I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind.
And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like. The conservative movement has always had an image problem.
Pre-Gingrich and ‘Contract with America’, a conservative conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm’s length.
Now the driving intellectual force of a conservative is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars…
The new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.
a loan shark society
Iceland’s national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.
Michael Collins:
Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks.
Covering the debt would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.
a primitive capitalist past
Enough Already: Venting Over Four Decades of Right-Wing Activism:
Today, Richard Nixon would be considered a flaming liberal. In Nixon’s day, Barack Obama would have passed as a typical conservative…
All this right-wing nonsense might be somewhat understandable if it were necessary to provide for a good life; however, the economy is becoming as dysfunctional as the ridiculous political system.
Watching people rebel politically or in the streets in Iceland and Greece, while people in the United States express their frustrations with the tea party, makes me noxious.
local swaps
As counties, cities and towns linger toward default:
But even when you don’t combine venal officials to the underhanded financier, you routinely find kissing cousins, chump officials hire venal advisor in cahoots with underhanded financier.
“The basic problem is the swap adviser gets paid only if there is a transaction — an unbelievable conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s the adviser who is supposed to protect you, but the swap adviser has a vested interest in seeing something happen.”
And that is as good as it gets.
Remember, there is no penalty for screwing up in a conventional manner.
again and again we go
Way-y-y before the web, there’s letterhead.
For example, the suitable header of Nikola Tesla, circa 1900.
just go ahead and teleport
JP Rangaswami says:
Building things is a human instinct. Taking things apart is a human instinct. Rebuilding things is a human instinct.
When you see battles, don’t assume that the battles are about them. The battles are about you. Your right to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them.
The right of your children to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them. Battles are about generations that follow you and me.
trouble making numbers
Pauline, writing down the words:
I must confess, numbers baffle me. They’re mysterious.
They multiply and divide with impunity, they add up to something else or take themselves away. When they are statistics, they lie. And when they are money, they disappear.
As for fractions, they make me fractious.
kill the bill
Habits:
Foreign Policy.
“The U.S. military spends $1.75 billion every day, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.”
control daylight
Switch windows on or off to radically reduce energy use.
Sage Electrochromics, Inc, a Minnesota-based inventor of an international breakthrough glass innovation – a window that can be switched on or off to reject up to 98% of the sun’s heat and light on demand – has received a financial shot in the arm from the Department of Energy for a total of $103 million to mass produce energy-saving glass.
“This investment will help cut utility bills, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs our economy needs,” said Energy Secretary Chu in granting the loan guarantee.
Breakthrough technology. Glass switched from clear to dark at the push of a button.
climate astrology
The South Dakota legislature has declared, by majority vote:
That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect (sic) world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative. [link]
rats clear landmines
Bart Weetjens, a rodent enthusiast, realized he could train rats to sniff out land mines. The rats run along wires between two handlers. When they smell a landmine, they stop, sniff the ground and begin to dig, signaling an explosive.
Next? Smuggled drugs and medical screening. Cheaper than dogs.
re-engineer the web
A former director of national intelligence says:
“We need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.”
In other words, we need to spy on everyone.
Oh. It’s important to know he now works for a spy firm.
sick or not sick
A person in whom the social feeling is at all developed, conscious as a being,
of course pays regard to others, and cannot want all the rest defeated.
One day this era will be known as the period of dishonesty.
this is looting
How ‘free market’ was turned into profoundly destructive behavior.
It’s been a long time a-comin’, this Crisis.
Invisible hand?
Free market?
It’s really scams, rip-offs and brazen looting.
Absurd complacency and happy talk.
Worthless cheer from the glossy clueless.
Travesty speculation.
Cooked figures and oblivious economists.
The outcome of this pseudo-scientific botching is an imposing corpus of pretentious quackery that somehow elevates unregulated ‘free markets’ into the sole mechanism of economic activity.
We are supposed to believe that by some alchemical process, maximum indulgence of human greed results in maximum prosperity for all.
Officially Sanctioned Thievery On An Epic Scale.
tiny box of one
They can’t organize because there is nothing for them to organize.
A: Having a community allows communities to organize.
B: Lack of community prevents communities from organizing.
C: Once people could self-organize. Once there were strong communities which could pressure officials. But no longer.
D: There are no strong, cohesive communities.
to cure reality
Our civilization is collapsing. Why shouldn’t we feel bad?
We’ve exhausted the natural resources our planet took a billion years to store up, we live in suffocating, overcrowded, polluted, horrifically stressful conditions, and we have launched the planet into the 6th global extinction.
Depression is a sane response to a crazy world.
Gary Greenberg: The diagnosis is detached from where depression might come from.
More than 14 million suffer from major depression, 3 million suffer from minor depression longer than two years. These numbers are ridiculous — not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness.
“Well, if people are encouraged to think of external circumstances, then they may be more empowered to take action.”
Of course, as Mind Hacks points out, “One difficulty with their proposal, however, is that while they admit that social problems are one of the most common triggers for depression, they miss out the many studies that have found depressed people and, especially depressed people who ruminate, are reliably worse at social problem solving.”
do we ask?
What is civilization?
Is it doing business? Exxon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs? Or is it the rule of law, social order, clean water, sewers and waste disposal, a reliable food supply, literacy, mathematics, science and technology, art, architecture, public spaces and public forums?
family values
I wonder when America will confront pathology and be done with it?
California state Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), a fierce opponent of gay rights and top organizer of anti-gay marriage rallies is arrested for DUI after leaving a gay nightclub with an unidentified man in a state vehicle.
As Jon Stewart points out, “Jim Bunning didn’t block the extension of unemployment benefits as a principled stand against fiscal responsibility — he’s just a dick.”
universe is slacking
C’mon! Get going, rest of the universe!
who is poor?
In all, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 7 million more than official poverty reports.
The official measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care, housing, utilities or geographical variations in living costs.
first intestinal census
Trillions of bacteria live in our mouth, skin, lungs and especially the gut. There are 10 times more microbes inside our body than there are our own human cells !
1000 species live inside humans, the vast majority recently discovered. One individual might carry at least 160 different species.
thinking drinking
- Mothers who worried their children might become drinkers had kids that were significantly more likely to drink.
- Alcohol is so embedded in most cultures that perceptions and reality intermix in surprising ways.
extending implosion
Duh. And that would be because…?
This is especially troubling because the economy is still such a long way from being healthy.
Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist, estimates that 10.6 million jobs would need to materialize immediately to return the job market to its condition when the Great Recession began.
For it to get there four years from now, the economy would have to add 316,000 jobs a month. That pace would be faster than in any four-year stretch of the 1990s boom.
Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. That’s what most economists thought. That’s what everybody who didn’t have his head up his ass thought.
bang for the buck
Mark Zandi – chief economist for Moody’s – has calculated which stimulus work.
One more time, Bush and Republicans behind the line. [click large]
starve the real beast
- Every time you give a bank one cent of your money, you are simply short-changing yourself.
- There’s no reason to continue to pay your bank; it should be paying you.
- Move your money to find better rates.
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