Downright readable righty blogger Jon Henke has some interesting thoughts to share about Obama/Kerry "biographer" Jerome Corsi, a man who has proven that it is possible to write a book without ever having read one.
AMERICAN PRIDE
I felt a surge of American pride last week that had nothing to do with Michael Phelps. America now has more people incarcerated per capita than any other nation on Earth. U-S-A! U-S-A! War on Drugs! War on Drugs!
The Pew Center, as reported in the excellent industry sheet Correctional News, have announced the results of a study on incarceration, finding that a staggering 1.01% of the American population (1 in 99.1 adults) is in jail or prison. The annual cost to state governments: $49 billion dollars in 2007, up from $11 billion in 1987. That's a 400-plus percent increase in two decades in an era in which state budgets are in shambles.
Money well spent, though, right? You feel safer, right? This is working, right? Of course it isn't working, because there is no longer any "it" to work. There is no goal. We abandoned rehabilitative incarceration with the rest of the New Deal era in 1980, replacing it with the War on Drugs backed by draconian sentences in a purely punitive environment. The purpose isn't to rehabilitate, it is simply to take the (usually poor, brown) people declared unnecessary by the majestic wisdom of Thomas Friedman capitalism and put them somewhere out of sight. Just get rid of them. Send them to overcrowded gladiator academies like Stateville or Corcoran where, if they weren't already gang-affiliated, twitching balls of muscle ready to kill, they will be when they get out. Then act really shocked when they violate parole.
Pictured: Stateville's "Roundhouse"
Not pictured: a point
Costs have exploded, (mandatory minimum) sentences have doubled or tripled in length, and recidivism rates haven't gone down a bit (it's still 50% within 36 months). And lest you delude yourself about who is bearing the brunt of this: 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison right now. One of three are either on parole or in prison. A black male born today has a 30% chance of serving time in state or federal prison in his lifetime.
In rural areas – and prisons are always located in desperate, economically-dying rural communities like Crescent City, CA – half of the observed population growth since 1980 is a direct result of overwhelmingly-black urban convicts being shipped to rural prisons. For example, tiny Brown County, Illinois had 1 black resident in the 1980 Census. In 2000, 1265 (18%) of the county's 6,000 residents were black. Why? Western Illinois Correctional Center opened in Sterling, IL in 1989.
Politicians love to get "tough on crime" because proposing three-strikes or mandatory minimums is a great way for a bunch of candy-assed white guys to look tough. As naive is it might be to expect logic to intervene in this idiotic, delusional orgy of machismo, I have to wonder when Reagan's America will turn Rush Limbaugh down long enough to realize that these people taken "off the streets" do not cease to exist when the judge pounds the gavel. They have to be housed, and there are limits to how many can be jammed into a given space. Longer sentences and more prisons are proving to be a financial nightmare at $27,000 per head per year. We can't expect suburban America to care about the pointlessness or moral bankruptcy of this entire process, but as usual the bitching begins when they're asked to pay for it.
WEEKEND BONUS: PRURIENCE
I'm not entirely sure what athletic purpose is served (pun intended) by having women's volleyball players compete in stripper-caliber bikinis (outdoor) or tiny spandex shorts that might as well be painted on (indoor). Of the many things I can imagine enhancing one's performance in volleyball, neither thongs nor camel toe are among them.
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NPF: START THE REAR ADMIRAL JOKES NOW
I am being interviewed for an assistant professor position at the US Coast Guard Academy.
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You may let fly the "poop deck" and "seaman" and "rear admiral jokes" now. It may bring good luck.
It would probably be fair to tell them that I have never been on a boat but I still have respect for the men and women of America's 17th line of defense (just ahead of the Mississippi National Guard and behind the League of Women Voters).
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This interview is bound to go better than the one at Texas Christian. Not even kidding.
NPF: MUST-SEE TV
I am becoming alarmingly addicted to informercials in the same way I am addicted to Battlefield:Earth, World's Wildest Police Videos, and watching people slip on icy stairs. Infomercials are as bad as you remember, as my good friend Klee Irwin will show you. In addition to answering the hypothetical question "What would the offspring look like if John Waters boned Count Chocula?" Klee is well-known for being incredibly enthusiastic about your poop. He is personally committed to helping you pinch off a nice, solid log. To wit:
Infomercials say a lot about us as a nation. Because every one of these idiots – every last scam artist, charlatan, and flat-out criminal – is a millionaire. Remember, as you watch Klee Irwin or Kevin Trudeau making asses of themselves for your entertainment, that people regularly watch this crap and fall for it. Not one or two people – tens of thousands of them. They pick up the phone and pay good money – in some cases hundreds of dollars – for repackaged Flintstones vitamins or books that describe how to cure cancer with fruit.
Yeah, that's a little depressing.
I AM BORED AND I HAVE A DOLLAR
These two facts are enough to make one a homeowner in Detroit. If that link isn't depressing enough, try doing a ctrl-f search for the phrase "fire damaged." Or I will save you the trouble: that phrase appears a lot. Thanks, Mike.
Images of that episode of The Simpsons in which Bart buys a factory for a buck come to mind.
I DON'T KNOW WHO HE IS, BUT I HATE HIM
There's nothing more depressing than a person who is absolutely consumed by loathing for something they don't bother (or aren't able) to understand.
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We're good at this in America. Next time you hear someone go off on a 20-minute rant about (taxes, Muslims, No Child Left Behind, oil prices, whatever) ask them an incredibly basic question and watch the ensuing trainwreck. Information is entirely optional in acting out our irrational hatreds.
To full time Tax Bitchers, for example, the idea of high marginal tax rates creating a "disincentive to earn more" is a staple argument. Using hypothetical figures for simplicity, if the split between the second-highest tax bracket (say 30%) and the highest (35%) was at $150,000, individuals earning near that amount would have a disincentive to earn more. Seventy percent of $145,000 is larger than 65% of $155,000 ($101,500 > $100,750). It make sense, right?
That works for those in the reality-making world, but for the rest of us the facts get in the way.
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Progressive tax brackets are not applied retroactively. That is, when you hit $150,000 the new bracket applies only to incoome earned beyond that point. So there's never a "disincentive" in the (reality-based) definition of the term – you know, something that penalizes or otherwise discourages behavior.
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What progressive tax brackets provide are slightly less incentive. Less incentive (i.e., keeping 65 cents of each additional dollar rather than 70) is not the same as disincentive.
Ten million bonus points to Professor Hack (at U. Michigan…Flint!) for butchering the Laffer Curve. Sure, the top 10% of all income earners paid 50% more in taxes under Reagan, which is really impressive if you don't also mention that those same individuals more than doubled their incomes over the same time period (compared to a 13% increase for the bottom 90%).
MEET MR. FOX, OUR NEW HENHOUSE GUARD
As inexplicably good as McCain's prospects look, the actions of the incumbent administration can hardly be considered a vote of confidence.
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They are kicking off what I can only assume will be a five-month flurry of scorched-earth policymaking in anticipation of the GOP becoming scarce in Washington.
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On Monday Our Leader's Faithful announced that they are radically reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act. And in this instance "reinterpreting" means "pretending like it doesn't exist and gutting whatever meager requirements it imposed on the hallowed Free Market." To make a long story very short, the new rules will take those pesky "scientists" out of the regulatory process and allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether or not highways, dams, or other engineering projects will endanger protected plants or animals. Some Department of Interior employee with a lingering conscience leaked revealing documents to the press over the weekend.
Look, I could waste time talking about why this is stupid** and telling you things you already know.
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I could use worn metaphors (fox:henhouse, inmates:asylum, etc) to tell the story of more typical right wing bullshit, failing to raise even the protest from a public that is evenly split between thinking "Yeah, fuck animals!" and being too tired to fight it after seven years of this.
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Nothing new.
Instead let's just marvel at the official start of Operation Salt the Earth, a five-month, middle-fingers-extended sprint to dismantle as much of the skeletal remains of the regulatory state as possible before handing over the keys. Either McCain will win and find things to his liking or, ideally for the GOP, Obama will win and spend four years absolutely drowning under the mountain of debt and stumbling around the rubble of what used to be a government.
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But this will be exciting. What treasured principle will be the next to go? The anticipation is killing me!
**(If they weren't so goddamn stupid, they'd realize that all this will do is quintuple the number of lawsuits, dramatically increasing the costs to government and grinding the Federal courts to a halt. If. Like if the queen had a dick she'd be the king.)
HACKED BY OSSETIAN SEPARATISTS!
I wish the story was that exciting, but my webhost simply continued to prove that they don't understand the concept of automatically charging my credit card every month. Apparently the "shut down the site until Ed calls and says they can charge another to his card" system is more efficient.
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ALL-ENCOMPASSING IGNORANCE
I hope you set aside your cynicism long enough to enjoy the Olympic opening ceremonies on Friday evening; it was an unprecedented visual spectacle. Yes, I'm well aware of the fact that the Chinese government has acted in typical authoritarian fashion, displacing 1,500,000 residents, censoring media access, and rounding up dissenters to create the image of perfect harmony that we see. Fully recognizing that, I cannot help but be impressed by the magnitude of the "show.
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" They succeeded in making every previous Olympic ceremony look like a county fair and in terrifying London into wondering "How in the hell can we top that?" Every aspect of the coreographed performance was perfect, giving us the greatest hybrid of a circus, concert, and action movie ever made. Visually, they didn't miss a beat.
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Just look at the Beijing National Stadium and Swimming and Diving facilities. The Centennial Olympic Stadium from Atlanta 1996 looks like an Amish barn in comparison. Such is the advantage of a semi-authoritarian regime – they can command and direct the entirety of the nation's resources toward putting on a show.
One seemingly insignificant aspect of the ceremony really bothered me. Not because of what is says about China, but for what it says about us.
In the early portion of the ceremony, synchronized dancers formed the shape of a boat and oars to symbolize, Bob Costas pointed out, the ancient voyage of Zheng He. Without cheating, do you know who Zheng He is? I didn't. I had to look him up to discover that he was an explorer who sailed to a greater number of places than any famous European explorer – 100 years earlier – and is likely responsible for the spread of Islam in southeast Asia. Now, humility aside, I believe that I know a good deal more about world history than the "average" American, a simple function of the fact that I spend a lot of time reading about it. But I wouldn't know Zheng He if he blew me.
In reality, I don't know dick about "world" history. I know European and American history. In 21 years of formal schooling I have not once been exposed to any discussion of China. None. As I believe that I am representative of most Americans in this regard, the opening ceremonies made it clear that we know absolutely nothing about the largest nation on Earth.
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One out of every five people on the planet lives in China, the oldest civilization on the planet, and for all intents and purposes we Americans (and probably Europeans) know more about Albania.
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To us, China is communist, has a big wall, and gave the world Yao Ming, fortune cookies (which isn't even true), and General Tso's chicken. That's what we know.
This is corny, but I feel like China's stated mission of "introducing itself" to the world is an appropriate metaphor for these games. And "the world" – the overwhelmingly Eurocentric West in particular – sorely needs it. Maybe it doesn't need the cloying, coreographed, everything-is-perfect-and-harmonious face that China is presenting, but it does need to start paying more attention to the world's largest population, 3rd-largest economy, largest conventional military force, biggest industrial polluter, largest foreign holder of U.S. debt and dollars, and most prominent trading partner.
Perhaps I'm projecting my own ignorance, and in reality you and the rest of America are well-versed in Chinese history. Maybe Zheng He and his exploits are well-known to you and I'm a big dummy. It's likely, however, that you're in the dark too. Even though we can't learn much from China's idealized presentation of itself, I'm chastened by how little we do know.