Aggravating Tuesday
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Musings | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Early Tuesday here on California’s northern coast and listening to neighbors act like loud assholes at this early hour makes me want to scream, lash out into the dark, pierce the clear, clean air with a shitload of curses.
Although I’ve been awake awhile, and I’m fully awake right now, the disturbance to the quiet upsets the creative juices — hard to be innovative when there’s anger.
And this is one of those morning when I can’t come up with any decent, well-meaning subject in which to post, despite a ton of weird, frightening, sad, and more than just a little bat-shit crazy news out there, from that simple seamstress mutilated in Syria, to the dangers of selling booze in Iraq, to Michele Bachmann knowing for an absolute certainty President Obama is a one-termer.
Plenty of news, but nothing overwhelming as unique or even beyond the ‘new normal.’
And apparently if there wasn’t bad news, there’d be no news at all.
US peoples are glum, too, feeling bad about everything — in a new Harris Poll:
Looking at the President’s ratings, just one in five Americans (21 percent) give him positive ratings on his handling of the economy while 79 percent give him negative ratings.
In July, 26 percent of U.S. adults gave the President positive ratings while 74 percent gave him negative marks.
When it comes to his handling of the economy, even large majorities of Democrats (58 percent) and Liberals (64 percent) give President Obama negative ratings.
…
In July, one-quarter of Americans (23 percent) expected the overall economy to improve in the coming year, two in five (41 percent) thought it would stay the same and a little over one-third (37 percent) thought it would get worse.
This month, 45 percent think the economy will stay the same, 34 percent believe it will get worse and 21 percent think it will get better in the coming year.
…
Two-thirds of Americans (67 percentage) rate the current job market in their region of the country as bad, one in ten (11 percent) rate it as good and 22 percent say it is neither good nor bad.
In July, 64 percent of U.S. adults said the job market was bad, 12 percent said it was good and 24 percent said it was neither good nor bad.
Misery and no end in sight.
In all this woe, the economic situation for the non-rich is making more and more US peoples to ‘double up:’ This spring, there were 21.8 million “doubled-up” households across the nation, a 10.7 percent increase from the 19.7 million households in the spring of 2007, the Census Bureau said. That means 18.3 percent of all households were combined households.
And maybe there’s no loud, obnoxious neighbors because more and more US peoples live on the street: “The economic downturn and the government’s deep cuts to welfare will drive up homelessness over the next few years, raising the spectre of middle class people living on the streets, a major study warns. The report by the homelessness charity Crisis says there is a direct link between the downturn and rising homelessness as cuts to services and draconian changes to benefits shred the traditional welfare safety net.”
And man-folk can’t find work, the worse male jobs situation since WWII: “Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man. Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “That takes men and puts them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s,” Greenstone says. “That has staggering implications.”
(h/t AlterNet)
People much wiser than I am said,
“I’d rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love
than 2 people trying to kill one another.
I, of course, can agree.
It is a great sentence.
I wish I knew who said it first.
I agree with that but I like to take it a step further.
I’d like to substitute the word Fuck for the word Kill in all of those movie cliches we grew up with.
“Okay, Sherrif, we’re gonna Fuck you now, but we’re gonna Fuck you slow.”
– George Carlin
(Illustration found here).
Have a most-tantalizing Tuesday.
Goin’ on Holiday
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
Today starts the first official vacation I’ve had in years — the last a near-decade ago while working for a newspaper — and the feeling is already weird.
I’ll not be posting again until most-likely next weekend as this ‘vacation‘ is the first time I’ve been disconnected from the online world for any length of time for nearly four years.
And how will I feed my news and info addiction — smoking more cigarettes, how else?
(Illustration found here).
In the reckoning of things, this is a massive news cycle I’m leaving for awhile as everything is hitting the fan, from the US and world economies, to weather, to war, and even a well-received revival of the ‘Ape’ movies.
The news will just have to cease for at least five days.
I’m traveling via AmTrak to central California to visit with three of my daughters — one coming from Tennessee — and hopefully it should be a good time had by all.
And to the scant handful of peoples who visit this site on any kind of regular basis — please don’t forget me.
Have an awesome week!
Insane Becomes Sane — Rule of the Full-of-Shit
Filed Under Bullshit, Media, War & Politics | 1 Comment
A peep-hole into the soul of government can be witnessed during this mad-cap debt ceiling bullshit — one can see just how far a small, small portion of the population can near-about bring down a country.
The crying, finger-pointing, wailing — i.e., John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner telling his beloved own to “get your ass in line” — comes from the complete horror-disarray caused by those ignorant Tea Baggers, who apparently rule the GOP nowadays.
To the anguish of all US peoples.
(Illustration found here).
One could single out Jackboot John McCain for allowing the Tea Party to emerge — when he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP choice in 2008, the move allowed dumb-ass stupid to become part of the national political discourse.
Stupid touched a deep chord with the stupid, who most times has a much bigger mouth than the norm.
And why would the words “death panels” cause so much trouble during the health care debate?
A little stupid goes a long, long way.
From Science Blog:
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
…
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas.
It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer.
“Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
…
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working.
In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
So we can see it doesn’t take much to make a lie a truth.
And the Tea Party can just ruin a good get-together.
Matt Taibbi, most-likely near-about the best in covering US political bullshit, posted the ultimate view of the Tea Party last September: Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.
And in the debt ceiling pout match, even the GOP is tied to the nasty Tea Baggers as The Boner right now has his mitts full of trying to keep the whole shebang from blowing up in his cry-baby face.
From TPM: That’s because the GOP is teetering on the brink of a debt-based civil war. More traditional Republicans and big business types are desperate to avoid a recovery-crushing default. But their Tea Party colleagues are leading a rebellion of epic – perhaps even galactic – proportions.
Thus it is.
From Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics via The Big Picture:
“The Speaker is in office, but not in power, because the Tea Partiers do not respect party discipline. They argue that they are standing up for principle, but the principle they have chosen to defend is the idea that the only thing that matters is rapidly and substantially shrinking the government.
This, we respectfully submit, is nuts.
According to polls, it’s not even what most Republican voters want, never mind the country as a whole. Moreover, the first thing you learn from studying the aftermath of financial crises is that premature fiscal tightening is extremely dangerous.”
So tighten-up the old seatbelt, the bullshit could run the fuel-starved truck of state right off the cliff , then only thing to do is SCREAM.
Krugman at 4 AM — Hey, They’re Orwelling My Privates!
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
As these modern times gets more complicated, the ability of government to stare way-down into your bowels to catch a terrorist turd has come a long way, baby, and the future of freedom doesn’t appear too inconspicuous, either.
In fact, any private aspect of our daily lives is open to be scrutinized, filmed, recorded and posted on some government watch list just in case there’s a need, any need at all.
And the shit part is that you don’t have to be a terrorist, a criminal, or even a bad person who kicks puppies, or slaps little babies hard in the face — you just have say or do something the powers-that-be, or in our particular case nowadays, the right-wing hard-cases, do not like or agree with and whim-wham, thank-you ma’am, you’re under surveillance.
(Illustration found here via Google Images).
A case in point is from the illustration link above (Wired magazine) which details a situation reported from September 2007 where a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network is placed under an unknown government observation routine.
As if:
Flynn is a co-founder of the AIDS Housing Network.
One day before an AHN rally, she went to New Jersey to visit her parents.
She noticed a car with New York plates parked outside their house.
When she drove home to Brooklyn that night, the car followed her — and was joined by two others.
She did all the detective story check-your-tail maneuvers: making random turns, changing lanes, parking. They continued to follow.
And when Men-In-Black like cars followed her home, two other vehicles were already there with occupants watching laptops — even at 4 a.m. the assholes were still there.
Despite a personal investigation, Flynn could not discover the IDs of the culprits.
Since her experience, Flynn has continued to organize, though she says she’s not so enthusiastic before, and has seen other activists pull back.
Was she really followed?
We might never find out.
But when we hear stories about political activists losing their civil liberties, we shouldn’t assume that they’re potentially violent folks bent on smashing Starbucks and the capitalist state.
They might just want a cure for AIDS.
One sad, fearful tale.
Similar to this story reported in early March: An Egyptian-American college student who says he has never done anything that should attract the interest of federal law enforcement officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the FBI for secretly putting a GPS tracking device on his car.
And, of course, the FBI replied that they were just following “well-established Department of Justice and FBI guidelines,” which should tell you everything.
And to unsettle one’s self, there’s the government’s use of biometric technology, which in its actual defintion is freakin’ frightful – The word “biometrics” is derived from the Greek words ‘bios’ and ‘metric’ ; which means life and measurement respectively. This directly translates into “life measurement.”
No shit, Sherlock.
From Raw Story:
A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union on red alert.
…
The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.
To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.
…
“That’s what we’re really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time,” (Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C.).
…
“What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don’t know they’re on the list, they don’t know the standard for putting them on the lists and there’s no way to get off the lists,” Calabrese said.
“That’s a serious problem.”
“We’re not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren’t keeping up.
When it’s now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically … When that’s technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections.
They don’t exist right now, in many cases.”
And what got me interested in this shit this morning was a Monday column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, who flashed on the recent situation where a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin started a blog on the nefarious doings of the state’s GOP.
The historian wrote the Republican governor, the infamous Scott Walker, has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response?
A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point.
The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
…
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down.
It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.
Shades of the AIDs worker, huh?
Just watch that camera angle, and don’t use e-mail.
Whoppers as Reality
Filed Under Bullshit, Media | Leave a Comment
One giant, DUH!
From Media Matters:
Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”
Scripted news coverage, not unique to Winston Smith.
(Illustration found here).
Anyone who pays any attention to Fox News and has any sense at all knows this already: “It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”
And apparently, the viewing public does comprehend.
According to Public Policy Polling, Fox’s viewer-ship has greatly declined in the past year, and PBS is now the most trusted news operation in the US.
Liars are in their lairs.
Madness in media is apparently on the upswing and the right-wing is the nastiest of the bunch.
In a study by Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences the use of “outrage talk” is getting more and more prevalent in recent years.
Via Science 2.0:
The term ‘outrage talk’ refers to a form of political discourse involving efforts to provoke visceral responses, such as anger, righteousness, fear or moral indignation, through the use of over-generalizations, sensationalism, misleading information, ad hominem attacks and partial truths about opponents.
If you are left wing, think Michael Savage.
If you are right wing, think Keith Olbermann.
…
“Our data indicate that the right uses decidedly more outrage speech than the left.
Taken as a whole, liberal content is quite nasty in character, following the outrage model of emotional, dramatic and judgment-laden speech.
Conservatives, however, are even nastier.”
…
It isn’t just television and radio.
They found outrage language is now common among the nation’s leading newspaper columnists also.
But is it different now, or do older people in journalism and the population simply romanticize the past? Sobieraj and Berry studied 10 widely syndicated columnists during 10-week periods in both 1955 and 1975. They chose these dates to see if the tumultuous period of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests and the Watergate scandal led to greater outrage in newspapers at that time.
They found the answer was no.
“Outrage is virtually absent from both the 1955 and the 1975 columns, in contrast to the columns of 2009 which contain, on average, nearly six instances of outrage per column,” said the Tufts scholars.
“The titans of American journalism in 1955 and 1975 remained restrained in their language despite the impassioned politics of protest.”
One major factor not part of the past: There was no nasty, lying, rumor-mongering Fox News, the direct and biggest outrage outlet in all of history.
Watch and listen to Mississippi asshole Haley Barbour on Fox News this morning and get way-outraged.
Or maybe watch Hadley elucidate and be tickled.