Politics Nobody Cares

[Colm]

This, from the first page: "'I wed Iranian girls before execution'"

[praktik]

ya I looked for the quote couldn't find it


but now I can..

[Colm]

Originally Posted by workdowntown

Everyone's so caught up in the "was it racism?" argument. I'm bored with that endless morass as it seems there was fault and yes, stupidity on both sides, Crowley and Gates. I side with Gates merely because it seems frankly ridiculous to arrest an aging professor in his own home just because he doesn't show deference to your position.

How about "is being verbally unpleasant to a cop protected speech under the 1st amendment and if so was the arrest unconstitutional?".

This was my default position too, until I read the transcripts of the 9/11 call, and then Gates' own admission that he started to challenge the cop after being asked for ID (he flatout refused) because he 'knew where this was going to go'. And the fact that Gates' neighbours, the police department, and the mayor all have backed the cop's actions... I dunno, seems to me like Gates himself made several wrong decisions, and then tried to turn this into a King/Parks moment just to save face. If he'd been more up front with his response before the tapes were released, I'd definitely have no problem taking his side over Crowley's.

And while I've certainly dealt with many asshole coppers in my life, I've also dealt with many asshole professors too. In some ways, both professions can be equally happy homes for socially inept pricks with giant chips on their shoulders.

[Colm]

Leaving the silly Gates thing for now, here are some sobering comments on the 'road to recovery':

Hunky Dory
By James Howard Kunstler

08/04/09 Saratoga Springs, New York

Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to “permanent prosperity,” or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns of information technology. The more information comes to us about How Things Are, especially from TV, the more confused or wrong the conventional view gets it.

A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some “bearish” investors on the street that “the worst is behind us” in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become – a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins – suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.

The reason behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it’s based on wishing, especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences, luxuries, and leisure that had become normal in American life. These are now ebbing away in big gobs for most of the population – while a tiny fraction of the well-connected pile on ever-larger heaps of swag, enjoying ever more privilege. Those in the broad bottom 95% were content as long as there was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top 5% – by dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling, or some other venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and those ways are now gone. The bottom 95% are now left with de-laminating houses they can’t make payments on, no prospects for gainful work, repo men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser, cut-off cable service, Kraft mac-and-cheese (if they’re lucky), and Larry Summers telling them their troubles are over. (If I were Larry, I’d start thinking about a move to some place like the Canary Islands.)

Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we’re entering a new phase of history: The Long Emergency.

Government at every level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Commercial real estate fiasco just getting started.
Unemployment rising implacably.
So-called “consumers” unable to consume consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.

When The Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the greatest danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs – rather than face the need to make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly what has happened, and it didn’t happen under the rule of some backward-facing, right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a “progressive” party led by a dynamically affable young man unburdened by deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been sucked in and suckered. “Change you can believe in” has morphed into “a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold onto.”

Whatever else you might think or feel about Mr. Obama’s performance so far, this strategy on the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses with tragedy. What’s remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence of comprehensive vision – not just in the president, but in all the supposedly able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders not in government but in business and education and science and the professions.

History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now. Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition, whether it is military control of people in Central Asia, or colossal bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or national chain store retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global energy supply networks.

These imperatives are so outside-the-box of ordinary experience right now, that to drag them into the arena of politics can only evoke blank stares or nervous giggling. But whether we like it or not, these are the things that will really matter in the years ahead – not whether General Motors can ever make a profit again, or what Target Store’s sales figures are next quarter, or whether the latest high-rise condo-and-gambling complex in Las Vegas will be successfully marketed.

Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We’re prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making.

Anything can happen now. I certainly wouldn’t rule out international mischief as we arc around into fall. The air is so full of black swans that the white swan now seems like the exceptional thing. Whatever else happens, it sure will be interesting to see the public’s reaction to Wall Street’s announcement of Christmas bonuses. The folks at Rockefeller Center better be thinking about getting a fireproof tree.

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler
for The Daily Reckoning

[workdowntown]

^So to summarise:

"We're all fucked for the immediate future, wall street is in total denial"

[Colm]

That's the tl;dr version.

[praktik]

lolz, well looks like the birthers are taking teabagging to a new level, targetting Repugnant congress"men" when they appear in public fora:

GOP headache: The birther issue

As GOP Rep. Mike Castle learned the hard way back home in Delaware this month, there’s no easy way to deal with the small but vocal crowd of right-wing activists who refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

At a town hall meeting in Georgetown, a woman demanded to know why Castle and his colleagues were “ignoring” questions about Obama’s birth certificate — questions that have been put to rest repeatedly by state officials in Hawaii, where the birth certificate and all other credible evidence show that Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.

When Castle countered that Obama is, in fact, “a citizen of the United States,” the crowd erupted in boos, the woman seized control of the gathering and led a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The video went viral; by Sunday, it had been viewed on YouTube more than half a million times.

And birthers say members should expect more of the same in the coming weeks.

“Absolutely,” says California resident Orly Taitz, the Russian-born attorney/dentist who has become a kind of ringleader for the movement. “It is a very important issue, one that politicians should have taken up a long time ago.”

Moments after speaking with POLITICO Saturday, Taitz posted a call to arms on her blog:

“I believe it is a serious concern and I hope that each and every decent American comes to town hall meetings with a video camera and demands action,” she wrote.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by workdowntown

^So to summarise:

"We're all fucked for the immediate future, wall street is in total denial"

On bad days this is my feeling.

On good days I think that the people who are dumb are going to get what's comming and the system will be left intact with a collection of people who were smart enough to read about what they are doing.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by Colm

Leaving the silly Gates thing for now, here are some sobering comments on the 'road to recovery':

Hunky Dory
By James Howard Kunstler

Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we’re entering a new phase of history: The Long Emergency.

Government at every level is worse than broke.
Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
Commercial real estate fiasco just getting started.
Unemployment rising implacably.
So-called “consumers” unable to consume consumables.
Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.

...

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler
for The Daily Reckoning

I agree with the full list of negatives waiting to happen except for the food supply issue. Although food in the US is heavily dependant on oil to grow and transport it is also quite abundant. Drastic reductions in production could occur before even running out of imports and there is plenty of innovation around to be able to get distribution up and going with out oil, smart people are probably already getting this stuff done.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by praktik

lolz, well looks like the birthers are taking teabagging to a new level, targetting Repugnant congress"men" when they appear in public fora:

GOP headache: The birther issue

As GOP Rep. Mike Castle learned the hard way back home in Delaware this month, there’s no easy way to deal with the small but vocal crowd of right-wing activists who refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

At a town hall meeting in Georgetown, a woman demanded to know why Castle and his colleagues were “ignoring” questions about Obama’s birth certificate — questions that have been put to rest repeatedly by state officials in Hawaii, where the birth certificate and all other credible evidence show that Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.

When Castle countered that Obama is, in fact, “a citizen of the United States,” the crowd erupted in boos, the woman seized control of the gathering and led a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The video went viral; by Sunday, it had been viewed on YouTube more than half a million times.

And birthers say members should expect more of the same in the coming weeks.

“Absolutely,” says California resident Orly Taitz, the Russian-born attorney/dentist who has become a kind of ringleader for the movement. “It is a very important issue, one that politicians should have taken up a long time ago.”

Moments after speaking with POLITICO Saturday, Taitz posted a call to arms on her blog:

“I believe it is a serious concern and I hope that each and every decent American comes to town hall meetings with a video camera and demands action,” she wrote.

I can't wait until they figure out that the reason Obama is making them pay more taxes is to give the money to the chincs

Latent racisim for the revolution!

[Colm]

Originally Posted by praktik

lolz, well looks like the birthers are taking teabagging to a new level, targetting Repugnant congress"men" when they appear in public fora

I'm going to keep typing this until my fingers fall off: It doesn't matter if Obama was born in the USA or not! His mother was an American citizen: he could have been born anywhere in the farking universe, it doesn't matter, he still had automatic American citizenship at birth by virtue of his parent's citizenship. I just don't get the loony-rights obsession with this issue, John McCain was deemed eligible to be POTUS because of this law. But then again, a lot of loony-lefts still believe Bush, at the very least, allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. I guess some folks just need this shit to get by.

atbell: Could you imagine what would happen to cities like New York, Los Angeles or Chicago if food could only been accessed with a 100-mile local area? At some point in the future - even with renewable fuel source techonology - we're going to have to start supplying our communities with locally produced food. It makes more sense to plan for this now, when transportation isn't a big issue, than when it is.

Plus it's better for the enviro!

[judge wopner]

Originally Posted by Colm

At some point in the future - even with renewable fuel source techonology - we're going to have to start supplying our communities with locally produced food. It makes more sense to plan for this now, when transportation isn't a big issue, than when it is.

Plus it's better for the enviro!

this idea is pure fantasy.

there are plenty of food stuffs that are more efficiently grown in specific areas. if that means shipping it by truck for a week to a market, i dont see why we cant take advantage of the efficiencies our transportation network allows us.

if we have x amount of land suitable for crops in say the GTA, then why not maximize what we can grow best vs. inefficiently using land for other crops just to have them "local". whatever losses incurred by gas guzzling trucks might be equaled out with more farming work and water/chemicals needed to make certain crops grow properly on our land.

we have great cattle grazing land in ontario, but not great grape growing land outside of a few select regions. why not let the grape growing regions specialize in wine and ship it around while the beef producing regions do the same, as opposed to forcing both on the same areas just in the name of being 100 mile local? (its a bit of a specious example but you know what i mean no?)

mabey we just have to blend the local concept to something more moderate, and to accept that we cant expect to eat bananas and tropical fruit all the time, or have access to tomatoes and other types of food year round. if people were more open to eating more meat, root veggies and preserves during the winter months a happy middle ground could make it possible.

[Colm]

Originally Posted by judge wopner

mabey we just have to blend the local concept to something more moderate, and to accept that we cant expect to eat bananas and tropical fruit all the time, or have access to tomatoes and other types of food year round. if people were more open to eating more meat, root veggies and preserves during the winter months a happy middle ground could make it possible.

I'm not sure what about my comment was 'pure fantasy', since these are pretty much my thoughts on the issue. My concern is that we as consumers have become overly dependent upon importing food over great distances at the expense of farmland to the point where large communites could still survive even if the food distribution networks collapsed.

So no, I'm not saying we should stop importing apples from the Okanagan or wine from Napa Valley while we can, just that we ought to be more prepared for the occasion that we can't.

[judge wopner]

Originally Posted by Colm

I'm not sure what about my comment was 'pure fantasy', since these are pretty much my thoughts on the issue. My concern is that we as consumers have become overly dependent upon importing food over great distances at the expense of farmland to the point where large communites could still survive even if the food distribution networks collapsed.

So no, I'm not saying we should stop importing apples from the Okanagan or wine from Napa Valley while we can, just that we ought to be more prepared for the occasion that we can't.

i can agree with this, but your initial comment didnt give the sense that it was an eventuality should food distribution networks collapse.

i dont think its something a large city can really plan for. the sheer volume of food required beyond a very short emergency precludes us from ever feeding ourselves entirely on local farming. especially the winter months (for you Luddites who still think you need veggies and not just meat and animal fat to survive!! )

i dont forsee a situation where our transport capacities are reduced to the point where we cant import food. that would be along catastrophic lines of damage required to our infrastructure. if that were the case, large scale farming and distribution would be equally difficult and precarious considering the unruly mob of several million people cut off from their food supply.

there has been talk of catastrophic agriculture scenarios for decades, between weather change and running out of arable land, and yet none of them have come true in terms of global food supplies. (local disasters and problems are a different issue, we are talking about the availability of food on the global market).

so in a sense, advocating planning for a degree of self-sufficiency that is not realistic, nor is it really required.

this is more along the lines of what i mean by fantasy. i read so much about people who envision a time when we must grow our own food because of some sort of catastrophic event or energy price explosions. were energy to hit such a price, large scale, high-efficiency farming would become equally costly because of fertilizer costs. who is to say that more expensive shipping costs are on the whole greater than local farming using costly fertilizers when you include the relative efficiency of various farming regions that specialize.

i could agree that certain farming practices like grain subsidy create unfair economics for local farmers and can stress the soil needlessly. though i think this all stems from our societies unhealthy obsession with refined grains and high-fructose corn syrup, but thats another story!!!

[Colm]

Whatever man, you need to watch Soylent Green. Or maybe you have watched it, and the green crackers are already your nuclear option.
----
I don't really see why investiture in self-sustainable communities is something that should be dismissed wholesale simply because we didn't have a major food distribution problem 'for decades', or because of the problems of scale that would beleaguer a large community.

[praktik]

My letter to Andrew Sullivan made his blog:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...wing.html#more

[Colm]

Nice one!

[judge wopner]

Originally Posted by Colm

----
I don't really see why investiture in self-sustainable communities is something that should be dismissed wholesale simply because we didn't have a major food distribution problem 'for decades', or because of the problems of scale that would beleaguer a large community.

its a question of how best to allocate funds.

to insist on investing $$$ to serve purposes of self-sustainability for no reasons other than ideological purity of growing our own food or a transport catastrophe is myopic in my opinion.

investing in agriculture in say ontario or the GTA is great, at issue is the type of agriculture for this proposal; one in which our land is to support a massive metropolitan population. it would require a paradigm shift in how farming operates in the region. it would also soak up resources that could be allocated elsewhere for other projects or other scientific research to help lessen the chances of energy/transport catastrophe or improve the efficiency of what agriculture we do have and what we are already good at.

there is a distinct difference between industrial agriculture and farming to produce enough food to feed a neighboring city. especially with our entire cultural approach to food which entails large grocery stores providing out-of season food year round its not feasable.

so i would agree with the idea if we also changed our dietary habits. id have no problem eating within about 100-200 miles, accept not having olive oil. but i eat only meat and some basic veggies that i can grow hydroponically if need be. but most people eat a much more varied diet year round, to make us sustainable within any measure of reason (ie not trying to make olives grow on GTA farm land) would involve mass amounts of money, and what i think would be too great a shift in most people's eating habits to make the proposal successful.

growing food locally has its merits, and the local movement is great, but i think they act on different planes than talk of making an entire region or city sustainable with the climate we have in southern ontario.

i dont ever envision an energy situation so bad that the price of food becomes cheaper to grow here during our limited growing season, or that physically we are unable to ship food across large distances without it being the result of some massive catastrophe that would make large scale agriculture just as difficult due to the social and economic instability implicit to that kind of scenario.

[EffinHard]

Originally Posted by praktik

My letter to Andrew Sullivan made his blog:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...wing.html#more

nice..... although you had more to say than he did apparently.

[workdowntown]

Originally Posted by Colm

I just don't get the loony-rights obsession with this issue

Put simply, it's the end result of instilling fear in the ignorant masses as a political tool; something the Republicans did and continue to do (see under: healthcare scare ads) very effectively. The end result of always framing the other political parties as "enemies of America".

Fear of black people (the loony fringe still see 'half-black' as 'not white enough'), fear of muslims ("he's a secret muslim!111"), fear of Liberals/Democrats ("THEYZ COMMINIZTS!!"), fear of their guns being taken away et al.

The facts don't matter to them one iota, they just want to create maximum dischord and sow the seeds of sedition because everything they fear Obama represents (even if they're totally wrong) scares the piss out of them and there are many organisations/parties whose agendas are furthered by spreading the anti-Obama propaganda so I don't think we'll see an end to it anytime soon unfortunately.

There's also the whole "politics as team sport" aspect and well, the word "fan" has its roots in "fanatic" after all, these people simply illustrate it with their every waking moment.

[thom100]

Not sure if this has made the rounds on tribe already



amazing shot of Jack.

[gl*tch]

this looks fake to me - the bottle of whatever is really "bright" compared to the rest of the pic

[thom100]

http://thestar.blogs.com/politics/20...ne-before.html

[Hi i'm God]

"This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

Then, after spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marchal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right."

[Thunder]

Ten Trillion dollars deficit on frontline