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Tea For Two

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, News, Politics, Videos Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , September 2nd, 2010 @ 2:07 pm

Required reading:

This Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross hit the web yesterday. Let’s hope it does for her career what the VF profile of General Stanley McChrystal did for his.

Jane Mayer’s profile of the Kochs, David and Charles, in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago also helps to put a little sunlight on the monsters behind the Tea Party. If nothing else, it shows that Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only evil supervillian trying to take over the world. Now we just need a real-life James Bond to take these motherfuckers out.

Matt Taibbi is up to his usual snuff with a Rolling Stone post about the recent primary elections and the influence the Tea Party did and did not have on the outcome, and the insidious race-baiting of Murdoch’s FOX News.

Christopher Hitchens proves that he isn’t dead yet by giving the ol’ one-two to the Beckapalooza of last weekend. As infuriating as he is, we are going to sorely miss Hitch when he is gone. (If you’ve got the time, I also recommend this long video featuring interviews with teabaggers at the Beckapalooza for an up-close-and-personal look at the terminally stupid)

The always-funny “stupid customer” website Not Always Right.com had a little precautionary tale about what happens when teabaggers show up to vote.

And here’s a little history lesson about the origins of the Tea Party and its ilk:

Your Daily Infographics

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, News, Politics Tagged with , , , September 1st, 2010 @ 1:47 pm

First a small bit of context for the first one: I was simply gobsmacked by this Huffington Post story (pointed out by Jack Cluth) that twigged out something that went unreported in the “20% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim” story from last week: 52% of Republicans believe that Osama “probably or definitely” wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the United States. I will let you ponder the rank stupidity of that while you look at this Venn diagram (via Scott Underwood)


(original source)

Graphic #2 is, as I say, only marginally related, as it is more specifically about the Iraq War, but considering the lame bit of political theater from Obama last night, it’s worth recalling:

Make of these data points what you will, my friends.

The Keyboard Stylings of Johann Hari

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, News Tagged with , , , , , August 31st, 2010 @ 10:52 am

Man, lately you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an article by Johann Hari somewhere. If, by some chance, you have been swinging your dead cat and missing, Hari is a young British journalist, who rose to fame while at Cambridge about 10 years ago, and, like a lot of contemporary journos, is known for his political activism and advocacy as well as his writing. He’s won a bunch of awards including the 2008 George Orwell Prize for political writing and the 2010 Martha Gelhorn Prize for war reporting.

Personally, I rather like his writing. He’s a lot more versatile than some older and well-established political journalists, but a lot less “watch me, I’m amazing” than people like Malcolm Gladwell. Here are thee recent articles in three different publications which give you a sense of his versatility:

This review in the New York Times of a new biography of Winston Churchill looks at the fundamental contradiction of Churchill’s own Victorian/Edwardian worldview versus the repudiation of the very same ideals as re-interpreted by Nazism decades later and Churchill’s seeming embrace of democratic ideals in response.

At his regular gig as a commentator for the British newspaper The Independent, Hari looks back at the Good Old Days of the 1990s and 2000s and the way management consultancy firms basically bullshitted their way to extreme profitability and helped to created the failed corporations that litter the landscape today.

And at The Huffington Post, he has this depressing piece that sort of restates an obvious situation: global warming is getting worse, but nobody is really willing to do a damn thing about it, even if they aren’t busy denying its very existence.

Racism Isn’t Strictly American

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, News, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , August 25th, 2010 @ 11:40 am

Topic #1 for the month of August has been and continues to be the ugly return of racism in American politics. The very thin veneer of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been driving the “Ground Zero Mosque” story grows thinner and thinner every day, as the video of the black guy who was mobbed by the anti-Muslim protesters in New York clearly demonstrates, and as the nonsense about Barack Obama being Muslim has now seemingly infected somewhere around a quarter of the entire population. It’s “Scary Black People” Month 24/7 on FOX, as Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, and “Muslim” is just the code-word-du-jour for a certain word that rhymes with Tigger.

But racially-tinged politics and the threat of ethnic violence has been popping up all over Europe, as well. Writing at Project Syndicate, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder decries the return of violent anti-Semitism and a series of incidents in the Swedish city of Malmö. Confounding the issue, he says, is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism playing into the hands of anti-Israel Muslims living in European countries, even as Muslims themselves find their own battles with intolerance.

International financier George Soros also has an article at Project Syndicate about the efforts of a number of European governments to expel the Roma people from their countries. The Roma are more commonly, though derogatorily, known as “Gypsies”, and have been a persecuted ethnic minority for centuries. Not unlike the Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, the Roma have no home country to speak of. They mostly come from Southeastern Europe, but through diaspora have ended up in just about every country. The Roma are highly stigmatized as a “criminal element” throughout Europe, but the recent actions in France and Italy to expel them are unusual in targeting the ethnicity as a whole as a criminal group, sadly reminiscent of pre-war imperial times.

War, Peace, And Whatever The Fuck This Is

0 comments By Brian Filed in News, Rants Tagged with , , , August 19th, 2010 @ 9:56 am

Of all the meaningless gestures from the Obama Administration regarding our illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, none is more meaningless than the declaration that “the last combat troops have left Iraq”.

Fifty thousand troops remain in Iraq and the number of mercenaries used in lieu of U.S. military personnel will nearly triple from 2,700 to 7,000. An American military presence in Iraq is unlikely to disappear for decades to come. Just ask the Germans, who still have 68,000 American soldiers in their country even though their war ended 65 years ago. Or the Japanese, who have 47,000 U.S. troops. Or the Koreans, with 37,000. “They need us to maintain order”, “they need us to defend them”, “the strategic value of forward placement is critical to our national security”, “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, and so on. The lies evolve as the situation changes, but there is always some rationalization for permanent occupation.

John McCain had the temerity to say this on Twitter: “I think President George W. Bush deserves some credit for victory.”

Somebody should kick John McCain in the teeth. While it’s not the first time the United States trumped up some bullshit reason to invade another country, the outright lies from Bush and his allies used to gin up a case for a completely unnecessary war are nothing short of war crimes themselves. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tony Blair, every last one of them should be hauled in front of the same sort of kangaroo court that Saddam Hussein was tried in, summarily found guilty, and hanged for their crimes against humanity. Crowing triumph after seven years of unadulterated misuse of power should be seen as the craven act of a coward and a bully, and the bootlicker McCain deserves to have some sense smacked into him.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama received a great deal of criticism for using the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig”, but the news spin on this troop reduction is exactly that. Meanwhile, Obama himself deserves a pretty good smack for continuing and expanding the war in Afghanistan, now nearly ten years old and with even less legitimacy than the invasion of Iraq.

There will, of course, never be any proper accounting for all of this. The trillions of dollars squandered, the lives lost or ruined, the incalculable damage done to not just the people of Iraq and Afghanistan but also the people of this country. But neither should there ever be a banner raised in triumph, a head held high in honor, or a page written in history that portrays these last seven years and however many more to come as anything less than a disgrace and a shame.

The Luckiest Men On The Face Of The Earth

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, News, Science Tagged with , , August 18th, 2010 @ 11:15 am

The news media were quick to grab onto the story yesterday about brain trauma causing problems that resemble the debilitations caused by ALS because of the suggestion that perhaps Lou Gehrig did not actually have ALS, which has come to be known in this country as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. This possibility, by the way, is not actually mentioned in the study, and there is absolutely no evidence that Gehrig suffered from the type of brain trauma being studied rather than ALS, but the media LOVES a good headline better than it loves any actual semblance of reporting the real story. Witness the insanity of the “Ground Zero Mosque” story.

Anyway, I wanted to make the humble suggestion that if it is ever determined that Lou Gehrig did not have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis then the term “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” be retired right alongside his #4 in Yankee Stadium and that it henceforth be remembered as “Stephen Hawking’s Disease”. Hawking suffers from a motor neurone disease that is a variant of ALS, which was first diagnosed in 1963, when he was 21. His slow degeneration is very atypical; Tony Judt, who died two weeks ago, had been diagnosed with ALS in 2008, and the usual prognosis for someone with ALS is 3-5 years. But I think it’s worth arguing that Hawking’s perseverance in his groundbreaking theoretical work and his visibility as a user of adaptive technology and role model for others with debilitating diseases have been much longer-lived and widely known than the achievements of Gehrig. That’s not to diminish Gehrig’s legacy as an athlete at all, nor to try to limit Hawking’s deserved recognition to just his illness, but to recognize that as the first man helped to define public understanding of this horrible disease, so has the second one helped the public to see that even the severest limitation can be transcended.

Oof

0 comments By Brian Filed in Amuse, News Tagged with , , August 17th, 2010 @ 11:30 am

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