As The Cookie Crumbles (1/31/12): Brand-O

It's funny how what look like choices often aren't, innit?

You go to make groceries and you find shelf upon shelf upon shelf full of 'different' products which, after you remove the packaging, are functionally indistinguishable from one another. It's a problem in our politics, too.

Duopoly politics--the two-party lock--MADE Sir Barry, the Pale, appear to be the "opposite" of the Busheviks. There being only two choices, Obama was the non-Bush (McCain) by default, when what he REALLY was was just a slicker, smoother, better-spoken representative of EXACTLY the same interests it SEEMED (and was made to seem) he'd defeat and replace..

They pulled the con/sales job of the (new) century when they figured out how to convince a majority of voters that a difference of a couple of micro-grams of melanin in the complexion of one of the contestants would matter a jiggly shit in the way the Chosen One governed.

You heard the resultant political meller-drama played out in the SOTU, the other night, wherein brave Sir Barry tolled a round dozen of the GOPhux most cherished mantras, as if they were his own. He sounded more 'Republican' than ANY of the clown-car candidates-- other than Romney, whom he most resembles in other telling ways, too.

The GOPhux only attack Obama as rabidly as they do because it gives them the pretext to undermine further what they REALLY want to destroy: Democratic self-government, itself.

No. Really. Money can be patient, cuz it doesn't die. They've been working on it, full time, since about the 1880s or so and has proceeded relentlessly, if incrementally, since then: A total take-over, but without the devastation and massive clean-up an outright rebellion would entail.

A sort of "Neutron Rebellion," like the Cold War neutron bomb, which was supposed to kill of life, but leave the structures (and I'll leave you all to speculate on which "Neut" is the more noxious).

They're patient, thorough and relentless: Because as long as the democratic forms persist, and have not bee wholly discredited if not abandoned, there's always a chance some fool MIGHT get a mad hair up their legislative asses and pass something that would interfere in the plunder. You cannot be too careful. And you look where we've come from: it's not going back.

It is thje fact that they are going after "that damn Blackamoor" makes ANYTHING acceptable, excusable; as long as it is directed at the Black Man in the White House, widda blues. They'll ride that horse til it dies, spavined, in another four years. During which the GOPhux will exploit a GOLDMINE of financial contributions, looking forward.

You know my ever-humble opinion: the GOPhux are sitting this one out. They are going to take a pro forma swing at it, but mainly so as to spread a lot of money and ideology around. But I think the GOPhux know this is a fallow year for 'em. You'll know they're serious when they hoist another scion of the Bush dynasty onto the ticket.

I look for Jebbie to top the ticket, with Lizzie Cheney, in 2016. It's a winner they won't waste on 'defeating' a president with whom the Bosses and Owners (The "Oners", I'm now calling 'em, in honor of their lofty perch atop the One Percent) are perfectly content, as indeed they were to put him there in the first place.

They're figuring on TAKING the Senate which--with more Dims up this term than last, and more than there are vulnerable GOPhux--will I think be a lot easier than many pundits think it will be. Citizens United rules--rather, a lack of them--are still in play. Along with the holding the House, they'll skate, while AFBP (America's First Black President) absorbs ALL the blame for the incipient, irreversible "decline of the Murkin Empire."

That's why I always call him Shamwow, hippies?

See ya at the beach...

Hippie News & Stuff: Bully

There is some really bad shit going on in that town in Rhode Island, where a young, free-thinker/student caused a revered iconic representation of a Catholic prayer to be removed from its prominent place in the school gym, where it had hung, violating the separation clause, for 49 years....

The brave student is named Jessica Ahlquist; she is the 16-year-old daughter of a firefighter and a nurse,; and she has since become the object of public obloquy from across the community of Cranston's pulpits and its paper. She has received threats, even on her life, from residents and outsiders alike. She standing up to it bravely, promising to walk across the stage for her 2013 graduation.

I hope, but doubt, that she makes it. Don't mistake me: I have no fear that, unless actual ill befalls her, she'll graduate SOMEWHERE. But I doubt it will be Cranston, RI. But, outside prison and the military, there is NO PLACE like school where they can fuck wicha if they wanna. And it sounds like the good people of Cranston wanna.

For some reason, there appear to be individuals in the world who do NOT regard the assaults, both real and threatened, from citizens (and/or fellow students) and the religious hierarchy of the local Catholic Church, upon a 16-year-old girl who happened to have blown rhe whistle on illegal, compulsory school prayer in a small Rhode Island city, as bullying. Some commentators on Facebook discussions of the matter pooh-poohed the severity of the charges being leveled at the people attacking the girl.

One fellow even suggested that, unles she was suffering the actual infliction of physical, it didn't qualify as bullying. Another suggested that you had to be wary of these things because there were a lot of "wussies" out there who'd complain about anything, if their "widdew feewings were huuuht.

I disagreed: both that you had to be injured to be that there are " a lot of wussie people around" today.

What I think is that there has started to be enough awareness of the issue that a LOT of people who wer tired of getting pushed around by asswholes decided to say "Stop it, asshole. I can't stop you, alone, we both know that. But a LOT of people don't LIKE an asswhole. SO quit it."

Something like that?

I was pushed around as a kid. A LOT! Beaten up, too. Mugged. Robbed. Threatened. Humiliated. Almost daily for about 2 years in one certain school in Cleveland. And there was NOTHING I could do, because that behavior was 'normal' for the time and the place.
1959? Sounds about right...
"If I'd had a rocket-launcher" I'd have blown the fucking place up.

As the Cookie Crumbles: AIEEE! The Stoopit! It Burns!

One of my favorite political put-downs ever was administered in the early part of the 19th Century by arguably the most intelligent man of the age, and one ot the top three or four conrtenders for the honor off the smartest feller EVER--John Stuart Mill (Spoke English, French, German, Latin, and Greek before he was FIVE, among other things--folks who study such stuff reckon his IQ by our standards today would have scored well above 240)... Well anyhow, Mill said (roughly): "Not all Conservatives are stupid people. But the vast majority of truly stupid people are Conservatives.."

I was reminded of this when I saw a link on the FBook the other day which piqued my interest.

"Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice"

YOU COULD HEAR THE HOWLS. They HATE stuff like this down at the Family Values Council and Teabagger Central. Like when the DHS inadvertently studied the links of right-wingers to 'terrorist acts?' Man, the bellows of the bulls balls being busted were audible for 1300 fuuking miles.

IT gets better!

"Low-intelligence children are more likely to be racist adults," a controversial study explained, "due to the simplified world view offered by extremism" which matches their reduced cognitive capacities for dealing with subtlety and uncertainty.

And, it turns out, the same is apparently true of people espousing fundamentalist religious views: they're dumber, on average, than people who don't wallow in faith. The faithful are more likely to be among the less intelligent, who are more likely to be ignorant racist butt-holes. I've got links to both studies on the blog.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody," Nosek said.

Well, fuukin DUH! sez yer pal, Dr. Woody...who is still laughing at the discomfiture of the folks stung by this. Yeah that's gonna get right under the skin of the dumb, fucking right-wing racists...

It is interesting that, so often in the way of these things, this finding is almost the diametrically opposite to that purported in the mid 90s by Hernnstein and Murray, in their controversial (and ultimately rejected, by responsible scholarship) book, "The Bell Curve," produced explicitly to buttress the Neo-Con/CorpoRat/Privatization education agenda, about which I could go on at length, but will for now refrain. They claimed there was a "genetic" correlation between race and poor performance on standardized tests.

Since Hernnstein and Murray published (in '94), the academy has utterly eviscerated and discredited "The Bell Curve," the pretensions of which were so intellectually fraudulent and dishonest that Stephen J. Gould deconstructed them in "The Mismeasure of Man," fully 10 years BEFORE Herrnstein & Murry ever even formulated their "meta-analytic" design for the service of the Neo-Con education revolution.

If you haven't read Gould's book, you should do so. It's a lively and entertaining, and very enlightening account of the journey that "psychometrics" has undergone on its way to becoming the DEFINING discipline of public education.

Psychometrics? You don't know the word? Oh.

It's what the people who do it call "testing."

And you truly needn't bother with "The Bell Curve" except as an historical novelty and and book-length example of "begging of the question," that is assuming what is under dispute.

But AIEEEE, Hippies! The Stooooopit. It burns. Make it stop...Or I'll not be able to seeya at the beach...

As the Cookie Crumbles (1/26/12): Post Mortem

I'll be honest: I didn't watch brave Sir Barry's annual address on the State of the Nation, last night. I simply refuse. I have endured 10 presidents in my lifetime, and in these things, nothing ever changes. There are the usual, stale, patriotic tropes, depleted analogies, the exhausted metaphors and sincere exhortations to reclaim our national spirit, all of which have grown to ring hollowly, emptily out from the speakers, as if spoken by nebulous, rapturous evanescent orators detached entirely from reality. "Justice?" Where is "justice?" How can they talk about "justice," even rhetorically? It is as extinct as the carrier pigeon.

One can say, once again, if nothing else, Sir Barry gives goood speech. His melliflouous voice, with its cadences reminiscent of Sunday preaching, and his skillful and adroit use of language are the fruits of years of careful work and refinement. I remember Joe Biden said he was clean, presentable, and erudite. He still is.

I gathered my notes for this review from secondary sources. There were several themes, all of which lent themselves to the 'campaign' tenor of the event, and the 'populist tone' which this glib epitome of the coordinator class tries to project. I asm going to focus on two, related themes.

Fairness: Much was made of the disparity between the tax rates paid by common folks and those paid by the far more fortunate few. Sir Barry made some points by suggesting a top rate for people with incomes over a $1million/year of 30 percent. That is actually a REDUCTION, however, since the top marginal rate today is--wait for it---already THIRTY FIVE PERCENT.

BUT: If he were truly serious (bwahahahaha) about rationalizing the tax structure, he'd have introduced the idea of a "Financial Transactions Tax" on all "securities" (stocks, bonds, etc) and/or money/instrument trading schemes in the amount of 2 mils on the dollar, net value, on every transaction over, say, $10,000.

With such a tax in place, there would be enough money to fund a national, guaranteed-care, health care provision system, cradle to grave, for every person in the country.

But it makes better politics, I guess, to make the populist appeal to screw the arrogant bastards than to put the system to the use of the people...Heaven fucking forfend.

Then there was Competitiveness -- Shazama said he wants to "create more jobs and improve US workers' competitiveness." And I cringe and my tailfeathers curl under when I hear that shit.

Here's where you can tell he's blowin smoke up yer ass!

The phrase "improve competitiveness," like "increase productivity," is nothing but code for the eternal Bosses mantra of "reduce workers' wages and benefits, cripple unions, and end regulations" so that USer labor costs are comparable to those in the rest of the world.

So, if I read it aright, he means to increase the number of shitty jobs, lower wages and benefits, and turn the country over to the CorpoRats??

In what I must say was hubris even for the President, he extolled the USofA as "The Indispensable country." Stuff like that is "why they hate us." Because by making that claim about US, he's directly implying that other nations aren't indespensable, are in fact disposable or expendable. I gotta think that sets some teeth on edge in other capitols.

Then there were the usual discursive farts about how the wasted trillions of dollars and the million or so Iraqi dead made us safer; in the same vein, there was the pipe-dream of 'safe' gas-shale extraction, aka fracking. Of course, he's also extolled the virtues of clean coal, too.

So I was less than impressed, and I'm dumb-founded by the euphoria and triumphal zeal that attended it. But folks often take me to task for being negative, so I've got a little list of what I'd try to do if I ran the Zoo:

I would advocate a guaranteed annual income, enough to sustain a person in dignity whether they can find work or not. There will probably never again be "enough" jobs to keep everybody working who needs a job. There then would be no need for the "minimum wage," which makes sense because net jobs are disappearing faster than the people retiring from them can get aweay, and they WON'T be replaced.

I advocate TIGHT--down-right draconian--regulation of industrial and work-place safety. I spent some time in the construction binness in the old days and "cavalier" doesn't begin to touch corpoRat attitudes about disposable workers.

I advocate super stringent environmental legislation and regulation. I advocate for the corporate death penalty for frequent/repeat violators. I advocate imprisonment of violators and the termination of their businesses.

I'd declare that I knew ALL businesses are always slyly on the look out for ways to cut expensive corners, or to avoid regulations, or to escape taxes, to cheat workers, to short clients and customers and to escape detection. The larger the business, the greater the chances are for misfeasance. And so I'd double the number of attorneys investigating shabby/shoddy business practices.

I'd advocate for the overturning of Citizens United, in any way I could, and the repeal of CorpoRat personhood.

I also advocate a BAN on GMO seed; For a nationalized energy sector, and FOR MUCH stronger regulation on the "finance" industry, including returning to the principles abandoned when Rubin, Clinton, Summers, Greenspan, and Gramm killed Glass-Steagall in '99.

AND FOR a 'profits' cap, and as I said before a "financial-transactions tax" (2 mil per dollar) on stock, bond, or money transactions.

Just so's you know I, too, can think positive thoughts, hippies.

Tell me whatcha think when I see you at the beach...

HN & S, Jan 23, 2012: Run-Off

Two years ago this week, the SCROTUS decision in the Citizens United case handed the body politic of the USofA over to the tender mercies of the CorpoRats, by granting them 1st Amendment protections, and removing restrictions on CorpoRat spending to influence USer elections. Brave Sir Barry has dithered ever since.

IF he were TRULY desirous of combatting this political malignancy, there's AT LEAST two things Shamwow COULD HAVE DONE, AT ANY TIME in the last two years!!!--Without ANY authorization or approval from ANYBODY, and which COULD have ALREADY vitiated somewhat the poisonous toxicity of the Citizens United opinion:

1) Promulgated an executive order REQUIRING ALL and ANY corporations that do business with the government to disclose their political spending, beginning TOMORROW!

And 2) he COULD have been using the presidential bully-pulpit and declared his strong support for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics permanently and/or eliminate corporate Personhood.

We all KNOW the skeevy, jug-eared, grinning huckster WON'T do ANY of that and, since no such orders or advocacy will be forthcoming, we're stuck trying to pass an amendment, even without St. Barry's imprimatur.

The difficulties of enacting them notwithstanding, there is but one true KEY--the Holy Grail-- for such an amendment: public financing.

WHICH is the key virtue of the proposal Dennis Kucenish advanced last week. Of the several amendments in the hopper, Kucenich's appears to be the simplest: It forbids private contributions of any kind to federal elections.. Cuts right to the chase.

On another site, somebody complained: "Public financing means officially sanctioned candidates, doesn't it?"

Nah, done properly, candidates chosen this way wouldn't be "officially," but "publically!" vetted...Here's how I think it would work: think "run-offs:"

Level One: anybody who wants to run for office starts with x-dollars to spend dispensed by the state. No other funding is allowed. They use that money to get noticed, win support for their ideas. There's a vote. The top 10 advance. There's more money. There's another run-off. The top three advance. There's more money. There's a final ballot. There's a winner. It's public and transparent every step of the way!

Finance it?

We take the money it costs to run one carrier battle group for four years and every four years, that money is dedicated to the "presidential election project."

Every two years, we take the money it costs to support an Army division, or a bomber wing, and that goes to Congressional elections.

Seriously, hippies:

Other than providing for the general welfare and defending the borders, what better purpose IS THERE on which to spend our money than the selection and election of representatives who will write our laws and regulate our lives?

We can talk about what we're gonna run for when I see you at the beach...Paz! Back atcha, Winstone!

As The Cookie Crumbles: Corpses

Whenever there's some new revelation or fresh evidence of human stupidity, depravity, intolerance and/or other ugliness--especially if it's our countryfolk who appear to have committed it, there are veritable GALES of messages desperately, beseechingly wailing "Aren't we better than this?"

To even a novice student of history such as I, the answer, based on our record--which includes atrocities of varying scope and scale as far back as the colonization of the continent--obviously is "No. We are NOT "better than this," our vaunted exceptionality notwithstanding.

But NO ONE is.

This discussion became germane last week, in view of the flurry of emotion and outrage unleashed with the fotos of some Marines pissing on the corpses of Afghans they'd recently killed. The howls were as loud as they were predictable. How can we descend to "their" level, the plaintive cries demand? We're AMERICANS, they proclaim, exceptionally. We are better than that...

I want to ask, "better than what?" USer soldiers have committed far worse atrocities than merely urinating on the bodies of the fallen. Col. Chivington's Colorado militia cut the breasts off living Cheyenne women after raping and murdering their children.

More recently, nearly 60 percent of the remains of Japanese soldiers repatriated after the war from the battle zones in the Marianna Islands--Guadalcanal is one of them--were returned withOUT skulls. The war in the Pacific was fought almost entirely under the unspoken order to take no prisoners; only one in about 50 combat vets of the period report having killed prisoners, but more than 60 percent reported having witnessed it.

In Vietnam, US troops pretty routinely took ears off their kills; also, fingers. Some took penises, I've been told. We all heard about My Lai, and the massacre there. It was NOT an isolated or a unique incident, by the accounts I've heard.

You gotta understand. In war, there is no "better" way; there are no rules. And soldiers have desecrated the corpses of their fallen enemies as long there have been victorious soldiers and fallen enemy corpses to defile. Warfare REQUIRES soldiers to dehumanize their enemies. You can't get fired u enough if there is a shred of their humanity still to be considered.

Though I'm a vet, I served only on the periphery of the Vietnam war. I was never in a combat situation--"in the SHIT" as they called it... My 'evidence' is all hear-say, but the way I heard folks tell it who have been, when the guy or guys trying to kill YOU, lies dead at your feet, and you killed him instead, you wanna dance on his face, cut off his head and shit in his throat. That's how it was described to me.

It's NOT 'un-natural,' except to the extent that WAR itself is unnatrural. It's primal. Why do you think Achilles dragged poor, dead Hector around the walls of Troy? Homer wasn't just making shit up to make his poem spicier or more popular with the Greeks. He was describing a common, existential fact.

Only the names of the killers and their victims change.

What you should be upset about is that the guys doing the pissing were there doing the KILLING in the first place, and they were doing it in YOUR and OUR names. Still, after 10 years.

How can citizens demand extraordinary compassion of our soldiers when we do not extend it to our own citizens?

We are not a "civilized" nation, and will NEVER be, as long as the State encourages taking private profit from the immiseration (the imprisonment, illness, injury, disability or death) of its citizens.

When we cannot or will not take proper care of our own, will not protect the most vulnerable from the predations of profit in their darkest and weakest hours, where do we get the chutzpah to complain when OUR soldiers behave inhumanely to their adversaries corpses?

They did no more to those corpses than our own gummint does to the weakest of us, pissing on us when we're down...

[This post is my most visited, so far, on the Worldwide Hippies YouTube page. Last time I looked, there were more than 200 hits! Woohoo!]

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

It is probably unrealistic in the EXTREME to imagine that a functioning oligarchy in full cry might permit the continued, unmodified, uninterfered operation of so fundamentally liberating a technology as the Intertubez has become, and still remains. We need only regard how television was co-opted, and its liberatory poitential was turned aside, to become--along with the rest of its flickering-screened scions--the most POTENT agent of propaganda promulgation ever invented.

I regard the present structure of the Intertubez as I regard the Constitution: It works pretty well as it stands, and fucking around with it pretty much invites the bullies in, so leave it the fuck alone.

--Woody, Jan 18, 2012

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.