Category: Rants

I really dislike the "hey here is some thing I found, click on it and my work is done" style of blogging and I do my best to avoid it. Hopefully I am successful more often than not.

But not today. No, today you just need to look at this. Because I have laid eyes upon one of the most intoxicating trainwrecks created by man. You know Peak Oil, right? Well this might be Peak Wingnut. After this, the next rung on the crazy ladder is eating one's own crap.

You have been suitably warned. And it is work safe, unless your workplace has a policy against retardedness. So here. Look at this. For the love of God, look at it. Do not overlook the fact that it is interactive.

Scroll your mouse over each person in the painting for a fun civics lesson and explanation of artistic intent.

If there is something preventing you from being willing or able to look at this, let me briefly summarize.
buy aygestin generic buy aygestin online over the counter

It is an interactive painting entitled "One Nation under God" which depicts Jesus giving the Constitution to a small child (who will in turn give it to his "Handicapped Child" brother, if I may infer that from the captions). Not only are historical figures included – Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, and so on – but several cultural stock characters are also present, from "Mr. Hollywood" to "Liberal News Reporter" to "Professor" clutching a copy of The Origin of the Species to "Supreme Court Justice" shielding his face from Christ for the shame of his rulings.

This is part painting, part history lesson, and part holy shit what in the hell is wrong with people. Enjoy all three components. Enjoy the artist's skilled hand with the brush, evident from the fact that Ronald Reagan looks like the dad from The Wonder Years and John Adams appears to be a presenter on The Price is Right. Learn important facts like that farmers "truly are the backbone of America" or that "There are many good people in America, they are not all Christian" as he depicts an immigrant (note: "I wanted him to have a look of shock on his face when he sees where the source of America's greatness comes from when he sees Christ holding the Constitution.") Most importantly, sit quietly and contemplatively as you try to absorb how deeply disturbed a nation must be to get to this point.

I've got nothing. Nothing else. Just look at it. Learn from it. Learn all you can. It is our only hope.

A group of a dozen people are taking a pleasure cruise on a yacht. When they reach the middle of the ocean, one by one the passengers start showing symptoms of a terrible Ebola-like illness.

They are vomiting and have 106 degree fevers. It is obvious that without medical attention some of them will be in deep trouble.
buy priligy online langleyrx.com no prescription

The captain hops on the satellite phone and calls a Medevac – and discovers that a Medevac costs upwards of $50,000. Fortunately people on yachts tend to be pretty well-to-do, so he informs his passengers that everyone will need to pony up five grand. Problem solved. But the recession has hit the investor class hard, and the group of ostensibly wealthy people are actually struggling to make ends meet. They worry about their substantial debts and tell the captain to hold off on the Medevac. Why spend all that money – more accurately, why assume even more debt on the American Express – when the yacht will probably make it to land in time to get everyone taken care of anyway? One must keep an eye on the bottom line, after all.

Ten days later the yacht floats into the harbor and all but one of the passengers is dead. But at least they didn't charge that extra $5000. That would have been dumb.

I tend to be pretty conservative with my finances and I pay off my debts as rapidly as humanly possible. I simply don't like having that obligation hanging over my head, nor do I feel good about borrowing money I don't have unless I absolutely have to. Yet even I am dumbfounded at the extent to which "the national debt" and "the deficit" continually paralyze the thought processes of the American public and our elected officials. The most complete and enduring victory of Reaganism has been the demonization of deficit spending, which is ironic given how much of it Reagan and his GOP successors managed to do. Cue Krugman and Reich to explain – yes, unbelievably we actually need this explained to us as a nation – why unemployment is more important than short-term deficit reduction. It did not take the GOP long after failing to block the stimulus legislation to start harping on "paying down the deficit," as empty suit and toupee John Thune opines in the increasingly irrelevant Editorial section of the Wall Street Journal. You know the drill. Blah blah debt. Blah blah deficit. Blah blah our children. All tired arguments, all of which were conspicuously absent from the mouths of people like Thune between 2000 and 2008.

No, deficit spending is not a good thing. Yes, in an ideal world we'd have a balanced budget and a surplus (and don't forget that prior to George W. we had both). But with 10% of Americans unemployed by the "official" tally and with real (U6) unemployment/underemployment approaching 20% it is not time to start pretending like we give a shit about deficit spending.

It's time to figure out how to get more paychecks in more hands so that we don't have one in five adults in the workforce unemployed or working at KFC. Krugman was right nine months ago; the problem is that the White House and Congress wimped out with the stimulus. They spent enough to jack up the deficit but not nearly enough to be effective. If you're going to do it, do it. Now that the half-hearted stimulus has failed to effect dramatic changes, although things are starting to look up a bit, we are at a fork in the road. We can either spend enough to truly stimulate economic growth or we can run for the safety of the kind of emotion-based economic "policy" that consistently leads to failed interventions in the private sector. Since the President already allowed the clear minority to dictate the outcomes of the first stimulus debate, I'll let you take a wild guess at how things will proceed from here. The need for action continues to outpace the political will for it.

Is there any refrain more tired or more effective at immediately halting your desire, need, or social obligation to pay attention to the words coming out of someone's mouth than the phrase "with my tax dollars"?

It simultaneously betrays the speaker's wildly inflated sense of self-importance and the presence of deep seated issues with the basic concept of living in a society with other people.
buy cipro online buy cipro no prescription

Leaving aside the fact that 99% of Americans, and certainly all of those lazy enough to rely on such a stupid talking point, don't have the slightest idea how tax dollars are actually spent (I think 75% is paid out to teenage immigrant unwed mothers and the remaining 25% is funneled through the National Endowment for the Arts to support preverted and blasphemous sculpture) the idea that we get to pick and choose what we do and do not wish to pay for is, well, retarded.

But that doesn't stop tax bitchers, many of whom are unafraid of rolling up their pants and wading boldly into Lake Retarded. The latest meme, helpfully regurgitated by the non-partisan and objective journalists on the right, is the "I morally object to 'my tax dollars' being used to fund abortions!"

Don't worry, teabaggers. It is literally impossible for your tax dollars to fund abortions.
buy clomiphene online buy clomiphene no prescription

Or anything else. Because there is a very, very good chance that you're not paying a fucking dime in Federal income tax. This year, 47% of households filing with the IRS will have a Federal income tax obligation of zero. For incomes under $50,000 (which describes more than half of households in the country) a whopping 69.5% will pay not one dime, with the remaining 30% paying something on the order of 15% on the fraction of their income which will qualify as taxable.

Stop for a minute and let that sink in. Think of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the screaming teabaggers, the stupid protests, and the open talk about the need for someone to murder the President or at least depose him.

Those right-wing drones sure can make a lot of noise but as sure as the Pope wears a funny hat, there is a greater than 50% chance that these mouthbreathers won't be paying a penny in hated income taxes this year.

I realize that these people are almost comically immune to facts and their conception of "taxes" they pay "the government" is an amalgam of entitlement programs (Medicaid, SSI) and non-Federal obligations like property taxes. Nonetheless, this would seem to be a pertinent piece of information to provide tp your asshole coworker who, despite your repeated and increasingly desperate entreaties, will not turn down the damn Glenn Beck.

(note: Throughout this entry please do as I have been doing for an hour: hum "I want to be a right-wing pundit" to the tune of "I want to marry a lighthouse keeper.")

I am becoming a right winger and changing the format of this blog. My style of argumentation will be changing – perhaps even changing radically – but it's going to be so much easier on me. Harder on you, because everything I write will be terrible, but so long as it saves me time I don't care. Ayn Rand is beaming with pride from beyond the grave.

I have been inspired to make this abrupt change by Dan Riehl, one of the internet's most consistently idiotic bags-o'-dicks finest sources of reasoned political rhetoric, and his recent musings on murdered Census-taker Bill Sparkman. Dan is a to-the-point kind of guy, so he helpfully entitles the piece "Was Census Worker Bill Sparkman a Child Predator?" for readers short on time. Then he reassures the skeptical reader that he has "done a fair amount of crime blogging mixed in with politics over time. One doesn't rule anything in or out without some firm answers" to remind us that he has expertise and knows of what he speaks.

Taking a cue from Riehl, I'm going to helpfully summarize the argument in case you don't have the time to learn all there is to be learned from it.

Ah, Arizona. The youngest (continental U.S.) state. Land of the mighty cactus, the mighty Grand Canyon, and the mighty Larry Fitzgerald. Reliable, conservative Arizona, the state that hath bequeathed us Johns McCain and Kyl, the Minutemen, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It's the kind of state in which an unelected governor could reasonably be expected to declare that she has been sent by God to lead the voters through this dark economic night of the soul.

It is a sad commentary on our times, and our collective intellectual regression to the Dark Ages, that Gov. Jan Brewer can say the following without raising many eyebrows or striking Americans as out of the ordinary:

"I firmly believe that God has placed me in this powerful position of Arizona's governor to help guide our state through the difficulty that we are currently facing…And that has caused me, of course, to be grateful that we are a country of Christianity."

Excellent points, Governor.

This is the kind of crazy usually reserved for State Reps in Mississippi and the Florida panhandle. But Arizona has been on a tear lately, elevating to elected office a series of nutcases and felons that would make an Illinois Governor blush. Not content to elect the occasional fascist sheriff or State Senator who happens to be on white supremacist email lists, voters have previously filled Brewer's position with people Republicans who can't keep from running afoul of the law.

Brewer's messiah complex may be a refreshing change for Arizonans after Gov. Fife Symington was convicted of felony bank fraud and hounded out of office in 1997. And he followed into office Evan Mecham, who is, for my money, the elected official in our nation's illustrious history who most perfectly combined disregard for the law with the raw power of batshit insanity. A sanitized biography notes:

While governor, Mecham became known for statements and actions that were widely perceived as insensitive to minorities. Among these actions were the cancellation of the state's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, attributing high divorce rates to working women, and his defense of the word "pickaninny."

We know of Arizona's troubled history with the MLK holiday, a history in which Mecham played the role of peacemaker by stating that "King doesn't deserve a holiday" and telling black community leaders "You folks don't need another holiday. What you folks need are jobs." In response to charges that he was racist, he reassured voters that "I've got black friends. I employ black people. I don't employ them because they are black; I employ them because they are the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job." He was quite the uniter. He also had a penchant for filling his executive appointments with felons:

Mecham appointed Alberto Rodriguez as superintendent of the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control while he was under investigation for murder. Other questionable nominations included a director of the Department of Revenue whose company was in arrears by US$25,000 on employment compensation payments, an appointee for head of prison construction who had served prison time for armed robbery, and a former Marine nominated as a state investigator who had been court-martialled twice. Other political appointees who caused Mecham embarrassment were an education adviser, James Cooper, who told a legislative committee "If a student wants to say the world is flat, the teacher doesn't have the right to prove otherwise," and Sam Steiger, the Governor's special assistant, who was charged with extortion.

After running the state's economy into the ground, thanks in no small part to the MLK-related boycott, and serially pissing off every member of his own party or any other, Mecham scored an unprecedented and since unequaled feat in the history of American democracy. He is the only elected official to simultaneously be under impeachment, subject to a recall election (which he blamed on "a band of homosexuals and dissident Democrats"), and under felony indictment (for embezzling campaign money). Read that again. There was a race to indict him before he could be impeached before he could be taken down at the polls. It's the Asshole Trifecta!^tm

I can't say whether Jan Brewer represents an improvement over this parade of losers but it is clear that Arizona might need to stop foisting presidential candidates onto the country until it can elect a Governor who isn't insane, a felon, or an insane felon. It's not looking good for Brewer in the 2010 Governor's race, but it's not looking good for Arizona that she made it within a mile of the Governor's chair let alone in it.

Behold the conservative pant-shitting over the President's decision to remove "anti-ballistic missile" (ABM) systems from Poland. It's a cowardly retreat, a stab-in-the-back, an unspeakable betrayal of our noble Polish allies. As the internet's resident Polack I feel compelled to point out three things.

First, you do realize that ABMs don't actually work, right? I don't mean that in the grand strategic sense. I mean they don't work. In the illustrious history there have been some impressively expensive and idiotic boondoggles, but the five-decade quest to develop a missile that can intercept and destroy another missile is easily the most grandiose. From Nike Zeus to Skybolt to Skybolt II to "Star Wars" to the Patriot Missile to the latest iteration of this stupidity (THAAD), ABMs have been Moby Dick to generations of Republicans and military fetishists. Just imagine, a protective umbrella under which we could act with impunity! The problem is that after pouring literally billions of dollars on this problem for five decades we are no closer to solving the monumental technical obstacles from basic target-launch-intercept issues to they systems' vulnerability to simple countermeasures. Jack Hitt and Frontline do an excellent job of explaining that no matter how hard Raytheon, the DoD, and others try to rig the tests to make these things look successful, they're not. The long version is too long, so the short version is that under optimal conditions (i.e., a DoD test in which the slowest, biggest, simplest, easiest-to-hit target is fired on a predetermined flight path and the ABM system is given all of the target flight characteristics in advance) these things stand about a 15% chance of intercepting a target as sophisticated as a 1960s Soviet IRBM. In real world conditions – you know, the exact opposite of all of that – that falls to 1 or 2%. If it rains, it's effectively zero. Or if the entity launching the missile invests $100 in hollow metal or plastic decoy warheads (i.e., one real warhead and a slew of dummies on one missile in a MIRV configuration) and the offensive warhead has a better chance of being struck by lightning than an ABM. Understand that. Even if we vomit another $100 billion into this technology, any advances we achieve can be defeated by cheap metal cylinders shaped like warheads.

These things are fucking useless. That's kinda important.

Second, no offense intended to any of my Polish brethren, but the United States does not give two shits about Poland. Nor should it. Sorry. Russia is in the top five nations on Earth in terms of military size and oil & gas reserves (which they are currently using to strangle Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and, increasingly, Western Europe into submission). They are an economic and military power. Poland is Poland. Strategically – and American strategic interests are supposed to be the important thing here, right? – it is about the least important place on Earth. It is surrounded by nations either far more powerful (Germany, France, etc.) or far crappier (Belarus, Estonia, Moldova, etc.) and thus more desperate and easily bought when the U.S. decides it needs an ally of convenience in the area. That Barack Obama is unwilling to antagonize the unstable Russians over Poland shouldn't be flooring anyone. Bellyache all you want about "betrayal" or how we "sold Poland out." You're goddamn right we did, because doing otherwise doesn't make the slightest sense if it complicates our relationship with Russia. My people are in an unenviable position. If the U.S. needs something it will ask Germany, and if it wants something it will dangle some money in front of Azerbaijan or some other collection of hovels. Poland's smack in the middle and thus irrelevant.

Third, in what universe is "We can't show weakness in front of the Russians!!" a winning issue in 2010, 2012, and beyond? Does the GOP think that resonates with anyone under the age of 55 anymore? We know these people just cannot come to grips with the end of the Cold War and they've been searching for a way to keep fighting it since its conclusion, but this is how the Republicans are going to claw their way back to electoral relevance? Good luck with that, kids. Seriously. You really have your finger on the pulse of the American voter, not to mention a keen understanding of contemporary geopolitics.

Those three things need to be said; they provide crucial context in which to frame the pant-shitting.