Keeping the suckers poor

In New England and the Mid-Atlantic, you can actually better yourself. In the South, not so much.

Liberalism works - unless what you want is captive, cheap help who won't get in your way.

No shit, Sherlock

The AP asks, "Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?"

You've been non-comatose for the past three and a half years, and you're just noticing that now!?

Wingnuts begetting wingnuts

Abstinence doesn't work. Even the fundies have the fire down below. They can't keep it in their pants - too much desire to get into her pants. Or his.

Almost all of the states with the most teen pregnancy are Bible Belt states. The I'm-on-top ten:

1. Mississippi
2. New Mexico
3. Arkansas
4. Texas
5. Oklahoma
6. Louisiana
7. Kentucky
8. West Virginia
9. Alabama
10. Tennessee

Almost everything Teapublicans tell you is a lie. This one is convenient to sustain the inversion of interests by which so many working class people vote as if they made $250,000 a year.

People who defer parenthood have a chance to get educated, to mature before they have to provide for an infant. This gives them a chance to escape the hidebound system of economic and religious oppression that keeps them reliably voting for plutocrats, when those plutocrats in fact despise them.

On the sixth day, CNN caught up

I heard about filter bubbles on Facebook nearly a week ago - and I'm sure I'm not one of the first.  CNN scoops up the story and dusts it off today.

And then CNN headlines it as a personal scare story - "What Google knows about you" - instead of Eli Pariser's clear point about what Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, among many others, are hiding from you and what that means for society.

Why is it we need big media?  They're late, they don't filter out the bullshit, most of their pundits are third rate purveyors of conventional wisdom (and I'm being charitable), they don't investigate, they print official press releases as gospel, they fan the flames of manufactured controversy, and they have no institutional memory to help bring Alzheimer's/ADHD America back to reality.  They expect to be paid for this record of failure?

The next penis bomber

When we fly, we have to take off our shoes because of the Shoe Bomber.

When we fly, we have to show our junk or let it be felt up by the TSA because of the penis bomber.

Memo to al Qaeda: Please don't put a charger up some moron's ass, as in Man on Fire, and send him onto a plane. (As if please ever worked...)

The terrorists sometimes get more effect from not blowing up a plane.

Update (11/24): Patrick Smith of Salon has two more examples:

The scanners are also the latest turn in what is an unwinnable arms race. First came Sept. 11 and suddenly pointy objects are contraband. Then came Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," and TSA decreed that all passengers must remove their shoes. Next we had the London liquid bombers, and suddenly your shampoo and toothpaste are consigned to 3-ounce containers. Then came the Christmas Day underwear bomber, and as a result we're being body-scanned and groped.

Eager to please

The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country. Yeah, I'm damning with faint praise.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the gray lady, has been a defender of official bullshit from the time I first took notice of him in the late 1990s, when the Times's thrusting of Republican bullshit about Bill Clinton needed his defense. For Keller, it hasn't mattered whether the official bullshit is the Times's own or comes from Republican political operatives and their business interests. Keller will have no part in calling bullshit bullshit. He'd rather add more onto the compost heap.

Now, true to form, his spokesperson claims that calling torture torture would have been inadmissably biased:

When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

Words have meaning. Waterboarding has always been torture. The special pleadings of the torture-advocating war criminals of Duhbya's ugly administration don't change those meanings.

Torture is torture, no matter who applies it, no matter who suffers under it. It is possible to do evil to evil. Even for Americans...

Our media culture no longer recognizes this, and even mainstream Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani, encouraged by the unwillingness of big media to call bullshit, refuse to deal with the plain truths of our national stains. A culture so debased by lying to itself is in existential trouble, not from al Qaeda but from its own corruption of character.

Update (7/5): More good criticism from Salon:

[When the Washington Post and the New York Times] defended their acts of cowardice and dismissed criticism as tendentious, they went beyond harm. Their pride in subservience was a disgrace.

Get a grip

The IOC is investigating Canada's gold-medal-winning women's hockey team for daring to have beer and cigars on the ice after they beat the U.S.

Grow up, get a grip, stop being such priggish puritans. Try to enjoy life.

The Canadian women earned their celebration. I didn't want them to win, but they did. Let them enjoy their party.

Update (3/1): Here's a send-up.

Remedial web journalism

View Larger Map
Dead tree editions need art departments and photographers to put their stories into easy context. The challenge of TV made this true fifty years ago. Before that, if you read in the paper that a developer had given up on a development on Megunko Hill (might be in the neighborhood shown above since the story puts it near the Ashland commuter rail station), you'd better damn well know where Megunko Hill is on your own. Fifty years ago, we started to get spare little map insets - not enough of them since they cost money but quite a few.

Long-time residents may not need the geographic details that the story of Shepard Fairey's arrest calls for. They may all know where the ICA is. On the other hand, the Institute has moved within the time I've lived in greater Boston. And there's no way I could be sure of the location of the alleged tagging, although I could get to the intersection of Mass Ave. and Newbury St.

In fact, although I've lived in the same small suburban town west of Boston for twenty-four years now, I can always use a map for a real estate story like the Ashland story. After all, there's not yet a building to use as a landmark!

Here's a rule that professionals evidently can't seem to get their heads around: Every story that has any geographical significance should include a link to a mapping site, Google Maps or Yahoo or even one of the on-line phone number sites. In fact, newspapers should either spread the wealth or sell exclusive linking to the highest bidder if anyone would pay for it.

The fact that reporters and editors miss this obvious way to make their stories better suggests that even now they are living in a past journalist world that is not coming back.

Update (2/11): I can't claim credit, but someone at the MWDN is trying to get with the 21st century with a Google Map insert in another story.

Don't be stupid

Oregon and, allegedly, Congress and other states are considering a tax on miles driven. Democrats are interested. This is dumber than a bag of door knobs.

• We need to conserve gasoline (to save money, to slow global warming), not stop vehicles from slicing through the air (ooh, they might injure it).
• Semis batter the roads, not Priuses. Yes, trucks pay big taxes, but they still don't refill their own potholes.
• We really really don't want the government tracking us everywhere we go. At least now we can turn our GPS-enabled cell phones off. If we'd like to be unreachable for a little while, whether for hanky-panky or just a little damn peace and quiet.
• Bicyclists and pedestrians don't pay for road upkeep either. Better put monitoring bracelets on them, too, the sponging no-account bastards.
  

Here's a guy who gets it, even though it doesn't advantage him:

"It doesn't seem fair," said Paul Niedergang of Portland, that a hybrid would be taxed as much as his Dodge pickup. "I just think the gas tax needs to be updated."

The tax is not going to be easier to sell to taxpayers just because it's totally insanely 70 IQ stupid.

Mazeltov to the good Lieberman

There's a soft spot in my heart for 50-year-old basketball players - since I am one. No doubt a soft spot in my head, too...

Testify, brother!

David Vitter's nightmare: He's on the stand, trying not to say anything interesting enough to make the evening news, when he realizes he's not wearing any clothes and the hooker from the Big Easy that he called by his wife's name is on her knees in front of him. Oh, God! The sin...

And Eliot Spitzer comes running in with his checkbook open...

Facts just get in the way

For all teh people who think Jim Garrison was the spittin' image of Kevin Costner and a bunch of gay mafia Cubans assassinated JFK, it's always good to see mythic Hollywood extravaganzas get fact-checked, even a little tongue-in-cheek. The credulous are often the same folk who can't tell the mythic stories of the Bible from historical documents. No matter how many times you say Gilgamesh, they keep right on replying, "Never give up. Never surrender." And they believe "The Passion of the Christ" is history. Hey, it's in Aramaic!

It's amazing how well-represented Mel Gibson is in this panoply of bullshit, though it would be religiously incorrect to notice that "The Passion" is tendentious bullshit (not to mention a pornography of violence quite in keeping with Mel's secular work), and it is therefore omitted. Gives a whole new meaning to the line from "Notting Hill", "Mel does his own ass work. And why wouldn't he?" When it comes to gibsons, put your belief in Henry or in pearl onions steeped in gin.

I do have a hard time understanding how a movie released in 1968 can be held accountable for inaccurately predicting 2001. If "Back to the Future" showed the ridiculousness of Ronald Reagan's presidency from the eyes of 1955, even Ray Bradbury, who got closest with "A Sound of Thunder", couldn't have predicted the avalanche of decadence and stupidity that allowed Duhbya to take office in 2001.

It also cracks me up that sending a computer virus to alien spacecraft should be held up as an exemplar of authenticity. Probably just a Mac product placement and thus representative of the modern American commoditization, purchase, and sale of factoids as if they were true.

I have nothing against a good rollicking blockbuster myth. It's just that I can distinguish it from reality, and I wish more Americans could, too.

Price of freedom

I have no problem with vigilance, nor with continuing international pressure. But, seriously, it's a warning sign that Iran suspended its nuclear program? You'd think Duhbya was the first one ever to recognize that proliferation is a bad thing. I suppose I should stop complaining and just be glad he has finally come to understand that.

So, Iran has/has no nuclear weapons program, and "nothing's changed". Yep, that's about right. No facts could ever make a dent. Of course, Condi still justifies going into Iraq because of decades-old behavior. Any day now, I'm expecting Duhbya to rescue the Tutsis in Rwanda.

Of course, Iran, like Iraq before it, wanted its adversaries (including us) to think it has WMD, especially nukes. They're trying to take on protective coloration so the price of attacking appears too high. Then again, even without their having WMD, attacking Iraq proved too expensive in blood and treasure. Hey, how about Sudan! Ha.

Tolerable coercion

Why is it tolerable in a free society to have unions that can force contracts on corporations?

First, unions only provide some counterbalance to the power of corporations. Especially in today's global economy, they constantly have to give away previously negotiated benefits.

Unions themselves are much more democratic than even publicly traded corporations. Majority rules in strike authorizations and contract ratification. Shareholder proxies are dominated by the few and seldom determine anything of importance. I use them to withhold votes from Bushists - Robert Gates used to sit on a lot of Fidelity boards - but I always knew that was merely symbolic, and lately it's not worth the effort to find big Republican contributors and vote against them. But I've never yet seen competitive slates for the board of any fund or corporation.

Last and perhaps most important, the "free" market that conservatives adore, the invisible hand that uses greed, uh, self-interest to solve all problems, does not exist. The whole theory relies on atomic economic actors, which you'll only find in labor markets. Corporations for their part exist to escape competition. They don't want to compete; they want to win. So each corporation tries set up its business environment to avoid direct and dangerous competition with other corporations.

Most working people don't have that option. It's pretty rare to be Michelangelo or Bob Gibson or Louis Pasteur. And not one of them even was able to negotiate full value for his unique abilities, especially not Gibson until his teammate Curt Flood went to battle against the reserve clause.

Unions are a good thing - with occasional ill effects like most good things. We need more of them.

Promises of diplomacy or prelude to war?

When the SecDef rattles his fountain pen, look out.

The Bush administration is committed, for now, to using diplomatic and economic means to counter the potential nuclear threat from Iran, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday. (emphasis added)

We've been here before - only the names have changed (and not to protect the innocent).