brainiac conspiracy

Got an Easy Answer For That

No.

This is why.

---Vitelius

Tuesday Night Convention Blogging

Remember the time when Republicans were all moderate and stuff, before they, like, went totally berserk?

Funny, neither do I.

---Vitelius

Pic of The Day

Pretty much sums up the collective worldview on display, now doesn't it.

But let's see if we can't make some sensible compromises with them after the election.

---Vitelius

Everything in Perspective

Maybe it doesn't really matter if Father O'Blivion is going to deliver the benediction at Team Democrat's love-fest next week since, well, the planet's going to hell and we're all gonna die anyway:

The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat which would previously have been reflected back into space is absorbed.

This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster than most climate scientists predicted that, one of them reports, “it feels as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete.”

---Vitelius

DNC WTF

This is simply unacceptable:

Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan will deliver the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention as well as this week's Republican meeting, in a sign of bipartisanship after Dolan had taken a role opposing the White House on policy matters.

This is why:

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee confirmed Wednesday that it had a policy to pay suspected pedophile priests to leave the ministry.

The acknowledgement was prompted by a document made public by abuse victims' advocates from the archdiocese's bankruptcy that references a 2003 proposal to pay $20,000 to "unassignable priests" who accepted a return to the laity. The policy was crafted under then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who is now a cardinal and head of the archdiocese in New York.

If this scumbag objects to the Affordable Care Act on religious grounds, I couldn't care less. Anyone who would devise a policy to deliver "hush money" to pedophiles has forfeited any moral authority to offer church-sanctioned benedictions of any kind to anyone at any time ever again, period. And no, "But he rid the diocese of abusive priests" is not a valid excuse when the only true moral response to such a problem is (a) not to give the abusers your parishioners' money to go away, but to (b) fire them for cause, and then (c) report them to the police. I expect to see perverts like Dolan running amok at Republican conventions---but there is no justification in the world for people who are smart and conscientious enough to know better (i.e., Democrats) to give this awful man a forum for anything. If this seems intolerant, well, too fucking bad. I have zero tolerance for people like this, and so should the DNC.

---Vitelius

Minimal Blogging Day

The job creators are throwing more money at me, so I must humor them for a few hours with what meager marketable skills I possess. Refrain from any Bigfoot impersonations while I'm away.

---Vitelius

Daily Dose of Sanity

Suppose it's in bad taste, but if the Darwin Awards didn't already exist, we would have to invent them today:

A Montana man was struck and killed by cars Sunday night while trying to hoax a Bigfoot sighting. The Montana Highway Patrol reported that Randy Lee Tenley of Kalispell was pronounced dead at the scene on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell after being hit by two cars consecutively.

Tenley was wearing a military-style ghillie suit, which is a type of camouflage that resembles vegetation or foliage. Police interviewed Tenley's friends to determine why he would be wearing a full-length dark ghillie suit in the right-hand lane of the highway at night, and were apparently told of Tenley's nocturnal Bigfoot-inspired mischief.

Trooper Jim Schneider, interviewed by the Daily Inter Lake.com, said that Tenley "was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting. You can't make it up. I haven't seen or heard anything like this before. Obviously, his suit made it difficult for people to see him."

---Vitelius

Monday Night Convention Blogging

Strolling down memory lane all week long. Good times!

---Vitelius

Glass Half Empty

I suppose when you've got a book to sell, I guess this is your story and you're sticking to it, and while there's some degree of truth to the argument, well, uh, inadequacy:

For starters, the stimulus was by far the largest energy bill in history, pouring a mind-boggling $90 billion into clean energy when we had been spending just a few billion dollars a year. It included unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every form; a smarter grid; electric vehicles; advanced biofuels; and the factories to build all that green stuff in the U.S. The clean energy industry was on the brink of death after the financial collapse of 2008, but thanks to the stimulus, U.S. generation of renewable power has doubled under Obama. The stimulus is building the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar farms, and the nation’s first refineries for cellulosic biofuels. It created an advanced battery industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch, financing 30 new factories. And it launched a research agency called ARPA-E, modeled on the Pentagon’s DARPA unit that pioneered the Internet and GPS technology, that’s already creating the clean-energy breakthroughs of tomorrow.

As they say in the infomercials, that’s not all. The stimulus also poured $27 billion-with-a-b into health information technology that will drag our antiquated pen-and-paper medical system into the digital age, so just about every American will have an electronic medical record by 2015, and doctors will no longer kill their patients with chicken-scratch handwriting. The Recovery Act included the most dramatic federal education reforms in decades, including the Race to the Top competition that has transformed the national debate over public schools. It launched the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower, including a high-speed rail initiative that could transform America’s pathetic inter-city passenger trains. It modernized the New Deal-era unemployment insurance system, and extended broadband to underserved areas in ways reminiscent of the New Deal’s rural electrification. It included a new homelessness prevention program that kept 1.2 million Americans off the streets, so the homeless population declined despite the weak economy, and a new municipal bond program that financed $180 billion worth of public works, a stimulus hidden inside the stimulus. And so on [...]

Let’s just say that Americans don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Republicans have destroyed the reputation of the stimulus through a relentless campaign of distortion, dismissing it as $800 billion worth of mob museums, levitating trains to Disneyland, honeybee insurance and other fictional nonsense, while hyping the Solyndra non-scandal into a second Watergate. Democrats have been far more likely to quibble about the Recovery Act’s size or contents than to defend it, reinforcing the GOP message that it’s a big-government mess. The White House has made its own political miscalculations and messaging mistakes. And the media has blown the story as badly as it blew the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Americans haven't "gotten the memo" because the Recovery Act, for all its many virtues, did not address their most pressing concerns and most urgent needs in January 2009. Yes, the Teabillies demagogued it shamelessly, and yes, the Beltway press corps did a horrible job of reporting it, and yes, all of the investments in infrastructure and technology and green energy were, and are, much needed---and perhaps, 20 or 30 years from now, we'll be able to sit back with the advantage of hindsight and appreciate how this single piece of legislation launched a New American Renaissance. Or perhaps not. At present, we simply cannot know.

What we can know, however, is that the Recovery Act mortgaged the present to pay for the future. Because what Americans most desperately wanted and needed from their government in 2009---and what they still need now---were not Race to The Top, or digital medical records, or DARPA 2.0, or anything that will make government run more efficiently ten years from now, but jobs, and, money, and mortgage relief. And while it did some measurable good, the fact is that the Recovery Act---which was larded up with $300 billion in tax cuts to gain Republican support that never existed---simply didn't (a) provide enough jobs, (b) give people enough money, (c) abdicated responsibility for mortgage relief. Also too, (d) the administration did next-to-nothing to ensure that the causes of the Great Recession could never be repeated:

[W]hen the history of the Obama Administration is written, there will be some positive things to say about it, but also two particular blots on its escutcheon. First, the failure to act decisively to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, and second, the failure to hold anyone accountable for the financial crisis. These two failures are intimately tied, of course. Both are explained by the "Obama administration’s emphasis on protecting the banks from any perceived threat to their post-bailout recovery."

The logic here is that financial stability and economic recovery are more important than rule of law. There's an argument to be made that law has to give way to basic economic needs. I, however, would reject the choice as false. Instead, the best way to restore confidence in markets is to show that there is rule of law. The best route to economic recovery wash through [the] rule of law, not away from it. (Yes, I realize there are those who would argue that the GM/Chrysler bankruptcies and cramdown aren't rule of law, but rule of law can include flexible systems like bankruptcy, rather than just rigid rules.)

The Administration, however, determined that it wasn't going to rock the boat via prosecutions, even though there is no person in the banking system who is so indispensible to economic stability as to merit immunity from prosecution, and as the experience of 2008-2009 shows, recapitalizing institutions isn't rocket science. In any case, the Administration's policy has produced the worst of all worlds, where we have neither justice nor economic recovery. This is our new stagflation.

And I'm sorry, but whatever "homelessness prevention" program was in the Recovery Act, it sure as hell didn't affect my neighborhood on the west side of L.A. We had no appreciable number of homeless people to speak of in my ZIP code five years ago---but we began to see a noticeable swelling of their ranks starting in late 2009, and their numbers have only increased since then. Sorry to be such a wet blanket, but that's the reality of our neoliberal New New Deal.

---Vitelius

Wouldn't be The Worst That Could Happen

But I'm sure gonna gonna miss the smell of bacon all the same:

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists.

---Vitelius

Real Americans, Still Acting Real

Not sure where he's been keeping himself for the past 40 years:

[T]he real danger here is that this kind of thing may become the new normal. Obviously racially-coded attacks are especially effective when you're running against a black incumbent, but the truth is that the Democratic and Republican parties are becoming ever more split along racial lines regardless of who's running.

Well, yes, and there's a reason for that. Because---oh, how to put this as delicately as possible?---conservatives have been doing this sort of thing for decades. Shall we replay the highlight reel?

Also too, the Greatest President Ever:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,

The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.

But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.

Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

It could also be mentioned that in many stretches of the country, a "strapping young buck" is a prized game animal to be shot for its trophy head.

And let's not forget that giant of conservatism who was the movement's "intellectual" founding father:

The central question that emerges---and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born equal---is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes---the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists..

It's been going on forever with these people. The only difference from one election cycle t another is how much overt race-baiting their standard-bearer candidates are willing to tolerate, and/or what kind of language they decide to settle on to encrypt their messaging. Anyone who hasn't noticed it up to now just hasn't been paying attention.

---Vitelius

Kinda Figured it Would Come to This

Real Americans, acting real:

Four Army soldiers based in southeast Georgia killed a former comrade and his girlfriend to protect an anarchist militia group they formed that stockpiled assault weapons and plotted a range of anti-government attacks, prosecutors told a judge Monday.

Prosecutors in rural Long County, near the sprawling Army post Fort Stewart, said the militia group of active and former U.S. military members spent at least $87,000 buying guns and bomb components. They allege the group was serious enough to kill two people---former soldier Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York---by shooting them in the woods last December in order to keep its plans secret.

Not wishing this for a moment, but I've always it would be something close to a miracle if we didn't experience an Oklahoma City-style domestic terror attack sometime during the Obama administration. You can be certain that the FBI guys who handle that detail are all deserving of huge raises.

---Vitelius

Light Blogging Day

It's barely 8:00 in the morning, and the Inbox is already piling up with assignments. Times are tough, but things are gradually improving, so celebrate the progress we've made while I'm away.

--Vitelius

America's Booming Export Market

Some industries are virtually recession-proof:

Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress.

Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.

The American weapons sales total was an “extraordinary increase” over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of United States arms exports.

Actually, one could say that industries such as this actually improve in economic recessions and thrive in depressions since, as a rule, severe economic downturns tend to exacerbate social unrest vis a vis general strikes, capital flight, food riots, etc., hence the need for governments to re-arm themselves to keep the unruly plebes at bay. Put another way: this chatter about Iranian regional ambitions is bullshit. The Gulf states are scared of being Mubarak'ed and Gaddafi'd by their own angry citizens and they're stockpiling assets to maintain the existing social order. Good to see our government lending a helping hand to our many Friends in Freedom™ over there.

---Vitelius

Got Another Easy Answer For That

Cookie-cutter journalism is worthy of cookie-cutter analysis:

1. No.
2. Bite the heads off a live chicken while inserting steel rods into his nostrils.
3. What intraparty divisions? The party has been captured by crazy people.
4. Neither. The man is a belligerent asshole who has already worn out his welcome.
5. Hustling conventiongoers for wingnut welfare gigs.
6. Doesn't matter. They will blame Obama for destroying them both.
7. Promise to stop handing over their tax dollars to black people.
8. Yes, but for only as long as it takes to remind the voters of what awful human beings they are.

This really isn't difficult.

---Vitelius

Got an Easy Answer For That

Nine of them, actually:

1. No.
2. No.
3. No.
4. Rubio. Because he is less personally repugnant.
5. Oh please.
6. No. Because it's true.
7. Bwahahahahahhahaaa!!!!!!
8. Seven birthers are scheduled to speak. What could go wrong?
9. Very little. See how easy this political analysis stuff is?

That is all.

---Vitelius

Light Blogging Day

Got family stuff later, and am sorely needing a break from Apple Computer anyway. Give someone you love a tax cut while I'm out, even if they don't particularly want it.

---Vitelius

Saturday Mega-Funk Blogging

Turn on, tune in, relax and stay awhile.

---Vitelius

Neil Armstrong

Don't have much to add to the other tributes on the Interwebs tonight, except to to say it's difficult to convey the sense of wonder and awe people felt when they first saw these grainy images of a guy hopping around on the surface of the moon. Why, it was almost enough to make you think anything was possible, like eliminating poverty or ending war, or even guaranteeing affordable health care!

While the ensuing decades have disabused us of such silly utopian conceits, I suppose it deserves mention that the guy---like most of his colleagues in the Gemini/Apollo program---never attempted to cash in on his fame, even though he surely could have done so, with endorsements of Tang and Teflon, and his face on the cover of Kellogg's corn-flake boxes and so forth. Okay, John Glenn went into politics, Frank Borman went into business, and Buzz Aldrin went into Kirlian photography, but otherwise, all these astro-dudes pretty much faded into obscurity after the their flying days were over, even though any one of them could have gone Full Metal Kardashian---even in the less cynical '60s---and made millions off the box-office draw of their names. That's how revered they were in the public eye, and none more so than Neil Armstrong---and yet, they didn't do that.

So I think we should probably mourn the loss of someone---and really, of a generation---who didn't see it as his God-given entitlement to turn his 15 minutes of well-earned fame into the kind of personal ATM machine that we know in our time as The Many Lives of Bristol Palin. His kind is sorely missed, and more sorely needed, more than ever these days.

---Vitelius

The Wages of Fear

Non-union labor. High-stress jobs. Long hours. Crap wages: What could go wrong?

Cases involving border security agents were spread throughout the nation. In New York, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was discovered to be working with a drug cartel to rob other drug traffickers and sell their product. In Texas, a border agent allowed vehicles carrying “approximately 1,700 pounds of marijuana through his inspection lane in exchange for approximately $10,000 in bribes.” And in Georgia, a border agent working at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport used his position to bypass security and carry drugs and weapons for the cartel.

One notable case involved a border protection officer who “provided drug traffickers with his work schedule and lane assignments, which they used to coordinate their smuggling efforts through his inspection lane.” The agent received more than nine years in prison for his actions; his estranged wife, who also pleaded guilty to assisting the scheme, is on the run after not showing at a Texas courthouse.

---Vitelius