Anniversary
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Put-down of the day number one — from Juan Cole, pissed at Mitt Romney’s put-down of President Obama’s take-out of Osama bin Laden:
Mitt Romney said Monday that of course he would have taken out Bin Laden and that ‘even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.’
Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military.
Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and played a major role in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100.
So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn’t good enough to shine Carter’s shoes.
Furthermore:
The problem with Romney is that when it comes to the Muslim world, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about, and seems intent on alienating 1.5 billion Muslims, a fifth of the world.
He wanted to substitute a crazy conspiracy theory for a tactical approach to getting Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.
In this regard, the Obama campaign has correctly nailed him, but they haven’t gone far enough in emphasizing the truly creepy character of his obsession with Muslims in general, far beyond the fringe al-Qaeda element.
Romney knows life about as much as Sophia Loren is way-madly in love with me.
This the one-year dateline of Osama’s demise, but in a few weeks will be the 40th anniversary of Watergate — the biggest, internal US historical event this past century, and journalism’s big-clap event.
The two guys who gained way-more-than-fame off the episode — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — are in the news again, this time some stuff in their original reports might might have been a little off kilter and this might have upset the Bob.
(Illustration found here).
In the mid-1970s when I started my journalism career as a lowly police reporter in Montgomery, Alabama, those two Washington Post reporters were the gem in the IBM typewriter ribbon that beckon the pride and neatness of the job for all of us in the trade.
Didn’t like Woodward too much — appeared too much of a button-down asshole — but Bernstein was my kind of guy.
In appearance, he should have been playing bass for The Ramones instead of being in a newsroom, chained-smoked and looked like shit — I could way-relate.
In fact, I tried to emulate Dustin Hoffman playing Bernstein in ‘All the President’s Men.’
Woodward, however, looked the CEO instead one of ‘us’ regular guys in the newsroom.
And while Bernstein went on benders, dated Elizabeth Taylor, recovered from the all that Watergate fame to become a competent older journalist, Woodward has become a mouth-piece for the DC establishment — and has become wealthy.
In put-down of the day number two, Alex Pareene at Salon nails Woodward to a journalism wall of shame:
We now all know, in other words, that Bob Woodward is a sketchy reporter.
This has always been the case.
All of his post-Watergate books feature ridiculous, clearly invented (or “embellished”) internal monologues, and re-creations, with quotation marks, of scenes he couldn’t have witnessed or recorded.
He is shady about his sources, even to his editors, and because he is so well-sourced, he is always sitting on important information that he refuses to divulge, to protect his powerful sources.
His depressing flailing about the periphery of the Plame affair — Woodward was the first journalist to learn that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, and Woodward declined to mention his knowledge to his bosses or anyone else for months after the story broke, for fear of getting subpoenaed — was proof that his balancing of his responsibility to the public and his responsibility to his sources had become, or perhaps always was, severely out of whack.
I think that Woodward has enjoyed a lack of critical attention for years now, as he’s basked in the glow of his staggering professional success, and he is terrified that he’ll be remembered not as the greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century, but instead as the ultimate reporter as pawn of the truly powerful.
Some folks are journalists, some are fame-seeking hacks.
Reality, Or Not
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We all live by certain rules, sometimes, and to be able to live outside those guidelines is fantasy.
Michelle Obama has a thought, via CNN:
“It is hard to sneak around and do what you want,” Obama continued.
“I have done it a couple of times.
But you know one fantasy I have, and the Secret Service they keep looking at me because they think I might actually do it, is to walk right out the front door and just keep walking.”
What’s the First Lady actually saying?
(Illustration found here).
Mrs. Obama was waxing on fantasy, but not wishful thinking: “One of the things I have learned being a grown up is that you always look forward,” Obama said. “You look to where you want to go as opposed to looking back.”
What about that old chestnut: If you don’t remember the past, you’re bound to repeat it?
But we catch her drift.
And this present, past and fantasy/fact scenario got a touch personal in this piece from the UK’s Guardian last week — we don’t look at the future as us:
I’m struck by how my sense of my “present self” extends, quite specifically, for about eight years.
Me at 43 is just me at 36 with an even dickier knee; but 50-year-old me is some other chap entirely.
(In my mind’s eye, weirdly, he’s actually less bald.)
Then again, I think of next-week-me as different from present-me, too.
Many self-help tricks — such as stating your future goals in the present tense — are based on manipulating the relationship between these selves.
But would we need tricks if we could truly come to feel that all these “me”s were one?
In his book Staring At The Sun, the psychotherapist Irving Yalom suggests that this is exactly what we need to do to reconcile ourselves to the big one: death.
One of his clients told him that the revelation “came from realising it would be me who will die, not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me.”
Once we grasp that everything that’ll ever happen to us, including death, will happen to the same person, Yalom argues, we’ll make wiser choices, but also live far more intensely.
And speaking of the future, the most-delectable Onion has a rollout of problems to be encountered by potential presidential candidates for 2040 because of all the bad shit now recorded via social media — see it here. (h/t The Dish).
Nothing is fantasy and everything is fiction.
Except reality.
From the NY Times yesterday:
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades.
…
If the estimate holds up, it implies that the water cycle could quicken by as much as 20 percent later in this century as the planet warms, potentially leading to more droughts and floods.
“This provides another piece of independent evidence that we need to start taking the problem of global warming seriously,” said Paul J. Durack, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the lead author of a paper being published Friday in the journal Science.
…
Assuming that the paper withstands scrutiny, it suggests that a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past half century has been enough to intensify the water cycle by about 4 percent. That led Dr. Durack to project a possible intensification of about 20 percent as the planet warms by several degrees in the coming century.
That would be approximately twice the amplification shown by the computer programs used to project the climate, according to Dr. Durack’s calculations.
Those programs are often criticized by climate-change skeptics who contend that they overestimate future changes, but Dr. Durack’s paper is the latest of several indications that the estimates may actually be conservative.
The new paper confirms a long-expected pattern for the ocean that also seems to apply over land: areas with a lot of rainfall in today’s climate are expected to become wetter, whereas dry areas are expected to become drier.
In the climate of the future, scientists fear, a large acceleration of the water cycle could feed greater weather extremes.
Perhaps the greatest risk from global warming, they say, is that important agricultural areas could dry out, hurting the food supply, as other regions get more torrential rains and floods.
Another jab at fantasy, huh?
College Degree — ‘An Empty Cliff’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Economy, Finance, Jobs | Leave a Comment
Last week, a regular customer and I got into a short discussion during check-out on the subject of college debt — she told me she was having trouble paying off just $4,000 in loan obligations.
“It’s a pain in the ass,” she said, but agreed her total was nowhere the average for today’s young people just graduating — generally now estimated to be $25,000, a 25 percent increase in just the last decade.
Party time is way-way over.
(Illustration found here).
Although the customer doesn’t appear to use her college degree — she and here husband operate a tire business — the debt incurred getting that education is still due no matter the after effects.
And she’s among the more fortunate ones.
Via Raw Story: Two years ago, for the first time, total outstanding student debt in the United States topped $1 trillion, according to the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys.
And it be a portend to another financial disaster.
William Brewer, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys:
“Take it from those of us on the front line of economic distress in America: this could very well be the next debt bomb for the US economy.
“The reason: Students and workers seeking retraining are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money through federal and private loan programs to help cover the rising cost of college and training,” he added.
“In many cases, parents responsible for the student loans are in or near retirement years and facing repayment demands.”
That latter subject bad as in real-bad.
President Obama, in his weekly video address this weekend also noted the horror of higher education: “For the first time, Americans owe more debt on their student loans than they do on their credit cards.”
No shit, Mr. Sherlock.
In the face of a rate increase coming this July in the so-called Stafford loans for college — from 3.4 percent up to 6.8 percent — Obama is pushing to delay that move, but faces (of course) obstacles from the GOP.
One talked through her asshole (is it sexist to term a female such a way?), Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) noted earlier this month: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.
As it turns out, Ms Foxx has snagged nearly $50,000 in campaign donations from the for-profit education industry — nice touch.
And these for-profit colleges are bullshit — a new bill introduced in the Senate last week will target these organizations use of federal funds in advertising.
And on top of all that debt, there’s not much bang for the buck.
The real world is not welcoming place.
From HuffPost:
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
…
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years.
In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
…
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.
…
“I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field,” he said.
Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University.
The counselor’s main advice: Pursue further education.
“Everyone is always telling you, `Go to college,’” Edwards said.
“But when you graduate, it’s kind of an empty cliff.”
I attended the University of Florida, graduating in 1974 — although I couldn’t find the exact figures online, if memory serves correctly, it cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of about $160 a quarter as a full-time student.
And with the GI Bill plus a part-time job at Sears, I had a real good time.
But that was a different kind of time back then — cheaper and not so shitty-dangerous for cliff dwellers.
Early Sunday Evening
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(Illustration found here).
A deeply-beautiful afternoon on California’s northern coast — finally after what’s seem like weeks and weeks of rain in various forms, so far, appears like we will get a full-day’s worth of sun, and, there’s not much wind, so it’s about as good as it gets up here.
A lawn mower bangs somewhere in the distance, somewhere close out my window.
And a kind of lazy day — been listening to last.fm — jumping from one artist radio to another, mostly stuff from the ’90s, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Better Than Ezra, etc., along with the notables, Bush and Pearl Jam.
Just finished You Tubing Blur Song #2 — such scratchy, pithy fun.
I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet
It wasn’t easy but nothing is
Despite what we think.
In my humble opinion, the early to mid-1990s was one of the best ever for real rock-n-roll — dude, that’s covering a shitload of ground, yeah, so what — and this when the best stuff was produced outside the mainstream, although some of those bands, like Third Eye Blind off its first album, became big names in pop music (Semi-Charmed Life opened 1997′s Contact, the Jodie Foster movie).
I also heard a most-interesting version of Van Halen’s Jump earlier — catch it at Balloon Juice.
Performed by a band I’ve never heard of — Aztec Camera, a Scottish group out of the 1980s, which apparently has since disbanded or something, can’t find anything new from them online anywhere.
In a distant relation, also read at CNN those SS agents caught partying-hardy in Columbia were part-n-parcel of a likely assessment: All the employees are accused of cavorting prostitutes ahead of last week’s visit by Obama. They’d arrived earlier that morning as a part of the “jump team” that flies in on military transport planes with vehicles in the president’s motorcade.
Yep, might as well go ahead and jump…
And those boys jumped fast, too — in country by daylight, banging whores by dark.
And I missed the big bang this morning (find out tomorrow if anyone locally heard it):
A loud boom sounded over much of Northern California early Sunday, the apparent result of an ongoing meteor shower.
A meteor was streaking across the sky when it apparently broke up above the Earth, sending the sound reverberating across the area, said Stefanie Henry, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento.
The National Weather Service received reports of the sound across Northern California, and even as far south as Orange County, she said.
Odd that shit.
And apparently along with the bang, the incident also carried some rocking and rolling, though, without any earthquake: Erin Girard-Hudson of Arnold, Calif., told The Union Democrat of Sonora, Calif., that the loud boom that occurred around 8 a.m. made her 2-year-old daughter, Elsie, cry. “It knocked me off my feet and was shaking the house,” she said. “It sounded like it was next door.”
And included a fireball that was “…extraordinarily bright in the daylight” that accompanied the phenomenon, but even more odd was this from Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno: “People are putting two and two together and saying it has something to do with the meteor shower,” he said. “But the fireball was probably coincidental and unrelated to the peak of the meteor shower.” Though the fireball was seen over such a wide area, Ruby said it was likely just “a little bigger than a washing machine.”
Ever tried to pick up a washing machine, Dan?
Heavy as shit, and have pieces of it falling on you can’t be delightful at all.
This too on Earth Day (via Raw Story):
The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.
…
The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some conservatives almost certain to object to international interference in US domestic matters.
Well, I bet — a lot of the screaming GOP-ers/Tea Party-ers won’t stand (or sit) for anything like genocide to crop up in this country’s history, but reality is not part of their constitutional make-up.
And also most appropriate this Earth Day, ‘The Snake,’ by Emily Dickinson:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,–
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The last verse most telling.
And tomorrow’s Monday.
Dude, My Stash Is Half Gone
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
Despite today being the national pot day — 4/20 — hahahahahahahahaha….
If you celebrate this particular day in any fashion, you’re not a real toker, but a celebrity seeker.
In case you didn’t know it, everyday is 4/20, and why make a holiday out of something as regular as doing a bowl, besides, if one has to celebrate, where’s the reality?
Actual life right now requires more bowls and less talk — in a poll at CNN this morning it seems the mood of the US wants to get higher despite a clogged pipe.
(Illustration found here).
Good times are just around that far, far corner over yonder.
According to the poll, 43 percent say things are going well in the country, up a slight three points from February, but up a dramatic 19 points from last August.
Fifty-seven percent say things are going badly, down three points from February and down 16 points from last August.
Nearly a quarter of those questioned say the economy is starting to recover, with just over four in ten saying it has stabilized and a third saying that the country is still in a downturn with conditions getting worse.
“People who live in the western states are more likely than those who live in other regions to say that the economy is starting to recover,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“People who live in the South are most likely to say that the economy is still in a downturn.”
The South can’t help it, it’s the upbringing.
However, as all these US peoples clasp hands together and hope for a brighter future, the glass is really only one-quarter full, or three-quarters empty.
Economic brains are meeting in DC this week to plow through the reality of this slow-waltz of a recovery, and according to the ‘experts,’ tomorrow ain’t that peachy, and they can wax poetic, too.
From the New York Times also this morning:
There is a “light recovery blowing in a spring wind” with “dark clouds on the horizon,” Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said Thursday, at the start of meetings here that will focus on Europe’s troubles and global growth.
Ms. Lagarde implored world leaders not to become complacent.
Forecasters have said that the trends point to a moderation of economic growth in the United States, but they still expect the recovery to continue this year.
The slowdown in part reflects an unusually warm winter, which pulled forward economic activity, making January and February seem artificially good and perhaps making recent weeks look worse than they truly were.
Still, the breadth of the recent weakening of activity shows that the economy remains fragile, as is typical in the years following a financial crisis.
Lagarde also cried about the IMF itself is running out of money, but can’t look to the US for support because it’s an election year here, and a nasty, partisan one at that — follow the letters, G-O-P.
She expressed concern about five “dark clouds” — high unemployment, slow growth, over-rapid deleveraging by banks, strains in the eurozone and higher oil prices — gathering over the global economy.
She said she was looking for further support from “our broader membership” to ensure that it could tackle crises and ensure global financial stability.
“The fund needs to participate in building additional firepower to the global firewall we have been advocating.
I expect our own firepower to be significantly increased.”
Firepower from the rich, but then…
And once again, the late, great Mr. Carlin: “I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don’t confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything’s gonna be all right.”
Alright, boys, at 4:20 this afternoon we’re all gonna toke up and show The Man who we be — right after ‘Days of Our Lives,’ of course.