I wonder if there will be a "debate" on this one

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Kerry Doesn't Rule Out Boots On The Ground If Syria 'Implodes'

I wonder what he doesn't rule out when America implodes.

Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

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Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

Voodoo economics

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In a dream last week I was granted an important revelation:

We now have more empirical evidence for the existence of real-world zombies than we do for the validity of supply-side economics.

First came Miami: the case of a naked man eating most of another man's face. Then Texas: a mother accused of killing her newborn, eating part of his brain and biting off three of his toes. Then Maryland, a college student telling police he killed a man, then ate his heart and part of his brain.

It was different in New Jersey, where a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police. They pepper-sprayed him, but he was not easily subdued.

Update: post title changed to the obvious, which I started to do several times during composition but forgot.

When government "partners" with industry

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The US Constitution assigns to Congress the authority to regulate commerce. The idea that the Commerce Clause is widely understood to mean that the federal government should encourage or promote the development of commerce doesn't seem outlandish to most of us. However, the idea that the government should be a "partner" of industry is fairly new, at least in America. What that means, practically speaking since the Reagan Revolution, is that Industry (with a capital I) considers it the duty of the federal government to remove barriers to corporate profit-making irrespective of the justice of social usefulness of doing so. That expectation has come to include the even more dicey concept that government operations should be conveyed into the hands of Business (capital B) for purposes of "efficiency," which is a euphemism for wealth transfer from the US taxpayer into corporate bank accounts.

This idea was expressed most elegantly by Robert Kennedy Jr. in a speech I heard broadcast on my local pubic radio station a coupla months ago. Asked by an audience member to explain his understanding of the controlling legal ideology of the Roberts Supreme Court (the current one), Kennedy quoted his law partner: "corporations always win."

When it's person versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

When it's government versus the corporation, the corporation wins.

And when it's the person versus government, government wins. This happens because government is the "partner" of industry, whose job it is to look after the legal interests of the corporation. In general terms, their interests have largely merged over the past few decades. Industry is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of America; the federal government is the Executive Vice President for Human Capital.

Republicans are at least candid about this; Democrats are not. That, in my opinion, makes the Democratic Party the more detestable of the two.

I offer the above as a spirochete's-eye view of some mental synthesis I've been working through in order to reboot my thinking process. I think all of us could benefit by trying to refresh our perspectives on who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Today, for reasons of news topicality, I'm thinking that the typical Democrat plays Joe Paterno to the Republican Jerry Sandusky. The Democrat goes through the motions of doing the right thing in the eyes of his "base." But everything he does is for the aggrandizement of The Corporation. Any way you look at it, humanity is considered only an incidental feature of the environment, and one that The Corporation won't miss when it's gone.

The Cheesehead Revolution

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From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

September 11, 2010 [updated]

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Most commemoration of the violent "Muslim" attacks on New York City and elsewhere, which occurred on the subject date 9 years ago, just leaves me wondering. Ccreeped out and revolted, too.

Most TYPICAL AMERICANS are expected, from what I can tell, to believe that this EVIL MUSLIM  force majeure from the skies "essentially free[d] both parties from liability or obligation [because it was an] extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties... [that] prevent[ed] one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract." That is, THE CONTRACT.

And furthermore, in order to visibly document one's strong approval of how one or both of those parties did perform, even though they didn't, TYPICAL AMERICANS are expected, from what I can tell, to publicly express strong, heartfelt patriotic opinions about American righteousness in the face of those attacks. And in order to meet the approval of TRUE PATRIOTS, though, everyone instinctively knows it is best to pretend, fetishistically, that we are very sad, or very angry, or very defiant, or very solemn about these events even though we, ourselves, were not harmed on that date; and no one we know lost limb or life, either. And even though all of us are constantly indoctrinated by corporate-sponsored media to understand that the East Coast, north of the Confederate States of America, is a decadent hive of scum and villainy. As well as some other places.

Therefore, I strongly recommend that you read this recap, by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), documenting how mainstream corporate media rapidly volunteered to serve as a cat's paw for America's right-wing "assignment editors" as they fabricated false connections, slanderously, between EVIL MUSLIMS and AMERICAN LIBERALS:

At least one commentator blamed the left for the attacks themselves. Columnist Steven Schwartz (New York Post, 9/12/01) wrote that "the anti-globalist rioters seek to intimidate world capitalism into shutting down altogether, and the distance between breaking the windows of McDonald's to achieve that end and blowing up the World Trade Center is pretty damned narrow."

I think this FAIR article is important because, to me, it undeniably illustrates the core sickness of so many self-identified Republicans, conservatives, Tea Partiers, rednecks, and "patriots" today: the readiness to either seize or create opportunities to slander, silence, and if necessary eliminate people THE OTHER. That is, everyone who looks like they do not belong to THE TRIBE. Routinely, the opportunity to vilify THE OTHER is driven entirely by paranoic fanasy or prima facie hate. And journalists are paid to pretend that they are blind and deaf to this.

In advance, I apologize for the churlishness with which I may respond to any assertion that "both sides do it." No, they don't. In America, they really really don't. But the Kens and Barbies who staff our nation's network and cable news shops pretend that they don't know that. They are key members of the ideological lynch mob that has held this nation in fear and moral atrophy for 3 decades.

Update: here's another example of a perverted lunatic spinning slanderous "theories" about liberals with full impunity granted corporate journalists. Although he immediately quit his position as Georgia representative and Speaker of the House, in disgrace, upon being re-elected in 1998, Newt Gingrich is still highly regarded by the polite establishment as a political visionary. He claims, whether in sincerity or deception, that in effect Barack Obama is de Mau Mau incarnate. His motives mostly don't matter; what matters is that he's still portrayed as a policy expert and political bellwether by the media lie machines.

Editor's notes: (1) Rubber Crutch's decision to post this item on September 12, not September 11, was fully intentional. (2) Yes, he did knowingly begin this counter-commemoration post with a strange but genuine Wikipedia/Fifty50 "mashup." (3) This post is likely to need subsequent editorial review for after-hours booboos that elude detection at this hour. (4) Thank you for your attention to these matters.

Hedley Lamarr syndrome

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With respect to the so-called "paralysis of analysis," in the words of Hedley Lamarr:

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

I haven't lost interest in offering my interpretation of current events, but I've been temporarily exhausted by the effort. From the peanut gallery where I've watched the world turn for more than 5.5 decades, current events are simply unprecedented. Therefore, they are inexplicable from my conventional perspective and analytical framework. Part of my problem, and maybe yours, too, if you have one, is that there are too many sensational data points to comprehend. Analysis --- the process of understanding a large, complex whole by breaking it into smaller, comprehensible parts --- fails us as our daily experience becomes an atomistic horrorshow of disturbing factoids lashed around by Big Lies that are driving half of us to insanity and the other half to impotence. And those factoids, of course, are served up fresh every day by Big Media, and they inflame even those of us who keep our distance from mass media.

During my relative silence here I've been trying to synthesize a big picture or long view that might begin to account for the actual or imminent failure of every major institution this country has evolved over 2.5 centuries. Without abandoning any well considered opinions I've offered here, I've become certain that the die for this epoch was cast 30 years ago and we're now well under way toward Destination: Inevitable, wherever and whenever that may be located. I've been trying to elevate my inquiries to many levels above Mr. President Jelly Bean because I don't believe that America ever was or ever will be all about Him, his homespun values, or his worship of The Corporation as the ultimate organizing principle of society. History will view him as the vulgar homewrecker of U.S. constitutional democracy. I can't see myself disowning those opinions outside of a torture chamber, yet our modern history is no more sacred than the history of the Roman Empire, or Egyptian antiquity, or the rise and fall of Native American civilization. All of us are vessels (or flotsam, take your pick) in a tide of global history, and the tide happens to be rushing out toward the unimaginable ends of the Flat Earth. But it will well up again, after 50 years, or 100, or 200 --- maybe 400 if Western history is any indicator.

Synthesis is where I'm headed; I'm asking myself what this chaos might add up to if we try using a longer view of history to rise above the hurricane of scary-looking events. My first stop is 14th century Europe. Without reading some medieval European history, you'd have no idea how modern the 1300s look to us... or how medieval we look compared with, for example, The Enlightenment. That's where I'm headed for the moment.

Irony, presumably unintended

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Herein please find a special educational supplement concerning proper use of the term "irony," intended for Big Rock Head specifically and the greater Fifty50 community generally, courtesy of the Iowa "Tea Party" via TPM. You see, BRH, the irony of the scene depicted below is that President Obama is in fact a moderate, centrist U.S. President while mainstream Republican Senate "leaders" such as John Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Judd Gregg, John Cornyn, and Tom Coburn are right-wing radicals who thrive on the bitterness of fearful, naive "Real Americans" who they trick into believing that the unemployed and chronically impoverished people just have it too darned easy in life while our wealthy elites need even more tax relief than George Bush gave them 9 years ago.

A casual reading of any impartial 20th century history text will reveal that both Hitler and Stalin derived unheard-of totalitarian powers in part by aligning corporate management and strategic objectives (and financial interests) with those of their respective party apparatus. The differences in tactics of Hitler and Stalin were essentially irrelevant considering the enormity of the results they achieved, such as continual wars of aggression and industrial-scale mass murder. Can any of my shorties out there in Fifty50Land think of any examples from our modern times that resemble the Nazi and Communist merger of corporate, political, and military interests to prey on the fearful and naive? Do tell.

Editor's note: the photo above is by Deb Nicklay and copyrighted by the Associated Press and the Globe Gazette (http://gazetteonline.com/) in Iowa, U.S.A. Fair use is claimed for purposes of social commentary and community education. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

"It's elementary, my dear Watson," sez Gallup

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As seen on Hullabaloo, The Gallup Organization has applied state-of-the-art polling and statistical analysis methods to reveal that Tea Partiers are pretty much nothing more than core right-wing Republicans, if ones who like to act out and pretend they're the heirs to the philosophy of America's founders. If Fifty50 had a "No Shit, Sherlock" department, this revelation would headline it today.

However, I won't disdain Gallup for doing the survey or publicizing the results, because I think it's good that this fact be consecrated as "official" by an organization that establishment types consider to be legitimate. I will, however, disdain any reporting that Gallup's findings are surprising to any politically sentient American.

With regard to parasites

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Previously on Fifty50 --- last night, to be precise --- I compared the decay of our democratic and business institutions (not to mention church congregations) to what happens when a parasite thrives without any natural regulation and ultimately kills its host (and, a bit later, itself). But I'm not a biologist, so my parasitism similes may lack a certain technical "oomph" when critically examined. And with regard to the aforementioned post, there's a certain awkward mixing of parasitism similes and engineering metaphors. (That's one reason I write an E-list blog instead of textbooks.)

A favorite Big Hussein Otis metaphor for our current epoch is the 1960 George Pal film version of The Time Machine, portraying a future in which the hideous, animalistic Morlock society lures the passive, survival-challenged Eloi population to its underground fortress for the slaughter. [Editor's note: social metaphors aside, this is an awesome family film that every household should own, and is perfect for playfully scaring shit out of any 7-year-old who hasn't been raised on slasher movies.] I agree with BHO's assessment.

The Morlocks are an interesting crew. In a sense they're an apex predator, but they employ what might be viewed as a parasitic ranching strategy. (Again, caveat emptor with regard to my incomplete understanding of natural systems; Fifty50's technical monitors may feel free to help with refinement and nuance.) I say "parasitic ranching" because, if memory of the movie serves, the Morlocks provided no inputs to the Eloi flock --- no management was involved --- but simply exploited the atavistic Eloi response to civil defense sirens.  So the Morlocks might think they're the smartest guys in the room, and they probably are. But someone with a more sophisticated perspective, who incidentally is not in the room, can quickly grasp that the Morlocks do not have a sustainable "business model" for at least two reasons. First, lacking any stewardship of their food supply, the Morlocks are certain to exhaust the herd and consequently starve themselves to extinction. Second, it may be possible for the herd to organically develop a resistance to the parasite --- that is, adapt.

I wonder what would happen to our latter-day Morlocks if the Gulf Coast Eloi were to come under the influence of a 21st century Huey Long.

Another editor's note: the publicity photo of Eloi Yvette Mimieux and her Morlock captor, for The Time Machine (1960), is reproduced as fair use for purposes of literary criticism and social commentary. Thank you for your attention to this matter.)

Nonlinear times

The Portland Cement Association defines progressive collapse as "a situation where local failure of a primary structural component(s) leads to the collapse of adjoining members, which in turn leads to additional collapse." This dread phenomenon in structural engineering was the immediate cause of mass casualties in the 1995 right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.*

Progressive collapse also can occur under stresses that are otherwise nominal, but produce catastrophic failure when members or materials have been under-designed or have been subject to accelerated degradation that cannot support a design peak load. [Editor's note: at this point I welcome and invite the intervention of our local mystery technical phenom, who may go by the moniker of Professor Mahatma Kane Jeeves, to correct my imprecisions or to augment my explanations if necessary, or both.] As a general matter, progressive collapse considered a nonlinear event.

Since I first began to grasp the potential magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon oilwell disaster I've felt that this event --- which would probably be containable in an alternate universe in which U.S. democracy can marshal resources to serve the public good about as effectively as it did in the 1930s and '40s --- could start a cascade of environmental, economic, and political failures that industrial age institutions just won't be able to cope with. Our institutions are already run through with stress cracks and fatigue. The human institutions, public and private, have been rotting from the head for 30 or 40 years, and now they're necrotic right through to leech-filled guts. The parasites are killing their hosts. They think it's funny, and that the chaos they create means they're smart. They don't believe the concept of extinction applies to them.

I don't like my own melodramatics any more than I like anyone else's. But just consider how a few major stresses could play out directly, and consider the feedback loops that could get started. We have one of the largest environmental catastrophes of the industrial era, but it's not only making pretty birds oily and dead but also destroying the ecological services that provide income for tens of thousands of families along the "south coast." Meanwhile, rich people will not stand for restoring personal and corporate marginal income tax rates to a level that can sustain emergency government response to natural disasters, industrial disasters, or disastrous levels of U.S. unemployment. Bigots and know-nothings blame their usual suspects. Cracker politicians and infotainment media deliberately inflame them. At this point in U.S. history it is no longer unacceptable to puke hate speech over the public airwaves or in "mainstream" political gatherings:

mass unemployment + inflamed bigotry + paranoia = mob action       Eq (1)

What if the Gulf disaster, perhaps with help from a few hurricanes, makes large portions of the coast, including New Orleans, literally uninhabitable both owing to environmental impacts and the fully played-out impacts of a collapsed regional economy. Is it possible that tens of thousands of people --- or hundreds of thousands --- might be displaced? If so, maybe it's a good thing that we have a nice surplus of (decaying) housing stock; they all can move to California, Vegas, and Florida (at least until the tarballs and dead seabirds reach the latter). And don't forget that if nothing else, the BP blowout will most certainly inflate energy prices. And also don't forget about the conversion of the U.S. banking system into a multi-level marketing plan, like Amway and Ponzi schemes.

Meanwhile, I don't understand, in any technical sense, the financial pathology afflicting the Eurozone or what China is doing to the world economy, but many reality-based people who are savvy to those kinds of things are scared about what they could do to us. North Korea and Israel have both done a great service to the cause of international instability over the past 2 weeks. Significantly, the one hot zone stresses the U.S. and China in a big way, and the other stresses the U.S. and its oil protectorates (and oil antagonists).

And no, Chauncey, the "free market" will not prevent a progressive collapse, or stop it once it begins. We don't have a user's manual or a helpdesk for this sort of thing. I've been writing about various aspects of this looming situation for several years as if each aspect is at least somewhat independent of the others. That's because I came to this point in history believing that a robust constitutional democracy and a consensus about the role of government provided all of the stability necessary to break big problems into smaller ones, and then solve them. But the black spew has got me worrying that there will be a much larger price to pay for the Reagan Revolution than crumbling infrastructure and a 3-decade white collar crime spree. It's an event that deeply stresses the economy, the environment, civic peace, and possibly geopolitics.

__________________

* Although the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, also has been attributed --- supposedly conclusively --- to this phenomenon, I feel certain that future historians and forensic engineers (probably members of whatever superior civilization buries our own decadent one) will document something very much to the contrary.

Freedom Muffins?

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In the comments thread of my most recent edition of Wise sayings, our friend from across the Atlantic, Mr. Barry Coidan, posted a preemptive and seeming defensive comment about Americans (me in particular?) blaming Brits for the super-awesome oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico. In my case that actually wasn't so, and I in fact agree pretty much 100% with Mr. Coidan's comment because let's face it: BP is not a Merrie Olde Company run by and for a jolly bunch of droll, quick-witted Limeys, but a global multinational energy corporation that is no more or less profit-crazed, ruthless, and unethical than any of the other five "supermajors" such as, say, ExxonMobil, Chevron, or ConocoPhillips. (U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!)

There's probably no news in this here Mobile Press-Register report (Mobile, Alabama, that is) about the spill that you don't already know if you're even halfway following the saga. But take a look at the comments thread, such as this one from the appropriately named "yellohamr":

The British are no better at fixing oil leaks than fighting the Germans. American will half to bail tham out of both.

Yes, perhaps the hapless Brits will half to depend on American Halliburton, everybody's favorite American oilfield services corporation, with headquarters in good old American Houston, Texas, America, to bail tham out! You remember: good old American Halliburton whose Chairman and CEO works and lives in Dubai, UAE, "to Focus [the] Company’s Eastern Hemisphere Growth." I wonder if the United States has an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, it seems like Barry C. was justified in his prophetic defense. Americans can be expected to trade in their Freedom Fries for Freedom Muffins. Starting in the Deep South, predictably.

An explanation for Gurlitzer

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She of the heading above expressed confusion about this post in the comments thread. Too much shorthand in my work there, or I should say not enough longhand.

What's The Matter With Kansas is a book by Thomas Frank that examines why social conservatives reliably have voted against their own best interests (i.e., for Republicans) for the past 40 or 50 years. Wikipedia says Franks:

finds extraordinary irony in working-class Kansans' overwhelming support for Republican politicians, despite his belief that the economic policies of the Republican party are wreaking havoc on their communities and livelihoods for the benefit of the extremely wealthy.

So do I. So I tried linking to a report about Florida Gulf Coast fishermen who were applying for jobs to help BP contain the spill, but got snookered in return for their modest honorarium of $5,000 by agreeing in the fine print to waive all future rights to attempt recovering compensation for any damage or illness that might result from their efforts. In fact, some fishermen are so desperate for cash that they signed the contract with knowledge of the reamjob. That article included slice-of-life interviews with some of the affected people.

Enter stereotyping. I usually avoid this tactic, but let's face it: the "working class" in the Gulf states looks pretty much like an ultraconservative, government-hating Republican voting bloc. Anyway, instead of trying to find the article I originally intended to link I've found another one that's more to the point: a commentary by Dana Milbank of the Post that I cribbed from Cab Drollery with a bank shot through Eschaton. Here it is, and I think it's self-explanatory: people who live in Republican states usually have the luxury of hating government and taxation for legitimate public purposes because their cynical, scumbag leaders make it so easy for them. And for some reason these selfsame states receive federal dollars well in excess of what their tax bases contribute. But when there's a crisis, by Jesus Joseph & Mary, it's the government's duty to step in and make it all go away.

I know that reality is not as simple as all that, but it kinda just makes me want to say, "Fuck you, neighbors. The federal response will address only the national-level issues related to this disaster, such as future coastal safeguards for the entire nation and a comprehensive energy policy that rapidly dis-incentivizes the use of petroleum for fuel of any kind. If you all who benefit from fisheries --- or jobs therein --- and resorts, hifalutin beachfront properties, and quaint rum shacks want some help from the federal government, then first you need to ask yourselves your favorite question: 'Who's gonna pay for it?' Answer: you will pay through a surcharge on your personal and corporate income taxes, set to take effect as soon as you want it to. Before then, not a cent... socialist swine."

Caveat: the above is somewhat slopplily thought out and authored, but I'm just too damn worn out to revise this evening.

What's the matter with Kansas? [updated]

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Gulf of Mexico tutorial here.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Update: I pasted the wrong link into the first graf, which naturally confused everyone who clicked through. I have replaced that link to a later post explaining myself. Sorry peeps.

I read the news today. Oh boy.

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Whenever I read a story like this I wonder if assassination has become a sensational new American trend in the 21st century or if it's always been this popular. I hear myself and others rationalizing that maybe it's always been this bad but largely hidden from view before most people had access to the Internet. I've caught myself almost becoming blasé with every new report of a workplace shooting, a mini campus massacre, or personal assassination orchestrated by an aggrieved, insane individual. But this story stuck out to me, as did the last sentence in it:

The shooting occurred three days after a 32-year-old man with a history of mental illness opened fire in a middle school parking lot in Colorado, wounding two students. 

The latter shooting was perpetrated Tuesday in Littleton, Colorado, and surprisingly didn't seem to get overly lurid national news attention. That's good, but also made it easy to miss what with all the news about the Winter Olympics and Tiger Woods losing his "Gatorade" endorsement.

It shouldn't be difficult to find real statistics indicating that this is in fact a postmodern development rather than a visibility increase with respect to the American norm for murderous behavior. I don't feel like doing the research, and believe that my gut reaction is sufficient evidence for my own purposes.

Everyone can speculate about the compound causes so I will, too. America's collective nonchalance about the entertainment value of bloody violence is certainly one driver --- how could it not be when children are raised to think teenage splatter movies are funny? The coincident rise in individual social isolation and mental illness also are at the foundation. Now, the emergence of a hideously antisocial postmodern conservative Christian worldview that is neither conservative nor Christian may be completely unrelated, but it seems to me that it isn't. After all, postmodern America is a place where the idea of government-inflicted torture inspires "debate" and "ethical quandaries" instead of universal moral outrage.

Editor's note: even though the author is sermonizing above, it does not constitute your Friday Evening Prayer Meeting. You can find that right here.

Maybe, but I have reason to doubt

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This guy, whomever he may be, thinks Obama may be launching a campaign to draw Main Street's attention to the  sharp contrast between Democrats, who are trying to conduct the people's business, and Republicans, who have no goal other than to prevent the majority party from governing.

Well, maybe. If so, then Obama is beginning a thrilling gambit in his game of 10-dimensional chess --- maybe analogous to deliberately ceding the lead to the other team at halftime, then launching the third quarter with an onside kick and blinding touchdown drive that leaves the bad guys befuddled and deflated. And the crowd goes wild.

In order for this hypothetical tactic to work any magic, congressional Democrats in both chambers would have to get behind the quarterback and mash some Republican heads without worrying about how it might look to the Washington Post editorial board. In other words, the President and congressional Democrats would have to start ruthlessly working on a constructive agenda so regular people could have a taste of what progressive good government has to offer in contrast to the zombie Reagan agenda.

Nope, I don't see it happening. Just expecting more 1-dimension tiddly winks as usual, as Big Hussein Otis has called it.

Ruled by superminority

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Maybe you've heard about this jagoff of a U.S. Senator from Alabama who has abused Senate protocol rules to put a blanket hold on all of President Obama's nominees until he extorts some public funds for projects in his state. This isn't traditional legislative logrolling for the purpose of maximizing the bacon one brings back for the hometown crowd, which happens within routine lawmaking practice. It's the exercise of a secret active veto over pretty much any Senate activity by a single bad actor.

I haven't read the stories about this closely enough to know how the obstructionist's secret identity was revealed, but my understanding is that, at the very least, the Senate Majority Leader by definition must know who has placed the hold... and that it's considered not very gentlemanly for the Majority Leader to "out" that person.

So not only do Democrats feel they can't control the legislative agenda without a Senate supermajority (i.e., 60 votes as needed to overcome the threat of a filibuster). They don't even feel they can act on a routine presidential nomination if a single member of the club decides against it... because holding that member publically accountable would seem impolite.

All of the above, while not unique or profound observation, I present as background for a couple of Paul Krugman blog posts wherein he describes the abuse of the nobility's liberum veto in 17th century Poland. This familiar-sounding political dysfunction greatly contributed to the collapse, breakup, and annexation of that country, by its neighbors, at the dawn of The Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe.

So the bad news is that America seems to be swirling helplessly around the drain that empties into the septic tank of feudalism. (Think of nobility such as the Duke of CitiCorp, the Prince of General Electric, and the Archbishop of Viacom.) The jury is still out on any good news this may portend.

The biomimicry of the Reagan Revolution

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Here's a fascinating New Scientist article about the life cycle of a very cunning and ruggedly individual worm, Maculinea arion. This caterpillar is the beast of the insect apocalypse, seducing innocent ants to accept it into the breast of their colony, mimicking their queen and feeding them its "sweet fluids." The goal of its vermigenic largesse is to devour all the eggs, all the larvae, and all the adults, obliterating the colony so it can transmigrate into a beautiful blue butterfly for all the world to admire.

A parody of a parody

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The old adage about American politics, updated here using post-feminist lanaguage, was that the difference between the children and the adults is that the children want to be something and the adults want to do something. Today, though, the children don’t even want to be something --- they just want to be seen as being something. With few exceptions, Democrats are children. Or “wimps,” as Republicans have successfully branded them for 30 years. (So are Republicans, though, but that’s beyond my scope here.)

Just look at Obama and other Democrats like Jim Webb now tripping all over themselves to put a halt to a critical legislative process in order to wait for some neophyte Tea Party Republican to be seated in the Senate... so that he can lock down the filibuster for the minority party. This guy is literally a nobody, but they want to grant him a veto over legislation that was nailed down long before anybody outside of Massachusetts heard of “Scott Brown.” The only way this makes one f@*#king bit of sense is if Obama is just simply more interested in being seen by the public as always being the man who takes the high road, even at the expense of his own agenda and even his gross personal ambitions. And what is Webb up to? Maybe he is more interested in being anointed by the media as The New Maverick of the Senate than he is in expanding health coverage to unfortunate average Americans and cutting the federal deficit through good government. To these men... I mean boys... it’s not even about being something: it’s about appearing to be something.

About 10 years ago the phrase “perception equals reality” came into vogue. You noticed, right? But the trouble is, perception equals reality only for solipsists, psychotics, and gullible consumers. And what we have now is a political and policymaking establishment that seems truly to believe that government is about managing the perceptions of the rubes.

And then there are those Real Democrats --- “real” because they perceive themselves to be --- who think now’s the time to scapegoat progressives (i.e., liberals). Why? Because some liberals (1) have fought tenaciously for the agenda on which they ran for office and (2) now they talk about playing the same kind of hardball with their votes in the House like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu et al. have been doing all along in the Senate. Real Democrats are angered by a progressive bloc in Congress that might hold their votes hostage until they extract some meaningful concessions from their Real Democrat colleagues (legislative and executive). This is supposed to be dirty pool, you see, or “irresponsible.” Spare me. Liberals have compromised with moderates every f@*#ing step of the way, and not only on healthcare reform. Frankly, liberals have gone 10 extra miles to appease some very bad men and women who make a career of burnishing their images as “responsible” public servants on talk shows.

There may be a large bloc of Real Democrats who will weep to see their dream of healthcare legislation die this winter. From the commentary I’m reading these days, many Real Democrats now view healthcare reform much more as a Democratic political totem than as a public policy imperative. And that’s the main reason why they’ve stood by while Max Baucus and his warty playmates denuded the Senate legislation of its most important potential policy virtues (e.g., universal coverage and cost reduction for the government). Real Democrats cried crocodile tears while Baucus, Snowe, and their playmates stalled and vandalized, but now they are furious about filthy liberals like Howard Dean and HuffPost and FireDogLake who want to extract a coupla pounds of flesh on behalf of their own constituencies. But hey, why should anyone care about the fury of wimps?

Real Democrats have failed the public and themselves, since the onslaught of The Reagan Revolution, by dealing with the devil as standard operating procedure. It’s the easiest way to grab and hold a seat in The Club, after all. Yes, that’s right: cowardice and self-hatred are now entrenched personality traits of the modern Real Democrat. The way he and she copes with it, of course, is by psychological projection to an external scapegoat --- the filthy, irresponsible liberals. It’s the same way that Republicans cope with their own failures, after all. Unfortunately for Real Democrats, though, their little club can’t get along any better without the progressive bloc than it can without the Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe bloc. So they’d better come up with a Plan C, or else just become Real Republicans. Because most of them already are, and not closeted very well. (Rockefeller Republicans, maybe, if not Nixon Republicans.) Yes, the Elite Real Democrats should just join the Republican Party and accelerate its destruction from within using their own time-tested wimpiness. Not only are Real Democrats wimps, as right-wingers correctly point out: they are parodies of wimps.