Speaking at the University of Wyoming fieldhouse

I heard him speak at the University of Wyoming when I was in second grade. Here is that speech, from 1963. He was assassinated fifty-eight days later in Dallas, Texas. I had met Senator Gale McGee on a few occasions, by that time. Here is what I heard:

John F. Kennedy
Address at the University of Wyoming.
September 25, 1963

Senator McGee–my old colleague in the Senate, Gale McGee–Governor, Mr. President, Senator Mansfield, Senator Metcalf, Secretary Udall, ladies and gentlemen:

I want to express my appreciation to you for your warm welcome, to you, Governor, to the President of the University, to Senator McGee, and others. I am particularly glad to come on this conservation trip and have an opportunity to speak at this distinguished university, because what we are attempting to do is to develop the talents in our country which require, of course, education which will permit us in our time, when the conservation of our resources requires entirely different techniques than were required 50 years ago, when the great conservation movement began under Theodore Roosevelt–and these talents, scientific and social talents, must be developed at our universities.

I hope that all of you who are students here will recognize the great opportunity that lies before you in this decade, and in the decades to come, to be of service to our country. The Greeks once defined happiness as full use of your powers along lines of excellence, and I can assure you that there is no area of life where you will have an opportunity to use whatever powers you have, and to use them along more excellent lines, bringing ultimately, I think, happiness to you and those whom you serve.

What I think we must realize is that the problems which now face us and their solution are far more complex, far more difficult, far more subtle, require a far greater skill and discretion of judgment, than any of the problems that this country has faced in its comparatively short history, or any, really, that the world has faced in its long history. The fact is that almost in the last 30 years the world of knowledge has exploded. You remember that Robert Oppenheimer said that 8 or 9 out of 10 of all the scientists who ever lived, live today. This last generation has produced nearly all of the scientific breakthroughs, at least relatively, that this world of ours has ever experienced. We are alive, all of us, while this tremendous explosion of knowledge, which has expanded the horizon of our experience, so far has all taken ‘place in the last 30 years.

If you realize that when Queen Victoria sent for Robert Peel to be Prime Minister-he was in Rome–the journey which he took from Rome to London took him the same amount of time, to the day, that it had taken the Emperor Hadrian to go from Rome to England nearly 1900 years before. There had been comparatively little progress made in almost 1900 years in the field of knowledge. Now, suddenly, in the last 100 years, but most particularly in the last 30 years, all that is changed, and all of this knowledge is brought to bear, and can be brought to bear, in improving our lives and making the life of our people more happy, or destroying them. And that problem is the one, of course, which this generation of Americans and the next must face: how to use that knowledge, how to make a social discipline out of it.

There is really not much use in having science and its knowledge confined to the laboratory unless it comes out into the mainstream of American and world life, and only those who are trained and educated to handle knowledge and the disciplines of knowledge can be expected to play a significant part in the life of their country. So, quite obviously, this university is not maintained by the people of Wyoming merely to help all of the graduates enjoy a prosperous life. That may come, that may be a byproduct, but the people of Wyoming contribute their taxes to the maintenance of this school in order that the graduates of this school may, themselves, return to the society which helped develop them some of the talents which that society has made available, and what is true in this State is true across the United States.

The reason why, at the height of the Civil War, when the preservation of the Union was in doubt, Abraham Lincoln signed the Land Grant College Act, which has built up the most extraordinary educational system in the world, was because he knew that a nation could not exist and be ignorant and free; and what was true 100 years ago is more true today. So what we have to decide is how we are going to manage the complicated social and economic and world problems which come across our desks-my desk, as President of the United States; the desk of the Senators, as representatives of the States; the Members of the House, as representatives of the people.

But most importantly, as the final power is held by a majority of the people, how the majority of the people are going to make their judgment on the wise use of our resources, on the correct monetary and fiscal policy, what steps we should take in space, what steps we should take to develop the resources of the ocean, what steps we should take to manage our balance of payments, what we should do in the Congo or Viet-Nam, or in Latin America, all these areas which come to rest upon the United States as the leading great power of the world, with the determination and the understanding to recognize what is at stake in the world–all these are problems far more complicated than any group of citizens ever had to deal with in the history of the world, or any group of Members of Congress had to deal with.

“Peace”

If you feel that the Members of Congress were more talented 100 years ago, and certainly the Senators in the years before the Civil War included the brightest figures, probably, that ever sat in the Senate–Benton, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and all the rest-they talked, and at least three of them stayed in the Congress 40 years–they talked for 40 years about four or five things: tariffs and the development of the West, land, the rights of the States and slavery, Mexico. Now we talk about problems in one summer which dwarf in complexity all of those matters, and we must deal with them or we will perish.

So I think the chance for an educated graduate of this school to serve his State and country is bright. I can assure you that you are needed.

This trip that I have taken is now about 24 hours old, but it is a rewarding 24 hours because there is nothing more encouraging than for those of us to leave the rather artificial city of Washington and come and travel across the United States and realize what is here, the beauty, the diversity, the wealth, and the vigor of the people.

Last Friday I spoke to delegates from all over the world at the United Nations. It is an unfortunate fact that nearly every delegate comes to the United States from all around the world and they make a judgment on the United States based on an experience in New York or Washington; and rarely do they come West beyond the Mississippi, and rarely do they go to California, or to Hawaii, or to Alaska. Therefore, they do not understand the United States, and those of us who stay only in Washington sometimes lose our comprehension of the national problems which require a national solution.

This country has become rich because nature was good to us, and because the people who came from Europe, predominantly, also were among the most vigorous. The basic resources were used skillfully and economically, and because of the wise work done by Theodore Roosevelt and others, significant progress was made in conserving these resources.

Theodore Roosevelt with John Muir at Yosemite

The problem, of course, now is that the whole concept of conservation must change in the 1960′s if we are going to pass on to the 350 million Americans who will live in this country in 40 years where 180 million Americans now live–if we are going to pass on a country which is even richer.

The fact of the matter is that the management of our natural resources instead of being primarily a problem of conserving them, of saving them, now requires the scientific application of knowledge to develop new resources. We have come to. realize to a large extent that resources are not passive. Resources are not merely something that was here, put by nature. Research tells us that previously valueless materials, which 10 years ago were useless, now can be among the most valuable natural resources of the United States. And that is the most significant fact in conservation now since the early 1900′s when Theodore Roosevelt started his work. A conservationist’s first reaction in those days was to preserve, to hoard, to protect every non-renewable resource. It was the fear of resource exhaustion which caused the great conservation movement of the 1900′s. And this fear was reflected in the speeches and attitudes of our political leaders and their writers.

This is not surprising in the light of the technology of that time, but today that approach is out of date, and I think this is an important fact for the State of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain States. It is both too pessimistic and too optimistic. We need no longer fear that our resources and energy supplies are a fixed quantity that can be exhausted in accordance with a particular rate of consumption. On the other hand, it is not enough to put barbed wire around a forest or a lake, or put in stockpiles of minerals, or restrictive laws and regulations on the exploitation of resources. That was the old way of doing it.

The old way of doing it

Our primary task now is to increase our understanding of our environment to a point where we can enjoy it without defacing it, use its bounty without detracting permanently from its value, and, above all, maintain a living balance between man’s actions and nature’s reactions, for this Nation’s great resources are as elastic and productive as our ingenuity can make them. For example, soda ash is a multimillion dollar industry in this State. A few years ago there was no use for it. It was wasted. People were unaware of it. And even if it had been sought, it could not be found–not because it wasn’t here, but because effective prospecting techniques had not been developed. Now soda ash is a necessary ingredient in the production of glass, steel, and other products. As a result of a series of experiments, of a harnessing of science to the use of man, this great new industry has opened up. In short, conservation is no longer protection and conserving and restricting. The balance between our needs and the availability of our resources, between our aspirations and our environment, is constantly changing.

Techtonic plate theory would have to wait for confirmation
until secret US navy maps of the undersea topography
were declassified in 1966

One of the great resources which we are going to find in the next 40 years is not going to be the land; it will be the ocean. We are going to find untold wealth in the oceans of the world which will be used to make a better life for our people. Science is changing all of our natural environment. It can change it for good; it can change it for bad. We are pursuing, for example, new opportunities in coal, which have been largely neglected–examining the feasibility of transporting coal by water through pipelines, of gasification at the mines, of liquefaction of coal into gasoline, and of transmitting electric power directly from the mouth of the mine. The economic feasibility of some of these techniques has not been determined, but it will be in the next decade. At the same time, we are engaged in active research on better means of using low grade coal, to meet the tremendous increase in the demand for coal we are going to find in the rest of this century. This is, in effect, using science to increase our supply of a resource of which the people of the United States were totally unaware 50 years ago.

Another research undertaking of special concern to this Nation and this State is the continuing effort to develop practical and feasible techniques of converting oil shale into usable petroleum fuels. The higher grade deposits in Wyoming alone are equivalent to 30 billion barrels of oil, and 200 billion barrels in the case of lower grade development. This could not be used, there was nothing to conserve, and now science is going to make it possible.

Investigation is going on to assure at the same time an adequate water supply so that when we develop this great new industry we will be able to use it and have sufficient water. Resource development, therefore, requires not only the coordination of all branches of science, it requires the joint effort of scientists, government–State, national, and local–and members of other professional disciplines. For example, we are now examining in the United States today the mixed economic-technical question of whether very large-scale nuclear reactors can produce unexpected savings in the simultaneous desalinization of water and the generation of electricity. We will have, before this decade is out or sooner, a tremendous nuclear reactor which makes electricity and at the same time gets fresh water from salt water at a competitive price. What a difference this can make to the Western United States. And, indeed, not only the United States, but all around the globe where there are so many deserts on the ocean’s edge.

It is in efforts, I think, such as this, where the National Government can play a significant role, where the scale of public investment or the nationwide scope of the problem, the national significance of the results are too great to ignore or which cannot always be carried out by private research. Federal funds and stimulation can help make the most imaginative and productive use of our manpower and facilities. The use of science and technology in these fields has gained understanding and support in the Congress. Senator Gale McGee has proposed an energetic study of the technology of electrometallurgy–the words are getting longer as the months go on, and more complicated-an area of considerable importance to the Rocky Mountains.

Progress marches on

All this, I think, is going to change the life of Wyoming and going to change the life of the United States. What we regard now as relative well-being, 30 years from now will be regarded as poverty. When you realize that 30 years ago r out of 10 farms had electricity, and yet some farmers thought that they were living reasonably well, now for a farm not to have electricity, we regard them as living in the depths of poverty. That is how great a change has come in 30 years. In the short space of 18 years, really, or almost 20 years, the wealth of this country has gone up 300 percent.

In 1970, 1980, 1990, this country will be, can be, must be–if we make the proper decisions, if we manage our resources, both human and material, wisely, if we make wise decisions in the Nation, in the State, in the community, and individually, if we maintain a vigorous and hopeful ‘pursuit of life and knowledge–the resources of this country are so unlimited and science is expanding them so greatly that all those people who thought 40 years ago that this country would be exhausted in the middle of the century have been proven wrong. It is going to be richer than ever, providing we make the wise decisions and we recognize that the future belongs to those who seize it.

Knowledge is power, a saying 500 years old, but knowledge is power today as never before, not only here in the United States, but the future of the free world depends in the final analysis upon the United States and upon our willingness to reach those decisions on these complicated matters which face us with courage and clarity. And the graduates of this school will, as they have in the past, play their proper role.

I express my thanks to you. This building which 15 years ago was just a matter of conversation is now a reality. So those things that we talk about today, which seem unreal, where so many people doubt that they can be done–the fact of the matter is, it has been true all through our history–they will be done, and Wyoming, in doing it, will play its proper role.

Thank you.

Note: The President spoke in the University field house at Laramie. In his opening words he referred to U.S. Senator Gale McGee and Governor Cliff Hansen of Wyoming; President George D. Humphrey of the University; U.S. Senators Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf of Montana; and Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall.

Citation: John F. Kennedy: “Address at the University of Wyoming.,” September 25, 1963. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9433.

Charles deGaulle at the funeral of John F. Kennedy

Happy 95th Birthday, Mr. President. We might have had you still with us.

Courage.

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

The entire blogosphere has been coopted into the narrow agenda of a few individuals and the nation’s issues are thrust to the side as less important than their personal grievance, and coordinated, timed “blog against” an obscure individual is made more important than any other issue facing a nation in crisis.

This is a dangerous precedent. Beware.

Here is Patterico, taking a day off from the ongoing coordinated smear and personal destruction of Elizabeth Warren:

BREITBART TOLD THE STORY JUST BEFORE HE DIED

In the last radio interview Andrew Breitbart ever gave, on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Breitbart talked about a new ruthless tactic used by thugs against political opponents:

[O]ne of the things they’ve done to people who have worked with me in the past, including an L.A. prosecutor, is to “SWAT.” That means that they’re spoofing phones, pretending to be somebody else’s phone, calling 911, and saying “I killed somebody” and then the person’s home is met with the guns drawn, the SWAT and the helicopters, in a horrifying act. It’s happened twice: once in New Jersey, once in Los Angeles, with an L.A. County . . . prosecutor who [is] associated with me.”

I am that L.A. County prosecutor. And in this post, you’ll hear the hoax call that sent police to my house, pointing loaded guns at me.

THE NIGHT I COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED BECAUSE OF MY BLOGGING …

Ah, a coordinated act of personal destruction and blog terrorism claiming the selfsame projected qualities. “I know you are, but what am I?” as the noted pundit P.W. Herman is oft heard to say. And it’s always nice to see the ghoulish hand of Breitbart from beyond the grave …

Each to his own soothsaying says I. Some worship the Dow. Others (far too many) worship at the shrine of “Polls.” Not a day goes by that some new polling of the public (and we all know how painful THAT can be) reveals some grand new truth, or provides fodder for an army of journalists and bloggers who, evidently, don’t actually find anything much newsworthy and spend their long prologue into senescence by dithering about trivialites dug up by the unconscious biases of the pollsters  – because we can only poll on what we KNOW, and never on what we DON’T KNOW, which is where all the action in the news cycle is anyway.

Sadly, the pollsters, dependent on their constant polling commissions (and omissions) even find a way to capitalize (literally) on stunning new news, by polling the public on what they THINK about the twists and turns of history.

It is a form of soothsaying, unless mathematical prediction is any more legitimate a pursuit than the reading of turtle’s entrails or tea leaves.

If we all have free will, of course, polling doesn’t work. Then again, if all is Written by the Hand of Destiny, then we would think like most of the Eastern Hemisphere and our entire approach would be different.

So, allowing the metaphor of soothsaying, not as a belief system, or even as a serious proposition (since neither soothsayers nor scientists can grasp a simple fact in the whole morass, namely, that it either works or doesn’t work, based on an unprovable assumption that you can find in the Lord’s Prayer, an old Western/Middle Eastern notion called “As above, so below,” the basis of all sympathetic magic and skrying), today’s metaphor is Astrology.

In the land of no ears, Vincent van Gogh is king.

First I’ll tell you a fact: Algol is an eclipsing binary, Beta (ß) Perseus, known from time immemorial as the demon star.

Algol, the Demon, the Demon Star, and the Blinking Demon, from the Arabians’ Ra’s al Ghul, the Demon’s Head, is said to have been thus called from its rapid and wonderful variations; but I find no evidence of this [Star Names was published in 1889, it was that year that Algol was discovered to be an eclipsing binary — Wikipedia], and that people probably took the title from the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Al Ghul literally signifies a Mischief-maker, and the name still appears in the Ghoul of the Arabian Nights and of our day. It degenerated into the Alove often used some centuries ago for this star…

Our modern English word “ghoul” is derived from the Arabic name of the star, and it OUGHT to be a reminder to us that the reason so many of our major stars  carry Arabic names is that astronomy/astrology fell into disuse during the Dark Ages, and the flowering Arabic Civilization was ahead of Western Civilization in the arts and sciences. This is where we get “Algebra,” from the Arabian mathematicians. Nobody’s number one forever, and when the Western “knights” arrived during the Crusades, they were presented with a more technologically advanced civilization … which they stole freely from. But the star Algol has been pretty universally seen as maelevolent, even outside of the old Greek Myth of Perseus:

The Hebrews knew Algol as Rosh ha Satan, Satan’s Head, English writer on globes John Chilmead (circa 1639)’s Rosch hassatan, the Divels head; but also as Lilith, Adam’s legendary first wife, the nocturnal vampyre from the lower world that reappeared in the demonology of the Middle Ages as the witch Lilis, one of the characters in Goethe’s Walpurgis Nacht.

The Chinese gave it the gruesome title Tseih She, the Piled-up Corpses.

Astrologers of course said that it was the most unfortunate, violent, and dangerous star in the heavens, and it certainly has been one of the best observed, as the most noteworthy variable in the northern sky….

(from Star Names, Their Lore and Meaning, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1889.)

And the old Ghoul has been in the news just this month:

Astronomers discover ancient Egyptian observations of a variable star
Posted by TANN
Ancient, Astronomy, Breakingnews, Egypt, Universe 11:30 AM

The study of the “Demon star”, Algol, made by a research group of the University of Helsinki, Finland, has received both scientific and public attention. The period of the brightness variation of this eclipsing binary star has been connected to good prognoses three millennia ago. This result has raised a lot of discussion and the news has spread widely in the Internet.

“The Demon Star” – Ancient Cairo Calendar Shows Egyptians
Discovered the Binary Algol 3200 Years Ago [Credit: NASA]

The Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is probably the oldest preserved historical document of bare eye observations of a variable star. Each day of one Egyptian year was divided into three parts in this calendar. A good or a bad prognosis was assigned for these parts of a day.

“The texts regarding the prognoses are connected to mythological and astronomical events”, says Master of Science Sebastian Porceddu…

The ancient Egyptians have made accurate measurements that provide useful constraints for modern astronomers.

“It seems that the first observation of a variable star was made 3000 years earlier than was previously thought”, says [docent] Lauri Jetsu. “However, I want to emphasize that our research has only been sent to a scientific journal about two weeks ago. This type of results can raise a lot of controversy before they are accepted.”

Controversy?

You see, in our modern understanding of astrology (which ought to be what astronomy is called, “the study of the stars” instead of “the naming of the stars”)  Algol is actually an eclipsing binary star: two stars engaged in a deadly dance around a gravitational midpoint, an invisible maypole.

And the larger is tearing the smaller one apart, sucking it like a tick, until all its mass has transferred to the larger star.

The ancient Egyptians didn’t know that, of course. All they knew was that there was a star that would grow brighter and darker over a period (currently) of 68.75 hours —  or just under three days — “winking” at them. This was discovered by all great astronomical cultures fairly early, as the 3,000 year old Egyptian observations attest.

from “Astronomy 162″ University of Tennessee

So, the Egyptian records give a differential time of revolution for the Algol binary of (in scienteze) “0.017 days.”

I kid you not. Seventeen thousandths of a day.

What is that in millimeters, I wonder? Gallons? Kilohertz? Puppies?

24 hours multiplied by 0.017 gives us 0.408000 hours, which is a number just as useless as 0.017 days, or 92.7 handshakes, 5.6 milkshakes or 1.0 earthquakes.

How about 60 minutes an hour 24 hours a day? Equals 1440 minutes in a day.

We’re onto something. Now we just multiply those minutes by that fraction of a day, and we’ll have a human number.

Lessee: 1440 times 0.017 gives us 24.48 minutes and rounding that (in engineering math) .48 of a 60 second minute is half, so 24 and a half minutes.

About half an hour in 3,000 years. Thank you Ancient Egyptian trained observers.

Now, we can figure out a lot about the mass and loss of mass of the cosmic duprass (or, perhaps triple star system):

“We can explain why the period of Algol has increased by about 0.017 days”, says Lauri Jetsu. “The period increase during the past three millennia could have been caused by the observed mass transfer between the two members of this binary. In fact, this would be the first observation that confirms the period increase of Algol and it also gives an estimate of the mass transfer rate.”

But isn’t it also interesting that humans all over the Earth, watching that phenomenon, and declared the Ghoul star the evilest star in the sky?

I mean, they’re just burning rocks in the sky in the modern conception, so why aren’t the results more random?

Anyway, the point here is that we will undoubtedly be looked at in 3,000 years as condescendingly as we look at 3,000 year old Egyptians, especially when we had to pay an exorbitant fee to view them. Or, eventually, us.

I like astrology for that reason: the world came up with different systems of interpreting the motion of the stars in the heavens as reflecting here on Earth, that preserved an unquestioned precept of millennia past: “On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

And, in the centuries following the rather acrimonious breakup of astronomy and astrology, the twain have rarely deigned to meet.

I like the old Ptolemaic astrology, and the Arabian Parts and the Lunar Mansions, and the Hindu and Chinese lore. This is the first time in history we’ve ever had a chance to go through everybody’s notes and compare them. It’s a way of getting into the heads of historical figures, remembering that they gave as much credence to their astrological weather as you and I give to polls and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

So, the soothsaying metaphor, and a coincidence and another metaphor and we’re done. (If it helps, our word “alcohol” also comes from Medusa’s head, the Gorgon star, Algol. Ghoul.)

Medusa by Carvaggio (1595)

The language of astrology is poetic language for psychology, and modern astrology has been thoroughly adulterated with it. Everything is a lovely metaphor and nothing bad ever happens. You are in charge of your destiny, they intone in silky, comforting tone, and find some ‘lucky’ star to make you feel better.

This is a trick known to palmists and portfolio advisors alike, never give bad news, since, if you’re wrong, they’ll despise you. But, if you only give good news (or “buy” advice), they will only remember the pleasure of the gains and never the pain of the losses. It is a problem in soothsaying from astrologers to the business press, that never tell you the bad news in direct proportion to when you need it most.

Thus it was, when the eclipse occurred last Sunday, I noted the old Fixed Stars that were mainstays from before old Ptolemy (diviner of the Epicycles, that strange explanation of the wanderers — planets — suddenly reversing themselves and traveling backwards over many nights) until after Sir Isaac Newton (who cast and constructed horoscopes, there being as yet no bill of divorcement between astronomy and astrology).

Sir Isaac Newton, scientist and astrologer

After all, a “horoscope” is nothing more or less than a map of the sky dome (above the horizon) and the unseen sky dome below the horizon. If you know the night sky, and know to factor in a full thirty degrees* (the precession of equinoxes that most modern astrology has failed to note) , you could generate a “horoscope” for that hour and walk outside and know where to find all the stars and planets. It’s just a simplified sky map for a point in time.

[* thirty degrees equals, in human terms, three widths of your fist held at arm's length from your eye. Straight up is 90 degrees. The width of your little finger is two degrees, and the width of its fingernail is one. ]

Almost all cultures have taken this VERY seriously, however — as the careful Egyptians measured the blinking of the demon star three thousand years ago — and as comets were said to presage the fall of a king, or a plague, so, too everyone was sure that the stars moving in the sky meant something. And we have projected our mythology and our psychic history onto the night sky, and that’s why I enjoy it without necessarily subscribing to it: the rich tapestry of human poetic history is writ there, and guided the minds of our recent forebears.

When the Spanish Influenza struck the World during World War I, many all over the world (and right here in the Good Ol’ USA) were absolutely convinced that the Influenza came from the tail of Halley’s Comet, which we passed through when it returned in 1910.

The Head of Medusa, by Peter Paul Rubens (1618)

Or consider the origins of the word “Influenza,” which comes from Italian by way of the Latin root that creates our own word “influence.”

The word Influenza comes from the Italian language meaning “influence” and refers to the cause of the disease; initially, this ascribed illness to unfavorable astrological influences.^{[155] *}

[* Wikipedia Footnote source = "Influenza, The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition."]

You see? That old thought system is woven into the warp and woof of our culture, just like the Bible, and it is foolish to be culturally illiterate in either — whether one believes or not.

Which brings us to the eclipse. Now, in the old reckoning, eclipses are bad things. And the “ruler” of “ruling planet” of the eclipse is an indicator of how bad it will be. I am not an astrologer, nor a deep practitioner, but even I could look at it and see that the “ring of fire” eclipse took place over the Plieades, specifically Alcyone, and that Mercury (the “ruler”) and Jupiter were in tight conjunction over Algol at the time.

So, I checked the various web sites and online astrology sites to SEE how this was interpreted.

All New Agey “have a nice day” nothing to see here and suchlike. Virtually no modern astrologer noticing the Algol connection, and most saying that “in the olden days, the Plieades and Alcyon were considered bad/malefic, but, really, there’s no bad stuff and everything’s fine.”

Wood carving (door) by Thomas Regnaudin circa 1660

Even in the older branch of astrology, very little acknowledgement of the event. The older branch is called “mundane” or worldly astrology. It deals with the fate of nations and the world stage. It’s older because kings and potentates were concerned with it, and could pay court astrologers salaries, while the newer branch “horary” or hourly astrology deals with your personalhoroscope, and if you’ll meet your soulmate, etcetera. Not a big dollar market draw, and until recently, historically, the lesser focus of astrologers. Even old  J.P. Morgan, he of the invisible dirk and father of the modern bank that just lost $3 billion in derivatives trading, said  “Millionaires don’t have astrologers, billionaires do.”

(One wonders whether their current astrologer saw that coming.)

I finally found ONE more traditional astrologer who said this:

I don’t think I’ve ever done a chart where there were so many negative stars and I hope to never have to write about one again.

Now, my point isn’t whether astrology works, remember. My point is that, IF it did work, then virtually all astrologers should have noticed this really bad omen in the “heavens.”*

[* "Heavens" because most astrologers nowadays rely on computer software to tell them where the stars are, or old ephemerides books to do the same, and virtually NOT ONE of them could actually go outside and SHOW you the constellation of Gemini, or Taurus or Capricorn, and would have no idea that the bright star in the evening sky was Venus, nor that Mars is prominent in the constellation of Leo, or that Saturn is just two fingers' width from Spica, or "Arista" in the night sky. They claim to read the stars that they only know from books and not from the simple and traditional "looking up at the sky."]

And there is our metaphor. The astrologers of today are so much filled with their “have a nice day” and psychological nonsense that what would have been a clear sign to any astrologer of, say, the past 3,000 years is invisible to them, even assuming that astrology worked.

So, too, the liberal blogs and news media.

The sign of a concerted, coordinated blog swarm to destroy one person hasn’t been seen as clearly as when Billy launched HIS Kristol-nacht against one Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp and the New Republic magazine in 2007, which they later tacitly ADMITTED*. Then, the left wing blogs remained comatose. Today, as something far bigger, and far uglier takes place, the leftie blogosphere remains as comatose about the omen in the bloggy heavens as our modern astrologers are blind to the very sort of sign that their astrology exists to see and interpret.

[* Note that old "Bob the Confederate Yankee" is part of today's smear-and-smash. See The Columbia Journalism Review's post-mortem on L'Affaire Beauchamp.]

That is the metaphor. Both groups OUGHT to have the perspicacity to read the handwriting on the wall. Neither does.

Here, by the by, is the old interpretation of the influence of Algol [Wikipedia]:

In the Tetrabiblos, the 2nd century astrological text of the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, Algol is referred to as “the Gorgon of Perseus” and associated with death by decapitation: a theme which mirrors the myth of the hero Perseus’ victory over the snake-headed Gorgon Medusa. Astrologically, Algol is considered the most unfortunate star in the sky, and was listed as one of the 15 Behenian stars. Historically, the star has received a strong association with bloody violence across a wide variety of cultures.

Modern “psychological” astrologers throw out the 4,000 years of observation and cross-cultural interpretation and just go with the “Perseus” myth about Medusa and say it’s about “angry women.“ (Not because it makes sense, but because it’s convenient to their archetypal/Jungian interepretations.)

Modern “psychological” astrologers discount the literal, and emphasize the tendency to “lose one’s head” in a paroxysm of rage. Today’s blogswarm is certainly an interesting coincidence of that interpretation, but we must, needs, pooh-pooh any correlation for the purposes of our Metaphor, today. Just an interesting coincidence.

Perseus gave Medusa’s head to Athena
who placed it on her Aegis, her shield,
where it was last heard of. (Seeing it is
somewhat difficult for mortal observers)

And here is sleazebag Michael Barone in Real Clear Politics (on another matter, but double apropos here, like Algol):

Cocooned Liberals Are Unprepared for Political Debate
By Michael Barone
May 24, 2012

It’s comfortable living in a cocoon — associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972, the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern….

As I read this story, I had a creeping sense of horror. And my oft-stated sentiment that maybe I made a mistake ten years ago by blogging under my own real name became a genuinely fearful reaction.

Really, this should be called terrorism.

I’ve been known to call some people who comment anonymously on the internet cowards, at least when they make vicious inflammatory comments that they know no one will be able to call them out on. I’ve always been proud of the fact that, even when I’ve embarrassed myself by losing my temper or drunkblogging, writing things I regretted, I could always say without shame that at least I wasn’t hiding myself and was willing to take the heat for whatever I said. Even if I was harshly critical of a person, you knew who I was, I wasn’t hiding under a fake name so I could say nasty things and not have to own up to it.

But in my ten years of blogging, I know I’ve been professionally slandered, that it has at times hurt my career, and I’ve known people who lost their jobs just through saying things online (including commenters and guest posters on Dean’s World) that someone didn’t like. I have been targeted for online harassment, including sometimes-innocent but sometimes obviously-intentional out-of-context quotations of my work, but I shrugged it off as “just part of the internet, man.” I have received threats, but usually shrugged them off although occasionally feeling the need to note, “by the way, I do own a gun and know how to use it in defense of self and my family.”

But this appalling attack on Patrick Frey has me wondering if I shouldn’t simply pull my blog completely offline, root and branch, and start over somewhere else with a different name that no one will know. There are times when I’m pretty sure blogging here has hurt my career, and now I begin to wonder if it could hurt me or someone I love in a much more direct way.

This is not a f*n joke: they could have KILLED Patrick Frey. For the audacity of having opinions they don’t like, and for committing shameless acts of journalism they didn’t care for.

I worry about it now. I write something someone doesn’t like: about feminism, about AIDS, about Islam, about Fundamentalist Christianity and its Rapture Cult, about the Tea Party, about Occupy Wall Street, or Obama, or Bush, or the Iraq War, about men’s rights, or abortion, and not only might some lunatic come looking for me, but worse, someone might attempt what could be called “murder by cop” just because they don’t like my opinion?

The cops could have killed this man. Not because the cops were bad, but because they were doing their jobs and some slimebag who hated him filed a phony police report. One wrong move by Frey there, one rookie cop whose training slipped for just a second, and we might be talking about the man’s f*n FUNERAL.

I want to vomit.

I offer a prayer for you and your family, Patrick. We may have had our agreements and our disagreements these last 10 years, but my God man. I’m so sorry. I hope they not only find this bastard but that he does hard, serious time. They probably can’t call it attempted murder, but whatever the maximum penalty for filing a police report is, and anything else they can book him for, I hope that’s what he gets.

And by the way, let’s not forget to call this what it is: an assault on journalism and free press.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

Over the course of the past two elections, voters in Democratic and Republican primaries have shown the door to two of the most senior and influential members of the body. They include the man who was arguably among the Senate’s few Constitutional and legal scholars, Arlen Specter, as well as one of the body’s leading Foreign Affairs scholar, Richard Lugar.

More importantly, these Senators were institutionalists who cared deeply about process. They enjoyed the respect and admiration of their colleagues and were credited with being among the body’s most diplomatic and consummate negotiators, often crossing party lines to turn complex ideas into reality (curiously, both also were briefly opponents for the 1996 Presidential nomination when even then, their ideals were from an era bygone). But ultimately, that proved to be their downfall, and disturbingly, it’s becoming more and more the norm.

To be sure, the circumstances surrounding the loss of both Senators were different. Specter left the Republican Party in his 29th year in the Senate and Democrats couldn’t stomach the thought of voting for someone who was adroitly exposed in his opponent’s ads as“an ally” of George W.Bush. But Specter had bolted only when it became clear that he could not be re-nominated, a fact he admitted from the start.

The most recent reason for conservative fury was that Specter had sided with Democrats on the stimulus, but conservatives had long been mistrustful of him since his vote against confirming Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. This despite the fact that he had supported, and by all accounts, given fair hearings to everyone of George W.Bush’s Judicial nominees, and had nearly ended his own career through his fierce questioning of Anita Hill (which infuriated Democrats, women’s organizations, and me).

Specter’s legal mind was the keenest among any current Senator and his intellect first rate. As far back as 1970, he was thought to be on Richard Nixon’s short-list for the Supreme Court.

Specter kept his cards close to the vest when it came to his votes, often to the consternation of both parties. He had a prickliness that didn’t always sit well, and an inquisitive style that, if not answered to his liking, could leave witnesses, staff, and other Senators quivering. But his word was his bond, and even if his ultimate vote was political, colleagues knew it was well thought out.

If Specter’s prickliness was off-putting, Lugar’s congenial nature, “Hoosier smile,” and knack for civility made him beloved among colleagues.

In the 1997 book,”Inside Congress,” by Ronald Kessler, one Senator would explain how upon casting votes, he and other Senators would routinely gather around Michigan Democrat Phil Hart, (for whom the Senate Office building was later named),to see the right way to vote. In this era, that Senator could easily have been referring to Lugar.

Lugar supported Obama Supreme Court nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elaina Kagan (he did oppose Steven Breyer on grounds that Breyer wasn’t forthright about investments).He backed the “Dream Act,” even though it faced scorn with all but a few of his GOP colleagues. He has voted in favor of gun control and publicly mulled a way to support the legislation ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” though in the end, he did not. Lugar was also among the most vociferous proponents of the START Treaty, which ultimately received 2/3 of the Senate, but before which left Lugar in the wilderness in his own party.

A master of foreign affairs, Lugar could easily have been the body’s most astute foreign affairs guru since Bill Fulbright. At Madeline Albright’s confirmation hearing, many of the questions of other Senators were either perfunctory or window dressing. But Lugar tossed out serious issues about, among other things, the complexity of Russia.

Lugar’s rapport with members of the Indiana delegation was so strong that he often didn’t campaign against members of the opposite party even when they were facing tough races (eminently endangered Congressman Baron Hill was one such person.). Birch Bayh, himself a once-reverential figure in Indiana who was challenged by Lugar in 1974, called his loss “a disaster.” Despite their one-time rivalry, Bayh calls Lugar one of the finest men he knows.

Lugar was so averse to taking cheap shots that on one of the rare occasions that he did publicly ding a colleague, it was not a Democrat, but a Republican. Jesse Helms, whom he’s never exchanged Christmas cards with (the two had locked arms in a battle for the Senate Foreign Relations Chairmanship in 1987) was holding up the nomination of Bill Weld to Ambassador to Mexico . Lugar, chair of the Agriculture Committee, publicly threatened to hold up tobacco subsidies for North Carolina if Helms didn’t relent. Helms was startled but didn’t budge.

The campaign Lugar ran in his bid for a seventh term was amateurish, that’s for darned sure. But the scope of the loss — 23 percentage points and in all but three of the state’s counties, is evidence that even a first-rate campaign wouldn’t have been enough.

It’s not just the departure of centrists that bode ill. It’s the loss of the scholars, the independent thinkers, the folks who make the trains run.

In his farewell speech on the Senate floor and in his new book, “Life Among the Cannibals,” Specter noted how his Utah colleague Bob Bennett was denied re-nomination for supporting TARP and working with Democrat Ron Wyden on healthcare legislation, even though, as Specter mentions, Bennett still had a conservative score of 93%, He mentioned how Mike Castle had been rejected by Delaware Republicans in favor of a woman who” thought it necessary to defend herself as not being a witch.” And he recalled the the vibrancy of the moderate wing of the GOP caucus upon his arrival in the Senate, rolling out names long out of office like Weicker, Stafford ,Hatfield, and Danforth, to name a few.

It’s not solely Republicans who are being impacted. Wyden has faced not-so-subtle arm twisting from Democratic colleagues for trying to forge an agreement with Democraic boogeyman Paul Ryan on a Medicare reform package.

The fire that moderates are facing has made other traditional accomodationalists far less malleable. Chuck Grassley is a curmudgeon, aw-shucks, Iowa stubborn farmer who until recently had himself been among the most sincerely liked and trusted deal makers with Ds. He always took pains to vote Iowa first (even casting one of just two GOP votes against the Persian Gulf War resolution in 1991).But on health care, he seemed to cave to the wishes of GOP leadership and threat of right wing primary challenge in 2010, probably in that order. To put Grassley’s shift into perspective, in the past, it was Democrats who were critical of their own for compromising too much with him.

Grassley is now the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he has been helping to slow down the pace of much needed Judicial confirmations, even though he will ultimately vote for most of them.

Then there is Olympia Snowe. The Maine Republican bemoans intractability and has sided with Democrats on some key votes, and she is a master negotiator. But Democrats and Republicans alike agree that she caved in to GOP pressure to deny Obama healthcare win. What was most puzzling is that she voted for a measure in the Senate Finance Committee, the sole Republican to do so.

Harry Reid, a former boxer who knows how to play the political game as well as anyone in the Senate, questioned whether Snowe ever had intentions of compromising. My theory: she absolutely did. But the pressure from within became so immense that her vote proved elusive.

Even in major roll call votes, the trend is evident. Just prior to the House vote on Obama’s stimulus package, as many as 15 Republicans were publicly flirting with backing it. But then Minority Leader Boehner implored his caucus to stay united, and when the vote was called, not a single one voted for the package.

If there is a message in recent primaries it’s that only purists need apply. And that is detrimental. Iowa Republican Fred Grandy (best known as “Gopher” on the Love Boat) once called himself a “knee-jerk moderate.” We need more of that and more importantly, tolerance from within.

Our country deserve nothing less.

Scott Crass writes: “Punditry has long been my passion and I thrive on offering non-partisan commentary on upcoming elections with historical perspectives .From Maine to Maui, no election is too obscure and there’s not a character I don’t dissect. I call the races as I see them as I see them, even if it’s contrary to what I want to see happen. And for us political junkies and then some, it’s never too early. And if you can’t tell which side I’m on, I’m doing a heck of a job. Check out my analysis on twitter.com/crasspolitical.

Richard K. Barry, a New Yorker now living in Toronto, is the Associate Editor of The Reaction. You can also find him at Lippmann’s Ghost.

Both amateurs and professionals who write about politics struggle every day with what to write next. I have to say that an article yesterday at Politico was both an exercise in the obvious and a little kowtowing to political spin from the right. But material is material.

In a piece with the title “GOP Discovers That Mitt Romney Could Win,” Jonathan Martin provided a bunch of comments from high-profile Republicans that, by golly, Mitt Romney could win this thing after all.

They talk about poll numbers within the margin of error, a disappearing fund-raising advantage by the Obama campaign and a still uncertain economy. They cite problems they think Obama is having with his core message that Romney is a bad capitalist. They cite what they take to be recent evidence that Romney is running a more disciplined campaign. They cite the extent to which party rank-and-file are coming to Romney.

In essence, they cite the “big news” that experienced Republican campaigners have come to the realization Mitt Romney is their nominee and it will do no good for them to express any doubt that he could possibly win.

From where I sit, none of the empirically verifiable events that have taken place since Romney became the nominee are a surprise. And none of the pure spin from GOP operatives, who all got the same briefing book, is unexpected.

Now, anyone who has any political experience who thinks he or she can predict electoral results six months out with any degree of certainty is a fool.

Romney has some strengths, certainly. Obama has his, like more paths to 270 electoral votes. So, of course either could win.

The one thing that stood out in the article was the “half in jest” suggestion by some Republicans that “they’d be better off with Romney in a bunker for the duration of the campaign.”

The general election campaign has started in earnest. The GOP has stopped attacking itself and is now focusing all its efforts on Obama. And Romney is now able to keep better control of his campaign because the “shooting war” with Obama has not yet started, the “mano a mano” has not yet begun, but it will. When it does, Romney will have to show himself, and if the GOP nomination taught us anything it is that the more people see of Romney, the less they like him. And you can’t run for president from a bunker.

Romney was able to beat a bunch of losers to get the nomination. When things get real, I’d still put my money on Barack Obama.

Okay, so this is what I want: I want, when someone changes their mind about something, for them not to go ideologically swinging to the far other side. I was reading some reviews of Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, and there are some of former feminists writing about it. And when I say “former” I mean “anti.” We’re taking PhDs in women’s studies who have suddenly realized men are people, too, and they are also oppressed by our patriarchal structure, and so that means we have to wipe out decades of feminist thought, because obviously the two cannot coexist.

Someone can explain to me why this is later, I have tickets to the opera tonight and I have a feeling it’s going to take a while.

Quiet Riot Girl, the ex-feminist with the PhD in women’s studies whom Ms. Crispin refers to, has a short, simple, eloquent response:

That is easy. It is because feminism is fueled by misandry and a need to present men as the oppressors of women.

In that one pithy sentence, Quiet Riot Girl (should we call her “Dr. Quiet Riot Girl?”) manages to encapsulate what I’ve often inarticulately felt since I was a boy growing up in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the meantime, Girlwriteswhat, herself a sharply intellectual critic of the Patriarchy Theory of female oppression, appears to have gotten herself a new fan club. Complete with bloodied pictures of her face, attacks on her boyfriend, and abusive distortions.

You know, there’s nothing some people hate more than a woman speaking her mind. Funny how often that turns out to be people who call themselves “feminists.”

I think the old guard feminists are mostly aging Baby Boomers with foolish assumptions who are not used to having their prejudices challenged, but a new generation of women who don’t accept all their doctrines as dogma is starting to slowly appear–and to speak out because they know the men in their lives love them, and they love them back, and that the “Patriarchy Theory” of women as oppressed and men as oppressors isn’t just oversimplified, it’s blatantly insulting to many of the women, and men, of history.

The funny part is I think it’s going to have to be women to do the heavy lifting on changing these attitudes. Men who complain about it are dismissed as whiners, losers, and more. We’re going to need women to speak up if anything’s really going to change.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

*Update*: Quiet Riot Girl responds with more on the often ruthless attacks on women who dare to dissent.

California’s 30th District: Race Between Consensus Builders Berman and Sherman is the Most Fascinating Redistricted House Battle
by Scott Crass

This redistricting year is forcing numerous pairings of one House member against another. Some are Democratic vs. Republican matchups. Others involve incumbents whose party affiliations are the same, but whose styles are different. But the most fascinating contest and by far most expensive is taking place in the West San Fernando Valley, where two long-time and well-liked Congressmen with vastly similar philosophies are winding down what may turn out to be just Part One of a titanic struggle which will culminate with only one having a seat in the next Congress.

For many in California ’s 30th district, the choice between 15-term Congressman Howard Berman and his eight-term colleague, Brad Sherman is so difficult because the two men share so many similarities. The “Jewish Journal” goes so far as to imply that with a caption, ”Two Jews: One District.” Both are fairly hawkish members of the Foreign Affairs Committee (which Berman once chaired), and in a district with a large Jewish population, are fiercely supportive of Israel . On social issues, each have liberal bents and rarely abandon the House Democratic leadership. The pair are anything but flashy with unquestioned intelligence and a penchant for avoiding the lime light and working behind the scenes.

Indeed, if politics is like sausage making, each has shown an ability to stay in the factory, ironing out the intricacies of high profile legislation few other colleagues seem to have a desire to go near. Few could argue that if the title of most underrated members existed, both Berman and Sherman would top the list.

Berman, 71 may well be the quintessential legislator. If his challenge is to provide an aura of tranquility among a hyper-partisan institution, he succeeds with flying colors. His soft-spoken, calm demeanor makes him highly approachable to colleagues of all ideological stripes. This has led him to master the institution and deliver. He routinely forges complex language with Republicans on matters of high-profile foreign issues (Israel, Iran), patent/copyright and immigration/visa matters, His one-time role as Ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee’s Courts and Intellectual Property Subcommittee has enhanced his reputation as Hollywood’s champion, and prominent industry execs and celebrities alike have reciprocated by giving him their unambiguous backing. Several times, Berman has been tapped to serve as lead Democrat on the House Ethics Committee, an ”honor” that he says “he could do without.”

For Berman, the policy nature and respect from colleagues is far from new. It wasn’t long after his 1972 election to the California State Assembly that Berman nearly became Speaker of the body (the post ultimately went to Willy Brown, who is as legendary for ostentation as Berman is ordinary). His friendship with Henry Waxman enabled a Waxman-Berman machine, a force to be reckoned with for endorsements even on the lowest rung of west LA politics.

Sherman,58 is famously self-deprecating. A CPA, he once called himself “a recovering nerd.” and at campaign stops, often passes out combs with his picture (he’s bald). The combs would say, “you need this more than I do.” He has tended to local affairs and makes it a point that he has held over 160 town meetings in his tenure. Sherman plays an active role on Foreign Affairs as well, but has a large presence on Financial Services, where he has become known as a fierce advocate for corporate accountability. His ability to incorporate his humor with his otherwise monotone presentation can make his quips all the more quips scorching. When Alan Greenspan testified on his monetary ideals, Sherman replied that he’d like to be called by Julia Roberts (he was single at the time), but noted it was highly unlikely.

Unlike Berman, Sherman is not a natural politician. A member of the California Board of Equalization before coming to Congress, he had to cultivate a following. But his devotion to local issues has enabled him to do just that, and few can argue that he is anything but well-liked.

The contest, and animosity between Berman and Sherman and the events leading up to it have remnants of a redistricting matchup that ultimately never materialized on the east coast decades before. Steve Solarz and Chuck Schumer, both young, ambitious Brooklyn Democrats, were up’n'comers who came of age in the Vietnam War and had a 60’s idealism. Schumer worked for Solarz, then succeeded him in the New York Legislature. By 1981,both had neighboring House seats. But New York was losing multiple seats and both Solarz &Schumer amassed a massive war-chest preparing to do battle. A faceoff came to pass.

California ‘s dynamics are slightly different. Berman and Sherman seem to have no enemies, whereas many dislike Solarz and found Schumer a brash media hog. Additionally, the state is not losing a House seat but must create more Latinio majority seats. Already, Berman’s CD was majority-Hispanic,with Sherman ‘s rapidly growing in that direction. That set the impetus for the tension 10 years ago. Unlike Solarz and Schumer, Berman and Sherman were not forced with being paired(Berman’s brother Michael was the Dems.lead redistricting consultant). But the danger of acquiring more Latinos was real. When the first draft came out, Sherman’s district was made substantially more Latino, to the point that a primary challenge could’ve threatened his tenure. Sherman said Berman” stabbed me in the back. The two compromised and Berman’s district ultimately took in a Hispanic population of 37%. Sherman says that until now, that was the only tension that took place between the two.

Fast forward 10 years. Because of a voter approved redistricting referendum Berman no longer had the clout to draw his own lines and had to sit on the sidelines along with every other member of California ’s delegation awaiting their fates. And when the lines were released, Berman’s worst fears came true. His new district did contain 71% of his current constituency, but with a huge Hispanic majority population that would’ve made winning a primary a difficult task against a prominent Hispanic LA politician.

For some time after the commission released the lines, a showdown between the two was far from inevitable. Many Democrats implored Sherman to run in a Ventura County based and very Democratic leaning (but not safe)district, and cede the 30th to Berman. It’s not clear that he seriously entertained the thought and scoffs at mention of it. Indeed, Sherman, who has 58% of the new district, implied that Berman should find another district in which to run (he not so sarcastically suggested Seattle , where Dennis Kucinich at one pint had been considering running).

The money raised is of epic proportions.$4 million vs.2.5 million, though Berman’s burn-rate has been faster.

Berman secured the early backing of Governor Jerry Brown all but two of his Dem.colleagues from California (Nancy Pelosi as Minority Leader is neutral, but many view her as squarely in Berman’s column )Sherman takes a proverbial man of the people approach. He mentions his
backing from local leaders& his town meetings. To that end, he’s been critical of Berman’s PAC’s, posh fundraisers (including one hosted by George Clooney), 163 foreign junkets(Sherman just three),and a taxpayer funded car. He notes opposing the Wall Street bailout, which Berman supported.

Berman has won important union backing as well, including the influential Service Employees International. Berman argues it’s a question of clout and points to his work in bringing more cops to the valley and widening the heavily over trafficked 405 Freeway (Sheman also claims he played a role).when Sherman criticized him for sharing a limo ride with Obama, to the Clooney fundraiser on a date the House was in session. Berman’s spokesperson told Jonah Lowenfeld of the Jewish Journal that Berman’s “access…is why he has an unmatched record of accomplishments for the Valley and the world.”

None of this seems to bother the newspapers. The LA Times and “LA Daily News” have both given Berman ringing endorsements for the issue of clout. One Democratic official dubbed the races theme as”one’s home and the other isn’t.”

On that score, I think of another redistricting matchup in 2002. Appropriations barron John Murtha was challenged by his far-more junior (yet older)colleague Frank Mascara. Murtha pointed to his ability to funnel money through his legendary earmark status. Mascara complained about Murtha’s delivering in a check and disappearing, adding, “I hate that.” But Berman is no hack and his integrity is unquestioned.

If the ad war is a question, Berman may well be winning. One featured Betty White saluting Berman,adding he has”very nice blue eyes.” Rafer Johnson.also got into the mix. So have Tom Hanks, Bette Mider, and Kate Capshaw.Sherman countered by scoring Bill Clinton early on, which many(including Berman)assume is due to Sherman ‘s fierce backing of Hillary (Berman sided with Obama, albeit later in the season).

If the primary was like other years, June 8 may’ve been end of story. But with California’s new system, the top two finishers, will advance to November, regardless of party. That has breathed life into Berman’s bid for a 16th term. He is forcing Sherman accuses him of soliciting support from Republicans, and points to Berman’s backing from Democratic bogeyman Darrell Issa. Still, if that is indeed Berman’s strategy (which his camp does not deny), it may be a sound one.

There is no reason to think Sherman will be locked out of the GOP vote. But Republicans will need someone to gravitate towards, and Berman is working to convince them that it ought be him.

The district gave Obama 66% of the vote which means Polls show Berman in a close race for second place with Republican Mark Reed, but seems to be pulling away slightly, which means that June 8th would only set the stage for the battle to head into November.

One thing is certain in the matchup. Whoever wins, DC loses. When the 113th Congress convenes in Januasry, the House will be losing one of it’s most creative consensus builders.

And in an age when proclivity for compromise and solutions are sparse commodities, that is quite unfortunate.

And until more legislators with those qualities come along, it’s a loss that will set the art of legislating back even more.

Scott Crass writes: “Punditry has long been my passion and I thrive on offering non-partisan commentary on upcoming elections with historical perspectives .From Maine to Maui, no election is too obscure and there’s not a character I don’t dissect. I call the races as I see them as I see them, even if it’s contrary to what I want to see happen. And for us political junkies and then some, it’s never too early. And if you can’t tell which side I’m on, I’m doing a heck of a job. Check out my analysis on twitter.com/crasspolitical.

Candidate photos (supplied by their offices) via Canyon News

While it may be that the Fat Lady has not yet sung–we do have an entire Summer and Fall to get through after all–it does look like the “Occupy” movement is sputtering badly and may soon be completely extinguished, having done little of significance except add a few barely-coherent ideas into our political discourse. I find this both a bit of a relief and disappointing at the same time. As I’ve been saying for the last year, no matter what the merits of your position may be, self-righteous rage, incoherent sentiment, and failure to take showers do not a successful political movement make. Even if they do manage somehow to re-surge, unless they completely change strategies and tactics they’re more likely to be a problem for President Obama than his opposition. Being Not-A-Republican, and Not-A-Tea-Partier, and Not-A-Conservative, I find that all disappointing. As Walter Russell Mead says

The ideas behind OWS are more important than the movement; questions about the legitimacy and the consequences of liberal capitalism are going to be part of the political discourse as long as markets produce socially disturbing and morally questionable results. It is natural and healthy for young people to question society and to explore the alternatives to the intellectual status quo…neither Thomas Jefferson nor Andrew Jackson would celebrate the crony capitalism that the conventional establishment takes for granted.

Mead says other things that need saying too. I suggest you read the whole thing by clicking here.

(lev radin / Shutterstock.com)

The main problem with this being, Clinton has repeatedly said she doesn’t want the job, and not in particularly coy terms either. This begins to remind me of the Bush years wherein so many people wishfully speculated speculated that Condoleezza Rice would either replace Dick Cheney in 2004 or would run herself in 2008, no matter how many times she insisted she wasn’t interested.

Mind you, there’s little doubt that this move would energize much of Obama’s base and might even bring a few wavering centrist voters into his camp. And the Clinton/Rice comparison is imperfect, given that Clinton has run for President at least once before. Still, I can’t help but think that, just like those who hoped for a Bush/Rice or a Rice/Someone Republican ticket, those hoping for Obama/Clinton are mostly wasting their time on something that isn’t gonna happen. Maybe I’ll be wrong, but I don’t think so.

*Update*: In the meantime, Philip Klein suggests a potentially exciting choice for Romney: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

G. Dubya Bush assuring residents of The Big Easy that
nothing bad actually happened in Katrina, and even
if it did, everything would be hunky dory. The square
was lit by emergency generators : virtually the only
electricity IN New Orleans that night…

I wrote this to the Eugene Register-Guard in 2003:

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

Letters in the Editor’s Mailbag

June 19, 2003

A question of war crimes

After 80 days, it’s time Americans confronted a grave question: If no weapons of mass destruction are found, then members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes.

The U.S.-sponsored United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2, states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” And “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

In the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, there were four counts, and one, if not two, are applicable here. Count one: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and count two: waging aggressive war, or “crimes against peace.” When it was argued that the court had no jurisdiction, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor, rejoined, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Remember that in the near year of spin leading up to this war the term “regime change” was never used until 48 hours before the war began: because such a war would have been unlawful.

If war crimes have been committed (thousands are dead), those who screamed about the “rule of law” in 1999 better step up to the plate, else there is no such “rule.”

HART WILLIAMS

Well, at least one court now backs me up. Interestingly, not much comment in the American press. One short page on Google yesterday and one long page and another short overflow story on the next (and that’s when you turn off the redundancy filter):

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia

by Yvonne Ridley
The Foreign Policy Journal
May 12, 2012

Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison….

Interestingly enough, the Nuremberg Trials at the end of WWII (“watch the great movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster for a bit of the flavor) were cited by the court. Thus far, it’s Yvonne Ridley’s story, her having done the best job of early reporting, having seemingly read a good portion of the transcripts.

It is a sad day, my friends, when old Lenin Era Pravda now online in the XXIth century with a new direction and mission does a MUCH more credible reporting job than the US press and most of the blogosphere. Here are links to four parts of the transcript — such as it is — of the findings of the court with a suggestion that the story has been hacked at least once in the notes to one of the interior parts:

Part 1:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-05-2012/121063-accusations_war_crimes-0/

Part II:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/10-05-2012/121082-united_states_torture-0/

Part III
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/12-05-2012/121089-us_torture-0/

Part IV
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/13-05-2012/121099-usa_dock_four-0/

Here is the citation of our own hypocrisy in staining the national character before the whole world (who were watching):

The charge against the accused here is very similar to the charge for which the Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg trials: “the charge of conscious participation in a nation-wide governmentally organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by … authority”: Alstotter case.

This is because after 9/11, all the pronouncements from the top made a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining such treatment. A combination of factors account for this: fear, ideology and almost visceral disdain for international rules and norms. There are others who have also committed war crimes but those that have been charged are the key players. Against them there is overwhelming evidence and they bear direct responsibility for war crimes.

That is how it ends. You owe it to yourself to go and read the English translation put up in full by good ol’ Pravda. Time was, citing Pravda was a guarantee that you was at least a pinko, if not an outright commie. Boy times sure change.

George W. Bush, Agent of Al Q.A.E.D.A. is a post you should read

But what I said then was true. It remains true and as this story gains traction, every force in serpentine media and slithery supplication will attempt to convince you that our good nation did NOT commit War Crimes. These are the same bastards who maintained that no US soldier had ever or would ever do anything bad in our invasion and toppling of the regime of that guy who was responsible for Nine-Lebben.

Oh wait.

You see: we Americans are REALLY GOOD at ignoring important problems we find inconvenient. Slavery. Segregation. Child labor. Sweat shops. Women’s rights — promised them during the Civil War by politicians as part of expanding suffrage. Women’s actual rights, and not just the right to vote. Hispanic rights. Minority rights. Disabled access. The right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace. Gays and gay rights and no rights for “illegal aliens” who force sweatshop owners to fire all their American workers and employ the dirt-poor illegals to work for much lower wages, with zero rights.

Kind of like that slave labor in China that builds our computers and our i-Phones® and all the rest of the Wal-Marted, Four Bank and Four Oil Company America.

We are REAL good at it.

The  (graven) Image Makers at work

We Americans have never met a problem so big that we couldn’t all agree that it wasn’t actually there, and, therefore, nothing needs be done, nor talkin’ about that bothersome … thing. WHAT thing?

My point.

But the Bushies have PROVEN that you can be lied to with a straight face and will buy ANY crap they want to shove a feeding tube down your throat and ladle into your poor stomach.

Only next time, the country they topple and install their “approved” government after writing its “pillage and loot” constitution won’t be in the Middle East.

It’ll be in the Middle West.

Remember when I said “Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values”? Well, here’s a piece of news for yas:  ”American values” are now whatever we SAY they are. So  …

What is the blogosphere rambling on about?

Romney v. Obama blah blah blah, and it’s only the Fourteenth of Freaking May. Democracy in America is ill-served by this obfuscatory persiflage masquerading as journalism. It is not journalism: it is sycophantism and infantilism and paroxysm. But it is NOT journalism, which, in its finest flower doesn’t merely report the news (with hefty chunks of gossip and hot air speculation thrown in to pad out the segment), but finds the IMPORTANT news and goes after it like a terrier after a rat.

Sure: One of these days we’re going to have to face up to the crimes of the past thirty years. That is guaranteed.

But not today.

That is guaranteed, as well.

Genuine; not PhotoShopped.

Courage.

====================

Kudos to Thom Hartmann for having the cojones to write about this on TruthOut and mention it on his program today(?).

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

Richard K. Barry, a New Yorker now living in Toronto, is the Associate Editor of The Reaction. You can also find him at Lippmann’s Ghost.

A couple of conservative commentators are very excited about a recent poll (published May 11) by Rasmussen Reports that finds Mitt Romney ahead of President Obama by a seven-point margin, 50% to 43%, which is actually based on what they call a “rolling three day average.” They randomly survey 500 voters each night.

To put this in perspective, RealClearPolitics lists seven polls on the race, including Rasmussen, and calculates an average of 47% to 45% in Obama’s favour. All of these polls were conducted within the past 11 days.

Aside from Rasmussen, only one other poll listed by RealClearPolitics has Romney ahead, and that is the Politico/GWU/Battleground poll that has Romney up by 1. Associated Press/GfK has Obama up by 8, although with a relatively small sample size.

So, is there a problem with Rasmussen?

According to Digital Journal:

Rasmussen polls were cited 94 times by Fox News prior to the 2010 midterm elections and over-stated potential Republican votes, according to Nate Silver of the New York Times as reported by Media Matters. Media Matters goes on to say that this should raise suspicion about motivation with respect to Rasmussen polls.

In discussing Rasmussen, along with the Cato Institute, the article had this to say:

The Rasmussen poll, like the Cato Institute, is seen by some analysts also as a conservative, largely Republican group whose poll questions are set up to solicit, and obtain, conservative opinions.

As Silver himself put it, perhaps treading somewhat carefully on the question of bias:

What it does mean, though, is that when you’re evaluating the polls in a particular race, you need to take an especially long look at who’s conducting them. If you tell me that the latest poll has the Republican up by two points in Colorado, that’s going to mean one thing if it’s Research 2000 telling me that and quite another if it’s Rasmussen.

Digging a bit deeper, regarding the 2010 midterm elections, and perhaps being a bit less careful this time, Silver had this to say:

The 105 polls released in Senate and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen Reports and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points, a considerably higher figure than that achieved by most other pollsters. Some 13 of its polls missed by 10 or more points, including one in the Hawaii Senate race that missed the final margin between the candidates by 40 points, the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.

Moreover, Rasmussen’s polls were quite biased, overestimating the standing of the Republican candidate by almost 4 points on average. In just 12 cases, Rasmussen’s polls overestimated the margin for the Democrat by 3 or more points. But it did so for the Republican candidate in 55 cases — that is, in more than half of the polls that it issued.

And this:

The discrepancies between Rasmussen Reports polls and those issued by other companies were apparent from virtually the first day that Barack Obama took office. Rasmussen showed Barack Obama’s disapproval rating at 36 percent, for instance, just a week after his inauguration, at a point when no other pollster had that figure higher than 20 percent.

Not that this should necessarily mean anything, but Rasmussen has in the past issued polls under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News, that “fair and balanced” news outlet.

There is a lot more in the Silver piece if you really want to read a good critique of faulty methodology, but you get the point.

So, when Brietbart.com cites the Rasmussen poll and then asks if it might be time for President Obama to panic, the answer is, ah, no. Like everything else that goes on at that sewer of a website, it’s complete BS.

The state media wasn’t much better, devoting an article or two on a “exposé” and then right back to debating pig effluvium and its pros and cons. The blogosphere picked up the story, and when the voters found out, they overwhelmingly rejected these measures in states in which they were exposed, and passed them in states in which they were not.

This year is the SAME THING. On steroids.

And if we don’t pay attention, and if the media do not pay attention, then we are guilty of electoral treason. Period.

Let me give you a case in point, and then I’ll tell you WHY we need to pay attention to what the REAL election is, and why it’s important.

Foster “Aspirin Knees” Friess.

Koch Dominionists for Santorum 6 January 2012

Slow as it was, the dinosaur media found out that Foster was financing Rick Santorum’s superpac. And, he was standing behind Santorum cheering in Iowa. A couple Wyoming blogs and I found it almost immediately. (I give them full credit for spotting Foster first, but my observation wasn’t influenced by theirs.)

Articles were written. Pundits pontificated. But nobody dug.

It remained obscure in news reports that Foster financed and just ponied up another seven figures for The Daily Caller, run by his Jackson Hole, Wyoming neighbor and Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Neil Patel. Cheney is another neighbor in Millionaire Gulch, outside of Jackson. The only face noted by media is the media face, Tucker Carlson, and even that isn’t much talked about.

We know, for instance, that Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson staged a stealth maneuver to “interview” Bill Ayers.

[* A "benefit" lunch with Ayers was auctioned off at a fundraiser, not for his past, but for his present involvement in the community and education; an operative purchased the auction, and then Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller dot com showed up. You can hear Bill Ayers public radio interview "My dinner with Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson," March 15, 2012 HERE.]

The spirit animating Breitbart dot com

Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller have become prominent for taking down persons, bullying media and getting people fired (e.g. Shirley Sherrod in the former case, and David Weigel in the latter. There are many more instances.)

But, during the entire phony “presidential” primaries race and media circus, amidst torrents, floods and seas of blather, nobody had any spare time to note the bizarre connection between The Daily Caller and Foster Friess as a meaningful avenue of inquiry?

This is the same media that provided their OWN tour bus for the fake “Tea Party Express” tours (CNN) thus giving the imprimateur of imperial media legitimacy, even though it’s the same bus show that started out as the “You Don’t Speak for Me, Cindy” tour, to promote the War and silence Cindy Sheehan’s increasingly effective (at the time) protest against the unlawful war of aggression against the wrong opponent.

The “public’s right to know” 2010

When Foster made his “aspirin between the knees” joke to Andrea Mitchell, he claimed a special “wedding anniversary” getaway and existed the media spotlight to hide out like the drunken younger brother of a legislator up for state re-election in a Motel 6, with plenty of booze, cable TV and a baby-sitter.

The media stopped asking any questions, even though it is known that Foster Friess was one of those singled out for praise by Charles Koch at the Palm Springs get-together last year for having given their zillionaires’ slush fund a million dollars before. I’ve gone into this at length, so I won’t repeat myself here.

The Aspen Koch Get-together. Click pic for details

The point is that when somebody gives the Kochs a million bucks to launder however they may, almost single-handedly underwrites the presidential campaign of the last man standing, who was given absolutely zero chance of surviving past Iowa by those self-same know-it-alls, isn’t that worth cutting a couple slices of BS blather out of the columns and paying some investigative attention?

When he underwrites a prominent new “attack media” Right Wing blog in collusion with the fading Breitbart dot com empire that gave us James “Pimp” O’Keefe, with the instantly recognizable mask of Tucker Carlson in front of the snarling face of the Cheney Veepiness, isn’t that worthy of paying SOME DAMNED ATTENTION TO?!??

No.

Because this election isn’t expected to involve us. This election is for rats. This election will take place at the state and local levels as the Friesses and the Kochs finance a Pavlovian election machine that they tested out in 2010.

Let me show you how pernicious this is. AAMCO Transmissions. (You ought to hear their jingle “Double A, Em Cee Oh. AAAMCO.)

Those jingles, ubiquitous in American life since the early days of radio, have a very specific purpose: they condition you to associate the tune with the name, so that you will think of the name when you think of the product.

Roto-Rooter!

Well and good. But that’s conditioning. That’s not choice. Bill Maher was paneling last night and ranting about fast food, that it was a choice and his split on the issue. But it isn’t a choice. If you’ve watched any TV, you might notice that the food commercials come on just at those points they think you might be hungry. Dinnertime. Breakfast.

Even my favorite recent commercial, where a “phantom bong” is in the middle of a table surrounded by Jack in the Box taco wrappers, always run late at night (with Late Night logo), and showing the reverse angle that no, it’s ACTUALLY a ceramic mug and was a trick of the light. The two stoner dudes are saying how great their surcease of munchies was.  The initial impression is clear: stoned? Jack tacos would be AWESOME right now, and hey! We’re open right now.

Click for the commercial on YouTube

Or the current Applebees commercial, (which you should just listen to, without looking; THEN go back and look): The soundtrack emphasizes the sizzle sound. And they even cop to it. “And what gets your juices flowing.” Anton Pavlov must be chuckling. Now, they ring the bell, and WE drool.

Frank Luntz became the indispensable man in Republican Rhetoric long ago, not for his eloquence, but for his Pavlovian research into WHAT words will imprint, will create the proper emotional response, will cause the dog to drool.

Death Tax.

And now, it’s a simple game of pick your candidate, turn on your secret SuperPac machine, and carpet-bomb with conditioning.

Candidate A? Unicorns and rainbows and butterflies.

Candidate B? Dark Satanic rites, prowling wolves, spiders.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Roto-Rooter.

Associative Conditioning

What happened in 2006 was a national legislative agenda, drafted by unseen hands for shadowy plutocratic masters. And we STILL don’t actually know who financed it. (Although the implications are clear enough that anyone but a journalist or lawyer could see it.)

What happened in 2010 was a shift to playing a national game at a state level. Having a slate of candidates. Taking out unwary incumbents in poorly-covered primaries. Overwhelming the state parties and organizations with CONDITIONING and taking over governorships and legislatures across the land.

The real, untold story of 2010 was how the “Tea Party” meme was created and conditioned, supported and financed, successfully, to grab massive power across the land, and the same machinery is clanking underway this year as well.

The Republican party is being taken over by another force, the pie on whose crust Mitt Romney merely is a top flake upon. Here’s a little factotum: The Republican governor of New Mexico, elected in 2010 was aided by a $300,000 donation from Foster Friess, the largest donation in her campaign.

In Wisconsin, Foster Friess is (or was, as of last month) among the top contributors to Scott Walker’s “Don’t Recall Me, Bro!” campaign, to the tune of six figures. (And the bastard has the gall to whine that he’s not NEARLY as rich as some of the other players. “I may be richer than Croesus, but I’m an underdog, because so many gazillionaires have more than I. I’m not even a lousy BILLIONAIRE.” Awww. We weep.)

When you’re worth several hundred
million dollars, you get to pretend
you’re a cowboy and nobody
will say a word. Money talks.

THAT is this year’s election. The shadowy masters, and those trying to make us drool, utterly without any but the slightest nod to the higher cognitive faculties, like … choice.

All they are trying to do is to get the rats to press the proper lever, using conditioning and reinforcement techniques.

And if that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, there’s no point in going on.

This is a NATIONAL campaign being waged on a state level.

Used to be that it was a contest of self-limiting size. It used to be here in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator’s campaign rarely went above five figures spent (and a low five figures at that)  and often less than five figures. Now, it is a six-figure race. Each election ramps up the costs of running for statewide offices geometrically.  Money becomes the determinant.

And, increasingly, as in Wisconsin, the money has nothing whatsoever to do with the state. Somewhere in Valhalla, over a marble chessboard, played with bejeweled pieces made of precious metals and lovingly hand-crafted by Norns, the Great Bears and Bulls play a money game this year, picking and choosing the candidates that they have no moral entitlement to support or deny, since they do not live on the ground with we, poor ants, nor share our toils and travails.

Political parties used to be different, state by state. The “national party” was a creature of the state parties. Today, the GOP is a franchise operation, and the local and state parties merely retail outlets, where, mostly, “involved” citizens are allowed to play kabuki politics that have no effect on the candidates, the issues or the legislation that ensues. They are valuable more for their bodies in getting the rats out to press the proper lever than they are for their modest contributions. Their money is meaningless, as is your money.

Sorry lady. You’re off the board and out of the game.

But we pretend that it is still like Idaho was in 2006. When you look through the patiently chronicled contributions it is easy to spot the out of state “Club for Growth” bundles. The average donation that year was five and ten, and sometimes fifty dollars. Those were the in-state donations. The out-of-state donations ran to four and even five figures.  How is granny going to compete, politically, with her widow’s mite against the plutocrats’ might?

Local fundraising and local donations (and support) have become mere window-dressing. The real action is in the money that can now sluice in, smoking and steaming,  from every piggy bank in hell.

THAT is the real election. THAT would actually employ reporters covering a presidential contest more notable for its gaffes than for its substance. One candidate actually HAS no substance.

But he DOES have a massive “independent” conditioning machine behind him, as Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and all other pretenders found out to their chagrin. No candidate ever approached 1:1 parity. Usually they were outspent twenty and forty to one.

teeny facebook ad
running presently for
Americans For Prosperity
(Koch front group) page

We are enslaved by our conditioning. Multiple generations of Americans will instantly hear a jingle when the magic words are spoken.

I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener.

The Faux Nooz crowd are so conditioned that they truly believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, is a “socialist” (whatever THAT means, but it’s BAD, right?), is a Marxist (see previous parenthetical), a radical, the “most divisive president in modern American history” (as I actually heard spoken with a straight face this week, thinking, true, if by “modern” you mean the past three years) and is a “celebrity.”

Jack = yum

Which is hilarious, since being a celebrity has become the lingua franca of American discourse AND the chiefest thing to be ardently hoped and dreamed for its magical acquisition. cf. “Kardassian.” cf. every author in America, who must now become a “celebrity” interview to sell books. cf. everyone on TeeVee. cf. every journalist, who requires the cachet of BEING on TV to lend “celebrity” status to his/her journalism. “I been on TeeVee. I’s a REAL journalist.”

Or in the words of Faux Nooz (local edition):

The Fauxmobile screeches to a halt (You can tell, because it’s got the logo emblazoned on its otherwise white exterior). Reporter, sound/boom guy and cameraman emerge, along with another couple of guys holding portable lights, which they aim at an unshaven, fedora’d fellow leading a pack mule out of the Sonoran desert.

HEAD JOURNO: We are reporters. You know, journalistos.

F.C. DOBBS: If you’re journalistos, where are your facts?

HEAD JOURNO: Facts? FACTS?? We don’ got to show you no steenking facts!

(With apologies to John Huston.)

The “reporting” isn’t as important as the conditioning.

Bong: Jack in the Box.

Phantom bong reinforcement

(The later message that it was a trick of the light, even though J.P. Morgan’s ‘phantom dagger’ is literally in the center of the frame doesn’t undo the conditioning. FIRST impressions are almost always the only impressions that matter. How else do you explain the still prevalent idiocy that AIDS has something to do with homosexuality? It’s a disease that shows up according to the chain of transmitters, not the method of transmission. In Haiti and Africa, it’s a disease of heterosexuals. But the INITIAL conditioning was that it’s “God’s Vengeance on Homos” and that conditioning remains stuck fast in the glottis of American small-mindedness to this very day.)

Famous Edward Steichen portrait of
J.P. Morgan with “phantom dagger”

Let me give you an example (from “Truth Is Whatever I Say It Is” ):

[Karl Rove] “writes” this in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal today:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief [sic] would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are…

Setting aside for a moment Mr. Rove’s qualifications as a film critic (they are slightly fewer than his qualifications as a creature with a soul or a conscience), one asks one’s self: When was the last time that you ever heard ANY Republican admit that Bill Clinton could possibly be right about ANYthing? And yet, here, Karl Rove is marking up the merchandise right in front of our eyes.

[...]

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has “corrected” the lie that Karl Rove told:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column included an incomplete quote from Bill Clinton in the last paragraph.

Now, it reads: Even President Bill Clinton says in the film ”I hope that’s the call I would have made.“

Which completely changes the meaning of Rove’s oily assertion.

The correction doesn’t matter. The first impression has produced the desired imprinting, GIGO as they used to say in the punch card days of computing, “Garbage In: Garbage Out.”

YouTube “click to turn off” Romney ad that appears on videos right now

Here is some conditioniong today from John Hinderaker, new Koch appointee to the CATO Institute board, former vice-taker-downer of Dan Rather:

John Hinderaker / Power Line:

Is Romney Pulling Away? —  It is, of course, way too early to get cocky.  But Republicans have to be happy with the way current polling is going.  In this morning’s tracking poll at Rasmussen Reports, Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama by a stunning 50%-42%.  Rasmussen’s matchup is a rolling three …

Discussion:

Gregg Re / The Daily Caller: Obama ignores gay marriage issue on Saturday as Romney surges ahead

Scared Monkeys: Rasmussen: Mitt Romney 50% – Barack Obama 42% … Hardly Good Polling Numbers for an Incumbent President

McPartland / nation.foxnews.com: Rasmussen Poll: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

Weasel Zippers: Rasmussen: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

You see the talking points, which are about conditioning. And it has been successful. You can see how much if you follow threads in discussion groups. A made up example:

Someone is making a point about campaign cash, and uses an analogy about tacos.

Someone else says: “Tacos! Tacos? I LOVES me some tacos!’

And someone else says ‘But not those tacos at Hyper-Taco. They’re using evil chemical additives!’

And then someone else says, yes, it’s all a conspiracy of the FritoBandito Supremacy, who have taken control of every bubble-gum manufacturing facility on the planet!”

And someone else says “Bubble-gum! Bubble-gum? I LOVES me some bubble-gum!”

And so forth.

Jack tacos yum – from same commercial

The logical train of thought is not rational, it is associative: it is dream logic, the logic of the subconscious (or the soul-in-drag) of teddy bears remind you of childhood and that reminds you of your childhood and that reminds you of your bed where the teddy bear used to sit and that hole in the mattress that your brother burned in it playing with matches and how much you used to like matches and free matchbooks that said “Can you draw the Pirate?” and how much you liked Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.

Can YOU draw the pirate?

The links are by association, but not logical. The constant and unending conditioning that we’ve undergone has programmed an unending and endlessly annoying series of conditionings that have trapped us as surely as the Lilliputians trapped Gulliver with gossamer threads.

So: secret gazillionaires are paying Frank Luntzes and filmmakers to condition you via carpet-bombing all the way down to the local level. And you’ve been neatly finessed right off the game board.

Because your thoughtful vote only counts as one against a sea of rats trained to press the proper lever.

Woof

All the way down to your hometown.

That’s this election and that’s the national story that we need to be talking about, no matter whose face ultimately graces the marquee.

All that matters is that the conditioning proceeds, bypassing rational thought and producing the proper results for our chess masters.

But that’s not newsworthy.

Roto-rooter!

Courage.

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

In the 1990s renowned political scientist and author Ben Barber wrote in Jihad vs McWorld that global capitalism was at war with democracy. He was right, of course, and the intensity of that war has only increased since then. Global corporations are battling democracy’s environmental regulations, taxation, labor laws, legislation aimed at fairness or income equality. They are battling democracy’s concern for the long-term survival of community or any values more human than economic.

Emblematic of the global assault is the massive campaign by Canadian oil and gas corporations to construct a transcontinental pipeline across the American heartland regardless of local environmental consequences. Emblematic, again, are the mining corporations suing Ecuador in the WTO to open up that country’s rivers, forests and indigenous landscape to destruction. Emblematic is the 2005 exemption of “fracking” from the U.S. Clean Water Act resulting in millions of gallons of poisoned waste water, allowing global corporations like Halliburton, (headquartered in Dubai), to override the interests of local American governments, farmers, ranchers and cities. Emblematic is Wal-Mart’s aggressive activity in Mexico, consciously subverting the rule of law. Democracy is not strong in Mexico; Wal-Mart has not made it stronger.

A symbol of the global war is in that one five-story building in the Cayman Islands which is the address of more than 18,000 corporations. The Caymens do not levy income taxes. So all the corporations that call that home are opting out of their responsibilities in the U.S.. Apple, Google, and Bank of America are exemplars. They say that they are simply following the tax code and being headquartered in the Caymens is not illegal. That’s right. But they are also turning their backs on an American society that gave them educated workers, roads and bridges, science, health care, and above all, courts and the rule of law. What these corporations do not say is that they spent millions lobbying the U.S. Congress to make tax havens legal. They have made it legal but they have not made it right.

It is clear that these offshore havens create a crisis for democracy by squeezing the money out of government. What may be less clear is that these legislated special privileges also create a crisis for capitalism. In the very short term capitalism may not look like it is in trouble: Major corporations are reporting record profits. Bonuses on Wall Street in 2010 exceeded $90 billion. The Dow Jones in 2012 has been mostly above 13,000. Wall Street appears to be healthy. A Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives thinks it will get even healthier if we just eliminate all government regulations.

Never was an elite in greater delusion. Predatory capitalism is killing the middle class goose that lays the golden egg. That’s the first danger. Secondly, it is unselfconsciously driving toward unlimited exponential growth that is producing climate change which eventually will lead to social and economic chaos. In the longer term therefore capitalism is killing the eco-system that makes golden geese possible. Finally, in both short and long terms capitalism’s oligarchs and supporters in Congress are fixated on a flimsy free market doctrine. In sum, the crisis of capitalism is created by the fact that today’s oligarchs still understand the world in terms appropriate for the agrarian 18th century, are opposed to regulation as if they were combatting a revolution of the proletariat, and their theoretical doctrine is to return to the simplicity of corporate life in times when monopolies were granted by kings.

The result is that today’s 1% are squeezing the blood out of the middle class, creating conditions of predictable eco collapse, and have no doctrine more sophisticated than Ayn Rand. But these, even combined, are not even the greatest danger that capitalism faces. The even greater danger to capitalism is plutocracy’s blindness toward the advantages that come from democracy. These are advantages in innovation, mobility, creativity, and productivity that all arise with popular government. Oligarchs have missed this point entirely. This month The New York Times carries a quote from a former Bain Capital associate of Mitt Romney’s who says, quite literally, “At base, having a small elite with vast wealth is good for the poor and middle class.” He could be an English aristocrat on the eve of the American Revolution.

What the Bain Capital investor and the rest of the elite do not seem to understand is how much he and they depend upon democracy. A prosperous economy requires reliability in contract, truth in science and medicine, widespread, popular education, and nonviolent processes of change. Without these, markets shrink, innovation is endangered, mistrust and corruption replace nonviolent process, and plutocrats themselves become insecure. For examples, look anywhere in the non-democratic world. Look at what is happening in China this month. Bo Xi Lai’s fall, and the power struggle in China that it represents, is no different than the fall of the Caesars, the Borgias, the Stewarts or the Bourbons. Insider power struggles, wrapped in secrecy and murder, rumors of pay offs and spying by one aristocrat upon another, are the hallmark of medieval Europe and still today of Russia, Central Asia, and Latin America, to say nothing of China.

Undermining democracy as the plutocrats seem wont to do undermines all values of equality and mutuality and, without these as a restraint, power concentrates, feudalism creeps back, plutocracy takes over and capitalism is itself endangered. Without democracy, the narrative to expect is like that of the Caesars killing the Republic in Rome, or the Medici’s suffocating the Republic in Florence, or communists stamping out the people’s revolution in 20th century Russia. They all tried democracy a little bit. But they then slid into plutocracy and cut themselves off at the knees.

We therefore live in a time of two crises, one of democracy, another of capitalism. They are intertwined. The solution to the democracy crisis is probably the only long lasting solution for the capitalists. Apparently, most corporate leadership does not understand this. Unfortunately, without that understanding today’s oligarchs are apt to bring both down.

Craig Barnes is the author of Democracy At The Crossroads, Princes, Peasants, Poets and Presidents Struggle for (and against) the Rule of Law. His website is www.craigbarnes.com

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” –Rebecca West

I have long been alternately amused and irritated by that famous quote. Why? Because I find myself relating to it in divided fashion:

For my part, I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is either. But I do know that people call me anti-feminist, or a misogynist, whenever I question the logic of some self-proclaimed feminists–or express sentiments that differentiate me, as a man, from a doormat.

I began ruminating on this a few days ago upon reading an essay by the (thoughtful, rational, and decent) Willow Wilson entitled How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Feminists. There’s not a thing wrong with that essay, and I highly recommend reading it. Were I to give it a shorthand summary it amounts to, “Angry feminists may sometimes be over the top but there are some real evils in the world and they often serve a necessary function to combat that evil.” OK. I can dig it. (But seriously, read it yourself.)

On the other hand, I’ll be 46 this year, and if I’ve done my math right that means I’m about 16 years older than Willow. That doesn’t give me any special authority or make her viewpoint any less valid—indeed, I’m often wearied by Baby Boomers who obnoxiously tell me my own youth compared to them means I “just don’t understand” certain things that I think I understand very well, thank you very much. But it does mean I remember things she would never have experienced: how men, especially those of us who were boys in the 1970s and 1980s, were often castigated by self-proclaimed feminists for things we didn’t do and had no part of. Or how frequently normal boyish behavior was deemed wrong or evil–and by that I do not even mean things sexual, I mean guy stuff like enjoying professional wrestling, heavy metal music, tinkering with engines or electronics or computers instead of being concerned about the latest emotional goings-on around us, or not being very tidy.

A favorite cliche I remember from my youth that I daresay most men my age will remember: “you’re only messy because you were brought up to have your mother clean up for you and now you expect women to do it for you!” Um, no. First off, she didn’t clean up after me much. My stepfather was the neat freak. Second off, I’m just not a very tidy person thank you very much. I will consistently put up with a greater degree of household messiness than most women, and the proof has been that whenever I’ve lived with a woman who’s gone “on strike” and refused to “clean up after me,” I have obliviously gone on without even noticing. On the other hand, whenever I’m asked to clean something, I simply do so without (much) complaint, because my very male brain says “the female needs this cleaned, thus, I will clean it and she will be happy.” (Note to self: make sure to explore in a later essay just how automatically and unthinkingly most American men will do anything a woman asks just because she asked.)

I remember how frequently we were accused of attitudes we really didn’t think we had. How often we might get accused of misogyny or sexism for just uttering a thought or sentiment that was not deemed Politically Correct by many self-proclaimed feminists–Political Correctness itself being (in part) an invention of self-proclaimed feminists. Or how often we were subjected to double-standards of behavior by women in our age group, who simultaneously demanded utter equality when it suited them, but deference and chivalry when it was convenient. Or how often we experienced–and still experience!–gender discrimination in the workplace today.

I work in a field where women are given preferential hiring status, and fast-tracked for promotion because they are women. I don’t necessarily object to it–in fact I tend to prefer working for female managers over male ones–but I do note that this is a systemic bias that no one seems to care about. And that such systemic biases are common in today’s work world. Discrimination against men, either overt or subtle, is so innate to this culture that it’s either completely invisible to most people until you point it out, or, it’s often considered laudable. Indeed, in many fields, women make considerably more than men the same age do, often even when they work fewer hours. Instead of wondering if that isn’t evidence of at least some level of systemic bias against males, the usual take on that is to laud it as a great achievement.

And if feminism is supposed to be about equality for women in a world that oppresses them, what are we to make of the following facts–all of which I’ll be happy to verify with references if anyone really needs me to–which are all going on right now in modern-day America, circa 2012?

* The vast majority of High School dropouts are male.
* Fewer men now go to college than women, and are far more likely to drop out if they do go.
* Women are now by far the majority of college graduates, a trend that’s been increasing for years.
* Men are significantly more likely to be the victims of violent assault in their lifetimes than women.
* Men are the majority of the nation’s homicide victims.
* Men are as likely to be assaulted by intimate partners as women are, but are less likely to report it and more likely to be laughed at or accused of wrongdoing if they do.
* The vast majority of prison inmates are men.
* The vast majority of alcoholics and drug addicts are men.
* The overwhelming majority of the long-term homeless population is male.
* The overwhelming majority of victims of work-related injuries are male.
* The overwhelming majority of work-related deaths are male.
* The overwhelming majority of successful suicide attempts are male.

Anyone who has a son, or a brother, or a father whom she loves should find those facts sobering.

And by comparison, while we as a nation are preoccupied with the problem of “Violence Against Women,” as Patricia Pearson noted in her classic book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, “Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States; more than 80 percent of neonaticides; an equal or greater share of severe physical child abuse; an equal rate of spousal assault; about a quarter of child sexual molestations; and a large proportion of elder abuse… The rate at which infants are murdered by women in the U.S. is higher than the rate at which women are murdered by men.” Those facts remain fundamentally unchanged, except for the fact that the (reported) rate of female-on-male violence has been on a steady rise for about 20 years. For her audacity in noticing things like this, Patricia Pearson wasn’t hailed by feminist political groups as a gender-role-busting warrior for equality, for giving women agency by holding them accountable for their actions, but instead was either ignored or attacked by much of the politically-active feminist community. (And if you don’t believe me, ask her.)

A good counterbalance to Willow’s essay, I think, is by the remarkable “Girl Writes What,” a blogger I recently stumbled upon whose work thrills me. She’s a bit over 40 so she remembers some of these things I’ve talking about very well, and can still see how some of it remains active in modern America. She’s by no means a conservative or a right-winger, but she’s still got beefs with modern feminism. To quote part of her Manifesto on Female Agency and Equality:

Under extremist modern feminism, there can be no female autonomy or agency because though we have freedom and opportunity, there is no corresponding expectation of self-sufficiency, accountability, or responsibility placed on women. And there can be no male autonomy or agency, because for men there is only self-sufficiency, accountability and responsibility, while freedom and opportunity is becoming a thing of the past.

If chivalry infantilized women, feminism does the exact same thing. Only instead of running to tell daddy/Sir Galahad about all those horrible brutes who are so very mean to us, we’re supposed to run to daddy government.

But I have news for modern feminism. Some of us just aren’t that interested in feeling like victims. Being victimized is something that happens to people, and is often completely outside our control. But we DO have a choice as to whether we see ourselves as victims, and choose to live our lives as victims, or not. Modern feminism wants me to feel like a default victim. And I am NOT a victim. Victims are passive. Victims are acted upon. Victims lack agency. That’s not the way I will ever choose to view myself, and it saddens me that so many women have been convinced to see themselves this way.

But I suggest reading the whole thing.

I heartily recommend reading her other blog essays. If you like having your preconceptions challenged, you’ll get plenty of that there.

Now one of the problems with Girl Writes What’s writings is her use of the term “feminism.” She offends some people when she uses it, because she writes about it critically. It points to the same problem in reverse with Willow’s article, or really, almost any article I’ve ever read or discussion I’ve ever had with anyone about feminism: nobody can tell you precisely what they mean by it. This leaves a lot of people in a whiplash condition. There are perfectly decent people who don’t hate women and want women to be free to live their lives as they wish who still say they are anti-feminist. But there are others who say, “If you respect women and want women to be free to live their lives as they wish, that makes you a feminist!” Then there will be those who read Girl Writes What, who is critical of feminism, who say “wait a minute, I’m a feminist and I don’t think those things she accuses feminists of!” And they get their feelings hurt.

To close this out where I began: I have never been able to figure out what feminism is, because it appears that no one can agree on what it is, let alone whether or not it is a good thing. If you can’t even agree on what a word means, you will usually get into tailchasing exercises where both parties argue fiercely with each other when it turns out they’re arguing as much or more about what that one word means than they are about the actual issues involved.

So me? I just won’t use the word “feminist” if I can avoid it. It’s a distraction: like the word “socialist,” in the modern English lexicon it has come to mean anything the speaker wants it to mean at the moment they say it, subject to revision at any given moment if their opinions change. I won’t even play with words like that anymore. If you want to even discuss feminism with me, I first ask that you tell me exactly what you mean by that word, and once you do we can discuss that. Hopefully in a mutually respectful way. Otherwise, frankly, I would rather use less emotionally charged terms like “gender equity” or “gender fairness” or “women’s issues” and “men’s issues” or, really, anything other than the damned “f” word that not only makes people angry, self-righteous, confused, or otherwise in a state that makes clear communication impossible.

What do I actually think about men and women? I think men are biologically, psychologically, spiritually, and pragmatically different from women, and vice-versa, although men and women have more in common than not, and no gender label perfectly describes anybody. I think neither men nor women are innately superior as human beings by dint of gender. I think that everybody should have a chance to do whatever they want with their lives, regardless of their sex, so long as they actually have that capability. I think that as much as possible, women and men should be treated equally under the law except in those rare areas where that’s impossible, and in those cases we should strive to make it as equitable as we can. Special treatment should always be avoided wherever possible.

There are those who would call all of that feminism. There are those who would call it the radical opposite of feminism. There are those who’d call it liberal. There are those who’d call it right-wing. And you know what? That’s why I eschew labels when I can. Because what do I call all of that? I call it “what I think.” And I’m open to hearing what you think, so long as you can avoid calling me names or making nasty allegations about my character or motives.

Peace out.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

I feel like it is difficult to be a casual follower of the Iranian nuclear issue. All related news items are generally tagged with a derivation of one of the following themes: a) Israel is going to attack Iran; or b) the parties are set for nuclear talks. Particularly with respect to the nuclear talks, it is even frustrating for me, an IR nerd of sorts, to see this title every once in a while, as I have every once in a while for the last ten years. Besides dates and parties, they are all a bit of a wash in my head. So let’s talk about why no fruit is growing from that tree.

Iran’s nuclear program started in the ’70s, under the Shah of Iran, with direct support from the United States and other world powers. The idea was that Iran, a large producer and exporter of crude oil, could benefit from a cleaner, cheaper form of energy. It would allow them to sell more of their large but ultimately limited supply of oil, which was good for the world consumer as well, while diversifying their domestic grid. It was tacitly understood at that time that the dual-use nature of nuclear technology as well as Iran’s military ambitions meant Iran would one day likely have a nuclear bomb.

The fundamental logic of that energy choice applies even more today than it did in the ’70s. The problem is, Iran is now a “rogue state,” and so the bomb idea doesn’t really fly anymore.

To understand why negotiations have failed, it is essential to recognize that both sides see the entire process as a zero sum game.

News has focused on the potential that Iran will use nuclear technology for the purposes of building a nuclear bomb — no doubt, that is the biggest concern. But under the zero sum construct and current relations between the two countries, any step Iran takes in the direction of nuclear energy is bad for America; a sworn enemy will have both proven that despite sanctions and a lack of diplomatic relations with the United States, it can accomplish huge technological feats worthy of its desired standing among the world’s most powerful nations.

For Iran, every step it takes further emits an aura of self-sufficiency and contentedness that it strives so hard to maintain in the face of what it sees as America’s desired monopoly on everything, and dominance of Iran in particular. The threat of having the bomb or the capability to throw one together, Iran’s leaders are not too ignorant to notice, has its own cachet.

In a zero-sum game, the only thing that works is force or incentives. Nobody is convincing anyone of anything on the basis of merit. Example: One of the most essential requirements of the United States and other world powers is that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment; what people fail to cite is that Iran did so once, for the purpose of “confidence building,” in 2003. It wasn’t for confidence building at all; it was because Iran perceived the U.S. as ready, willing, and moderately likely to invade, as they had just done in Afghanistan and Iraq. Force.

As Iraq turned into a quagmire, and Afghanistan too, both with Iran’s help, Iran’s cooperation dissipated, as if it was tethered to the threat of force which looked more and more unlikely.

Is it any surprise, then, that the recent volume augmentation on the “bomb-bomb Iran” song has led parties back to the table yet again? The difference this time: There is no real threat of force. Simply put, partially for reasons I outlined here, America can destroy Iran’s nuclear program and oust its regime (the most scary thought that ruminates under the great Mullah’s turban when he sleeps), but won’t. And Israel, by the vast majority of accounts, cannot do much alone.

So, then, the second recourse of incentives must be used. A discussion on that in the days to come.

Ali Ezzatyar, a contributor at The Reaction, is a lawyer and writer based in Paris and San Francisco. He is also the director of the steering committee to establish the Berkeley Program on Entrepreneurship and Democracy in the Middle East.

A full PDF of the official Air Force report on the crash of Capt. Jeffrey Haney is available here. The most chilling note, to me, is in the conclusion:

“By clear and convincing evidence, I find the cause of the mishap was the MP’s failure to recognize and initiate a timely dive recovery due to channelized attention, breakdown of visual scan and unrecognized spacial disorientation.”

Thus writes Brigadier General James S. Browne.

You cut off a guy’s air supply, and then you figure he’s at fault for “channelized attention?”

OK, carefully thinking about that, and reading other parts of the report, it seems that there may have been a training issue there; suggestion of the report is that what the pilot should have done was take off his oxygen mask, which would plausibly give him a minute or three of air while he made sure his plane was oriented properly and also worked on getting oxygen restored, but apparently, according to them, he panicked because his airflow was restricted and he felt suffocated, and because of his high speed he had barely a minute to figure out what to do before he crashed, and he was focused on his oxygen mask instead of his plane. Plausibly, this could be fixed in training procedures where you simulate the oxygen mask suddenly stopping and suffocating you, so you can practice whipping it off your face while still keeping the airplane reasonably oriented. I can see that as a defensible position.

But where is the question of whether or not there might be a design flaw somewhere in the oxygen delivery system? You know, even if we didn’t give a damn about human life, those airplanes are worth a few hundred million dollars each, and just in pure monetary terms fighter pilots themselves are pretty damned expensive when you add up how much time it takes to recruit, train, take care of, and pay them, and compensate their families. Even if you do take the “if you signed up to be a fighter pilot you knew you could die” mentality, there doesn’t seem to be much excuse for not demanding a very careful review of the design of the oxygen systems. Not just the maintenance procedures, but the design itself. One unforeseen problem by the design engineer, or manufacturing flaw, plausibly something very simple, could cause something like this. I would think that pilots expressing concern over that would be respected, wouldn’t you?

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)

PS – If you want to see the follow up movie to “Little Stuff” I posted earlier on TMV, here’s the link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNkT3aQtqkM

Seems that Mitt Romney tired of abusing dogs and turned his attentions to boating. Buzz Feed reports [emphasis added]:

Mitt Romney Was Arrested For Disorderly Conduct In 1981

According to what Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, he had taken his family off to Wayland, Mass.’s Lake Cochituate, about an hour outside Boston, for a summer excursion. As Romney prepared to put his family boat into the water, a park officer told Romney not to launch because his license appeared to have been painted over. The officer told Romney if he put his boat into the water he would face a $50 fine.

Romney felt that his license was still visible and decided to ignore the order from the officer and pay the fine.

Because, you know, it’s only about what you’re willing to pay. Laws? LAWS? We don’t have to pay attention to no steenking laws. Listen to Thurston opine on the fundamental pestiness of these stupid laws. Mitt “felt” that he was in compliance with the law. So, rather than change his plans, he ignored the officer’s instruction.

Hey, what’s fifty bucks? A mere Grant. Here, buddy. Buy yourself a new nightstick.

After Romney put the family boat into the water, the officer reappeared visibly angry and arrested Romney for disorderly conduct. Romney was handcuffed on the scene, taken to the local police station, and booked.

“There I was, dripping wet in a bathing suit,” Romney told the Globe. A magistrate let him go without bail.

Several days later, Romney appeared in Natick District Court and threatened to sue the arresting office for a false arrest. The charges were dropped and sealed at Romney’s request.

Aw. Jeepies. Turn the tables and bring in your legal eagles to personally attack and harass the officer and drain the resources of the local court? Why, anyone to the Manor Born would do as much.

Hell, Thurston Howell IV would utterly appreciate how “sporting” Mitt had been. He graciously felt (according to his self-serving recounting) that if the fine was only $50, then the law is actually a sort of vending machine. You plonk in your fifty bucks and do as you please.

GET THAT: your money entitles you to break most any law you please, and if you get arrested, use your immense wealth to intimidate the police and the courts. And, in return for charges being dropped, the PERSONALLY EMBARRASSED zillionaire (‘There I was, dripping wet in a bathing suit,’ Romney told the Globe. A magistrate let him go without bail. – from the story) had the records sealed — so that none could ever talk about what had happened.

Except Mitt, when it came up.

Thus, the only version that we hear is Mitt’s self-serving version. (I guess that’s the inner madman Ann Romney in her thousand dollar tee-shirt told us about?)

But it is a disturbing character trait. When he returned from taking credit for rescuing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, in 2002, he was not eligible to run as a Massachusetts resident for Governor. RETROACTIVELY, he paid Massachusetts resident taxes for the years in question — when you have homes in several states, as Thurston Howell IV would understand, your “residency” is merely a matter of some tax laws. Hey. He’d pay the $50 fine.

And a grateful Utah refunded Mitt’s Utah taxes, his lawyers took charge, and,presto, chango! Mitt was a Massachusetts resident – despite very publicly living in Utah for two years.

Seriously.

Who you gonna believe? as Richard Pryor said, ME or your lyin’ eyes?

Then, on camera, Mitt and Paul “Eddie Munster” Ryan handed out what Wisconsin election law calls political bribes, and adjudges a low-class felony.

But I guess they threatened to sue the non-arresting officers and the court, because not a damned thing has even been heard about “Oh, I’d just go ahead and pay the fine” Mitt’s little FELONY IN PURSUIT OF THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN THE LAND.

Hey! After Watergate, what’s a few felonies among friends? You know. Give him a mulligan felony. Country Club rules. Gentleman’s agreement.

That is his APPROACH to law. That is his understanding of it. If you’re willing to pay the fine, fine. If you get in trouble, you know that in America, enough money turns the tables on the courts, when the Defendant has far more resources available than the harried local police, prosecutor’s office and court.

Just imagine those hands on the levers of power, and then think of the audacious immorality (if not to say treason) of Iran-Contra, and then get back to me on what the multiplicand would be. Tenfold? Fiftyfold?

People tell you who they are.

Even when they lie to you with a straight face, a clear eye, an untroubled brow and all the time.

Right, Thurston?

Courage.

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

The President has fairly good reason to be confident. That said, Romney has not yet truly begun the general election campaign. While he is the presumptive Republican nominee, he doesn’t have the nomination quite yet, and cannot afford to take it for granted; if he were to seriously anger any significant portion of the base prior to being given the nomination, it could be imperiled. His nomination, while statistically almost certain, is still not 100% certain (merely very very very close to 100%). If he stays disciplined, he will do nothing to seriously upset the GOP base at least until June. So expect Romney–who has run an extremely disciplined campaign from day 1–to spend most of the next month or two mending fences and shoring up his base. Expect him to fully introduce himself to the general electorate and start working on winning centrist voters around the time he picks a Vice Presidential running-mate and formally accepts the nomination at the convention. Yes, he’s focusing on Obama primarily now, but he’s also not taking a lot of risks as far as that’s concerned.

The Obama campaign plans to be tightly disciplined and smart. But the smart money says that the Romney campaign plans exactly the same. Both candidates should have quite impressive operations put together by August. My prediction would be that you should watch for Romney’s approval ratings to slowly climb as Republicans who didn’t like him start to get behind him, and even moreso as Romney begins working on convincing centrist voters that he’s a good choice for them. Barring unforeseen surprises, I think we can expect a very close election in November.

(This item cross-posted to Dean’s World.)