Oh, yeah, and speaking of God-botherers...

... the eminent Ms. Jennifer Bryson at the equally eminent Witherspoon Institute, wishes to make a causal relationship between porn and terrorism where none existed before, and may yet not exist at all.

Now, apart from needing a remedial lesson in correlation not necessarily indicating causation, Ms. Bryson also seems to assume that the rest of us are as pissing-in-our-pants-scared of Islamic terrorism as she is, and would, as she does, describe it as a dire threat to our species' survival. Umm, sorry, sadly, no.

Ms. Bryson, moving out of the slow lane of intellectual befuddlement into the fast lane of religious frenzy, makes the improbable assertion that if a connection between porn and terrorism could be made, well, it "would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation." This woman seems to have forgotten that pornography comes from the ancient Greek, meaning "pictures of prostitutes," which strongly suggests that pornography has been around for at least 2500 years before nuclear weapons, and in all that time has managed to coexist quite nicely with human existence, whereas world war, genocide and nuclear weapons have in the 20th century alone taken a toll wholly more, uh, dramatic and real than her imagined terrorism resulting from pornography.

But, hell, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and give her a choice. She can have a copy of Hustler dropped in her lap, or she can have a two-megaton warhead dropped on her head.

At the very least, if she chooses the former, she'll still be around to rant about pornography's imminent destruction of civilization, even if no one pays any attention to her.

Let's get utterly real for a moment. The real threat to civilization is state-sponsored terrorism, of which the very moral and upstanding policy elite of this country of ours--and our friends--are past masters.

The real pornography of terrorism is wanton death and destruction, regardless who's doing it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what Jennifer Bryson, in her willful ignorance and her desire to shift the public's gaze from the obvious, claims is of existential importance.

Just one thought on the panoply of...

... Repug presidential candidates.

Including the soon-to-declare Gov. Goodhair, more than one has said, in so many words, that "God told me to run."

Now, applying just a tiny bit of logic here, either one or more of them is lying, or God is fucking with them, or us, or both.

It's been a remarkable few weeks...

... on the rocket-powered handbasket ride to hell.

Haven't been posting all that much because there's just been so much to be completely gobsmacked about that it's getting near-impossible to sort it all out and put it all into perspective.

But, top of the list, of course, is that the looniest politician currently drawing a paycheck on the people's dollar is now one of the Repug front-runners after a thorazine-assisted debate performance in New Hampshire. If Michele Bachmann were sedated any more than she appeared to be, Scary Sarah could have pretended Bachmann was the caribou on her reality show and gotten off at least five or six shots before Bachmann noticed she was under fire....

The more I see and read of Bachmann, the more I'm convinced that there's a weird parallel-universe Pat Paulsen effect going on with her and the press. Paulsen ran for President as a joke. The press knew it was joke, Paulsen knew it was a joke, and both knew that it was a great way to get people talking and thinking about not only issues, but the process of campaigning, as well. Now, Bachmann is goofier than Paulsen could ever imagine being, but, and here's where I start to lose it, the press is treating her seriously, as if she actually could, conceivably, make sense, and be electable.

This woman is not normal. In fact, if I were looking for the perfect actress to portray her in the inevitable biopic, it would be Sally Kellerman, because Kellerman already had Bachmann nailed down, in "Slither." Deep, deep down, Michele Bachmann is Kitty Kopetzky.

The great mystery of the moment is why the press is treating her as if she's the reincarnation of Margaret Chase Smith.

Ran across a curious little mockumentary...

... the other day, thanks to Netflix streaming--"The American Ruling Class," which features Lewis Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper's magazine, advising two fictional graduates of Yale on how to find out if there is an American ruling class, and how to join it if it exists. One graduate is headed for Goldman Sucks, while the other wants to write, and, hopefully, make a positive difference in society.

We can sort of guess how this will turn out--the vaguely well-meaning but mostly apolitical Yalie finally decides that he's tired of poverty and menial work and goes to work at Goldman Sucks, too, because he's sure that he'll be able to retain his altruistic impulses after decades of soul-numbing number-crunching and devising skeevy plans to benefit his wealthy clients.

We know he won't. He interviews dozens of the nation's movers and shakers, the crème de la crème of the American foreign policy/financial elite, and every single one of them lies to him about the existence of a ruling class, just bullshits him like a carnie barker ropes in a hayseed from the country (James Baker III turns out to be the lyingest, silliest manipulator of them all in that regard--he won't even entertain the question and simply dismisses it out of hand as specious, after trying mightily to make shit sound like Shinola). And the back story is filled in with extraordinarily ironic commentary from Mr. Lapham himself, including one telling aphorism, "Just so long as you understand that 'national interest' means 'self-interest.'" And, of course, Lapham means the self-interest of the elite themselves.

I found it odd that I ran across this curious little documentary just days before all the mounting frenzy--particularly in the mainstream news media--over the impending royal wedding in the UK. I realize it's a stretch, but, there's always been an impulse in this country toward monarchy, because the monarchy the Founders knew best contained an aristocracy (and there were probably as many monarchical loyalists during the American Revolution as there were rebels). Madison and Jefferson, particularly, warned about accumulated wealth approximating an "artificial aristocracy," and it sure looks as if wealth has created an American ruling class with the same inclinations toward anti-democratic behavior as any landed gentry in the United Kingdom. That those inclinations seem to be heavily weighted on the side of political conservatives in this country probably should come as no surprise, and even though that contemporary conservatism is fraught with all the signs and signals of an emergent proto-fascism, the roots are similar--one leader for life, ordering society for the benefit of those who would protect power at all costs, and for those who would benefit financially by doing so.

At virtually the same time, Washington was preparing for its own version of a royal ball, with the press invited to rub elbows with the courtiers of power and notables of the entertainment world--the jesters of our society today--the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. The dinner itself is always just a warm-up for the parties afterward, sponsored by powerful corporations and media outlets hoping that a free drink and a few canapes and the opportunity to kiss a celebrity on the cheek will induce some hapless dodo of a social-climbing reporter to think favorably of some rapacious corporate raider when word reaches him or her that said raider has probably broken five thousand-odd laws in the pursuit of profit, or to view some moral midget of a politician as a "real" human being worthy of polite respect because they have a pulse and are ever so slightly warmer than room temperature. Case in point: the Washington Post online "Lifestyle" section dutifully reports that "After the correspondents' dinner, Sarah Palin attends the Bloomberg & Vanity Fair cocktail reception at the residence of the French ambassador in Washington," and, that not being quite enough coverage of La Palin, also headlines, "Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin attends the MSNBC party after the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington." And, lest the well-known Palin resentment be thwacked into bloom, the Post makes sure to note that Palin's club-footed dancin' fool of a daughter is also in attendance, "Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, arrives at the MSNBC after-party." Well, we're not sure of the order of those events, but, no matter, it's still the elite's version of pub-crawling, except that there are enough limos to prevent skinned knees and to avoid opportunities of bumping into the hoi polloi.

And, let's not be remiss in reminding everyone that this exercise in mimicry of aristocracy is arranged by the Washington, D.C., press corps. And, let's not be remiss in reminding everyone of who doesn't get invited to this soiree, or who has the good sense not to be associated with it even if invited: Seymour Hersh. Robert Parry. Amy Goodman. Ray McGovern. Chris Hedges. Vandana Shiva. Glenn Greenwald. Mike Malloy. Noam Chomsky. Greg Mitchell. Matt Taibbi. Michael Hastings. Robert Scheer. Bob McChesney. Barbara Ehrenreich. Alfred McCoy. Mike Davis. Mac McClelland.

There is a ruling class in this country, and the very largest measure of us have no say in it. If that seems to put the lie to this country as a true democracy, perhaps it's because we've been encouraged not to pay attention too carefully to the inner workings of power in this country.

On edit, if there's any question that the ruling class is sensitive about what the rest of us know about their comings and goings and doings, this should answer that question:





The response of the mainstream press to Wikileaks pulling back the curtain just a tiny bit is no different than that of the power elite. So much for an informed citizenry.

Just a note about The...

... Donald. C'mon, folks, he's not serious about the job. Here's why: If he were to win the Preznidency, he'd have to give up control of his "empire," and he's not about to do that, because the trustees might discover that he's been doing everything from check-kiting to bribing S&P ratings analysts, and, lordy, lordy, lordy, he doesn't want any of that coming out.

He can't let other people run his business while he's playing Prez, first, because that would be an ego-deflator, and second, because they might discover what he's been up to.

Nope, the headlines will read, "Trump Dumps Jump," or, perhaps, "Chumps Dump Trump." Something will cause him to bail out. This guy is defined by his own definition of his self-worth--in dollars, real or imaginary.

No job is worth giving that up--even the Presidency.

Have been ruminating on various...

... opinions about what government is these days, I suppose because of the accumulated dreck emanating from the right wing these days and especially with regard to the Tea Partiers' whining about wanting to "take their government back" and "getting back to what the Founders intended in the Constitution," a document that few of them have read through to the end and even fewer understand.

Some of this nonsense is, certainly, rooted in nostalgia for the `50s, which were wonderful if you were white, male, had credit and a good job, and were utterly conformist, but not very good for everyone else.

But, even then, government was large and growing noticeably larger, so the arguments about smaller government deserve some examination. I think the first misapprehension of the "small government" types is that until the New Deal, government was some tiny entity that required little to no funding, and that just isn't true. WWI cost a lot of money--so much so that inflation was accelerating to the extent that, around its conclusion, Wilson had introduced wage and price controls, and there were additional debts to be paid for the Spanish-American War, some of which was to play the quit claim charges extracted by Spain for them to give up their Caribbean interests, about $20 million, along with the price of an occupation force and government in the Philippines, and then, on top of that, there was the price of Seward's deal to buy Alaska from the Russians, along with the cost of Teddy Roosevelt's dispatching of the "Great White Fleet" around the world as a show of American military might (not to mention the $10 million he paid to rebel groups in Panama for their interests in the Panama Canal). As the country's leaders were realizing, war and imperialism weren't cheap, which was most of the reason why the income tax was created. And, with imperial ambition, a central bank was necessary, prompting the creation of the Federal Reserve.

All that occurred well before FDR came to power and realized that the banksters had put the country in a tub of shit, and decided to do something about it, without overly antagonizing the Wall Streeters and the industrialists, because he was going to need them for the next war, which was looming on the horizon.

And the population at the time FDR was first elected in 1932 was roughly 40% of what it is now. Further contrasts: air travel was in its infancy--the idea of normalized air traffic control was almost non-existent. Commercial radio was less than twenty years old and commercial television, even in rudimentary form, was almost two decades away. The closest thing to a national sense of ecology was provided by John Muir's attempts to preserve some part of the wilderness, and talking moving pictures were about six years old. Weather prediction was guesswork, and there were no weather satellites to help provide accurate weather forecasts, let alone electronic computers to analyze the data. There was a peacetime military, complaining about being underfunded, but, perfectly in keeping with the actual threats to the country (nearly none). Small farmers were still the norm, rather than the exception, and huge parts of the country existed without electrical service (from 1936 until 1947, the only electricity on my grandfather's farm in Texas came from a 6-volt, 200-watt Wincharger windmill, which was enough to provide a lightbulb in my grandmother's chicken coop, a light or two in the house, and enough power to charge the batteries for the radio, which my grandfather saw as his window to the outside world--before 1936, they had no electrical power at all--until FDR's REA program brought reliable electrical power to him).

It's very important to understand that, at the time, big business had neither the money nor the inclination to expand the economy to dig the country out of a depression, but, the aggregate resources of the government did. Big business did not initiate at its own expense the enormous energy projects of the `30s--only government had the resources necessary to accomplish those tasks, some with labor funded by the government that big business would not or could not employ. Big business did not create over 600,000 miles of roads into the backwoods of America, because there was no profit in doing so. That same big business did not build swimming pools for inner-city children or day camps in the country for them, again because there was no profit in doing so.

Government did those things, not just to create make-work jobs, but because those things were necessary if the country was going to, first, escape the economic doldrums which big business had created, and second, acquire and create the infrastructure necessary to keep the economy going.

So, the first lesson that the teabaggers have unlearned is that government is necessary. It's now, like it or not, an integral part of the economy. Even today, the teabaggers have no understanding of what the government does with regard to the economy. Every office in the government today uses computers, printers, network paraphenalia, desks, furniture, and the office buildings, too. From where do those items originate? Tens of thousands of suppliers around the country who employ millions of people. How about the paper the government uses? More thousands of people in the timber and paper industries. Beyond those limited economic effects, the couple of million federal employees get paychecks--supplied by the taxpayers, yes--that then spend that money for their sustenance and shelter, their diversions and the education of their children, mostly in their neighborhood businesses and banks.

Along with all those hard economic advantages, there were other improvements in ordinary citizens' lives that began during the FDR years--a formal end to exploitive child labor, the right of labor to freely organize, to obtain contracts for their work in exactly the same way that CEOs today negotiate their contracts, the initiation of minimum wage laws (however badly administered by Congress in recent decades),the beginning of guaranteed old-age pensions through Social Security, and the result was the economic advantages that accrued to workers in those same `50s teabaggers now fondly remember.

What most teabaggers have no conception of today is that government is a giant engine of the economy, and that it works principally for business, and especially for big businesses. Much of what the government does today is not giving money away to foreign countries as foreign aid, or welfare, or a dozen other activities the teabaggers have been told take away their freedoms and their tax revenues, but, rather, is work for business. The government produces thousands of reams of statistics--on unemployment, on business trends, on exports, imports, GDP, on where government spending goes, economic sector analysis, the debt, the deficit, you name it, the government provides a statistic for it, all of which is grist for the corporate economists, Wall Street, the general business sector, on publicly-held companies and their expenditures, on taxation, on everything of business interest in this country and around the world. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, among many other tasks, does a line-by-line audit of the government's budget every year, separating every minute expenditure into categories useful to business. The Import-Export Bank arranges loans to foreign countries to buy American goods and services, and most of the money in non-military foreign aid is arranged by the U.S. Agency for International Development to go to American companies doing international aid work.

When Calvin Coolidge said, very reductively and somewhat moronically, that the business of America was business, he meant that government was largely in the business of helping business, and that's just as true today as it was in the `20s.

All that said, are there ways in which government has grown too large? Oh, you betcha, as Scary Sarah would say. Ever since the end of WWII, when the United States was virtually the only industrialized country in the world that had remained unscathed by war, the country's leaders have been obsessed with imperial hegemony, and our tax dollars have been used to support that aim, starting in 1947 with the formal codification of the national security state. Within a couple of years of that date, the country embarked upon a plethora of domestic and international campaigns to establish a kind of neocolonial domination of the world, using both military and economic power, which has not abated to this day. And yet, oddly, it is this humungous growth of government which the Tea Partiers and their fellow travellers find normal and acceptable--that government is "keeping us safe," when nothing is further than the truth.

At the beginning of the Korean War, military spending would quadruple from peacetime levels and would never come down again, and those levels, including war expenditures, are now six or seven times the amount necessary for real defense at a time of real peace. On top of those costs came the new demands for extreme secrecy, a CIA free of ethical, moral or practical constraints, and, even after the end of the Cold War (a "war" we furthered and amplified--there's plenty of documentation from the former Soviet Union that they were much more terrified of us than we of them), new enemies in the Middle East had to be found to justify continuing military expenditures.

Add in the debt on such expenditures, the new desires of government to surveil its citizens at will, new technology and the burgeoning roster of private security-surveillance-intelligence corporations eager to feed the paranoia of right-wingers, milquetoast Democrats and the public alike, and military spending is now through the roof, most of which constitutes the means by which the rights of ordinary Americans have been roughly violated, and yet, the "smaller government" proponents never mention these egregious infringements on their liberties, nor do they complain about the huge bite out of their wallets that pay for these excesses, because "big government," which they otherwise hate, is "keeping them safe."

It's a conundrum, isn't it? In truth, many of the complaints about big government are deeply embedded in racist attitudes about foreign aid and welfare (which have always been small percentages of the national budget) and just general whining about taxation. If "big government" were a real problem for such people, they'd be up in arms about their loss of rights, loss of their own privacy, and the orders of magnitude increases in the secrecy of the government in its affairs, because those are the biggest encroachments of big government in the last sixty years, bar none. And yet, the right-wingers, for the most part, blissfully accept that reality as normal, out of partisan idiocy or fear or both.

The very wealthy in the right wing are determined, in the false name of smaller government, to destroy the best parts of government and society, and to keep the worst, and the uninformed great middle are blithely cooperating in that effort. We've seen wholesale efforts at the state and federal levels to destroy public education, unions for public and private workers, end restrictions on child labor, defund programs that have lifted the elderly out of poverty, eviscerate environmental law and a host of other bad, bad, bad ideas in the name of lower taxes and smaller government, the advantages of which will almost exclusively accrue to the very wealthy, and still, people of modest means and opportunity have signed on to these abominations in the name of "shrinking the size government."

What can we ascertain from this thoroughly strange set of circumstances? Perhaps, first and foremost, that we have greatly underestimated the power of propaganda, and second, that there is no underestimating the divergence from logic and reason that occurs during times of desperation. Our chosen leaders know these principles far better than their electorate, which is why they can bullshit their constituents to the degree they do.

Dorothy Parker's Lament....

For months and months now, each new day has prompted me to ask, "what fresh hell is this?"

The news has been so unremittingly depressing that it's been difficult to single out any one piece of it for the shredding and/or belittling it deserves, let alone to do it in writing. Nevertheless, out of the miasma has come the conclusion that I've been horribly wrong about one thing in particular. For years now, I've been saying that the Repugs want to take us back to the days of the the Gilded Age. Wrong. We're already there in some important ways.

First, there's almost no doubt left that we have a government that is working almost exclusively for the very wealthy, both corporate and individual. Poll after poll shows that, regardless of how people self-identify politically or ideologically, when it comes to issues that are important to them and their families, they want the things that Congress and the Executive have absolutely no interest in pursuing, and yet, the Beltway crowd seems to get what it wants.

Second, as the most recent flapdoodle over Paul Ryan's infantile exercise in budget-making has evinced, the punditry, the media and the fever swamp that is Washington, D.C., are mostly enthralled with servicing the rich. "Courageous," my ass.

Third, there's a weird obsession with the markets that wasn't a part of the zeitgeist forty or fifty years ago. Tune in to NPR in the early `70s and you'd be lucky to hear a stock market report but once a week, on a Friday evening newscast summing up the week, and, if one bothered, on Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street program on Friday nights. Now, the updates come almost hourly, even though 80% of the country has nothing invested in the markets, or, at best, a few bucks in a 401(k) mutual fund.

Fourth, there's some perverse notion afoot in the nation that we all have to work for "the economy's best interest," even though the economy largely benefits the wealthy these days--as every estimate of income distribution makes very, very clear:



Fifth, the very, very rich are whining, non-stop, that they aren't sufficiently appreciated whilst they suck money out of the real economy and put it in their pockets. Lloyd Blankfein says he's "doing God's work," while millions of people can't find work, are being thrown out of their homes and are also being expected to foot the bill for keeping firms like his afloat after they've engineered global-scale fuck-ups. Temerity is too tame a word to describe what's going on in the banking world right now.

Sixth, even when a pussy like Dick Durbin dares say of the Senate, "the banks run this place," no one takes him seriously but a reporter for a goddamned music magazine, Rolling Stone. It's not Mark Hanna passing out thousand-dollar bills on the floor of the Senate as it was in 1898, it's even worse--it's lobbyists promising campaign cash and future-compensation nirvana to do the will of corporations.

On top of that, we have a black President who thinks Ronald Reagan (who began his national political ambitions in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of some of the worst racial violence in the country's recent history) is a pretty neat guy, and that all that Laffer Curve bullshit and trickle-down economics is Shinola. Why else would he put a CEO that eliminated twenty percent of his company's domestic jobs in ten years on a Presidential commission on job creation?

Seventh, there are yahoos at the state level that want to do away with child labor laws.

Everything gained by ordinary workers in the last eighty years is under attack by a bunch of meth-snorting vigilantes working for big business, and their rallying cry is "freedom." Freedom for whom, exactly? The very, very wealthy, that's who, to do the fuck as they please with the environment, the economy and the country, and the powers that be are completely complicit in the effort. That's not 2011. That's 1893.

Our country is being run by a bunch of skeevy fucks with money, and the Repugs and the Tea Partiers, while the worst of the bunch, are not the only skeevy fucks doing the fatcats' bidding. That honor is wholly bipartisan.

Might as well change the name of the country to Fuckwits United, because that's what we've become.

For a long, long, long time...

... I've had the nagging feeling that we are in the midst of some weird, unexplainable mass institutional insanity.

Unfortunately, I keep getting proof for that suspicion. For example, we have Ms. Martha Roby, Congresswoman from Alabama, who was apparently so traumatized by irrational numbers in school that she wants to rid the country of them.

NASA might as well close up shop if this becomes law, along with who knows how many engineering firms, big and small.

Still, it's symptomatic of something much larger and much more insidious at work in this country, the definition of knowledge as elitist. Okay, start off with the acknowledgment that scientific knowledge is mutable and subject to change as better evidence is revealed to us. After all, the natural philosophers of three or four hundred years ago thought that some aethereal substance known as phlogiston was responsible for fire. When Joseph Priestley stumbled upon the element, oxygen, as the reason for fire, there was plenty of hawing and harrumphing, but, eventually, repeated experimentation and related study showed the rightness of his discovery.

That's the way science works. And the sciences need mathematics. Undermining mathematics produces errors in science, which is the ultimate ambition of legislation such as Roby's. Once scientific method can be discredited, it can be discarded, to the great relief of fundamentalist crackpots everywhere.

But, what's mystifying about this is the presumption for Roby's legislation. It's the notion that making children more ignorant, more sure of being right when they're horribly wrong, is going to increase their collective standing on international measures of educational effectiveness. Roby is trying to be helpful to our struggling students:

"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi.... I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Calling this moronic offers it dignity it does not deserve.


I once had a math instructor in college who had spent thirty-five years teaching math in the public schools, and then another fifteen teaching at the college level, who, when encountering a student who could not resist the urge to argue from a false premise, would draw herself up to her full 5'5" and say, forthrightly, "the inability to let go of a bad idea is the sign of a weak mind."

I think that's where we are today as a society. We cannot let go of the bad ideas with which we have been bombarded for several decades. We have ample proof, for example, that trickle-down economics and the aptly-named Laffer Curve were, at best, cruel jokes played on a public woefully uneducated in economics, and, at worst, devious and deceptive principles whose objects were to move money upwards into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful (these ideas, at their best and worst, were enormously successful--a substantial minority of the public believes in them as if they had been written on stone tablets and brought down the mountain by Moses himself).

Even today, with the wreckage of financial speculation and wretched imperial excess all around us, a significant portion of the public buys into the rank propaganda that our problems are solely due to the federal deficit, and that they will be good citizens by supporting legislation which will impoverish them for decades to come, even when historical data contradict the lies they've been told.

There are bad ideas seeping through this society, like toxic waste through subterranean streams of drinking water, promoted by weak minds with loud voices. Some of them, like Martha Roby's, will eventually encounter obstacles such as a Presidential veto or death in Senate committee, but others, such as the many bills currently in state legislatures around the country to legitimize creationism as science, or to destroy representative government, or to transfer wealth to corporations from the public coffers, may yet prevail.

Eventually, we are going to have to come to terms with the reasons why we have allowed ourselves to be governed by a minority of the weakest minds among us who have been busily promoting those bad ideas. We can do that before or after the crash, it's our choice.