snow-moon

2011-12-12T03:00:00.000-05:00

digby

firedoglake

think progress

crooks & liars

paul krugman

dean baker

naked capitalism

the second alarm

mike konczal

the nation

rachel maddow

countdown on current

facing south

talking points memo

the current moment

the young turks

glenn greenwald

michael moore

moviemorelocks.com

laughing squid 

random bookshelf

the right side of history

2011-12-08T00:42:00.001-05:00

1 in 3

2011-12-03T14:31:00.002-05:00

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 100 million American citizens--one out of three--subsists below or just above the official poverty line. Demographers, statisticians and economists were stunned. "These numbers are higher than we anticipated," Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau's chief poverty statistician, told The New York Times. "There are more people struggling than the official numbers show."

Ted Rall @Common Dreams

what are we for?

2011-12-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

Occupy Together
(National)

Occupy Wall Street
(Liberty Square)

FAQ
(The Nation)

Timeline
(Wikipedia)

Occupy Wall Street
(The Guardian)

Global Revolution livestream video

New York General Assembly (NYCGA.net)

Avaaz live

2011-10-14T07:47:00.003-04:00

avaazwallstreet on livestream.com.

2011-10-08T05:43:00.006-04:00

Occupy Wall Street:
The Most Important Thing in the World Now
Naomi Klein
[excerpt]

"Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called 'the movement of movements.'

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world."

MORE

Occupy Wall Street Media

2011-10-06T02:09:00.002-04:00

2011-10-05T00:04:00.004-04:00

occupation is the message

2011-10-04T02:43:00.002-04:00

"The occupation at Liberty Plaza may outwardly appear to be just a large encampment of hundreds of tired, exuberant, unwashed people. But it’s an incredibly subversive idea. What the occupation has managed to do thus far is set up a center for agitation on Wall Street’s doorstep, while simultaneously stand up to the most militarized police force in America. In that brave act of defiance, they’ve begun the process of recapturing public space to assemble and foment resistance against a corrupt system, a public space lost to us after 9/11 (with the introduction of “free speech zones”) and just as importantly, begin to remedy the fear and cynicism so many Americans have been feeling for well over a decade now under the hand of a police state and a domestic intelligence apparatus unparalleled in American history. The Founders clearly understood that the right to assemble was of key importance to those who wanted to correct wrongs done by their government. If they could not assemble, they could not achieve their goals. Liberty Plaza is a long-overdue civics lesson."

Dustin M. Slaughter - The David and Goliath Project

via Kevin Gosztola @ FDL - The Dissenter
photo: David Shankbone

pbs

2011-10-03T21:57:00.002-04:00

inc.

2011-10-02T21:17:00.003-04:00

The Corporation (2003)

2011-10-02T20:02:00.024-04:00

The Dissenter
fdl's daily live blog of #OccupyWallStreet

Take Wall Street
public #OccupyWallStreet list curated by Kevin Gosztola (twitter)

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

finding meaning

2011-10-02T07:32:00.004-04:00

Matt Stoller
Naked Capitalism

[excerpts]

"What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, 'we matter.'

Meaning is a fundamental human need. The act of politicization, of building any movement, is based on individual, and then group self-confidence. As Daniel Ellsberg said, 'courage is contagious.' I’m reminded of how Howard Dean campaign worker and current law professor Zephyr Teachout characterized the early antiwar blogosphere and then-radical campaign of Dean, as church-like in their community-building elements. That’s what #OccupyWallStreet reminded me of. Even the general assemblies, where people would speak, and others would respond, had a rhythmic quality to them, similar to churches or synagogues I’ve attended.

You can tell this is a somewhat different animal than other politicized gatherings. No one knows what to expect. There are no explicit demands. It’s not very large. And yet, celebrities are heading to Zuccotti Park. Wall Street traders are sneering and angry. The people there are getting press, but aren’t dominated by it. People are there just to be there, because it feels meaningful. The camp is clean and well-organized, and it feels relevant and topical rather than a therapy space for frustrated radicals. Just a block away is the New York Fed, a large, scary, and imposing building with heavy iron doors, video cameras, and a police presence that scream 'go away.'"
______

"Many of the angry establishment liberals are frustrated that this protest has no top-down messaging strategy . . . But these people, who represent the rump of support for Obama, are not part of the conversation here. The conversation is global. And you can sort of tell that this protest really bothers the community on Wall Street, stirring up deep existential questions for the people that work there, many of whom know there is a spectacle going on in the streets below.

I don’t think anyone knows where and how this ends, or if it does. I’ve been part of movements full of meaning just like this, movements that utterly failed based on structural weaknesses and the power of the status quo. They seemed full of life, zest, and ended up as yet another set of bloodless bureaucratic failed institutions. These protests may yet be another false start. I’m told, though, by those who were in successful civic uprisings around the world that they all had many, many false starts. But perhaps success and failure isn’t the right way to think about what’s going on in downtown New York, any more than thinking about a church as successful or failed based on its political objectives is the right way to think about how those in the pews satisfy their thirst for spiritual vigor. What these people have found in themselves, and created for each other, is meaning."

#OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest

grass roots

2011-09-30T21:24:00.007-04:00

"‎The Occupy Wall Street protests, which this week received a boost from pledges of support of local unions, are expanding not only in the number of participants but in geographical scope as well: Demonstrators in Boston, Denver, Chicago, Santa Fe, Lexington, Kentucky, and now three big California cities, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, have all joined or are preparing to join the movement. A website has been set up calling for Floridians to occupy cities across the state on November 5, “Guy Fawkes Day.” In total, there have been online calls to action in over 77 cities across the United States, most of them slated to occur within the first week of October."

"And the call for revolution is expanding well beyond the U.S. borders: On Friday, a Twitter account for Anonymous South Africa posted a call to Occupy the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Another website has been set up for an Occupy Manchester, UK event on October 2. It already boasts the support of the Manchester University Students Union, Manchester Metropolitan University, Education Activists Network, Manchester University Staff Against Cuts and other local labor organizations."

~ Carl Franzon

Talking Points Memo

imagine

2011-09-30T18:40:00.003-04:00

David Graeber - guardian.co.uk
[exceprt]

"We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.

Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart."

Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination

too big to ignore

2011-09-30T14:30:00.004-04:00

"The Occupy Wall Street protests, now entering their third week, are poised to get a whole lot bigger than its core of 200 to 300 people, potentially even exceeding the protesters original goals of 20,000 demonstrators, thanks to recent pledges of support from some of New York City’s largest labor unions and community groups."

~ Carl Franzon

Talking Points Memo

Air Line Pilots Association

New York Transit Workers Union (Local 100)

United Federation of Teachers

Service Employees International Union (SEIU 32BJ; SEIU 1199)

Workers United

United NY

Strong Economy for All Coalition

Working Families Party

VOCAL-NY

Community Voices Heard

Alliance for Quality Education

New York Communities for Change

Coalition for the Homeless

MoveOn.org

"It’s kind of a natural alliance with the young people and the students— they’re voicing our message, why not join them? On many levels, our workers feel an affinity with the kids. They just seem to be hanging out there getting the crap beaten out of them, and maybe union support will help them out a little bit."

~ Jim Gannon, TWU Local 100 - Transport Workers Union Votes Unanimously to Support Occupy Wall Street

~ Daily Intel, New York Magazine - Labor Unions and Leftist Groups Prepare to Join Occupy Wall Street As Protesters Settle In

2011-09-30T01:41:00.007-04:00

~ juan cole

Visiting Liberty Square (Occupy Wall Street)

"Now that a massive political movement to elect Barack Obama as a way of fixing the abuses of the Bush era has largely failed, with Obama coddling Wall Street, unwilling to prosecute the crimes of his predecessors, and taking disappointing positions on our civil liberties and on domestic surveillance, it is hard to see where we can go but to the streets."

overdue

2011-09-30T00:09:00.004-04:00

to the left

2011-09-28T20:53:00.004-04:00

"Some of this anti-protest posturing is just the all-too-familiar New-Republic-ish eagerness to prove one's own Seriousness by castigating anyone to the left of, say, Dianne Feinstein or John Kerry; for such individuals, multi-term, pro-Iraq-War Democratic Senator-plutocrats define the outermost left-wing limit of respectability. Also at play is the jingoistic notion that street protests are valid in Those Bad Countries but not in free, democratic America."
_____

"There's a vast and growing apparatus of intimidation designed to deter and control citizen protests. The most that's allowed is to assemble with the permission of state authorities and remain roped off in sequestered, out-of-the-way areas: the Orwellian-named free speech zones. Anything that is even remotely disruptive or threatening is going to be met with aggressive force: pepper spray, mass arrests by highly militarized urban police forces, and aggressive prosecutions."
_____

"Financial elites and their political servants are well aware that exploding wealth inequality, pervasive economic anxiety, and increasing hostility toward institutions of authority (and corresponding realization that voting fixes very little of this) are likely to bring London-style unrest -- and worse -- to American soil; it was just two weeks ago that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned that the unemployment crisis could trigger "riots." Even the complacent American citizenry -- well-trained in learned impotence and acquiescence to (even reverence for) those most responsible for their plight -- is going to reach a tipping point of unrest. There are numerous weapons of surveillance and coercion that have been developed over the last decade in anticipation of that unrest: most of it justified in the name of Terrorism, but all of it featuring decidedly dual-use domestic capability."

Glenn Greenwald

"I’m beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US. No one who is a wage slave (which is the overwhelming majority of the population) can afford to have an arrest record, even a misdemeanor, in this age of short job tenures and rising use of background checks."

Yves Smith

stillstellung

2011-08-20T08:55:00.001-04:00

"Needless to say, this is not the usual way in which we describe the history of the universe—it is the conventional sequence of events told backward in time. But the laws of physics work equally well run forward or backward in time. Thus, this sequence is as legitimate as the usual one. It serves the purpose of driving home just how unlikely the entire history of our observable universe really is."

The Cosmic Origins of Time's Arrow
Sean M. Carroll - Scientific American
May 2008

via Cosmic Variance: "Despite appearances, this really is just the standard cosmology, not some fairy tale. I just chose to tell it from the point of view of a time coordinate that is oriented in the opposite direction from the one we usually use..."

The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)
[Laurie Anderson: 1989]
click title to listen

Hansel and Gretel are alive and well
And they're living in Berlin
She is a cocktail waitress
He had a part in a Fassbinder film
And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin
And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down
And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch
He says: I've wasted my life on our stupid legend
When my one and only love was the wicked witch.
She said: What is history?
And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress

On the Concept of History
[Walter Benjamin: 1940]

"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment . . . to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

from the archive: 26 May 2008

focus

2011-08-11T06:18:00.001-04:00

Why the President Doesn’t Present a Bold Plan to Create Jobs and Jumpstart the Economy
~ Robert Reich

"I’m told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn’t understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender.

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia."
_ _ _ _ _

". . . the President is being badly advised. The magnitude of the current jobs and growth crisis demands a boldness and urgency that’s utterly lacking. As the President continues to wallow in the quagmire of long-term debt reduction, Congress is on summer recess and the rest of Washington is asleep."

MORE

credibility

2011-08-08T01:52:00.000-04:00

"The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized."

~ Paul Krugman

Chomsky '92

2011-08-06T05:15:00.000-04:00

agenda

2011-08-06T01:29:00.004-04:00

"Whatever S&P’s agenda, it has nothing to do with avoiding default risks or putting the US on sound fiscal footing. It appears to be intertwined with their attempts to absolve themselves from responsibility for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, and they are willing to manipulate not only the 2012 election but the world economy to escape the SEC’s attempts to regulate them.

It’s time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poors what their political agenda is and whom it serves."

~ Jane Hamsher

a timeline

focus

2011-08-03T03:03:00.000-04:00

"So why, if his Presidency has been such an unmitigated disaster, is he continuing to pursue this reckless course. My theory is that the key to the Obama administration’s political strategy is not compromise or incrementalism. It is, quite simply, fooling liberals. When you look at Obama’s governing role, he is clearly a servant of American oligarchs. But obviously he can’t explicitly tell liberals this (unlike Republicans, who are explicit in saying they favor “job creators”), because liberals like to think of themselves as favoring economic justice. So how do you acquire support from liberals, as he did in the primaries in 2008 and will need to do again in 2012, while pursuing oligarch-friendly policies?

You do it by ensuring that liberals only focus on the ceremonial non-governmental aspects of the Presidency. You do it by making sure that they focus only on the televised aspects of the Presidency."

~ Matt Stoller

expectations

2011-08-01T20:24:00.019-04:00

". . . if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn't bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won't be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.

And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?

It strains the imagination to think that the country's smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by "surrendering" at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?"

~ Matt Taibbi

Obama's base

at least

2011-08-01T04:45:00.001-04:00

"All in all, the weekend's events represent a smashing victory for the Tea Party and a crushing defeat for Democrats -- and more of the same coming down the pike. But at least Congress will be able to recess on time next week."

~ Andrew Leonard @ salon.com

what's left

2011-07-31T14:07:00.002-04:00

New leadership will not emerge until you make room for them by taking out the old, corrupt order. And that job starts with the enablers. The ones who will be rolling out any minute now to placate liberal outrage and whitewash the piece of shit they voted for yesterday. The ones who will wrap themselves in the flag and mewl that they "had to do it for the country."

Few will admit they were willing to cast old people into poverty and deny them medical treatment for the sake of Barack Obama’s 2012 election hopes. They’ll just furrow their brows and shake their heads with concern over the final deal — now that their votes are no longer needed."

~ jane hamsher @ firedoglake

no there

2011-07-28T21:48:00.000-04:00

"I keep hearing that the Tea partiers are radicals and anarchists, as if they are some kind of intellectual force to be reckoned with. But there's no there there. They are simpletons, drunk with power, who in their zeal to serve their masters have decided to burn all the crops in order to save on watering costs."

~ digby

heart and soul

2011-07-21T17:04:00.002-04:00

"Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right – attacks on the nation's social safety net – into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders."

~ glenn greenwald

choice

2011-07-19T23:30:00.002-04:00

"I can’t wait till next November, when the party that wants to cut Social Security and Medicare squares off against the party that wants to cut Social Security and Medicare while raising taxes slightly."

~ eli @ firedoglake

morning in america

2011-07-15T12:45:00.000-04:00

"I'm afraid that the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that grandma must pay, come what may.

And the sad thing is that because Democrats have a right wing opposition party that's batshit insane it means that they can run as Ronald Reagan and people feel they have no choice but to vote for them anyway. It must be so liberating for politicians not to have to worry about the effects of their policies on real people."

~ digby

Remembering Reagan

2011-02-06T13:29:00.003-05:00

enlarge image

out of control

2011-01-28T23:30:00.000-05:00

White House wobbles on Egyptian tightrope
Simon Tisdall

Amid the juggling, one fact may be pinned down: the US would not welcome Mubarak's fall and the dislocation a revolution would cause in Egypt and across a chronically unstable region. Gradual reforms of the kind Clinton discussed in a recent speech in Doha about the Arab world, and a competitive presidential election this autumn, would probably be Washington's preferred prescription. As matters stand now, this is the least likely outcome.

Either the regime will suppress the unrest, possibly by ever more brutal means, as happened in Iran in 2009; or the uprising will spiral out of control and the regime will implode, with unpredictable consequences, as in Tunisia. In this latter scenario, one outcome could be a military takeover in the name of national salvation. It has happened before in Egypt, in 1952, when the Free Officers Movement forced King Farouk to abdicate. If it happened again, the US might be expected to endorse it.

That's because, in the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and influential country, in its corner. That's the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt's demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.

no sense of direction

2011-01-24T21:46:00.004-05:00

temptingfate comments at FDL:

As is generally the case when reading news about the insiders through the lens of the mainstream press we need to parse the words. Moving to the center always means moving farther right. Pols that move to the left, if there were such a thing in our money driven election system, would always be moving to the left not the center. Thus it is correct that Obama is moving to the center because that’s the way that moving to the right is phrased for mass consumption.

What we are graced with is the same story passed on in the Clinton years and phrased in nearly the same way. Obama thinks he can “recapture” the independents and the border-line Republicans...

The only difference this time is that we already watched this story, via Bill, and it doesn’t play as well in reruns

White House Insider Debunks “Obama’s Moving to the Center” Meme

digby @ Hullabaloo:

It's the thoroughly predictable move for any president who's been accused of being a socialist for two years and suffered a bad mid-term. They always "run to the center" in the second half in order to get re-elected. And if the economy cooperates, it might just work. But it is at the expense of liberalism and the Party whether or not it's a conscious strategic decision to distance themselves from the left or not. At the end of the cycle, Obama will have run on a set of issues and solutions marginally to the right of those which he ran on in 2008. And those were marginally to the right of those which Kerry ran on in 2004 or Gore ran on in 2000. This is how we find ourselves looking back at Richard Nixon's agenda and thinking that even Dennis Kucinich wouldn't be so bold as to propose much of it.

Money, Power, Triangulation

Christmas with Irving

2010-12-21T18:00:00.003-05:00

1. Christmas

2. The Stage Coach

3. Christmas Eve

4. Christmas Day

5. The Christmas Dinner

Project Gutenberg:
Old Christmas
From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving
illustrations by R. Caldecott
[included in html download]

ebay: Sketch Book

ebay: Old Christmas

news flash

2010-12-14T00:27:00.004-05:00

from David Sirota:

"It may be less that liberals dislike compromise and more that liberals have caught on to the fact that the president isn't proffering compromise on key issues as much as deliberate complicity. We saw that with his efforts to kill the public option, stop the audit of the Fed, promote a new NAFTA-style trade pact with South Korea and pass all of the Bush tax cuts.

In short, liberals may finally be waking up to the fact that this president is actually a lover of conservative policies rather than the fighter against them that he promised to be."

(DSIDWY)

compromise?

2010-12-10T02:50:00.002-05:00

click to enlarge

via

shooting the messenger(s)

2010-12-06T16:38:00.000-05:00

from digby:

"Wikileaks is working with partners in the press to release these documents, which are being reviewed and redacted before they are uploaded on to the web and published in newspapers. Right now the only people besides Wikileaks who have access to all the cables are the newspapers they've partnered with.

I imagine that many of the people who are threatening to imprison and assassinate Assange do know this and also understand that they are threatening not just him but the publishers of newspapers all over the world who also have these documents.

Is everyone comfortable with that? "

something to do with class

2010-12-04T21:22:00.006-05:00

Paul Krugman:

"But why Social Security? There was a telling moment in 2004, during one of the presidential campaign debates. Tim Russert, the moderator, asked eight or nine questions about Social Security, trying to put the candidates on the spot, while asking not once about Medicare, which serious people – as opposed to Serious People – know is the real heart of the story. Why the focus on Social Security?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with class.

When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.

Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs^* and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.

So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know."

^* VSP: Very Serious Person

update from Krugman:
Not Crass, Class
via digby:
Village Ethos

fallout

2010-12-04T16:16:00.001-05:00

digby writes:

"It is a hideous set of choices before us, caused not by the group of people who are revealing secrets, but by what has been revealed to be inept, corrupt and malevolent leadership across the spectrum of the governing class, whose purpose in keeping these secrets seems to have more often than not been to thwart democratic norms, cover their massive mistakes or enrich themselves.
- - - - -
People feel very strongly about this on all sides and that's fine. But I do think that there is one thing we should all agree on: the appalling open calls for Julian Assange's assassination are barbaric authoritarianism at its worst. (The obvious attempt to smear him as a sexual predator for alleged condom failure fall into the same category.) The man put some documents on the internet and there is a vigorous global debate going on about it. If there was ever a case for public servants and the media (which should all clearly be on the side of Wikileaks, in my opinion) to be circumspect in their language it's in this case. I'm astonished that these calls for murder are so casually accepted. (But then, we are living in a country in which torture is accepted, so I'm probably foolish to keep clinging to these silly notions about civilized, democratic behavior.)"

MORE

more linkage from digby

a wall of secrecy

2010-12-02T14:42:00.000-05:00

The Economist
W.W. @Democracy in America
29 November 2010
In defence of WikiLeaks

"I think we all understand that the work of even the most decent governments is made more difficult when they cannot be sure their communications will be read by those for whom they were not intended. That said, there is no reason to assume that the United States government is always up to good. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it's important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.
- - - - -
I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy."

via Glenn Greenwald: The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics

"Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That's the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics -- whether intended or not -- are helping to preserve. There are people who eagerly want that secrecy regime to continue: namely, (a) Washington politicians, Permanent State functionaries, and media figures whose status, power and sense of self-importance are established by their access and devotion to that world of secrecy, and (b) those who actually believe that -- despite (or because of) all the above acts -- the U.S. Government somehow uses this extreme secrecy for the Good. Having surveyed the vast suffering and violence they have wreaked behind that wall, those are exactly the people whom WikiLeaks is devoted to undermining."

this invisible government

2010-12-02T13:43:00.001-05:00

from Glenn Greenwald:

"If there's nothing new in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad;

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

That's just a sampling."

MORE

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1906

public secrets

2010-12-01T04:31:00.004-05:00

from zunguzungu:

"Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.
- - - - -
. . . The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, [Assange] reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone. Even if all the elements of the conspiracy still exist, in this sense, depriving themselves of a vigorous flow of information to connect them all together as a conspiracy prevents them from acting as a conspiracy."

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy...

from Glenn Greenwald:

". . . there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to serving, protecting and venerating government authorities than the U.S. Indeed, I don't quite recall any entity producing as much bipartisan contempt across the American political spectrum as WikiLeaks has..."

h/t digby:

"Regardless of where you come down on Wikileaks, it's important to at least consider what they are actually trying to do-— because they're doing it whether you like it or not."

tactical advantage of orthodoxy

2010-12-01T03:30:00.003-05:00

How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): the attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis
Brian Martin
Published in Science as Culture, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 215-239

Abstract Supporters of dominant scientific theories sometimes attack competing, less favoured theories in ways that conflict with expectations of proper scientific behaviour, for example by using double standards. To reduce concern about their actions, supporters can use a variety of techniques: cover up the violation of expectations; devalue the competing theory and its advocates; interpret the process as proper; use expert panels, meetings and other formal processes to give a stamp of approval to the dominant view; and intimidate opponents. These are the same five methods used regularly by perpetrators of actions widely seen as unjust, such as violent attacks on peaceful protesters. When these methods fail, the attack can backfire on the attackers. Orthodox scientists' treatment of the theory that AIDS originated from contaminated polio vaccines used in Africa in the 1950s illustrates how this framework can be applied to science. Opponents of this theory have used all five methods of inhibiting concern about violations of expected scientific behaviour. This analysis shows why supporters of orthodoxy have a tactical advantage over challengers.

[excerpt]

"In summary, how can scientists attack a theory and get away with it? There are lots of ways of attacking, such as withholding evidence, blocking publications, demanding an excessive level of proof, making disparaging comments about ideas and individuals, publishing spurious refutations, ignoring evidence, not responding to arguments, denying research grants, threatening careers and taking legal action. The trouble with most of these methods is that they seem to be unfair: they violate common expectations of how science is supposed to work.

So how do scientists get away with attacks? Partly by hiding them, reinterpreting the attacks as normal behaviour, and by using expert forums such as panels, conferences and journal editorials to give the stamp of authority to rejection of the theory. And partly through the effects of the attack itself: disparaging comments lower the credibility of targets and intimidation scares many into silence.
- - - - -
In many public policy disputes, scientific theories are attacked as part of a wider struggle involving politics, economics and ethics. In such situations, it is naive to assume that scientific theories will be evaluated neutrally and fairly."

MORE

World AIDS: Origins

2010-12-01T02:02:00.001-05:00

watch at FreeDocumentaries.org

from Edward Hooper at AIDSOrigins.com:

"...the "oral polio vaccine" or "OPV" theory, proposes that AIDS began after batches of an experimental OPV called CHAT, which had been cultured in chimpanzee cells, were given to up to a million Africans from the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi in the latter half of the 1950s. This hypothesis is controversial, and is rejected by many medical scientists, including those who prepared and administered CHAT vaccine in Africa, and those whose articles and letters are published in Nature and Science, the world's two leading scientific journals.

The OPV theory is also rejected by many (though by no means all) of those involved in present-day public health programmes. Sadly, many of the latter seem to believe that questioning the safety of one particular experimental vaccine prepared fifty years ago is dangerous, because it might diminish public confidence in the efficacy and safety of modern-day vaccines. I believe this view is inherently wrong. There have indeed been occasional vaccine disasters down the years, but few who have examined the history of vaccination would argue with the view that the cost-benefit ratio is heavily in favour of vaccination, which technique has saved many millions of lives. However, I would argue that it is risky, and indeed profoundly wrong, to whitewash the history of CHAT vaccine in Africa in an attempt to protect the reputation of vaccination per se. Those who do this are not only guilty of sloppy scientific thinking, but also of convenient moral compromise. At the end of the day, they are more concerned with avoiding the perceived potential risks of multi-billion dollar law suits, and of protecting the reputations of colleagues, than of doing what they are supposed to do - which is to pursue the truth with clear and unbiased eyes."

from November 2010 Update by Edward Hooper:

"For what it's worth, my own theory - which is based on the earliest observed instances of HIV-1 infection and AIDS - is that by 1960 there were between ten and a few dozen people infected by HIV-1. I believe that these were not links in a chain of human infection affecting "thousands" of people and stretching back 50 years, but rather some of the first few unfortunate infectees with a recombined chimpanzee SIV that had contaminated different batches of a live [oral polio] vaccine grown in chimpanzee cells, and administered to hundreds of thousands of Africans in the last three years of the 1950s. Only a small proportion of those vaccinees (including those who were already immuno-compromised, or who had cuts in their mouths or bleeding gums) would have become infected by the chimpanzee SIV that contaminated the vaccine, and it is these persons who became the index infectees with the different clades of HIV-1(M) that are now called subtype A, subtype C and so on. The 12% genetic difference that Worobey observed between the 1959 and 1960 HIV-1 sequences does not represent 50 years of HIV-1 evolution, but rather the difference between two viral variants, the index cases of two clades of HIV-1, emerging from two different soups of recombined chimpanzee SIVs. Of course, there is no way for a molecular clock to be able to model an iatrogenic catastrophe such as that one. All a molecular clock can do in this instance is to fabricate a false prehistory for HIV, one that consciously or unconsciously fits with the preconceptions of the scientists calibrating the clock."

Read The River.

sometimes the mask slips

2010-11-30T19:28:00.000-05:00

CommonDreams.org
Normon Solomon
29 November 2010
WikiLeaks: Demystifying "Diplomacy"

"With its massive and unending reliance on military force -- with a result of more and more carnage, leaving behind immense grief and rage in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere -- the U.S. government has colossal gaps to bridge between its public-relations storylines and its war-making realities.

The same government that devotes tremendous resources to inflicting military violence abroad must tout its humane bona fides and laudable priorities to the folks back home. But that essential PR task becomes more difficult when official documents to the contrary keep leaking.

No government wants to face documentation of actual policies, goals and priorities that directly contradict its public claims of virtue. In societies with democratic freedoms, the governments that have the most to fear from such disclosures are the ones that have been doing the most lying to their own people."

MORE

from a world of war

2010-11-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

TomDispatch.com
Tom Engelhardt
30 November 2010
The United States of Fear

"Americans don't tend to connect what we're doing to others abroad and what we're doing to ourselves at home. We refuse to see that the trillion or more dollars that continue to go into the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the national security state yearly, as well as the stalemated or losing wars Washington insists on fighting in distant lands, have anything to do with the near collapse of the American economy, job-devastation at home, or any of the other disasters of our American age."

MORE

Against Torture

2010-11-16T21:49:00.002-05:00

The New York Times
John F. Burns & Alan Cowell
16 November 2010
Britain to Compensate Former Guantánamo Detainees

The settlement with the detainees came only weeks after Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, insisted that his operatives did not use or collude in torture. In the most declaratory statement anyone from the agency has made, Sir John called torture “illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

[Justice Minister Kenneth] Clarke used similar words to disavow any British involvement in torture, calling it “a serious criminal offense,” whether committed at home or abroad. “And we will not condone it,” he said.

The path to Tuesday’s settlement in Britain opened in July when [Prime Minister David] Cameron approved negotiations on a deal. That followed a court order demanding the disclosure of a reported 500,000 confidential documents, prompting Mr. Cameron to say that reviewing the documents would take up huge amounts of time at Britain’s intelligence agencies. Mr. Cameron also announced the appointment of an independent inquiry into the accusations of MI5 and MI6 collusion with the C.I.A. and other foreign organizations in the torture of terrorism suspects.

via David Dayen @firedoglake

GENEVA (Reuters Legal)
Stephanie Nebehay & Terry Baynes
16 November 2010
UN expert urges full U.S. torture investigation

The new U.N. torture expert urged the United States on Tuesday to conduct a full investigation into torture under the Bush administration and prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered it.
- - - - -
"The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability," said [Juan Ernesto] Mendez, himself a former torture victim, in the wide-ranging interview at the United Nations in Geneva.

"There has to be a more serious inquiry into what happened and by whose orders. It doesn't need to be seen to be partisan or vindictive, just an obligation to follow where the evidence leads," added Mendez, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture.

Under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, ratified by the U.S. in 1994, the government must conduct a "prompt and impartial investigation" where there is "reasonable ground to believe" that an act of torture has been committed.

A previous investigation by a U.S. special prosecutor into torture allegations was limited in scope, and congressional inquiries focused on the Pentagon but not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), according to Mendez.

"There is a lot more to the story than has been revealed," said Mendez. "It is important to get to the bottom of what happened and under whose orders, and if necessary to bring charges."

via tristero @hullabaloo

Interrogation Nation

2010-11-16T19:56:00.002-05:00

Slate
Dahlia Lithwick
10 November 2010

We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would "turn the page" on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration's war on terror. What he didn't seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There's no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it's feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it's not illegal after all.

MORE

Harper's Magazine
Scott Horton
15 November 2010

The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

MORE

The Democrats' Problem

2010-11-16T14:23:00.004-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Christopher Phelps
16 November 2010

excerpts:

When set against other liberal-reform phases in American politics—the Age of Jackson in the 1830s, the Progressive Era of the 1910s, the New Deal of the 1930s, or the last liberal heyday of the 1960s—what the Obama presidency has lacked is not centrism but a vibrant left-of-center mass movement capable of shaking up the establishment and advancing the national agenda beyond Washington's comfort zone.

Without a doubt, the 2010 election was historic. Midterm results typically confound the party of a sitting president, even more so in poor economic times. The Republicans' gain of at least 60 seats in the House is their largest since 1938—not exactly the preferred replay of the New Deal period sought by left-of-center observers.

But that outcome does not reflect a conviction of Republican conservatism. In exit polls, voters disdained both parties. Only 41 percent viewed the Republican Party favorably, while 43 percent saw the Democrats positively. How voters could marginally prefer one party while resoundingly electing the other has to do with district lines and a perceived lack of alternatives in a winner-take-all system. It also has to do with context.

The media's story line was the skillful rebranding by the Tea Party of a discredited right. But a more crucial variable was the near-total absence of countervailing left-of-center movements for social justice. The workingmen's movements of the 1830s, the women's-suffrage and socialist movements of the 1910s, the labor and unemployed organizing of the 1930s, the civil-rights and antiwar mobilizations of the 1960s: No comparable wild-card movements materialized in the past two years to demand more of the Democrats and corporate America than they were prepared to offer.

- - - - -

An estimated 29 million Obama voters from 2008 did not vote in 2010. Much of the reason lies in the administration's hewing to the center, even the center-right. Labor activists supported Obama dedicatedly, only to see the Employee Free Choice Act shunted aside. Gay and lesbian voters were estranged by Obama's failure to fulfill his promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and "don't ask, don't tell." Environmentalists' jaws dropped as the administration announced its support for off-shore drilling a few weeks before the BP disaster and a once-in-a-generation chance to do something about carbon emissions cratered in the Senate. Civil libertarians have seen secrecy and warrantless wiretapping undiminished. The collapse of the youth vote may owe something to the 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq and the escalation in Afghanistan.

MORE

Greenwald/O'Donnell

2010-11-09T22:10:00.003-05:00

Lawrence O'Donnell vehemently denies his own words

Glenn Greenwald:

The Republicans have long lived by what they call "The Buckley Rule": always support the furthest Right candidate who can plausibly win. This year, knowing that it would be a wave election, one that would sweep in huge numbers of Republicans in districts where they ordinarily couldn't get elected, they changed that to: support the furthest Right candidate, period. That's because they believe conservatism will work and want to advocate for it. Democrats don't do that. The DCCC constantly works to prop up the most "centrist" or conservative candidates -- i.e., corporatists -- on the ground that it's always better, more politically astute, to move to the Right. Even in the pro-Democratic wave years of 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party blocked actual progressives and ensured that Blue Dogs were nominated, even though the anti-GOP sentiment was so strong that any Democrat, including progressives, could have won even in red districts (as Alan Grayson proved).

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown. Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating. Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests). They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront. They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces. And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles. Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality. And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

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Stewart/Colbert

2010-11-08T08:24:00.005-05:00

Rally preaches compromise and complacency

WSWS:
Joseph Kishore

The basic sentiment that Stewart sought to cultivate was one of complacency. The rally was called in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in generations, but there was absolutely no mention—either before or during the event—of the desperate situation facing millions of people. There was nothing about the ongoing wars carried out by both political parties that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There was no hint of the unprecedented attack on democratic rights in the United States.

According to Stewart’s analysis, the immense divisions that are emerging in American society are little more than a media creation. The outlook is in fact preposterous.

There was also an ugly element to the rally, a deliberate attempt in particular to blackguard and delegitimize any left-wing opposition to the policies of the ruling class. On a number of occasions, Stewart lumped together left-wing opponents of Obama with the extreme right, declaring, “Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our constitution? Or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?”

The attempt to equate socialists with racists and homophobes is a deliberate attempt to render illegitimate any argument that the political system is dictated by the interests of the corporate and financial elite—a sentiment in fact shared by millions of people.

MORE

streaming

2010-10-20T13:11:00.000-04:00

WQXR - NYC (classical)

WCPE- NC (classical)

WCOM - Carrboro (community)

WUNC- Chapel Hill (NPR)

WFDD - Winston-Salem (NPR)

WNYC (NPR)

NPR program stream (national)

Radio DavidByrne (eclectic)

Far Side Radio - London

WBAI - NYC (Pacifica)

WHRB - Cambridge (Harvard)

A Prairie Home Companion

WZEN - Zen Mountain Monastery

Joanna Newsom

2010-10-20T06:50:00.002-04:00

Joanna Newsom Live at The First Unitarian Church Sanctuary
Philadelphia, PA 2006-11-16
"Emily"

full concert here

How about it ... how does it feel living in a box?

2010-10-01T02:57:00.000-04:00

Now I'll get right to the point: I'd like for you to listen to a story about a radio so you can know what sort of person I am. Yes, a radio. Actually I was terribly addicted to news for a long time. I wonder if you see what I mean. I couldn't stand it if there weren't fresh news reports coming in one after the other all the time. Battlefield situations go on changing minute by minute. Moving picture stars and singers keep marrying and divorcing. Rockets go shooting off to Mars, and a fishing boat sends off an SOS and blacks out. A pyromaniacal fire chief is apprehended. When a venomous serpent escapes from a load of bananas and an employee of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry commits suicide and a little girl of three is raped, an international conference achieves great success and ends by collapsing, a society is formed to breed sterilized mice, a child is discovered buried in cement at the construction site of a supermarket, the total number of deserters from troops throughout the world sets a new record, the world seems to be boiling over like a teakettle. The globe's capable of changing shape the minute you take your eyes off it for even a second. I took seven different newspapers; I set up in my room two television sets and three radios; when I went out I never let a portable radio out of my hand, and when I went to sleep I left the earphones plugged in. I got different news reports on different stations at the same time, and there could be special news broadcasts at any moment. Timid animals keep too close a watch around them, and gradually like the giraffe their necks stretch or like the monkey they become incapable of coming down out of the trees. Don't laugh. For the one afflicted it's serious. He spends the greater part of the day just reading and listening to news. Angry with the weakness of his own will, still with aching heart, he is unable to separate himself from the radio or television. Of course, I was very much aware that no matter how much I went rooting around for news, I wouldn't necessarily come closer to the truth. I realized that, but I couldn't stop. Perhaps I needed the news form, which is summarized in clichés, not truth or experience. In short, I was thoroughly addicted to news.

One day, however, I suddenly recovered. A trivial event served as an antidote, so really trivial that I myself inclined my head in disbelief. It was - where was it indeed? - oh, yes, at one corner of the wide sidewalk between the subway station and the bank. During the day few people pass that way. A middle aged fellow who at first glance seemed to be a white-collar worker was walking in the most ordinary way right in front of me. Suddenly all the strength left his legs, and he moved as if to sit down, but fell on his side, and lay motionless. I had the feeling he was playing a game of big bad wolf with a child and had been shot. A young fellow with the air of a student, who was passing by, looked at the fallen man amused. "My God, he's dead!" he said. I remember that he looked up at me shocked with a wan smile on his lips. I paid no attention, but he reluctantly went to use the telephone at a tobacconist's two or three stores farther on. Being a professional photographer - well, I was, merely to the extent of getting a job once or twice a month making commercial samples of insert advertisements - I at once set up my camera and tried focusing it from all sorts of angles. In the end I changed my mind and did not take a picture, but that was not because I was especially grieving over the corpse. It was because I realized at once that it would absolutely never become news.

Dying is, of course, a kind of transformation. First of all, the skin suddenly pales. Then the nose thins, and the jaw withers and gets smaller. The half-open mouth resembles the edge of a tangerine skin cut open with a knife, and the red artificial teeth of the lower jaw begin to jut out from the opening. Further, even the clothes that are being worn change. What appeared to be of very high quality turns before one's eyes into cheap goods, showy but worthless. Of course, such things are not news. But it would seem that for the dead man in question whether it's news or not has nothing to do with him. Supposing one is the tenth victim that had fallen into the hands of a much-wanted, fiendish killer, I don't suppose he would devise a particularly different way of dying. The dead person has changed himself, but the outside world has changed too, and things cannot change any more than they have. It's such a great change that no news, however big, can match it.

No sooner had I realized this than my thinking about news suddenly changed completely. How shall I say . . . ? Slogans won't do the trick: "You too can stop news-watching." But I think you understand . . . somehow . . . why everybody wants news the way they do. Are they preparing for times of emergency by knowing in advance the changes taking place in the world, I wonder? I used to think so. But that was a big lie. People listen to news only to feel reassured. Because however great the news of catastrophe they hear, those listening are still perfectly alive. The really big news is the ultimate news announcing the end of the world, I suppose. Of course, everybody wants to hear that. For then one does not need to abandon the world alone. When I think about it, I feel the reason that I was addicted was my eagerness not to miss this ultimate broadcast. But as long as the news goes on, it will never get to the end. Thus news constitutes the announcement that it is still not the end of the world. The following trifling clichés are merely abridgments. Last night the greatest bombings of North Vietnam this year were carried out by B-52s, but somehow you are still alive. Gas lines under construction ignited and eight persons received serious and light wounds, but you are alive and safe. Record rate of rising prices, yet you continue to live. Extinction of marine life in bays by waste products from factories, but somehow you survive everything.

Now, what were we talking about?

The World According to Monsanto

2010-04-18T23:44:00.000-04:00

dancing in the dark

2010-02-23T15:11:00.000-05:00

3/12 update

Glenn on Health Care maneuvering:

[excerpt]

The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation. They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it. One minute, it's Jay Rockefeller as the Prime Villain leading the way in protecting Bush surveillance programs and demanding telecom immunity; the next minute, it's Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer joining hands and "breaking with their party" to ensure Michael Mukasey's confirmation as Attorney General; then it's Big Bad Joe Lieberman single-handedly blocking Medicare expansion; then it's Blanche Lincoln and Jim Webb joining with Lindsey Graham to support the de-funding of civilian trials for Terrorists; and now that they can't blame Lieberman or Ben Nelson any longer on health care (since they don't need 60 votes), Jay Rockefeller voluntarily returns to the Villain Role, stepping up to put an end to the pretend-movement among Senate Democrats to enact the public option via reconciliation.

Read more

American Suicide Bomber

2010-02-21T05:10:00.005-05:00

from Glenn:

... Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which the term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way."

We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.
- - - - -
In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T...

MORE

UPDATE

in conclusion...

2010-02-12T17:49:00.005-05:00

from digby:

The "tea partier may believe that he's part of something 'unique' and 'fresh' but the American far right is the same as it ever was: angry, resentful, bigoted, xenophobic and nativist, afraid of change, anxious to blame those who they perceive to be undeserving and the elites who defend them. Guess who those undeserving and elites are?"

more

"lawyering up"

2010-02-01T20:06:00.003-05:00

from Glenn:

[excerpts]

"This notion that the protections of the Bill of Rights specifically and the Constitution generally apply only to the Government's treatment of American citizens is blatantly, undeniably false– for multiple reasons– yet this myth is growing, as a result of being centrally featured in 'War on Terror' propaganda."
- - - - -
"There are millions of foreign nationals inside the U.S. at all times– not only illegally but also legally: as tourists, students, workers, Green Card holders, etc. Is there anyone who really believes that the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to them? If a foreign national is arrested and accused by the U.S. Government of committing a crime, does anyone believe they can be sentenced to prison without a jury trial, denied the right to face their accusers, have their property seized without due process, be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and be denied access to counsel? Anyone who claims that the Constitution only protects American citizens, but not foreigners, would necessarily have to claim that the U.S. Government could do all of that to foreign nationals. Does anyone believe that? Would it be Constitutionally permissible to own foreigners as slaves on the ground that the protections of the Constitution– including the Thirteenth Amendment– apply only to Americans, not foreigners?"

More

listening...

2009-12-31T03:33:00.000-05:00

2009-12-30T07:47:00.000-05:00

lowered expectations...

2009-12-20T15:21:00.004-05:00

from Glenn:

"As I've written for quite some time, I've honestly never understood how anyone could think that Obama was going to bring about some sort of "new" political approach or governing method when . . . what he practices -- politically and substantively -- is the Third Way, DLC, triangulating corporatism of the Clinton era, just re-packaged with some sleeker and more updated marketing. At its core, it seeks to use government power not to regulate, but to benefit and even merge with, large corporate interests, both for political power (those corporate interests, in return, then fund the Party and its campaigns) and for policy ends. It's devoted to empowering large corporations, letting them always get what they want from government, and extracting, at best, some very modest concessions in return."
- - - - -
"One finds this in far more than just economic policy, and it's about more than just letting corporations do what they want. It's about harnessing government power in order to benefit those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector. In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists. Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed forces. Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded."

The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate

sadly, I agree

2009-12-17T02:44:00.004-05:00

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." - Russ Feingold

from digby

"One can only speculate about what might have happened if they had gamed this out a little bit differently. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference. But the fact remains that Obama last made a speech about health care last September (in which he inexplicably put a 900 billion dollar cap on the legislation) and there's been nothing but mild admonitions to "work it out" ever since then. He simply did not show leadership on the issue. And now his own ratings are suffering because of the mess. If Greenwald is right when he says that the White House achieved the plan they always wanted, then it came at a very high price."

living among the dead

2009-12-03T12:48:00.010-05:00

The Wreck of Time

By Annie Dillard

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not fathom the fuss. What was the big deal? David Von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: “I mean, there are so many people.”

One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, uncovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England’s Lake District.

Recently in the Peruvian Amazon a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, “Isn’t it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?”

How are we doing in numbers, we who have been alive for this most recent installment of human life? How many people have lived and died?

“The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1,” a demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, wrote in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on the earth run from 70 billion to 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. We living people now number 5.8 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living.

Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Some of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, if overexcited.

We who are here now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have appeared to date. This is not a meaningful figure. These times are, one might say, ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Are we not especially significant because our century is – our century and its nuclear bombs, its unique and unprecedented Holocaust, its serial exterminations and refugee populations, our century and its warming, its silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not.

Since about half of all the dead are babies and children, we will be among the longest-boned dead and among the dead who grew the most teeth – for what those distinctions might be worth among beings notoriously indifferent to appearance and all else.

In Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, a dead woman says to her dead son, “Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time.”

On April 30, 1991 – on that one day – 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned it to my daughter, who was then seven years old, that is was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning.

“No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

Who were the people Ted Bundy killed? Who was the statistician who reckoned that everybody would fit into Lake Windermere? The Trojans likely thought well of themselves, one by one; their last settlement died out by 1,100 B.C.E. Who were the people Stalin killed, or any of the 79.2 billion of us now dead, and who are the 5.8 billion of us now alive?

“God speaks succinctly,” said the rabbis.

Is it important if you have yet died your death, or I? Your father? Your child? It is only a matter of time, after all. Why do we find it so supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topsides? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of topsoil our feet poke?

“A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Joseph Stalin, that connoisseur, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.

How can an individual count? Do we individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Koran says, “Not so much as the weight of an ant in earth or heaven escapes from the Lord.” That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.

Ten years ago we thought there were two galaxies for each of us alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble Space Telescope, we have revised our figures. There are nine galaxies for each of us. Each galaxy harbors an average of 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, says a report, that the universe “is at least 15 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies… sixty-nine suns, 100 billion suns –

These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.

III

What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heart-breaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did you weep? Did your anguish last days or weeks?

On a shore, 8,000 waves break a day. James Trefil, a professor of physics, provides these facts. At any one time, the foam from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth’s surface. This acreage of foam is equal to the entire continent of North America. By coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to the world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population, in other words, although it is the third largest population among nations, is as small a portion of the earth’s people as breaking waves’ white foam is of the sea.

“God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves,” wrote Thomas Merton.

We see generations of waves rise from the sea that made them, billions of individuals at a time; we see them dwindle and vanish. If this does not astound you, what will? Or what will move you to pity?

One tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time, it is raining on only 5 percent of the planet’s surface. Lightning strikes the planet about a hundred times every second. The insects outweigh us. Our chickens outnumber us four to one.

One fifth of us are Muslims. One fifth of us live in China. And every seventh person is a Chinese peasant. Almost one tenth of us live within range of an active volcano. More than 2 percent of us are mentally retarded. We humans drink tea – over a billion cups a day. Among us we speak 10,000 languages.

We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago, when we settled down. We are Homo Sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago, when our species presumably arose; and we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest forms of Homo.

Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet. A hundred million of us are children who live on the streets. Over a hundred million of us live in countries where we hold no citizenship. Twenty-three million of us are refugees. Sixteen million of us live in Cairo. Twelve million fish for a living from small boats. Seven and a half million of us are Uygurs. One million of us crew on freezer trawlers. Nearly a thousand of us a day commit suicide.

HEAD-SPINNING NUMBERS CAUSE MIND TO GO SLACK, the Hartford Courant says. But our minds must not go slack. How can we think straight if our minds go slack? We agree we want to think straight.

Anyone’s close world of family and friends composes a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, a group invisible, at whose loss the world would not blink. Two million children die a year from diarrhea, and 800,000 from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed 1 million Cambodians, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed 21 or 22 million people… shall this go on? Or do you suffer, as Teilhard de Chardin did, the sense of being “an atom lost in the universe”? Or do you not suffer from this sense? How about what journalists call “compassion fatigue”? Reality fatigue? At what limit for you do other individuals blur? Vanish? How old are you?

Los Angeles airport has 25,000 parking spaces. This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when a volcano erupted. This is one space for each of the corpses of more than two years’ worth of accidental killings from leftover land mines of recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport parking lot all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, or the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. But you could not fit America’s homeless there, not even at twenty to a car.

Since sand and dirt pile up on everything, why does the world look fresh for each new crowd? As natural and human debris raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It is all a stage – we know this – a temporary stage on top of many layers of stages, but every year a new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the illusion that ours is the new and urgent world now. When Keats was in Rome, I read once, he saw pomegranate trees overhead; they bloomed in dirt blown onto the Colosseum’s broken walls. How can we doubt our own time, in which each bright instant probes the future? In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs – sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?

How can we see ourselves as only a new, temporary cast for a long-running show when a new batch of birds flies around singing and new clouds move? Living things from hyenas to bacteria whisk the dead away like stagehands hustling between scenes. To help a living space last while we live on it, we brush or haul away the blowing sand and hack or burn the greenery. We are mowing the grass at the cutting edge.

In northeast Japan, a seismic sea wave killed 27,000 people on June 15, 1896. Do not fail to distinguish this infamous wave from the April 30, 1991, waves that drowned 138,000 Bangladeshi. You were not tempted to confuse, conflate, forget or ignore those deaths, were you?

On the dry Laetoli plain of northeast Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people – likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus afarensis – walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago – before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered their footprints and hardened.

Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked; it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three’s steady footprints intact.

We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupt, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.

After archaeologists studied this long strip of record for several years, they buried it again to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.

Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple’s blaze. He wept; he saw the blood of the slain. “He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity” in Babylon. He kissed the footprints.

Who were these individuals? Who were the three who walked together and left footprints in the rain? Who was that eighteenth-century Ukrainian peasant the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of modern Hassidism, who taught, danced, and dug clay? He was among the generations of children of Babylonian exiles whose footprints on the bare earth Jeremiah kissed. Centuries later the Emperor Hadrian destroyed another such son of exile in Rome, Rabbi Akiba. Russian Christians and European Christians tried, and Hitler tried, to wipe all those survivors of children of exile from the ground of the earth as a man wipes a plate – survivors of exiles whose footprints on the ground I kiss, and whose feet.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the 30 million Mao starved, or the 11 million children under five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others. And you?

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our current generations the important ones? We have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones, the ones since Hiroshima? Perhaps we are the last generation – there is a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? We are ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.

We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something ultimately heroic about our time, something that sets it above all those other times. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot made strides in obliterating whole peoples, but this has been the human effort all along, and we have only enlarged the means, as have people in every century in history. (That genocides recur does not mean that they are similar. Each instance of human evil and each victim’s death possesses its unique history and form. To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity.)

Dire things are happening. Plague? Funny weather? Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy – probably a necessary lie – that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and I am in the know: crazy people, bunches of them! New diseases, sways in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

As I write this, I am still alive, but of course I might well have died before you read it. Most of the archaeologists who reburied hominid footprints have likely not yet died their deaths; the paleontologist Teilhard is pushing up daisies.

Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for 7,000 individual clay portraits – twenty-two centuries ago – must have thought it a wonderful difference that workers buried their only simulacra then so that their sons could bury their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months or years they gained. One wonders what one is, oneself, up to these days.

VII

Was it wisdom Mao Tse-tung attained when – like Ted Bundy – he awakened to the long view? “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru. “China has many people… The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.

Does Mao’s reckoning shock me really? If sanctioning the death of strangers could save my daughter’s life, would I do it? Probably. How many others’ lives would I be willing to sacrifice? Three? Three hundred million?

An English journalist, observing the [Missionaries] of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”

One small town’s soup kitchen, St. Mary’s, serves 115 men a night. Why feed 115 individuals? Surely so few people elude most demographics and achieve statistical insignificance. After all, there are 265 million Americans, 15 million people who live in Mexico City, 16 million in greater New York, 26 million in greater Tokyo. Every day 1.5 million people walk through Times Square in New York; every day almost as many people – 1.4 million – board a U.S. passenger plane. And so forth. We who breathe air now will join the already dead layers of us who breathed air once. We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.

[First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998. Later a part of a larger collection of reflections titled, as a book, as “For the Time Being,” First Vintage Books Edition, 2000]

Elizabeth Warren on PBS

2009-11-15T22:01:00.001-05:00

excited & scared

2009-11-07T21:40:00.009-05:00

from David Byrne's Journal:

[excerpt 1]

I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?

meanwhile...

Little Red Riding Hood:

Mother said, 'straight ahead,
Not to delay, or be mislead.'
I should have heeded her advice.
But he seemed so nice.

And he showed me things, many beautiful things,
That I hadn't thought to explore.
They were off my path, so I never had dared.
I had been so careful, I never had cared.
And he made me feel excited...
Well, excited and scared.

When he said, 'Come in,' with that sickening grin,
How could I know what was in store?
Once his teeth were bared, though, I really got scared.
Well, excited and scared...

But he drew me close, and he swallowed me down,
Down a dark, slimy path, where lie secrets that I never want to know,
And when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever,

At the end of the path, was Granny once again,
So we wait in the dark, until someone sets us free,
And we're brought into the light,
And we're back at the start...

And I know things now, many valuable things,
That I hadn't known before.
Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood.
They will not protect you the way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers, even flowers have their dangers,
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.

Now I know, don't be scared. Granny is right, just be prepared.
Isn't it nice to know a lot?

...And a little bit... not.

"I Know Things Now" by Stephen Sondheim
Into the Woods (1986)

back to David Byrne:

[excerpt 2]

The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.

much, much more:
Internet Antichrist

Fast Flip

Maggwire

new month, new playlist

2009-11-07T20:51:00.003-05:00

Radio DavidByrne

2009-11-03T17:31:00.005-05:00

digby:

. . . I'm skeptical about the prospects of eliminating the filibuster. But there is one thing that can be done: the Democrats can get over this nostalgia for the good old days when Democrats and Republicans all slept together in one big cozy pile and start acting like a real political party.

The argument for abolition of the filibuster falls apart when you see that the Dems have the 60 votes— and it doesn't make any difference. And that's because there is always some pampered little prince or princess who thinks he or she should be running everything and they will hold up the process regardless. That 50th Senator for the vote would be as hard to get as the 60th for the filibuster unless the Democratic party starts to require some partisan loyalty.

In the days when legislation was cobbled together on a bipartisan basis, you didn't want too much discipline or you couldn't get the other side to cross lines when you needed them. But the realignment has solidified the partisan divide on the basis of ideology, philosophy and region. The Republicans have adapted already and understand that their job is to obstruct when in the minority and steam roll when in the majority. The Democrats are still living in the past.

We are a politically polarized country with very different views of how to govern this country. We have regular elections to determine if people are happy with what the majority party is doing. That system will work just fine if only the politicians will enact their agendas and then let the country ratify it or reject it. I don't see what's so wrong with that. It sounds like representative democracy to me.

This fetish for bipartisanship seems more and more like a social construct to allow the ruling class to live happily together.

Californication

2009-11-02T20:18:00.003-05:00

Matt Taibbi:

. . . when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other.

- - - - -

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

The peasant mentality lives on in America

zombie-angel's library

2009-10-31T21:11:00.005-04:00

(last.fm widgets require registration and login)

rose-ghost's library

2009-10-31T09:11:00.004-04:00

(last.fm widgets require registration and login)

bramtinker's library

2009-10-31T08:11:00.002-04:00

(last.fm widgets require registration and login)

Beethovenfest Podcasts

2009-10-24T07:03:00.000-04:00

only the wind . . .

2009-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

"The Haunted House and Other Spooky Poems and Tales"
(1970 Scholastic Magazines, Inc.)
Read by Paul Hecht and Carole Danell

image

The Making of The Shining

2009-10-12T21:54:00.000-04:00

2009-10-06T10:21:00.006-04:00

“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infintely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring."

Francis Harold Cook
Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra

Exploring How We Connect, And What It Means

When you tell someone that they have an influence on people who are three degrees removed from them, you're telling them that they have an effect on, you know, 10 friends, their 100 friends of friends, their 1,000 friends of friends of friends, suddenly you're telling them that they're responsible not just for themselves but a whole host of people, some of whom they don't even know, and I think that a lot of people, the way they react to that sense of responsibility, is I'm going to actually try to work harder to exert my own will over my own life.

NPR

Talk of the Nation

Science Friday

for your ipod: wnyc/wbez

2009-10-02T05:15:00.000-04:00

including
this american life,
studio 360,
& streaming music 24/7

We ask it, in the spirit of love

2009-09-27T07:25:00.001-04:00

2009-09-21T03:53:00.004-04:00

Glenn:

. . . there's no real coherent message to these protests; it's just amorphous anger which likely has numerous causes among the various participating constituents: Ron-Paul libertarians, paleoconservatives, LaRouchians, Southern race resenters, social conservatives, GOP operatives, standard dittohead liberal-haters, etc. Each group has a different agenda, often wildly divergent. The only thing they seem to have in common is that they hate Obama.

But look at who the lead supporters are: Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck, the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio generally, business groups led by Dick Armey. Does anyone actually believe that what motivates them is concern over the excessive, corrupting influence of Wall Street and large corporations in government? Please. They are pure GOP partisans who are exploiting citizen anger to undermine Democratic politicians in order to return the GOP to political power. It's nothing more noble or profound than that. In fact, many of the movement leaders are among the most vocal advocates for unfettered corporate power. From the expansions of the Surveillance State and endless imperial power to strident opposition to lobbyist reforms, they support the very policies that most empower those corrupting groups and further the government-corporate merger. If they're so concerned about excessive government power, debt and corporate influence and corruption, where were they during the Bush era? Cheering it all on. They didn't discover their "small-government principles" until Barack Obama was inaugurated and it became a means for undermining his administration and recovering from Republican political ruin.

additional thoughts from Glenn- on Glenn

yup.

2009-08-11T17:11:00.003-04:00

digby today:

I actually suspect that many in the Obama White House believed the hype about changing Washington, which was always patent nonsense. Perhaps the more cynical among them felt that his race actually protected him from the kind of low level character attacks that the right usually employs. But they didn't get it. The right doesn't need to resort to low level character attacks on Obama because he's black. It's baked in.

So they can just call him Hitler, even though it makes no sense, and gin up the most outlandish conspiracy theories and their crazies are on board without anything having to be said. The conservative base, and a good number of people whose committment to progress of any kind is pretty thin on a good day, can easily be prodded into providing the kind of entertaining sideshow the media just love. Et voila --- teabagging.

If these Democrats had spent less time gossiping about what Clinton really did with Monica or handwringing about Gore's "lies" and more time analyzing how those spectacles unfolded, they wouldn't be caught flat footed today. But they didn't because they blamed Clinton for being "weak" and Gore for being "inauthentic" as if those were the real problems. I'm sure it made them feel very confident that it couldn't happen to them.

But, of course, it can, because it's not a function of the individual Democrats who are the targets of these jihads but rather the nature of the opposition. Until they finally grok that-- and after impeachment, stolen elections and Cheney it's mind-boggling that they still haven't done that-- this will keep happening.

MORE

on sausage

2009-07-31T20:55:00.006-04:00

digyby writes:

. . . the truth is that Obama is weakening not because of health care, which was always going to be very, very difficult and which would necessarily require a huge chunk of political capital. This is simply because as much as everyone was thrilled by the "change" candidacy, what they really wanted to change was the occupant of the white house. Most people find serious, fundamental change quite frightening and are, therefore, easily subject to fear mongering, especially when they are already experiencing extreme economic stress over which they have no control.

Our economy is very bad and a good many people are scared to death right now. And their fear is real, even if they don't really understand the reasons for what's happening. I personally know people who are going bankrupt and losing their jobs and I would bet that most of you do too, if you aren't one of those people yourself. This fear is not the result of pre-digested, focus grouped propaganda for entertainment purposes as is so much of our political discourse. The country is in deep distress. And when that happens, they look to the government, even as they perversely believe that it can't do anything, and they get angry.

- - - - -

. . . liberals gave up the war of the rhetoric a long time ago and contented themselves with playing around the edges of conservatism. Until that changes, liberals will be fighting on their turf and that means that no matter how much institutional power liberals attain, needed change is going to be more difficult than it already is-- which is to say extremely difficult. When people don't know what "change" means beyond a change of occupancy in the white house, the other side can very easily fill in the blanks with tales of terrorists and government boogeymen coming to kill senior citizens.

more

Bill Moyers on Health Care Reform

2009-07-21T03:16:00.000-04:00

program resources - video; audio stream or download; podcast; transcript; supporting materials; viewer comments; archive | JOURNAL | PBS |

choice?

2009-07-19T00:09:00.002-04:00

Don McCanne, MD:

Imagine presidential candidate Barack Obama telling his audiences during the campaign, “We promise you choice. For most of you already receiving your health insurance through your place of employment, we will provide you with the choice of keeping that insurance plan or paying heavy financial penalties for dropping off the plan, no matter how unhappy you are with it. For a select few of you, we will offer the choice of private plans within an insurance exchange, even if you can’t afford them, and maybe even throw in a public plan that a couple of you may be able to purchase, if you meet our rigid enrollment criteria.”

False promise of choice

John Geyman, MD:

Based on the content of the debate swirling around these questions and how the mainstream media are covering the story, we have two major blind spots in American culture today concerning health care — continuing denial that markets fail the public interest in health care, and that market failure leads to serious adverse economic, social and moral consequences. These two blind spots are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.

Societal Blind Spots As Barriers To Health Care Reform

P.O.V. Online Shorts

2009-07-03T23:11:00.003-04:00

hope?

2009-06-25T02:46:00.006-04:00

John Geyman, MD
Monday, Jun 22, 2009

Now that we have a new president espousing health care reform and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, isn’t this a time to be excited and optimistic for long-overdue reform? Much as we would like to say “Of course!”- we cannot. The “reform” effort is already way off the track, despite the hype of “progress” in the uncritical mainstream media.

So what’s going wrong? For starters, not all interests are at the negotiating table; noteworthy in its absence of advocates for the public interest. Fundamental questions as to the goals of reform are not being asked, and in fact are being kept out of the discussion. These questions include:

Who is the health care system for (e.g. patients and their families vs. corporate market stakeholders and their investors)?

As a basic human need, is health care a right or not?

Should our system be based on the for-profit business model or a not-for-profit public financing system of social insurance?

Are there any alternatives that will actually save money?

Should the debate be based on evidence, ideology, or political power of the stakeholders in the present (failing) system?

The “debate” over health care reform has already been taken over by the very interests who are themselves a big part of the problem (reminds us of the banking industry and the bailout in process). True to their business model, the insurance, drug, medical device, medical equipment and related health care industries are naturally more interested in their future markets, profits and returns to investors than building a sustainable system of universal access that would rein in their profiteering and hold them more accountable to the public interest. For them, health care costs are revenue, and the “reform process” is an opportunity to protect and expand their future financial wellbeing.

MORE

digby again:

2009-06-20T20:17:00.003-04:00

"You cannot have a dynamic, growing economy when people are not able to take risks for fear that they will lose everything they have, even their lives. If you can't change jobs or start a business or move to a place where there are more opportunities for fear of being without health insurance, the whole system slows down. If you try to "fix" the system without a serious program to contain costs, then American businesses will remain at a disadvantage as well. And, needless to say, making American citizens dictate all of their important life decisions on the basis of whether or not some insurance company bureaucrat might decide that the dental work they had seven years ago disqualifies them for health insurance is a recipe for economic stagnation."

MORE

crazy!

2009-06-20T17:34:00.000-04:00

profit over patients

2009-06-20T07:06:00.004-04:00

digby writes:

Insurance companies have had the marketplace all to themselves for many years. And it has also been clear for many years that the ever increasing cost of health care is unsustainable, that our businesses can't compete because of it, that Americans are going bankrupt by the millions because of an illness even if they are insured, that care is being rationed in an arbitrary and cruel fashion and that insurance companies, particularly their CEOs, have been getting obscenely wealthy on the backs of their sick customers. They could have fixed this system, or at least behaved like decent corporate citizens at any time. They chose not to, squeezing every last penny out of their customers and giving as little as they could get away with in return.

Insurance companies have been instrumental in creating this crisis and are now complaining when the government has to take measures to keep the whole system from imploding and taking down the American economy with it. But this time we can either bailout the average working American by giving them a real option for a change rather than bailing out another failed industry with more taxpayer dollars.

The insurance companies are using the vast wealth they accumulated in the run up to this crisis to keep from having to pay the piper. They do not want to have to compete with an entity that will be charged with actually serving their patients over profit. It's not like they didn't see it coming. They could have fixed many of the problems themselves and chose not to because they figured it was cheaper and easier to buy off the political class instead.

MORE

AMA and drug companies

2009-06-15T17:46:00.003-04:00

from Think Progress:

". . . while the AMA projects an image of representing doctors (a claim tarnished by the fact that the AMA inflates its numbers by giving reduced membership fees to medical school students and retirees, who make up about half of the dues payers), it is actually financially tethered to the drug industry. Unless there are major structural changes to the AMA and its sources of revenue, it is difficult to view the group as an honest broker in the reform dialogue."

A Symbiotic Relationship-
The AMA And The For-Profit Health Lobby

Single Payer Health Care

2009-06-15T13:54:00.002-04:00

The AMA does not speak for the majority of health care professionals.

AMA represents 29 percent of licensed U.S. doctors. (or 20%.)

"Fortunately, many physicians believe that patients, all patients, are more important than wealth-creating opportunities. That's what Physicians for a National Health Program is all about."

Daily updates

PNHP Blog

The following medical associations endorse a Single Payer system:

Physicans for a National Health Program

American Public Health Association

American Association of Community Psychiatrists

Massachusetts Academy of Family Practice

American Medical Women’s Association

Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Society

American Medical Student’s Association

D.C. Medical Society

National Medical Association

American College of Physicians (Illinois Chapter)

Long Island Dermatological Society

Islamic Medical Association

American Nurses Association

Nurses’ Network for a National Health Program

D.C. chapter of the American Medical Association

2009-06-01T04:33:00.005-04:00

Saturday 30 May 2009
Millhouse Road off Old 86
Orange County, NC

2009-03-17T10:01:00.001-04:00

Executive Orders & Presidential Memoranda

White House Blog

White House Press Briefings

2009-03-17T09:11:00.004-04:00

Surveillance Self-Defense from EFF
a how-to guide to fight government spying

via Wired: Threat Level

Top Internet Threats
from Wired

2009-03-16T23:25:00.000-04:00

photograph copyright Shaun O'Boyle

2009-03-16T22:59:00.000-04:00

Lukas Foss

August 15, 1922 - February 1, 2009

snow-moon: Jan 2007

last.fm: "solo"

last.fm: full tracks

Stewart interviews Cramer

2009-03-13T17:23:00.001-04:00

extended, uncensored version

2009-03-13T16:11:00.000-04:00

Southern Oligarchy and the Labor Unions
By Joseph B. Atkins
via Facing South

[excerpt]

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it's the thread that connects all of Southern history -- from the antebellum South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to Tennessee's Bob Corker, Alabama's Richard Shelby and the other anti-union Southerners in today's U.S. Senate.

It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

The recent spectacle of Corker, Shelby and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leading the GOP attack on the proposed $14 billion loan to the domestic auto industry -- with 11 other Southern senators marching dutifully behind -- made it crystal clear. The heart of Southern conservatism is the preservation of a status quo that serves elite interests.

Expect these same senators and their colleagues in the U.S. House to wage a similar war in the coming months against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act authorizing so-called "card check" union elections nationwide.

2009-03-07T16:20:00.004-05:00

Paul Rosenberg:

Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given.
- - - - -
A true pragmatist would say, "Fine, private health insurance creates perverse incentives. We won't use it." It would just be as simple as that. That doesn't mean "socialized medicine." It doesn't mean government bureaucrats assigning you a doctor against your will, and then telling your doctor what they can and cannot do. And it's only free-market ideologues--and their neo-liberal enablers--who think that that binary choice is the only one we have.

In short, there is nothing the least bit pragmatic about the neo-liberal's "pragmatic" compromise with the conservatives. It is not just incredibly costly in the purely economic sense, it is systematically wrong-headed, ands its costliness ensures that many other things will have to be sacrificed to keep it in place.

There is nothing the least bit pragmatic about it at all.

Obama's Anti-Pragmatic Ideology vs. Universal Health Care

Open Left