Yawn

I'm finally coming out of my Olympic torpor. *yawn* Back to the real world, or what passes for it in this day and age.

That Paul Ryan graduated from Miami the same year I did. Never saw him, however. He reminds me of "Lloyd Braun" from SEINFELD.

Wrong Wing

I'm tired of the endless obstructionism and shrill posturing of the Right in this country. It's ridiculous, and has kept the country from moving forward (that is, progressing) on any number of issues. It's why we're lagging on a host of things while our First World cousins in Europe and elsewhere are leaving us behind. Now, I know the exceptionalist propaganda line where we blow smoke up our own asses is well in place, the whole "envy of the world" bullshit (as much bullshit as the idea that this is somehow a classless society that is highly socially mobile), I know that's all going like gangbusters as usual.

But the thing is, when has the Right actually been RIGHT about anything? When have conservatives been on the mark? Their blend of rigid thinking, dogmatism, and closed mindedness has never, ever been a path to progress. Quite the opposite, really. And how far back should we go to demonstrate this?

The trend toward Know-Nothingism is so bad in today's GOP that people who absolutely are/were Republicans 20 years ago are afraid to call themselves Republicans today, because they're embarrassed by this trend. They tend to call themselves "Libertarians" today, which is really just a smokescreen for saying that you're a Republican who realizes that the GOP has gone off the deep end -- it's no accident that the long demise of so-called "moderate Republicans" that began in the 60s paralleled the emergence of so-called "Libertarians" -- it became a shelter for those folks who found themselves exiled from the GOP.

Anyway, the conservatives are nearly always wrong -- and I just threw the "nearly" in there to be nice (a problem we liberals tend to have). The trend toward Know-Nothingism is staggering -- their ideology has ballooned up around them and colors their view to the extent that they're willing to go after science, itself, because it's challenging their political reality? Is that how bad it's gotten? Good fucking lord. It's like having somebody's crazy uncle at the steering wheel, refusing to let anybody else drive.

The reactionary response is this: if reality doesn't fit the theory, change reality. THAT is their approach, in a nutshell. And that's how an entire ideological industry has sprung up to ensure that Right-thinking people don't go "wrong" -- which is to say, that they are protected from their lying eyes by ideological bullshit.

Pick an issue, and lay out the reactionary position on it, versus the liberal, and you'll see what I mean.

Evolution: The Right doesn't believe in it, supports creationism/intelligent design. The scientific community has found the evidence for evolution increasingly persuasive going back to the 19th Century!!

Global Warming: The Right doesn't believe in it. The scientific community overwhelmingly finds evidence supporting it.

Gays: The Right thinks it's a choice, born out of temptation by Satan, no doubt. Again, the science is increasingly showing that homosexuality is genetically derived. (Posting that one because they're afraid to do this kind of research in the US, given that Gay is to the American Reactionary what Jew is to Nazi.

Taxes: The Right still peddles supply side theory and accompanying snake oil, even though the economic evidence overwhelmingly points to the utter failure of this as an engine of robust, meaningful, long-term growth.

Vaccination: The Right increasingly fears and resents public health programs that have been demonstrated to work. Because of the nonsense about vaccination, we're seeing resurgences of whooping cough and measles. Cause and effect, you fucktards.

Universal Suffrage: Reactionaries are uncomfortable with democracy, especially when it leads to outcomes that stand in their way, so they throw in for voter suppression as a way of countering it, because they don't want everybody to get a vote, whether it's minorities or women. The Right's view on this is very clear -- whether it's voter ID laws, poll taxes, fire hoses, or throwing elections -- they are hostile to democracy. And they're wrong to be that way (and that fear goes back to the pre-Enlightenment era).

Slavery: The reactionary view of slavery was that is was a-okay, ordained by the Bible. The progressive/liberal view was that all people were created equal, and that slavery was an unconscionable evil. The Right was a-okay with slavery.

I could go on and on and on. The conservative view was that Earth was the center of the universe. THAT was the conservative view, until Copernicus and Galileo were like "Uh, wait, dudes, you know what..?" On and on. An unobstructed path of wrongness.

This is why the GOP is going after science, itself. There is, in the back of their dogmatic brains, this fear that they're wrong, and the only way they can combat this is to attack science, itself. With what, exactly? Oh, that's right: ideology, rhetoric, and religion. Those are their weapons, delivered with characteristic zeal and anger. Again, the Crazy Uncle hypothesis, drowning out everybody else in the room with his braying.

Enough is enough. Liberals screw themselves over by trying to be ecumenical, trying to be tolerant, and being uncomfortable with, well, dogmatism. But they need to be willing to call bullshit on the bullshit when they see it, and to act on it. If nothing else, to leave the Know-Nothings behind in their ideological hog wallow, and move forward (again, the p-word, progress, comes into play, here).

Countries that don't have their heads up their asses are progressing; our country is being held captive by the least-rational, least-tolerant, least-informed, least-reasonable reactionaries who pander to the very worst impulses in people for the sake of momentary political gain. Enough, already. Americans are becoming a laughingstock as we stagger down this ideological dead-end, captive to a policy elite who actually have no good answers for ANYTHING, because they're simply dead wrong -- they are informed not by evidence or science, but by ideology, which is the bathtub gin of philosophy.

Enough, already. Let's move forward, America, and stop walking backwards with our eyes closed, going "la la la la I can't hear you" with reality. Keep doing that and we're going to go right off a cliff.

Off to the Races

I saw that news blurb about how more non-white babies are being born than white babies and grimaced. The people saddled with racism are going to be having a field day with that, going apeshit as they fret about this. Between that and everything else that's dragged the GOP into looneyland, it's not going to be pretty. Forget notions of E Pluribus Unum and what-not; no, Whitey is gonna be going crazier than usual over this latest demographic trend, with doubtless more strident calls to save "the white race" from the non-white hordes. Lordy.

And with Obama as President, it's going to be even worse, in terms of the tone of the rhetoric of the Right. Not pretty. It's embarrassing to think that racism would still be part of people's mental makeup in the 21st Century. Like when you think of all the things a person has to face in this century, all the things to deal with, being a racist is even more pathetic -- in 1912 or 1812, I can see it, but in 2012? Embarrassing as hell. And this latest news is going to fan the fires of those rearguard racists. Fear is at the heart of all racism (and, really, all conservative politics -- hell, that's been borne out in research).

Speaking of fear, the city's all aflutter over the NATO Summit, which is starting today. Supposedly thousands of protesters have bused into the city over the past couple of days, and the city's on alert to make sure nothing happens. We'll see if anything does. I'm thinking it'll be a tempest in a teapot, honestly; if this were Berlin or Brussels, I could imagine a lot of fervent protest about NATO, but in Chicago? Honestly? I don't see it really happening. But we'll see, I guess. The summit's supposed to be all weekend.

Romney, etc.

I'm amused at watching Romney try to reposition himself for the general electorate. It's ironic, because, as I've written before, Romney was only a little to Obama's right, politically -- Obama the 80s Republican masquerading as a Democrat, and Romney, the "What do I have to say to win?" candidate.

Obama's the most conservative Democrat to be in the White House in a generation -- he makes Bill "Third Way" Clinton look like a liberal by comparison. So, in theory, Romney was the most likely candidate to be able to bamboozle enough voters into voting for him, for failing to be able to see the difference between the two. And, in truth, that's how it was, at least before the primaries. For all the Right's hysterical howling and strident sermonizing, Obama and Romney were very, very close politically. And, in likelihood, they still are.

But, in order to navigate the GOP primaries, Romney had to drink the Kool-Aid. He had to quaff it to be able to squeak enough votes to secure the nomination. The GOP has butchered its brand by pandering to their reactionaries (sorry, should I say theocratic fascists?) who are hell-bent on pushing their moral and social agenda on the rest of the country. This, to the detriment of the GOP -- polls are showing that 58% of Americans view the GOP unfavorably, with only 36% viewing the GOP favorably. By way of comparison, 50% of Americans view the Democrats favorably (and I hasten to add that this isn't something the Dems should be proud of -- they've been sucking royally, too; they just are more in step with what the majority of Americans want than the GOP).

So, a candidate who should have been a real contender against Obama is forced to go into the general election with Kool-Aid stains on his teeth.

The GOP brand is so soured nowadays that I know plenty of people who were diehard Republicans a decade or more ago who are now claiming to be Libertarians! (the same folks who would have scoffed at that label if it had been thrown their way back then) These are folks who were generationally Republican, proudly so. Now they are hemming and hawing and backing away from the Republican label. Why? Because the brand is toxic. And it has been made so by the reactionaries.

The GOP is captive to the headless beast it has created, and it's going over a cliff. The wages of ideology, alas! What sucks, from my perspective, is that in their efforts to appease these right-wingdings, the Democrats of today have stepped to the Right, themselves, to the extent that they resemble Reagan Republicans -- which, of course, makes them seem like raging socialists to today's Kool-Aiders in the GOP.

So, it's going to be a "choice" between Republican Lite (Obama), or Friendly Fascism (Romney). There it is. Overall, it's not going to be good for the country -- the remaining GOP dead-enders will burn the whole place down if they can, rather than compromise, and they certainly have no intention to let America be more tolerant, compassionate, diverse, intellectual, scientific, just, fair, open-minded -- no, that's not what they're about.

It would be nice for the Democrats to grow some balls and say to these nutballs that it's okay for the GOP to be bigoted, cruel, provincial, anti-intellectual, unjust, corrupt, close-minded demagogues -- but that the rest of the country (and the world) isn't going to pay for their militant ignorance -- their their whacked out views deserve no place in public policy-making. But wishing for the Democrats to have some balls is like asking for the sun to rise in the west.

End result, Romney's going to be screwed going up against Obama, the GOP is going to try even harder to find their Fuhrer for the next presidential election, Obama will continue his Republican Lite politics, and the very real needed progress in American politics won't happen. The choice is treading water (Obama) or sinking (Romney); America will vote for treading water. But it's still not progress.

Supreme Fallacies

As ever, Paul Krugman gets it right...

Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

Indeed, conservatives used to like the idea of required purchases as an alternative to taxes, which is why the idea for the mandate originally came not from liberals but from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. (By the way, another pet conservative project — private accounts to replace Social Security — relies on, yes, mandatory contributions from individuals.)
So has there been a real change in legal thinking here? Mr. Fried thinks that it’s just politics — and other discussions in the hearings strongly support that perception.

I was struck, in particular, by the argument over whether requiring that state governments participate in an expansion of Medicaid — an expansion, by the way, for which they would foot only a small fraction of the bill — constituted unacceptable “coercion.” One would have thought that this claim was self-evidently absurd. After all, states are free to opt out of Medicaid if they choose; Medicaid’s “coercive” power comes only from the fact that the federal government provides aid to states that are willing to follow the program’s guidelines. If you offer to give me a lot of money, but only if I perform certain tasks, is that servitude?

Yet several of the conservative justices seemed to defend the proposition that a federally funded expansion of a program in which states choose to participate because they receive federal aid represents an abuse of power, merely because states have become dependent on that aid. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed boggled by this claim: “We’re going to say to the federal government, the bigger the problem, the less your powers are. Because once you give that much money, you can’t structure the program the way you want.” And she was right: It’s a claim that makes no sense — not unless your goal is to kill health reform using any argument at hand.

Reactionary Ideology Trumps Science

This is an appalling study. Basically, it shows that among "conservatives" (I'd call them "reactionaries" in truth), there's been a 28-point drop in their trust in science since the mid-1970s. While liberals and moderates have maintained their same level of trust in science, conservatives went from 63% in around 1974, to around 35% today.

What that says to me is that ideology has eclipsed science within the ranks of conservatives. This is a disastrous turn for them, and reflects the triumph of Know-Nothingism among their ranks. Such a steep decline can't be attributed to the general dumbfuckery of their ranks, either; this is occurring at the elite end of the conservative spectrum, and that means the culprit must be ideology.

The secular religion of ideology has supplanted science among the ranks of conservatives. I've grimly joked that the Right is the American equivalent of the Taliban, but this is puts data behind that idea. It's like Galileo being forced to recant his ideas before the Pope, because they didn't mesh with Church doctrine. And this is where the GOP is? Lordy, it's embarrassing.

And what's more, these ideologues are actually framing public policy -- not based on actual science, but on fucking ideology? So, the rest of the country (and, by extension, the world) is forced to suffer the consequences of their hidebound ideology?

Science and empiricism are about as close to sacred as I get, honestly -- I respect them because they are data-driven, methodological, and they work. Ideology is creepy, it's the snake eating its own tail, and has, at its heart, only "Because I said so" as its justification. Pathetic. Horrific.

For a group to be so blinded by ideology that they turn their backs on something with such a proven track record of success as science? Holy shit. I'd be hugely embarrassed if I were a thinking conservative, honestly. This "brain drain" within their ranks is dreadful, and accounts for the absence of actual ideas from the supposed "Party of Ideas." Another few years of this ideological winnowing of reason and the idea of a "conservative intellectual" will be oxymoronic!

If reality doesn't fit their theories, they throw out reality. *golf applause* What this brain drain points to is that objective science wasn't buttressing their ideological views, so they have stopped trusting it, rather than changing or adapting their views to reflect extant reality. Insanity. Idiocy.

And for what? An ideology. The Way Thinks SHOULD Be(tm) is not the same as The Way Things Actually Are, conservatives! Reality is going to bite you on the ass, whether you acknowledge it or not. That's what's cool about science, why it will always (eventually) beat out ideology.  "Why? Because I said so, that's why." Sorry, but that doesn't pass the intellectual sniff test. You want to embarrass yourselves that way, that's fine; just don't inflict that kind of militant ignorance on the rest of society, please. And what's worse, don't expect the rest of us, those who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, to go along with your bullshit.

Supremely Irritating

If the Supreme Court were capable of irony, they'd realize it's ironic in the extreme that these individuals, who themselves benefit from single-payer healthcare (like their peers in Congress), are all set to strike down Obama's tepid quasi-reform. Safely and effectively insured in the manner that the rest of the First World is insured, they can pontificate about healthcare knowing that their own coverage is assured. Marvelous, yes?

I'd love for somebody to actually call them out on this -- again, not that Obamacare is single payer; it's not, unfortunately -- but I guarantee the reactionary justices are all hostile to the idea of single-payer, even as they use it for their own health needs. Ever wonder why the justices tend to live a LONG TIME? Single-payer healthcare -- if their health was entrusted to the free market, they'd not live nearly so long. I mean, they're well-compensated for the work they do, so they could afford to pay for their own healthcare if they had to, but thanks to single-payer, they don't have to, and they enjoy robust health, without having to fear the price tag for it -- just like every citizen in the First World outside of America.

I also wish activists and protesters would call bullshit on Congress for that; the same guys who strenuously oppose healthcare reform as the very ones who enjoy exactly the same kind of healthcare they would deny the rest of the country. At least I'd like to see them refuse that socialistic single payer every Congressman enjoys and pay out of pocket for their healthcare -- or, at the very least, for these supposed representatives to have the same healthcare of their constituents, just to highlight the disparities and inequities of for-profit healthcare.

This issue's not going away; as the Baby Boomers slide ever closer to their mass grave on a banana peel, healthcare is going to loom ever larger. It remains one of the most common causes of personal bankruptcy. The civilized nations have all recognized this and gone the single-payer route, recognizing that safeguarding their people's health is a national security issue. Our country remains the stubborn outlier. Here, you get the care you can afford, and if you can't afford it, tough for you.

The insurance lobby is going to have to go down, one way or another, for reform to actually come about. It needs to be done. So, once Obama's weak-tea, pro-insurance industry, Romneycare-derived plan gets lit up by the Supremes, the problem will continue to loom, and, indeed, to grow ever larger.

(Health)Careless

Looks like the Supremes are gong to scuttle Obamacare, which should be a surprise to exactly no one. The problem I always had with Obamacare is that it was a false solution to an actual problem. The US is the lone outlier in the First World in that it doesn't have national healthcare. Indeed, many Second World and even some Third World nations are going to national healthcare, too. It gets at a fundamental aspect of healthcare: that good health, in a civilized society, is neither a commodity nor a privilege, but is a human right.

Obamacare, for all of the howling of the reactionaries, was a reform that was so business-friendly that Eisenhower's administration could have put it forward. It wasn't socialism, but was, instead, a sloppy kiss to the private insurance industry. And therein was the problem -- the individual mandate, which forces people to buy private health insurance, is, fundamentally, unconstitutional.

By trying to cater to the private insurance industry, Obama sowed the seeds of the ruin of Romneycare...err...Obamacare. Since he was going to encounter rabid, shrill hostility from the Right regardless of what he did, Obama should have been bold and gone for Medicare for All -- single-payer for all Americans. Medicare remains a popular program (even among the rank-and-file of the Right, who seem not to understand that Medicare is from the government when they protest "Keep the government out of my Medicare"). The Right's leadership wants to do away with Medicare, but their rank-and-file enjoy its benefits.

So, strategically, Obama should have made that his program, so the Right's leadership would have to be at odds with their own supporters' preferences as they tried to stop it. And it would have granted healthcare access to all Americans, would've reduced costs, ensured Medicare's solvency, and would have brought tangible benefit to millions. It would've been a bold move, a courageous one, and a just one. He needed to be bold, not timid, because the opposition was going to go after him regardless of what he'd offered.

Instead, Obama dusted off Romney's plan, put his name on it, and foisted that on Americans, hoping it wouldn't step on any of the power players' toes. The result is what we have right now, and it's looking like Obamacare is dead on arrival at the Roberts Supreme Court.

*golf applause*

G-Ain't

So, looks like no G8 for Chicago, after all. No doubt Obama, Inc. are sweating having riots in the home city in an election year; they're opting for Camp David for a more secure place to conduct business. The NATO summit will still be here, so there'll still be enough craziness to go around, for sure.

Speaking of that, it's Stupor Tuesday. No doubt the GOP will continue cutting its own throat. There's not enough voter fraud and voter suppression in the country to enable them to win this year. They'd have to create massive ballot bonfires to be able to prevail with whatever candidate they belch up at this point.

Romney's the only actual threat to Obama in the general election, but only because Obama's the most Republican of Democrats to ever be President; he makes Bill Clinton look like a radical by comparison. But the Republican voters want some serious fascist Kool-Aid this year, and won't stomach Romney, it would appear. Gonna cut their noses off to spite their faces. It's going to be a GOP flameout of epic proportions. Maybe they're banking on a putsch or something, but, in terms of elections? No way. Obama's going to mop the floor with whichever sorry soul the GOP trots out. Except, of course, for this last dirty trick up their sleeves. But doing that would create a situation where there would be a president-elect robbed of even the semblance of legitimacy; it would make the Bush/Cheney electoral theft of 2000 seem almost quaint by comparison.

That's not to say Obama's particularly good; he's been a big disappointment precisely because he's governed so far to the right. In the overcooked atmosphere of today's politics, if he were actually governing as a moderate, the GOP would declare him a socialist -- oh, wait, they already have. Actual Republicans from the 90s back to the 50s would look at Obama and recognize him as one of their own. Only cross-eyed Republicans from 2000 onward fail to see that. The beast is eating its own tail, and it's not pretty (although, as somebody from the left, I welcome that partisan ugliness endemic to the GOP; let'em eat their own tails). It's just unfortunate how much it's cost this country for the last 30+ years.

Anyway, onward into the abyss.

Off the Deep End

Seems like a Leap Year is the perfect time to consider the ongoing drive toward war with Iran. The latest bout of saber-rattling on our part, relative to Iran, is reflective of a long-simmering neoconservative wet dream about going to war with Iran. It's something they've wanted to do since the Bush/Cheney co-presidency -- hell, I saw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as Rounds One and Two for the war with Iran, as a rather pernicious Round Three.

Anyway, when the Republicans lost the White House, the drumbeat for war with Iran was somewhat muted, although the war drums did pick up volume at two discrete intervals in the Obama years, among DC policy elites. And now that's kicking up again, with more force than I've seen before, so I'm more than a little worried that our country is seriously contemplating a war with Iran.

This would be a disaster for our country, and an apocalypse for Iran. I really, really hope we don't do this. I remember reading up about Iran and seeing that its rank-and-file populace had several key qualities:

1. They liked American culture -- yes, they disliked our government's hostility to their own country, but the people of Iran had a surprisingly positive view of America. Sadly, their rank-and-file were far more positive about Americans than the rank-and-file American is about Iranians.
2. They were more than a little disenchanted with the reactionary theocracy that has ruled Iran since the 70s. The Iranian Revolution has failed to help everyday Iranians live better, and they know this. Much of that revolution's energy came from Iranian resistance to the dictatorship of the Shah (who was our man in Iran for generations)

Now, left to its own devices, I believe that Iran's theocracy will eventually be toppled by a "Persian Spring" much in the way that the Arab Springs have been scuttling dictatorships throughout the Middle East (again, dictatorships America has supported for decades).

The ONE THING that could give a shot in the arm to the theocrats in Iran would be -- you got it -- American invasion of Iran. It would be exactly what those dunderheads would need to unit their guardedly pro-American populace against an invading foreign nation.

It's very frustrating, because if our country pursued peaceful diplomacy with Iran, engagement instead of aggression, it would put the theocrats at odds with their own populace, and would erode what little legitimacy those creeps have on the reins of power.

But our foreign policy is so tone-deaf to this kind of stuff, that I'm worried that we're going to rush headlong into war with Iran and have a fight on our hands that is far worse than the Pyrrhic victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's just so damned needless, even by our own standards of pointless warmongering.

A war in Iran, should it actually occur, will be a disaster, and will set back healing the wounds between the US and Iran for a generation or more.

Obama has, unfortunately, governed much like the "third term" of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency, continuing so much of their policies that it's caused this country incredible harm. It would be a terrible shame if he continued along that path and went to war with Iran.

So, I'm hoping we're not stupid in this, but hoping against American stupidity is like hoping that the sun isn't going to rise. And, yes, cynics will point out that Iran has tons of oil (and, gee, that wouldn't possibly motivate us to go to war, now would it?) but the vastly larger population in Iran, the terrain, and everything about it would make Iraq seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

And it would absolutely give those tottering theocrats -- who are in serious danger of being consumed and overturned by their own people in a few years -- a stranglehold on power as they sought to unite their country against "The Great Satan."

The above opinion is, of course, completely outside of the mainstream. The "Beltway Consensus" about Iran is something like this: "We should invade them NOW." (hawk position) or "We should invade them LATER." (dove position) -- and it's sad but true, reflecting just how little range of opinion is allowed in this issue of vital national importance.

Our country does not need another pointless foreign war. We really, really need investment at home, not squandering money abroad.

Unconstitutional

Interesting piece in the NYT, about how the Constitution is in freefall as a model for governments around the world. While the NYT tries to blow a little smoke up America's ass near the end, it's clear that this is just another example of how our country is falling behind. It talks about us being a "legal backwater" in the eyes of the world's jurisprudence, and how other countries, such as Canada and New Zealand are increasingly serving as better models of governance. I get it, sadly, although the majority of Americans won't/don't, which doesn't bode well for our future. We are a declining superpower, whether we acknowledge it or not, and as much as we gulp down propaganda of assimilation that tells us we're the envy of the world, it prevents us from honest introspection as to where we are as a country, where we are going, and where we want to be. As much as I'd hate to quote the Bible, Proverbs 16:18: "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall." -- just don't tell that to the fundamentalist Christians, naturally, with their heretical views of Christianity that seem to hold pride as the most sacred of virtues, and that haughty spirit might as well be the Holy Spirit to them. Speaking of that, this is a good piece, too.

But point is that our country is politically and ideologically unable to navigate this century; we've been on cruise control, not even realizing we've gone off the road decades ago.

Quickly

Can't believe January's nearly over. I wonder how it feels to old people, if time shoots by even quicker for them. When you're a kid, an hour can seem like an eternity, and a month might as well be a year. But nowadays, a month blows by so quickly, seemingly.

The boys are peacefully sleeping right now, very sweetly. I love that B1 sleep-laughs. That really cutes me out. He never remembers what made him laugh, but they're hearty laughs, whatever it is. B2 doesn't sleep laugh, but rolls around a lot.

I'm looking forward to "The Grey" coming out. Hopefully it's at least an entertaining movie. The trailer for it looked promising enough, but we'll see. I'm a little worried, since they sometimes bury crap movies in January, but because it's so snow- and cold-themed, maybe they ran with that. Not sure. But I'll find out, anyway. I'm guardedly hopeful, I guess.

Saw that we were having some solar flares recently. I wish the US would be smart about protecting its infrastructure, but it seems like forward-thinking things like that are not our country's strong suit, anymore. Maybe that'll change. Maybe having massive power outages in the wake of a major solar storm sometime will change people's perspectives. I dunno.

Was marveling that we have 50 million uninsured in this country. There was just an article in the NYT the other day, comparing the US system to the rest of the First World (and, yes, all of those countries have national healthcare), and how much more expensive our system of care is, relative to theirs. We have good outcomes in particular areas, but the cost differences are extraordinary. For the supposedly more efficient private system (with 25% of the overhead tied to the administrative paper-shuffling of the insurance industry *koff koff*), our system is terribly expensive. A huge percentage of personal bankruptcies in this country are tied to healthcare. It's like a slow-motion trainwreck -- more and more employers opting out of coverage of their employees, more and more people unable to get the care they need, more and more uninsured. It's a disaster. And, unfortunately, a preventable one. We'll just shamelessly lurch along with our 50 million uninsured, with politicians (themselves covered by national healthcare, mind you) busy trying to scuttle Medicare and Medicaid and push everybody into the private insurance industry, whether they can afford to pay or not. Disaster.

Although I will qualify it by saying that around 43% of those without insurance are non-citizens. But that still means we have 25 million Americans who don't have health insurance, millions of whom are children and the elderly. That's just a mess. And as more companies opt out of coverage, that number is going to continue to climb.

This is kind of a fun applet, tracking your food spending. According to what I input on this, I spend far more on groceries than most Americans, but I eat out far less than most Americans, too. Maybe it's because I enjoy cooking, I'm not sure. Still, it's fun to see that data compared.

Bandolier?

So, since I'm busy quibbling about continuity in movies, something came to me while watching "The Empire Strikes Back" after seeing it for the umpteenth time -- in the torture scene(s), when Chewbacca is in the cell, being subject to sonic torture, did you notice that he's wearing his ammo bandolier?

Now, these are, we are to believe, power packs for his famed "laser crossbow," whatever that is, exactly. Some kind of glorified blaster. At any rate, it's an effective weapon he'd put to good use a time or two.

But the Imperials just chucked Chewie into the torture room with his bandolier. Huh. Given the Wookie's propensity for tech prowess, I have to wonder what they were thinking with that. Now, maybe it was a part of the costume and Lucas didn't want to have to redesign it or whatever. But, strictly speaking, from a continuity perspective, the presence of that bandolier is troubling -- there are likely any number of things a knowledgeable soul could do with blaster ammo clips/power packs, yes? We see him put C-3P0 together without much more than a hydrospanner, so surely he could do a lot of damage with a bandolier full of power packs.

Continuity. Are we to believe the Imperials are so contemptuous of the Wookie that they'd let him go into a jail cell packing his ammo like that? Especially when they are careful to cuff Chewie later, showing that they are clearly aware of the Wookie danger.

Just something I noticed. Maybe not as egregious as Leia rolling over for Jabba, but still a troubling bit of discontinuity in the movie. Lucas obviously didn't think of anything like that for Chewie, since he was only a secondary character, and wasn't going to have the enterprising Wookie bust himself out of dodge with some adroit use of the ammo clips he was packing; still, it would have been nice for Lucas to have given Chewie the benefit of a doubt and showed him without his bandolier, just to reflect the thoroughness of the Empire's detention policies.

Side note: It's kind of ironic, isn't it, those torture scenes? I mean, when that movie came out, what was it, in 1980? Torture was seen as synonymous with Imperial evil (which, of course, it is, yes?) But now, watching even those sanitized, PG-rated torture scenes, it's sort of creepy to think that torture is now officially part of American policy (as is indefinite detention and rendition of prisoners, including Americans). What used to be a cartoonish stand-in for the villainy of the Empire (Leia getting interrogated in "Star Wars" by the creepy Imperial Torture Droid; Han, Chewie and Leia getting tortured on Bespin) is now our government's policy. How times have changed! The outrages of 1980 are the official policies of 2011.

*cue "The Imperial March" as new national anthem*

Huh

While watching "Captain America: The First Avenger" on DVD, I was bemused to see during the credits, when they did their medley of WWII-era propaganda posters, that they had doctored a rather famous one...

They'd replaced the USSR flag with the Russian Federation flag, which I thought was a rather curious historical revision. I mean, obviously, the movie's ersatz 40s vibe is fictional, and, I imagine, most Americans don't dwell much on paltry issues like history, but the Russian Federation didn't fight the Nazis in WWII, and didn't exist in the 40s; but the USSR did both. The Russians lost something like >20 million of their people in WWII (and, I'm sure, much of the blame can be leveled at the feet of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, who were woefully unprepared for what the Germans hurled at them -- at least at first). But if it hadn't been for the Nazis invading Russia, and for the quagmire of the Eastern Front sapping the German war machine of lives and men -- in other words, if not for the sacrifice of those 20 million Russians--the Nazis might have won WWII.

So, to have the USSR's role in WWII excised like that, even in a fleeting credit, is a weird kind of thing. The Soviet Union was not a nice place, and did plenty of bad things--but they did fight in WWII, and they were instrumental in the defeat of the Axis. Omitting them is a curiously graceless thing on the part of the moviemakers. And why did they do this, exactly? Who were they worried about offending by showing the poster as it actually was, versus the doctored one? And as they were making the rounds of propaganda posters, were they realizing that doctoring a propaganda poster was, itself, a bow to propaganda? Or did the Hollywood blacklist so thoroughly sterilize and scour the movie industry that it couldn't even allow a teensy little hammer and sickle appear onscreen for two seconds?

I just find it curious, one of those glimpses behind the mask our society wears. A small thing, yes, but a revealing one, all the same. And, yes, the movie's a fictional tale about a superhero fighting a make-believe Nazi menace--but just the same, if they are wanting to trot out the propaganda posters of the era as a kind of tip of the hat to the era, don't doctor them for whatever weird ideological needs of the moment. As I said: over 20 million Russians died fighting in that war; give them their due, don't be so chickenshit (and, weirdly, Stalinist) to rewrite history...

You can see the doctored shot at 1:40.

Train in Vain

I'm not really surprised by this...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technocracy/2011/12/high_speed_rail_is_dead_in_america_should_we_mourn_it_.html

To be honest, I never thought high-speed rail ever had a chance in this country. It's far too much of a First World kind of conveyance for our country to seriously consider it, particularly as we slide into post-imperial Second World status (and, sorry, but that's where we're heading, folks).

The kind of capital expenditure and infrastructure awareness high-speed rail requires doesn't fly in the land of car culture -- Americans like cars, like sprawl, like highways (hell, I like cars, too, although I recognize that a proper rail network would strengthen our country, not weaken it).

Only when gasoline is about $10/gallon will Americans begin (and I stress "begin") to wonder if alternatives are desirable. And even then, the politicians are likelier to offer non-solutions like hydrogen fuel cells or some other meta-contrivance to something like a rail service, let alone a high-speed rail service.

This article is also illustrative:

Why Conservatives Hate Trains

So long as our government panders to reactionary crybabies, nutballs, flat-earthers and whiners (mislabeled "conservatives" in our Gliberal Media), we'll continue to fail to see progress in things like rail. Frankly, it should be confined to blue states, rather than trotted out across the entire country. Let those who get it, get it (although maybe, even in blue states, people don't get it). I dunno.

Pepper Pike

I admit I am amused about the whole "Cop Casually Pepper Spraying Everything" meme that cropped up in reaction to the UC Davis debacle. There's your 15 minutes of fame (or infamy), Slick. Some people are known for inventing things, or creating works of art, or writing, or any number of other things; you're known for casually pepperspraying protesters in the face (I wonder if he went to Pepperdine?)....

Umbrella Man

Having forgotten my umbrella today, and, correspondingly, getting spritzed with rain (thankfully wearing my squall jacket, so only my slacks and shoes got reasonably wet), I saw this short film in the NYT, on this 48th anniversary of the JFK assassination...

The Umbrella Man

Which is pretty good, worth a watch!

Randroids. *scoff*

Reading an article about something else, I saw this good piece on Ayn Rand from a few years ago...

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/11/how_ayn_rand_became_an_american_icon.single.html

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave.

She was nuts, too, apparently...

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living(1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."

And a manifest authoritarian, too, a cult leader...

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."

Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.

A fitting end...

She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?

I would say that "Atlas Shrugged" is the "Mein Kampf" of American fascism, truly.

Weekender

I've had the boys since Wednesday, and they are doing fine, having fun, of course. They haven't once asked "Where's Mommy?" I'm sure they'll be glad to see her when she finally returns (maybe tonight; I asked her, but she wasn't clear on it). But, as ever, I'm keeping everything rolling.

Did I mention that stores over here are starting to sell Graeter's Ice Cream? Wow! I stumbled onto that the other day, couldn't believe it. Of course, it's expensive: $5.49 a pint at Treasure Island (I have to see if they have it at Dominick's). But their Coconut Chocolate Chip and other flavors are fab.

Seeing Graeter's (and things like Great Lakes Brewing Company beers, among others) reinforces just how many Ohioans have fled Ohio for greener pastures. Under the withered hand of a Republican-dominated state government for the last 15+ years, pursuing Republican economic policies, the state has hemorrhaged jobs and population. I'm hoping that enough people are sick of that bullshit to try to turn things around for Ohio, but we'll see. As someone who grew up in Youngstown, I think Youngstowners saw that kind of stuff early -- that is, it appears that the rest of the state is catching up with where Youngstown was decades ago. And, by extension, what Ohio has been experiencing for decades is what the reset of the country has begun to experience from about the point of the housing market crash, onward.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-03-09-ohio-census_N.htm

Anyway, the result of this ongoing economic death spiral is that there is an Ohioan "expatriate/refugee" community in Chicago, to the extent that bars give themselves over to Buckeyes fans during the season, and you see a lot of Buckeyes jerseys and Browns jerseys peppered around. Of course, plenty of Miami of Ohio bumper stickers and so forth. There is a bar, too, I think it's called "Reds" or something, that is tailor-made for Reds fans (big shock, right) with Cincy fare at it. Ohio's loss has been Chicago's gain, to be sure (although it looks like Columbus has also benefited from the losses of the other cities in Ohio). It's just weird for me, since I was an early emigrant (1993), when almost nobody from Ohio was in Chicago. Now, they are all over the place.

Hey, you Fawkes!

Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Not like it means much in the States, although Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous have certainly made the Guy Fawkes mask and, of course, V for Vendetta, more common sites. I remember reading "V" in the long-ago time -- like a year or two after it came out, since I liked Moore's "Watchmen." Anyway, I bet Moore is pleased to see the proliferation of V/Fawkes masks on the whole protest movement front.