mimosa trees--a terrible mistake I made fifteen years ago--have had their yearly orgy, and if I don't get out there with a chainsaw we'll have a dang forest of the worthless things before long. Here's a pic of a satiated mimosa, enjoying a cigarette and a beer no doubt.

It's close to that moment when what seems without a doubt to be "fall light" appears. Maybe it's today. There's a way the shadows fall. It's also the moment when, since Hurricane Fran back in '96, it feels like Hurricane Season is on us. I keep waiting for the coverage to start--the tracking of tropical depressions chaining across the Atlantic from Africa. They all get names, and trajectories. Some years it seems like they all march into the Gulf. When that's happening it seems looking at the map so obvious that the Gulf draws them in, that the idea of one of them coming up here seems highly unlikely. Other years, the big shallow bay which is the southern half of the NC coast, from Wilmington to Ocracoke, seems to be nothing less than a big catcher's mitt, and the strikes just keep coming, one after the other. There was a time when weather prognosticators thought all hurricanes had to turn north at Florida because of the earth's spin. It was in this epoch that the great Galveston hurricane occurred, killing thousands, including a whole trainload of folks from Houston who were going down there for a day at the beach because no one who spoke English realized the big storm was coming. (Spanish-speaking weather forecasters in Cuba knew different, but we'd just defeated Spain and controlled Cuba, and we weren't gonna let no Cubans tell us whats what.)

Here's a string of our fungii friends, looking just like a hurricane map of the western Atlantic:

I think depicted below is also the same mushroom as the one I started this out with--that as they age and expand the red is diffused into orange as in the "hurricane map," but sometimes things go a different way. I'm not sure of that. Here's one more pic of the red ones, this time "open" but not orange at all and so possibly a different species, even though this one occurs very close to the red caps:

Of course it's equally possible that the two red mushrooms are not related, or that the orange ones are yet another species. I love how the mushroom books tell you never to eat one unless you're certain of which kind it is. Not that that's not great advice. The red one that starts this post might be the kind of critter responsible of up to 90% of the mushroom eating deaths in the US each year. That's some significant info. But the word "certain" in that dictum. I hope nobody ever feeds me a plate of forest gathered 'shrooms and doesn't tell me till I've half-finished the deliciosity.

Meanwhile, of course, oblivous to the remarkable beauty of the day, the machinery grinds on. Here's a wonderful piece on that:

http://vagabondscholar.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-four-types-of-conservatives.html

Blow Up

We're having these frightening thunderstorms for the past several days. They roll in towards twilight, from the southwest. Here in the cabin the southwest quadrant is a towering wall of hardwood forest, climbing uphill as well. In the winter one can see the moon, now and then, disappear through the tree trunks when it is setting. Of course by winter the sun has moved to the south anyways. But here at the height of summer it's thick green, and the storms burst upon us with only approaching thunder as their herald. This morning there's a cool breeze still coming in the window where the cats sit and watch the day, and the air is bright and clean, sun and shadows across the big trunks of the oaks and hickories. Last night, just as we were going out to catch our son-in-law playing a late gig at the Cave in Chapel Hill, the storm broke on us, hard blowing rain misting into the kitty ledge, hail I think (at least it sounded like it). After we left we drove just in the wake of the storm, watching constant lightning and the various roiling shapes the clouds formed and reformed. As we turned onto 15-501, about 20 minutes into our trip, I thought I might have spotted a funnel cloud back-lit by flashes, then it was gone, or never was.

About then the cell rang and it was our daughter telling us the Cave was flooded as were the streets of Chapel Hill. How bizarre. An indoor gig rained out. It was a very thoughtful call, and we turned around and headed back home, where we watched a documentary about belly-dancing women touring with the rock show Lollapalooza. The general theme of today would be, if you look closer things aren't the same as what you thought.

Sheila O'Malley has a very nice blog about movies and art and other things and posted the following the other day, apropos Zelda Fitzgerald's birthday. The post is long and very much worth reading and thinking about. There's this conventional view of Zelda, poor crazy southern belle Fitzgerald married, who then broke his heart and drove him to ruinous drink with her insanity. And indeed, as O'Malley's post makes clear, Zelda did have some questionable moments. But she also wrote this, which O'Malley quotes in her post:

Excerpt of review Zelda wrote about her husband’s book "The Beautiful and Damned":

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald – I believe that is how he spells his name – seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

This is wry, droll humor of the highest order. It is written by a smart and delightful person. It is the sort of paragraph a writer could fall in love to.
http://www.sheilaomalley.com

____


I'm reading E.C. Pielou's great book, "After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America." Only a few pages will show anyone who can think that the work of science is not really to be countered by the airy backhands of people who just say stuff like "I don't find the arguments for human assisted climate change believable." It's similar to the situation with regard to Third Parties. In an important sense--the most important sense--there aren't any third parties in the United States political system as we find it. There is an incredible mass of factual evidence which tells a particular story of how much of the North American continent was covered in ice, then uncovered, with countless specific details concerning the return of life to vast places where there was for many centuries, no life. There was a time when huge land areas existed which are now under the ocean, such as an area called (by scientists) Beringia, which was a cold desert, was populated with animals and plants, and was a refuge from the ice sheets of North America and Asia even as it connected those two great continents. One can say "but I believe something else, something quite different." Such a statement does not offer a counter argument to facts as plentiful as grains of sand on a beach. Nor are the grains of sand merely an elaborate hoax concocted to cage grant money. As I've probably said here more than once, Bishop Berkeley is not to be read in the primary grades. Kick the stone first.

Ms. Pielou makes the following statement in her book:

There is a wealth of evidence, however, showing that climate change is never ending. Even if major climatic "steps" are comparatively quick, it is almost certain that the climate in the intervals between steps undergoes continual lesser changes. In the light of present knowledge, therefore, ... disequilibrium in ecological communities is much commoner than equilibrium...

[This fact, of disequilibrium] should lead in time to a much needed change in popular thought. The notion espoused by so many nonprofessional ecologists--that the living world is "marvelously" and "delicately" attuned to its environment--is not so much a scientifically reasonable theory as a mystically satisfying dogma. Its abandonment might lead to a useful fresh start in environmental politics.
(p. 101)

Let it be noted that Ms. Pielou is not offering a critique of any theory of global climate change. Her point, rather, is that the entire conversation is mostly concerning the wrong things. As it's not pertinent to her subject, she does not address the "mysticism" emanating from the denier crowd, who tend to say things like "CO-2 is only a green house gas at the surface of the planet," and "how can CO-2 make any difference, it's only a tiny fraction of the gasses that make up the atmosphere." Much less does she engage with the plain fact that, mostly, denialism is a strategy aimed at stalling all governmental efforts to attack the problem of climate change by raising doubts in a voting public which has little time for a serious scientific look at the subject--or any subject. Obviously, her readers will have already overcome that shortcoming and so might manage to intake her deeper observations.

"Well," Libby said, raising her umbrella as we left the three boys to their own devices and squished down to the Toyota for our soon to be aborted trip to Chapel Hill. "We'd be talking about the drought otherwise."

The photo is called "Broken Shade," of an oak tree on my road, which used to shade a little farm house that burned down several years ago. It had been empty for years, and the tree was partly killed by the fire, but the one living branch soldiered on, and its weight against the dead trunk finally took it down. Buzzards like to roost in the top in the morning, but they weren't there last week when I took the photo. If you look carefully you might see a glimpse of crepe myrtle, a sure sign of human habitation.

The Prisoner

Ever watch that rather weird teevee show, The Prisoner. I saw bits and pieces of it back when it was running on, I think, UNC-TV. This was long ago. I probably never saw a whole episode, but I don't think that really mattered much. The premise was that this guy, possibly a British secret agent, had been spirited away to a prison camp which was designed to appear to be a comfy resort, where everyone was happy and having a great time. In each episode the hero discovers, somewheres along the half-way mark, that something is askew. He finds a cushion out of place that he left just so on purpose. He discovers that there's a camera in his ceiling. Another "inmate" whispers something to him, then disappears. There are countless variations on this theme of discovery, but at the end of each episode the hero (played by Patrick McGoohan) finds himself back at square one, in his nicely appointed bungalow, while unseen observers discuss his case.

So anyways, we've discovered that we are actually hostages of a feral cat colony which has been living here for an unknown number of months, unknown to us. Last evening, as dusk fell and Greg Biffle led the parade around Darlington, I went outside and looked down the driveway to where I'd parked my truck, sos I could do some mowing earlier. On top of my truck was a large silhouette--a cat's head and ears, his body shape directly behind. He was at rest, just looking. At me. I couldn't make out any of his features. I figured, though, that he was the big yellow tom. Libby later shone a flashlight in his direction and confirmed my theory.

Charlie Company might be viewed as a small invasion force, the first to make it inside our inner compound. (Except of course for the squirrels who live in the ceiling in the winter months, but they are a third force, and if anything good comes of our colonization it might be that squirrels make good meals for feral cats.) This, at least, would be the creationist logic of the situation, as opposed to visions of Newtonian entropy too depressing to savor on my meger two days away from my retirement
job. It's sort of like saying, "isn't it amazing how grapefruit all have the same number of sections. There must be a Creator." Versus something I saw the other night on the History Channel--where they were talking about Earth-like planets and someone asked, "well, how long would it take to get to one of those planets from here," and the answer was, "um, er, between 50 and 100 thousand YEARS." Which sorta takes the shine off the notion that we have alternatives "out there." Sartre was right.

I'm not sure that here in rural Chatham County we have much of a support system for them what wants to intervene in a feral cat colony, beyond the Old Ways (e.g., Mr. Yellow Tom provided a fine if silhouetted target, and I probably could have taken him out without much risk to my windshield). Here's a couple of youtubes of what people in more progressive realms do. It's pretty interesting for the cultural information, as well as for the information about feral cat colonies, imho (as the bloggers like to "say").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STZrgEJz_mI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SydX7jnox8&feature=related

I like the "drop trap" idea. As a movie I mean. I like how you can watch the colony at work, the momma and her adolescent charges. It worries me some, that latter part of the vid, where you have to get each individual cat into a smaller carrier from the bigger group confinement area. That part where you have to have one foot just so on the bigger trap, then put a foot on the smaller trap, with the box of rocks set just right on the tab at the back. That's a juncture in the procedure where there might be problems humorous from a camera's eye point of view to be sure, but related to the bullet hole in the windshield problem discussed earlier.

So we find ourselves now looking past the three boys, careening around our former living room with the speed of Sprint Cup racers, while the race itself unfolds on the screen, indeed, stopping to watch the cars now and then before some rustle or quick movement from another brother distracts them. Now it's about trapping these creatures who live Out There, who are bringing Out There to our very doorstep. Libby fed the momma at 2 AM. She stood guard at the door so the yellow tom would not steal Momma's food. She then researched the best trap some more on-line. We are told that some local stores carry knock-off versions of these traps which tend to fail. Above all, we don't want to teach these invaders that they'd best beware of food in a shiny box. Our hope is that if we get Momma neutered, the toms will be less interested in hanging around. We can deal with her--an outside cat, per se, is easier than an inside one.

We might have to take Momma to some more "civilized" county when and if we do manage to capture her. There's not much sign of a human culture here in Chatham County which resembles the people depicted in the two videos posted above. But then, we are amongst only 8 counties in our whole state which voted against the No Equal Marriage Constitutional Amendment which just passed here in North Carolina. Maybe in this small regard the google does not know all. We'll certainly ask around. Some places, like Ocracoke, NC and Seattle WA, cherish their feral cat colonies. We don't live there I don't think. Here such colonies are more viewed as new vectors for rabies, which already thrives in raccoon and fox populations.

Put 'er in warp drive, Scottie.

Pity the Fool

There's a reiterated refrain on right wing radio that asserts, over and over and over, that women are asking the government, e.g., you the taxpayer, to pay for "their" birth control medication. This is a Big Lie, period. It is part of the Big Lie Mr. Limbaugh spun out last week re Ms Fluke, who dared to offer rational, clear, believable testimony to what's really at stake in the contraceptive issue which the GOP has chosen to make one of their emotional rallying cries this season. Here's the simple truth:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/05/health-insurance-is-not-courtesy-it%E2%80%99s-wages

Here's a bit of the poster's piece, but it's all very very good. And unlike Limbaugh, Hannity, and the other right wing mouths who have gigantic megaphones and will shout your house down every day if you let them, this paragraph is actually true:

When I fill my prescription, I assure you that you aren’t the one paying for it. I am. When I go to the classroom and teach, when I grade papers, when I sit in office hours and coach your children on how to write, I am earning my own birth control. So are you. Whether you pay your own premiums or not, you are exchanging hours of your life for insurance. And if you don’t have insurance – how is that something to be proud of? It means you work for an employer who can’t be bothered to invest in its employees. It means you work for a corporation that finds you disposable, that tells you that you’d be a fool to expect your health to matter. Is that “freedom”? Really? Just because the all-seeing entity that wants to decide your fate doesn’t bear the stamp of the United States government? How utterly naive.

Hat tip to Digby, who posted the link. Big cudoes to the author of the piece--another sensible, rational American who happens to be a woman. There's a question over on the left of her page: where are the American men who are in favor of birth control? Good question. Digby suggests that voters should try to get whatever candidates they can find clearly on the record on this "issue" of birth control and access to birth control. The Right Wing is creating an enormous lie out of whole cloth at the moment. It would be nice to think that it's so obvious, and so wrong, that a lot of voters will actually see what's happening if only they look in the right direction--and away from the screed of salacious sanctimony that spews out of the right wing side of the media every day.


Meanwhile, this is how the conversation goes over in the land of the blind:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/05/a-nation-of-mean-girls/

As well as the absurd and laughable argument that Ms Fluke has attacked Mr. Limbaugh, which is the center of the piece, check out the amazing comment thread, were all the false presuppositions (such as the false idea that Ms Fluke and her cohort must be having lots and lots of sex because otherwise their birth control pills wouldn't cost so much) build themselves into a veritable mountain of lies.

This is how the Big Lie works. This is how, for example, a million or so Tutsi people were massacred in a few days by their fellow Hutu citizens in Rwanda. It's how Germany invented a scapegoat--the Jewish people (and the gypsies, and other minority groups). And again I have to wonder just why the United States has allowed Lord Haw Haw to have a baker's dozen radio shows running in every nook and cranny of the nation, 24/7. It boggles the mind. It's a 5th Stage Mind Rot, judging by those comments at pjmedia just cited.

And here at home, my own UNC Tar Heels are carried, on the radio, by a network of stations called "Rush Radio." We've come a long way. Jesse Helms used to call UNC the "Red Nest." Now these people just co-opt. It's a more effective strategy unfortunately.

Whoo Hooo, Sex Scandal

(photo Jack Delano, 1941, "Backstage at the Rutland State Fair")

Since I was away from the news and the computer for a few days due to the race, I watched a good deal of MSNBC last night--Matthews, Schultz, Maddow, O'Donnell. The primary focus was the Cain sex story, as it might be described. It's a complex "thing," this story. First, there's the Politico story itself, an assertion that Cain has settled one or possibly two sexual harassment accusations out of court, for cash. Second, there's the story of Cain's changing reactions to this assertion of fact, upon being confronted with it. Third, there's the hard right punditry's knee jerk reaction that it's an attack on a black conservative by the liberal press, a kind of accusation of racism. Fourth, there's the mystery of where Politico got its tips, which led to the story.

And there's the fifth aspect or facet of this story. That as is typical with such stories, it obliterated at least for a time the much more significant story that should be required work for the whole realistic American press--that right wing billionaires are successfully distorting our political process to their own ends, and that one of their smaller efforts in this regard is actually the candidacy of Mr. Herman Cain. For amongst the obliterated features of yesterday's news was the story that Mr. Cain received quite a bit of illegally contributed loot in his Presidential bid from groups directly associated with the Koch Brothers.

With regard to the sex story, seems to me that Mr. Cain's inept reaction to it is yet another proof that he has an extremely minimal campaign team, i.e., his candidacy is not serious, but is more like Gingrich's and the collapsed Palin phenomenon--an effort in self-promotion, a "book tour" so to speak. Had Mr. Cain a body of staffers, likely he would not have been personally surprised by the story, which led to his ever changing reactions to it (a feature of himself which isn't new to this story either, see., e.g., how his 9-9-9 plan is being revised on the fly as he runs into successive questions which reveal problems with it in its simple form--problems which actually go to prove the obvious, that a simple "flat" tax is grossly unfair and would be unpopular with almost everyone). Mr. Cain's lack of a body of staffers is in turn proof that his campaign isn't serious, which is in turn proof that the Republican Party finds itself unable to sift out the cranks from the serious candidates--a disastrous problem for an allegedly major party. And, one might also surmise from Mr. Cain's inability to settle on a truthful answer to the factual question he confronts--namely, did you in fact settle sexual harassment suits out of court for cash--suggests his inability to deal with the most important aspect of the job of President--being able to make firm decisions on important matters in real time. (But of course this inability is in a sense moot in Cain's case, since he isn't "really" running. Cain, like Gingrich, like Bachmann, like Santorum, is (as we say at Martinsville) just another Nemachek.

For a disinterested observer, which only means a person who understands that in the end they have but one vote, and that one vote is tho important, not a big fraction when it comes to Presidents, the question is more and more, how broke can this American system really get, before it actually breaks down. In that regard, my guess would be, on the question of who whispered in Politco's ear, Carl Rove. Certainly Democrats have no interest in derailing Mr. Cain, who derails himself with nearly every public appearance and appeals primarily to the people who ache to be derailed and distracted. Like Palin, Cain would be a candidate of choice for Democrats. Moreover, Politico is not a particularly liberal part of the press.

More generally, it seems to me that the de facto oligarchy is clearly of two minds about the direction the Kochs are trying to steer the country in. Last week the Dow went above 12 thousand. Mr. Buffet's editorial flutters on invisible wires in the air above the whole Congressional Republican delegation, a Mission Accomplished reproach to their patently obvious strategy of derailing any recovery in the hope that they will thereby derail Mr. Obama. Old money, such as the Koch family, brings with it a certain myopic perspective not shared generally by successful players, at least not in toto. While the Kochs imagine a stooge who distracts while the real game is played behind the scenes, the Buffets may consider a President of some capability to be of real value, as long as they still have his ear. It's possible that in the real world, yet another war, such as one with Iran or Pakistan, seems as big a mistake to the oligarchs as it does to everyone else living outside the blinders of "true belief," e.g., al qaeda or Palintot.

Nontheless, wouldn't it be nice if the public weren't distracted so often by the folks who are supposed to be windows to the world. It would help if institutions who are supposedly committed to maintaining those windows didn't collapse in the slightest breeze.

I'll repost the link for that sad remark here:
http://gawker.com/5854118/how-occupy-wall-street-cost-me-my-job

I have to wonder how NPR is "covering" the big Cain Sex Scandal.

For Folks Who Don't Pay Attention

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov

This piece comes from a guy who wrote it as he was leaving the GOP.  It is a good analysis, although Driftglass and many others have been saying the same things for many many years.  One also wonders what took him so long--was it just time to retire, and was the beach house now paid for?  Still, it has the value of being in some sense "from the inside."

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

He's right about the problems the country faces with its political system, that's for sure.  Money is power, and the monied are pretty much all lined up on the wrong side now.  Moreover, they have funded via getting their people elected powerful efforts to destroy organized unions, which not only weakens still further the ordinary working folks who are probably 90% of America, but weakens their voice in politics via union donations which to some degree off sets money from business, in our elections.  Then there's the pathetic "mainstream" media, which does not inform, and the devolution of the Democratic Party into simply GOP lite (which seems to me is due in part to the defection of people like the author of the truth out piece, who will end up being or at least voting Democratic because we have a simple two-party system).

I'm sure people who understand that we have a two-party system will, in 2012, vote again for Obama.  I'm also sure that many of the people who voted for Obama in '08, as a hope of real change in the United States, will now simply not vote.  This has happened before.  The depressing quality of the Vietnam era lead to lower and lower turnouts, and drove one very good President, Lyndon Johnson, out of office. Mr. Johnson, a master politician who makes Mr. Obama look like he is still in knickers, gave up in 1968.  This remarkable fact is seldom appreciated, perhaps because only five years later his successor left office to avoid impeachment.  People, in 1968, voted in Richard Nixon.  The implausability of Nixon's election should also  give pause forever.  Nixon's eventual collapse and forced resignation was no surprise, but almost predictable given his history.  The more abstract fact, that our system of government can become shockingly unstable almost overnight, is little remarked upon. 

Fox, which runs the propaganda arm of the GOP, also televises NFL, MLB, much top college sports, half the NASCAR season, etc.  You think they don't have credibility for their ongoing political distortions among people who don't pay attention?  They have more credibility where it counts than all the MSNBCs combined (and there's really only just one, plus Olbermann over on the hippie channel, bless his heart).

We are at a place in this country's politics where actual facts--truth--simply doesn't matter.  Michael Steele, a fairly thoughtful man and now an MSNBC analyst, said the other day that when a candidate was talking to his base it wasn't appropriate to question any of his statements.  Ed Schultz offered an example of this a couple of days ago, comparing Marco Rubio's recent speech on the theme of how social security and medicare weakens the "moral fabric" of the nation, with other speeches of his using examples of his own parents and their usage of social security and medicare.  As Mr. Lofgren above notes, Ayn Rand received both medicare and social security, without a complaint.  Yet it is without any doubt an effective water torture to press on with the double-speak--e.g., Democrats now routinely refer to social security and medicare as "entitlements," which is a loaded term suggesting that recipients did not in fact pay into these plans.  Moreover, the GOP goal is to turn whatever ends up being called "social security" and "medicare" into welfare programs for folks who are in dire need, dire being solely defined by people who are NOT in any need whatsoever, but in fact have wonderful, government funded health programs and magnificent retirement pensions which they voted in for themselves many years ago.  Once that happens it will be even easier to tighten the screws on people who have passed their "productive" years.  Such people will be merely the "parasites" amongst us.  And this sort of language is already being mainstreamed by radio commentators such an Neil Boortz.

I'm glad Mr. Lofgren decided to have his say.  At the same time, I do have to wonder, what took him so long.  As an insider, you'd a thunk he might have been saying something a couple of decades back?  The horses have long left the barn, and their hoofbeats blend with the distant thunder and flickering lightning beyond the far horizon.  Strange, that lightning.  It's a starry night around here.  We ought to get out the telescope and give Saturn a look, maybe we can see the rings.  The kids don't have to go to bed early--it's Labor Day.  What ever the hell that means? 

And speaking of things astronomical, here's a bit of reality which will of course be lost in all the meaningless blather that passes for commentary and analysis.  As usual, Mr. Driftglass is right on the money.

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-time-on-budget.html

Barking the Squirrel Down

bssda.webs.com

Once upon a time I saw a squirrel get barked out of a tree by a pack of dogs.  The squirrel was entirely safe.  The dogs couldn't climb the tree.  This is pretty much what is going on now with this deficit and debt panic.  President Obama is already nearly out of the tree too.  Meanwhile--the news media coverage notwithstanding--the facts remain.  The tree is solid and safe.  The dogs can't climb.  Here's a link, from last Sunday's New York Times.


http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2.html?ref=sunday

You may also recall that Republicans very much wanted the Bush Tax Cuts not to expire--for some reason in December, 2010, there was no debt or deficit crisis.  Meanwhile, last Friday Congress shut down the FAA, a little-noted event given all the coverage devoted to the "debt crisis."  Some 1200 post offices are also going to be closed down due to budget issues.

Most pundits I've read still predict a last minute resolution of some kind.  Wall Street, it is opined, will simply not "allow" the country to teeter on default, or actually go over that precipice.  But Wall Street seems to be entirely unable to explain to the people it helped elect last year that the Federal Government cannot be understood as simply a big family, where dad cuts the credit card up when sis buys too many pairs of tight jeans without his permission.  Indeed, as Obama did point out in one of his attempts to direct the American people towards reality, the debt ceiling "issue" is about paying for stuff we've already bought, not about new spending.  Even in the false Iowa Family metaphor Mrs. Bachmann's shrill voice invokes hourly (snipping with her most articulate fingers an imaginary credit card, for all to visualize), Dad is going to have to pay for those jeans, because sis has worn them twice, they've been washed, and there's a catsup stain on one knee.

Or maybe, in Bachmann world, the jeans go back anyways.  Not to any store I know about.   As most people know, reality is a stern teacher.  Much of the government's efforts go into softening the blows that reality will be happy to met out, all things being equal.  If the debt limit isn't raised, it might be better for the country as a whole to pay treasury bond interest, than to pay social security recipients.  At that point, perhaps the rank and file tea party people--not finding their needed check in the mailbox--may begin to wonder what they actually have signed up for.  Ain't no doubt a passle of tea party members do get those checks, and use Medicare.  You can see the demographics in the photos.

While I certainly don't want to see such an eventuality, I have to wonder what the hell is really going on these days.  Shutting down the FAA is not even making the news.

Thursday morning update:   NPR yesterday was musing that wasn't it amazing that America could ever get even so close as it is to a default, being as how we're so amazingly sophisticated about these things, not to mention rich.  Seems like NPR forgets that the nation that brought us the most sophisticated music, physics, philosophy, and theology in the western world blossomed in the late 1920s into systematic extermination of their own citizens and a military conflagration that killed some 50 million people and left their own country utterly flattened.  Obviously we do not have a vaccine against crazy.  OBVIOUSLY.  The procession of events in one of our most sensible, educated states, Wisconsin, should give all pause.  Even NPR.  Michele Bachmann is an elected representative from another of our most sensible, educated states, Minnesota--a state which also put a professional wrestler in as Governor.  And of course I'm not living in some glass house around these parts--my benighted state gave the world Jesse Helms, and more recently, Rep. Virginia Fox, who sits squarely in the hen house now, on the Finance Committee.   (The NPR musing was going on on the Diane Rehm show, by the way, where Alice Rivlin, who used to be sharper, evoked the "both of  'em do it" meme on the grounds that the Simpson-Bowles Commission Report, of which she was a signatory, was pretty much ignored back in January.) 

In the larger perspective the public continues to be played.  While everything focuses on a phony crisis that at best will be ended by Presidential Invocation of the 14th Amendment, our voting rights are being dismembered at the state level via i.d. laws which are going to change voting demographics significantly.  Meanwhile the Supreme Court considers whether the Civil Rights Voting Laws are now irrelevant.  Ha.  The only people who can seriously deny that racism still flourishes in the United States are themselves racists, and people who seem capable of living in denial on many fronts these days.  Voter ID laws are the new strategy in the age old game of stopping all but the privileged from getting to vote. 

Way Back When

Pete Maravich, 1970

Hey, remember when those awful SEIU goons beat up that nice black man who was giving away American flags at a Tea Party rally in St. Louis, back a couple of years.  Vaguely, right?  Well, he had his day in court, and Tbogg reports the results here:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/07/12/beat-me-in-st-louis/

I don't think the results are too surprising, and Mr. Tbogg also points to the lameness of various rejoinders offered.  But the problem for people trying to keep a realistic eye on life is, this stuff is an endless onslaught, a daily flood of lies.  And look how long it takes for even one of these lies to get quashed by reality.  In this case, two years and counting.  Meanwhile, the folks who think they can invent a right wing reality by just snapping their fingers together and believing continue on.  Yesterday on the news I heard both Michelle Bachmann and Rep. Steven King say that the debt ceiling is not really an issue--that default cannot happen, and that anyway, it's just like balancing a family's checkbook, this international web of financial transactions that we live in and that orders our economic life.  There's also intense lobbying on the Right for a balanced budget amendment--one of the stupidest ideas ever, but of course that's just like the family check book.

Maybe legislators need a degree in economics as a qualification for office?  Oh right--too late for that too, because the Right has built its own universities now, with their own "degrees."  It all goes back to the time, probably around 1970, when "Oral Roberts University" actually fielded an NCAA men's basketball team which made it to the big Tourney.  That moment probably mattered even more than Watergate. 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1084347/index.htm

Remarkable

http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2009/11/winter-apples.html

According to a detailed report at FireDogLake, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser physically assaulted a fellow justice (and a woman at that) prior to his upholding the "budget" law designed this past spring by Governor Walker and passed under dubiously legal circumstances by the Wisconsin Legislature.  Here's a link to the story at firedog:

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/06/25/wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-prosser-choked-colleague-before-anti-union-decision/

As you can read in the piece, much has yet to be fact-checked.  On the other hand, no clear denials are forthcoming from Justice Prosser, and one has to wonder if one is simply a reasonable person.  And once again, I have to note that this sort of exchange is basically a hallmark of authoritarianism--fascism if you will.  We're seeing a lot of this these days, in a lot of contexts.  Too many seem to think that if things aren't going their way, it's time to choke, punch, and even shoot.  As Mussolini said to the reporter when asked what his first act would be upon becoming the Supreme Leader of Italy--"Why, to kill you."  I've quoted that before.  I just think it's a striking illustration of the moment when dialog becomes something else--something not about ideas any more.

I hope someone somewhere is working on a book about how all these right-wing governors and legislatures cooked up this state-by-state mini-revolution that's now underway.  I find it very hard to imagine that it was just "in the air," although perhaps the ground-swell of Tea Party activism which preceded last fall's elections really lifted all these people to at least temporary power.  Certainly plenty of people at the Tea Party rallies were capable of living in immediate inconsistency: there was more than one quote along the lines of "get government out of health care, but hands off my Medicare."  Humans are more than capable of living in profound inconsistency.

Indeed, just yesterday I was reading a shocking article in the New Yorker* concerning a woman who refused ever to admit she was mentally ill and who eventually was discharged from an institution in New Hampshire and subsequently starved to death living in an empty house, enthralled and distracted by her fantasies.  She wrote a journal describing her life to the bitter end, and survived for months only on apples until they finally ran out.  This true story reflects a general trend in the ongoing "contest," if you like, between a law of absolutes and a psychiatry which deals with what we actually find here in the world--complexity and shadows.  The woman's sister is suing the hospital for discharging her without any word to anyone in her family.  The hospital, grounded in many legal decisions handed down since the '70s, believed they were simply following the woman's wishes and decisions: the woman, "Linda," refused all treatment, asserted that she had no mental illness, believed her sister was controlling, stood firmly on her right to "liberty" as she walked out the door with pocket change and no plan of survival.  The question--perhaps forever an open one--is where "decisions" can be judged by others to be so misguided as to be overruled--even at peril to some absolute "freedom" that we also all support here in the USofA.  It's a conundrum, that's for sure, and it exists not only at the personal level, but at the level of the body politic.  Let us not forget:  Hitler was elected.  Thus, in a real sense the rubble that was Germany in the fall of 1945 was a result of the will of the people of Germany.

I mentioned the fine conversation with Billy Wilder I happened to watch the other day on Turner Classics.  Mr. Wilder had escaped Germany in 1933.  He made a movie about the concentration camps in 1945.  Germans walked out of it--until he tied their food ration card access to sitting through the film.  His hope was that they would see--admit to themselves in other words--what had "really" happened.  This was not an easy task.  People would much rather deny painful truths.  And frequently people actually succeed in denying--until some harsher reality simply asserts itself in its complete undeniability.  The apples ran out and Linda starved to death.  And right now, Congress withholds funding the EPA.  Just sayin'. 

*God Knows Where I Am, Annals of Mental Health, Rachel Aviv, New Yorker, May 30, 2011.  [I've been told in conversations down at the Texaco that any reference to the New Yorker is suspect, because the New Yorker is a "liberal" source not to be trusted.  I offer this footnotal anecdote as an example of the methodology of denial, living and breathing--indeed puffing on a cigaret--even here in Chatham County.]

Update: Ann Althouse has obliquely confirmed the news that Justice Prosser assaulted Justice Bradley last weekend.   Here's the link:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/06/28/legal-scholar/
I take quibbling about who's "bigger" implies that the event is a fact and not some leftist smear.