The Dude abides

I don't think I've mentioned this on here before, but I'll do so now. A significant part of why I'm not working right now is political. I don't want to earn income that can be taxed.

As Chris Floyd recently quotes:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

-- Henry David Thoreau

I'm going to avoid such associations as much as possible. I don't believe this government has a right to my money, but I'm not willing to risk a direct challenge to their power. So I just won't work until I have to for pure survival, at which point I hope to be able to earn income without compromising my values.

the power of the pen

This email, whether genuine or not, reminds me very much of my personal correspondence with check my ip. It has the same aggressive condescension towards someone for questioning authority, the same disregard for logical argument, and the same sprawling agrammatical style.

It is an endless source of personal frustration that people with the mindset demonstrated in this kind of writing achieve positions of immense power. This frustration seems pretty pointless though, as there's nothing I can do to change it. There are reasons why such people are in such positions, and the reasons why they shouldn't be involve abstract values that are meaningless to people who think only in terms of raw power.

via

I was going to write this, but Winter Patriot did it first. Check him out, and take his advice.

Have you ever been several minutes into telling some kind of story and suddenly realized that there's no possible reason why anyone other than you would care about what you're saying? And then you have to decide if you finish it, or skip as quickly as possible to the ending, or just abruptly stop in mid-sentence.

Yeah.

Wouldn't that be funny if I was writing this because I was on the receiving end and wanted to drop a not-so-subtle hint to someone to stop telling me stupid shit?

Bush, Cheney: terrorist leaders

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts have made the deliberate, conscious decision to engage in state terrorism in order to advance foreign policy and energy objectives they held long before 9/11 "changed the world."

That is the true context, and content, of the war. Anyone who supports its continuation -- under any auspices, in any form, for any amount of time longer than it takes to remove all the troops quickly and safely -- is advocating the perpetuation of state terror in the name of the American people.

Yup.

6 years later, 10 points dumber

I took the GREs yesterday. That lasted about 3.5 hours and by the end my brain hurt. It was like running a mental marathon when I hadn't seriously trained in over 5 years. You get most of your score instantly, and I got 640 on the verbal and 800 on the quantitative (they're scored like SATs). My expired 2001 scores were 650 and 800, so at least I'm consistent. I expect these results to make me very competitive for any of the programs to which I'll be applying.

For reading this, you are rewarded with a picture of dust-covered Katsumoto.

Ecuador!

I hope every country in the world pays attention to what Ecuador is doing. Their President says that the U.S. can maintain its air base in Ecuador only if Ecuador can open a military base in Miami. On one level, I agree with Libby that I can't wait to see what contorted pretzel logic the White House uses in its response. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they pull out some dirty tricks to apply pressure. Nobody fucks with our Toddler-in-Chief's killin' toys.

Pete Stark backs down

Congressman Pete Stark (who previously earned See For Yourself acclaim for making his atheism public) got pissed off last week and started acting crazy. He actually told the truth. Obviously the truth is the last thing Congress wants its member to be telling us, so 173 of them voted to censure him. For some strange reason 196 voted against and the motion failed, but he gave a tearful apology anyway. (Maybe he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.)

They'll stop you from speaking out against an illegal war, but certainly won't do anything to stop the illegal war itself. They make a big fuss about the style of the complainer and ignore the substance of the complaint. The lightning rod "poor form" diversion strategy succeeds again.

Winter Patriot has written the apology that Stark should have delivered. Go read it.

We ain't 'fraid of no turrists

This is the CIA's new logo. The tragic comedy turns slapstick.

Heroes or Zeroes

This is hilarious to me, and probably only to me. I don't watch Heroes but my wife does. Last night she watched it while I was sitting nearby but not watching, so I mainly just heard the dialog. And it was TERRIBLE. I made a point of saying so, repeatedly, which got annoying to her. But I'm validated now that someone else agrees. Seriously, there were some terrible lines.

• Like after some amnesiac found a plane ticket in his name to some Canadian city (Montreal?), he said "all the signs point to (Montreal)."
• I don't remember the exact words, but at some point a mother in her 30s wanted to join some young girls playing jump rope and they started giving her a bunch of shit, like she was some dorky looking white guy calling next at a street basketball game in the inner city or something. Apparently cute little girls playing jump rope are tough.
  
• My favorite was an ominously delivered, "Its Bob," followed by a short pause and then, "he's one of them."

So... yeah. This post really was just for me. Sorry for the diversion. I'll get back to doom and gloom pronto.

simple solutions to problems

The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's an interesting tidbit:

Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

- Chalmers Johnson reviewing Stephen Holmes reviewing Geoffry Stone (that sounds confusing because it is)

Who ever said we learned nothing from Vietnam?

Here's the prescription to cure our ills:

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

- Chalmers Johnson

While we're wishing that the American people will dismantle their empire and military, we might as well wish for flying ponies for everyone. Shall we lament how much easier it is to suppress objections to destructive rampage than to avoid destructive rampage?

Is there anything worth saving anyway?

Blogs I read lately

Chris Floyd is filling in for Glenn Greenwald this week at Salon. I'd been meaning to post about what blogs I'm reading these days, so this is a perfect occasion as two of my favorite bloggers cross paths.

Must Reads:

Floyd's Empire Burlesque - Well researched and scathing indictment of American foreign policy and military action, with lots of Bob Dylan lyrics mixed in.

Arthur Silber's Once Upon A Time - A passionate voice crying out in the dark, wishing someone would listen, knowing no one will.

Who is IOZ? - The dark comedian of dissent. A unique combination of razor sharp analysis, laser sharp wit, Friday sharp cheddars, and various other sharp things, all brilliantly poked right in your fucking eye!

The Primate Diaries - An anthropology-centered intellectual look at various topics.


Falling from the top, but still good:

Glenn Greenwald - I still like him a lot, and he is extremely effective at exposing the flaws in the system. I still read most of what he writes, and at least skim everything else. He's dropping on the list for a few reasons, the most significant of which is that the blogs above cover his approximate territory in a more convincing way. Glenn seems unable or unwilling to put the big picture all the way together, and holds onto romanticized, idealistic notions about this country that I just can't stomach. He can also be a bit tedious. Overall he's a brilliant writer, and worth keeping tabs on.

Digby's Hullabaloo - Falling for similar reasons as Greenwald. I read almost everything she writes, and she's extremely good at (justifiably) demonizing the right, but she still seems to love Democrats way too much.


Rising Stars:

Unqualified Offerings
Human Voices
Winter Patriot
Rick Perlstein

Personal Blogs:

Neon Gods
End The Cola Wars
Paulp

Inconvenient Gore?

Interesting if not surprising: Al Gore's record on global warming as part of the Clinton administration seems to be pretty damn weak. The work he's doing now is good and all, but it would have been nice if he had actually done something about it when he had some power.

get real

Maybe this is the kind of advice I need, courtesy of IOZ:

Friends, you must shred the assumption that the Republic is "not dead, only dreaming." The heart has stopped. The coin is on the tongue. Charon's poled the barge. Etc. A new reality is better than a new movie, as Amiri Baraka wrote. Listen. America isn't a constitutional republic. Repeat it. You'll feel better. Or, you'll feel worse at first, but then you'll feel better. You have to open yourself up to the notion that there are other kinds of freedom than living under a certain kind of benevolent government, which is what you've been taught since kindergarten. Liberty isn't a symptom of your State. It's surprising what happens to your mind when you start calling things by their real names.

to fight fire with fire

[At a speech at West Point, Bush] added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that, in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion, amounted to an announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place." The preamble to the National Security Strategy document that followed claimed that there is a "a single sustainable model for national success" - ours - that is "right and true for every person in every society... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."
- Chalmers Johnson, pp. 286-287

We often hear how militant Islamists want to use violence to force the whole world to follow their belief system, which they uncritically accept as superior to all others. Our response to this alleged existential threat has been to use violence to try to force the whole world to our belief system, which we uncritically accept as superior to all others.

Noam Chomsky on 9-11

There is no doubt that the 9-11 atrocities were an event of historic importance, not - regrettably - because of their scale, but because of the choice of innocent victims. It had been recognized that for some time that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably lose their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. No one could have anticipated the specific way in which the expectations were fulfilled, but they were. For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere. The history should be too familiar to review and though the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not.
-pp. 119-120


One often hears that we must not consider these matters, because that would be justification for terrorism, a position so foolish and destructive as scarcely to merit comment, but unfortunately common.
-p.81

Often when I've argued that "they hate us for our freedom" is wrong, and that the real reason we're hated is because of our actions in the world, I'm told that I am some kind of terrorist sympathizer, a position quite foolish and destructive indeed. I agree with Chomsky that on any intellectual level that position is unworthy of reply, but I think its unfortunate commonness makes it something that needs to be addressed. So I will address it here.

(Listen up, Rudy and all my authoritarian acquaintances.)

SOMEONE HAVING A GOOD REASON TO BE PISSED OFF DOESN'T MEAN THEY ARE JUSTIFIED IN USING VIOLENCE.

Of course, saying this loudly or in bold capital letters won't change the way their minds work. The only justification they need to attack someone is not liking them. The link is automatic, hence their enthusiasm for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. This is why it is so important for them that "they hate us for our freedoms." If that wasn't true, and America had actually done something wrong that makes people angry, that would justify the use of violence against us, and their lizard brains would explode.

Even if they weren't so wrong, they're still assholes

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.

And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

The whole thing is pretty good.

read this now.

talking myself in circles about healthcare reform

Now having identified the perverse tactics of the right as lightning rods to distract from the main issue, health care for children, I suppose I ought not let them succeed, and spend some time contemplating the main issue. Honestly, I don't know much about it. I see it a small step of the battle for socialized medicine, and I don't know what to think about that either.

It seems to me that other nations are getting better results and spending a lot less money with a more nationalized system. It seems to me that insurance companies are getting fat off a steady flow administrative fees, and siphoning back some of that loot to the politicians to make sure they don't turn off the spigot. So it seems like turning off that flow and moving towards a more efficient system would be the right thing to do. But it also seems to me that more government power and bureaucracy are likely to be quite bad for everyone, given how the government has managed to turn basically everything they touch into a machine to make more money for rich people with utter disregard for the welfare of the population as a whole.

So I think essentially the question is: would a national single-payer healthcare system be a good thing, given that it will be run by this government? Some kind of idealism versus realism question. And of course it is just some incremental change in a system that basically needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Are any of these kinds of incremental changes useful? I don't even know how to evaluate these questions, and I imagine I sound pretty naive and pathetic. As a result I'm pretty ambivalent on the issue.

Ignorance. I guess that's why we'd rather focus on the lightning rods; it is much simpler to figure out what is right and wrong there.

Bill O'Reilly: "I'd rather be assraped than go to school"

On January 15, O'Reilly decided that kidnapping victim Shawn Hornbeck didn't escape from his abuser soon enough, and so he must have "liked his circumstances" and "had a lot more fun" because he could "run around and do whatever he wanted" instead of going to school.

Yesterday, Michael Devlin was sentenced to 3 life terms for attempted murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Hornbeck talked Devlin out of killing him by promising to do whatever Devlin asked. Further sexual assaults followed. This arrangement continued for four years.

Thanks to Mr. Smiles for the links.

I fell for it

All of this disgusting bullshit was just another right-wing lightning rod.

ps - Rush Limbaugh is such a disgusting liar it makes my eyes bleed.

only in the CHURCH bathrooms?

Why is it some kind of crime to ask for sex in a bathroom? Why are we having undercover cops doing gay bathroom stings all the time? And why aren't Republicans fighting back on this, considering every single one of them has gay bathroom sex?

want healthcare for your kids? WE WILL STALK YOU!!

I don't know why it continues to amaze me, but it does. However low you think the insane shrieking right-wing moonbats will go, they go lower. Congratulations, fucktards, you've blown my mind again!

update: now with even more hypocrisy!

update 2: In the comment section of this fine post at Obsidian Wings, I found a link to this, which appears to be written by someone who can read my mind:

If there were ever any doubt

that the right wing side of the blogosphere is a bunch of worthless pieces of shit, people for whom, as James Carville once said, I wouldn't piss down their throats if their hearts were on fire, let that doubt be erased. If there's a hell, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, the writers of The National Review and the Free Republic will spend major time roasting in it for this. They've taken intellectual dishonesty to new heights with their dissembling on the story of Graeme Frost, and I hope that the party they purport to represent gets the ever-loving shit kicked out of it next year when they have to defend Bush's veto of this bill.

Columbus for President!

Christophorus Columbus wasn't the only Real American Hero to delight in the slaughter of the Native Americans. The Primate Diaries reminds us that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson continued that fine tradition three centuries later.

President Thomas Jefferson, father of American anthropology and "friend to the Indian," came to support and continue the genocidal policies begun by George “Town Destroyer”6 Washington who famously ordered

"the immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more." 7

According to Jefferson,

“[t]his unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.” 8

Furthermore, in a letter to his Secretary of War, Jefferson ordered

“if we are ever constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” 9

Jefferson later explained that this was “necessary to secure ourselves against the future effects of their savage and ruthless warfare” since all “benevolent” efforts at development had failed. 10

But hey, everyone was racist back then so I guess we'll just pretend it never happened.

Columbus Day is bullshit

It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

Happy Columbus Day, Rodrigo!

And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down like dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arwaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arwaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

Happy Columbus Day everyone! (By the way if you don't think Columbus Day should be celebrated, keep it to yourself, bitch.)


Quotes from:

true lies

give it to me straight

If I were to say that Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen were the 2 greatest rock artist geniuses in the history of music, would that make me an idiot?

Please state your age when responding.

Food pictures

1 and 2, therefor 3.

1.) Impeachment is a moral imperative.

2.) Impeachment will not happen.

3.) America is an immoral monster.

Duh

Is it at all surprising that Bush used to torture animals as a child?

you are what you eat

How much thought do you give to what you eat?

Where does it come from? Who sold it to you? Who sold it to them? Who sold it to them? What do all those people do with it? What don't they do with it?

You spend thousands of dollars a year on food. Do you think about where that money goes? What it supports? Who gets rich off it?

Is it good for you? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the economy? Does it matter as long as it tastes good?

I think these questions all are important.

Jordan worship

Sometimes I think that all the Michael Jordan worship that still pervades basketball is a product of overblown media hype. But it isn't. Jordan did anything he wanted to on a basketball court, and nobody could stop him.

My college disaster

I was looking at my college transcript as I prepare to apply to grad schools, and I re-realized what complete train wreck my college academic experience was. The blunders are almost comical, and started my very first semester.

I rode into College Park on a full scholarship - tuition, room, board, books, and a stipend - and brought along 31 credits from high school advanced placement credits. I had four years ahead of me with no concern for money and a full year of college credit already on my record. I didn't know what I wanted to select for a major, but I was considering math, economics, and psychology.

So my first semester I took an advanced math class, Real Analysis, because I had received a letter from the department inviting me to take it. I ended up barely passing with a C, and convinced myself that math wasn't the right field for me. In retrospect it was clear that I wasn't prepared for that material, and that taking a few more courses before that one would have given me a much better chance to succeed. I didn't take another math class until the last semester of my senior year (Linear Algebra, which I enjoyed and would have benefited from taking before Real Analysis).

I took Psyc100 that semester also, and found it kind of boring and very easy. It was a huge lecture with hundreds of students, most of whom sat there doing crossword puzzles. Nobody answered questions when the professor asked them, and exams were scored on a curve. Based on that experience I more or less decided Psychology wasn't the right field for me. In retrospect it was clear that an introductory class wasn't going to cover the interesting stuff, and that the material and my classmates would get more stimulating in upper-level courses. I convinced myself that smart people didn't study psychology and besides, I couldn't get much of a job with a psychology degree.

That semester I also took a seminar through the honors program called Science and Pseudoscience. It was taught by a statistician who is a prominent part of the Skeptics community and I loved the class. I made no effort to further pursue any of the subjects or methodologies that interested me until a few years after I graduated. In retrospect it was clear that class was an early indication of the kind of ideas that I found exciting, and that I should have talked to the professor about how to explore those interests.

And the last class I took that semester was an introduction to music fundamentals. From many years of music training before college, I literally already knew every single thing that was covered in the course. I could have taught it. I knew that would be the case when I signed up, but I just figured taking an easy class that filled some credit I needed was a good idea. This would become a theme of the remaining 7 semesters.

With the tremendous opportunity of a full scholarship and the cushion of a year's worth of credits before I even started, I should have taken a wide variety of classes and explored my interests. I should have uses that experience to narrow down my interests and find a field that was interesting and challenging and that could lead me down a path to a job or graduate study that I would enjoy.

Instead I was tentative about pursuing subjects that interested me, and seized on various flimsy excuses to avoid the slightest bit of challenge. I drifted into the business school because a degree in finance seemed like it would be easy but likely to result in a high-paying job. I rarely went to class, and made the honor roll every semester just by cramming before the exams and forgetting it as soon as they were over. I would say that I didn't learn a thing, but that's not true. I learned to how to make myself look as impressive as possible while putting in as little effort as possible. What a fucking waste.

I feel ashamed at the way I squandered opportunities and derailed myself like this, but I have to wonder what kind of guidance I was getting that let this happen. It is obvious to me sitting here now almost 10 years later what a huge series of blunders I was making, but at the time I didn't really have anyone steering me in the right direction. Or maybe I did and I was ignoring them. It was a huge school and it was easy to slip under the radar if you wanted to. (But I was also actively getting bad advice. Who invited me to that math class? They probably just picked everyone with minimum SAT scores and sent a letter or something. And there was more bad advising in later semesters.)

Seeing the way Kira interacts with her professors here at this tiny school, I'm realizing that for my personality type, a small college would have been so much better for me. She knows all her professors and they know her by name. Faculty and students hang out and arrange trips and extra-curricular projects together. The faculty and administrators all take a personal and active interest in the students' education.

I can think of 2 professors who knew my name. In almost all of my classes I was just a social security number on a scantron sheet at exam time. I'm sure there were opportunities like that at my huge school, but I would have had to actively seek them out, which I never did. Small schools create a feeling of community, where you owe it to everyone else to make the best of yourself. Huge schools create an isolation, where you're just a number and you're on your own.

I think part of my desire to go to grad school is to make right all the mistakes I made as an undergraduate. Maybe having learned all this the hard way will ultimately be better for me.

Quick links about endless awesome manly wars

Hersh on the Administration's plans to attack Iran


Floyd on the same.


Linked from the above Floyd piece, Cole on how Saddam had offered to leave Iraq and go into exile prior to Bush's illegal invasion, but Bush refused.

He had a real offer in the hand, of Saddam's flight. He rejected it. By rejecting it, he will have killed at least a million persons and became one of the more monstrous figures in recent world history.

Gravel might be a semi-decent human being

I hate all politicians until overwhelmed with reasons not to hate them. No Presidential candidate in the current field will give more than a few reasons, and most give none at all. Mike Gravel gives some here.



This shouldn't be construed as any kind of endorsement. I'm just noting how the things he's saying here are the most decent and sane things any of these fuckers say, and he's considered the crazy old man. And we're only even talking about what they say, not what they do. And we all know Democrats don't do what they say they'll do.

Everyone can go to hell.