Puzzling Evidence

Mike Wallace wants my body.
Elvis meets Nixon.
Tri-lateral commision.
Suburban soul-sucking.

The greatest movie ever made:

The End is NIE

Iran,Neocon,Bush,Politics

Well, the new NIE is certainly a revelation.  Now the neocons have to figure out another strategy for bombing Iran.

Creationists : Dinosaurs : Flagellation

I was thinking about Saint Mary Francis of the Five Wounds earlier today. Then I read about a mummified dinosaur currently being scanned in a giant CT scanner at Boeing here in Los Angeles. Art and life have a way of juxtaposing the strangest of phenomenons.

So now I'm trying to find the connection between these two disparate things: a self-flagellating lunatic and an immaculately preserved dinosaur (or immaculate deception and immaculate preservation). The only link I could find is that humans will now have even more DNA to prove yet again how insane the idea of creationism, of gods, of demons and the whole fundamentalist religion movement is.

Fragrant Monkey Tail

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

Elaboration on a comment...

I was over at "Election Central" this morning pre-coffee time and wrote

I guess I see this in a different light. The apparent contradiction between Larry C's lifestyle, voting record and party affiliation seems merely to be a surface phenomenon. In truth, the modern republican party gains its strength from men like Craig and others who have something to hide and the party has capitalized on these "dirty" secrets to make arm twisting a much more efficient mechanism. If a party thrives more on internal authority than coalition building, then that party can take advantage of secrets, lies and dirty laundry to ensure that business gets done. Starting with the president himself and going down, the power can be AND IS exerted through the skeletons in the closet. That is not to say that there is some central file cabinet with all the dirt (though, hey, that would be interesting!); rather, diffuse knowledge and constant surveillance of everyone by each other leads to internal social promotion the discipline of the republican village. Promote larry craig, he'll do what we say because...

Of course, there are plenty of people who get off from the very repression we see in the external tropes of republican behavior and those people are naturally attracted to an authoritarian party that makes their secrets all the more titillating. There are also plenty of men who will say they are not gay but who are quite happy with occasional man-on-man action. The latter are quite simply hypocrites. But let's not confuse hypocrisy and what has become a structural device for control, punishment and promotion within the "party of values."

I would add that the evidence for this is what I would call correlative but compelling: how do you explain the significant numbers of Larry Craigs or just gays in the party that hates gays? How do you explain the attraction of Bill O'Reilly's and Scooter Libby (both of whom having written quite explicit and sexually disturbing passages in their novels)*? How do you explain the fascination with authority? How do you explain the multiple porn stars who have met the president?

There is a connection, I think, between this behavior and the workings of the party and how power gets distributed. Ah, authority, uniforms, fascism! I think they think it's cute--really cute!

Coffeeeeeeee.

*I can't seem to find Bill's book. My loofah filter must be blocking it.

Peace

Peace would be good.

 

Just a thought.

In the Entertainment Section

You have to love de.licio.us. This is a screenshot of a recent page. Check out the entertainment section.

Overheard

It is always interesting to read the comments in these stories. I sympathize with those who believe that Whites fled "danger" and disorganization cities back in the 50's, 60's and 70's. That is what we are told, but, of course, it is only a half-truth.

Let's start with that "truth." Yes, starting in the 50's, then especially for the next couple of decades, a massive de-industrialization of cities were taking place. Cities like New York, which had significant social safety nets thanks to the revenues of large industries, found themselves feeling and looking poorer and poorer as industry declined and people began moving (with the help of "suburban planning" and policy incentives) to the suburbs. So, yes, it is "true" that cities were in fairly bad shape, but this was not intrinsic to cities as a concept; this was a global economic process where jobs were shifted overseas. (This has been going on for a long time). Cities thus seemed to become the locales of joblessness rather than jobs. Meanwhile, new income, building and overall growth created an illusion that suburbs were a more viable economy, while they are actually much harder to sustain in terms of energy and social networking.

Yet while cities did suffer because of global and national economic policy shifts (think of G. Ford's comment "Ford to NY: Drop Dead"), it was rather quickly realized that suburbs were not all they were cracked up to be. The news industry, which ideologically springs from and targets both the wealthy elites (who never abandoned the city) and the various classes of suburban Whites, portrayed and continues to portray the suburbs as a sort of paradise even though just a little investigation shows this not to be true. Poll after poll shows that people who live in dense urban environments feel safer and HAPPIER than those who live in the suburbs. Anecdotally, we also know that almost all serial killers come from suburbs, not cities. Make Davis takes the example of the infamous Night Stalker in L.A. He seemed unstoppable and made his terrible reputation in rich gated communities. When he actually tried to kill someone in the poor, densely packed neighborhoods of East L.A., he was caught.

But let's also talk about rural vs. urban. The murder rate is much, much higher per capita in rural areas than it is in urban ones. It only seems the opposite because the concentration of media attention makes urban centers look less dangerous. Why is this? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is that rural life ceased being rural. Sure, it takes place out in the country and in fields, but its reason for being is no longer rural. What do I mean? I mean that rural communities exist mostly to feed urban ones. Factory farms and giant shipping infrastructures are part of the rural landscape, but they are urban inventions. This is why farmers, on the whole, are far, far more stressed than their urban counterparts. They are at the bottom of the production cycle, and believe me, everyone I know who has a chicken business, for example, says they are not working for themselves but for Goldkist. Any wonder then that rural poverty and insecurity are plaguing our country and our countrysides? Of course, you won't find that in the media. Our rural areas have been taken over by CEO's. They are beginning to fight back, but it may be too late. Regardless, let's not hide the fact that much of what is taking place in the countryside now is actually an extension of urban markets and urban market ideologies into the farm belt. Changing cities (inner and suburban) for the better can only happen in concert with agricultural reforms.

We've got to overcome racism (white-black AND sub/urban-rural) to move ahead. This is both a raising of political and geographical consciousness.

Capitalist Tool

Rich,Power,Capitalism,Solidarity,Class,War,Exploitation

"Forbes, Capitalist Tool."

Who thinks these things up? It's hard to read, but on the bottom right of the advertisement (which I found some airline's magazine), you can see "Forbes, Capitalist Tool."  I've alway thought of the Forbes family as tools too, so I'm glad they agree.

 

Anyhow, comments on the ad?  Here the neoliberal capitalists exploit the tropes of early socialism, suggesting that the capitalist class is in need of solidarity.  I assume this is so that they can pursue a war on the poor.

Ah, yes, those poor, poor rich people.  They need help! They need to come together!  Poor people ahve too many lobbyists in Washington!

Actually, exploiting the culture of victimization, it's the rich and powerful way. Between monarchy, eugenics, country clubs, private schools, slavery, tax policy and just flat out cultural capital, I'm wondering how the rich could have any more solidarity.

Mythmaking

Every time I complain about the lack of honest political discourse in the U.S., I need to remind myself that our "news" is 95% propaganda:

From Time:

The four most famous words of Ronald Reagan's Presidency almost were never uttered...

Honestly, is everyone in the the mainstream press a Republican? Do people think that the Soviet Union was not already imploding? Give me a break. I'm sick of mythmaking.

Disturbing News From Wall Street

Disturbing to me anyway. What Happens on Wall Street stays on Wall Street? (Unless you are one of the poor folks harmed by non-transparent financial systems and don't know where to trace it back to...)

From the WSJ:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ranks as the most profitable securities firm on Wall Street -- reflecting its mastery of trading on the world's public markets.

Now Goldman is turning that franchise on its head, creating its own private system to trade the stocks of companies that don't want the scrutiny and regulatory burdens of going public.

The new system, GS TRuE -- short for Goldman Sachs Tradable Unregistered Equity -- was announced two weeks ago and made its debut on Monday with an $880 million sale of a 15% stake in Oaktree Capital Management LLC, an alternative-investment manager.

Prisons or schools

With California poised to spend more on prisons than on schools for the first time in state history, I thought it a good time to debunk that old left-wing talking point about choosing between prisons or schools.

As the San Quentin website tells us, you can have prison and school. Indeed, here are just a few of the possible opportunities you will have once you enroll in its exciting combination of practical training with liberal arts (Religion, Languages) education:

• PIA: Furniture manufacturing, mattress manufacturing.

• Vocational: Dry cleaning, electrical, graphic arts and printing, landscaping, machine shop, plumbing, sheet metal.

• Academic: Adult Basic Education, High School/GED, Pre-Release, English as a Second Language, Literacy Program.

• Other: Community Service Crews, Youth Diversion, Religious, Arts in Corrections, Victim Awareness, Drug Treatment/Diversion, Joint Venture, Computers for Schools, Eyeglass recycling, Bicycle repair.

San Quentin has some 5000 "students," each on an individually costumized track, and with some 2000 staff and adminstrators, you know that you will not be neglected.

I also see that Arnold is bringing out a new license plate with the DMV: "California: The Prison and Education State."

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with this state? (Answer: Republicans, Lobbyists, Media, Democrats--in that order.)

Let it be known:

Let it be known that there is no nation so poor, so desperate, so direly in need of help that the United States cannot hinder its development.

Still more correlations...

The NBER, of whom I can be suspicious at times, has an interesting paper out:

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13097

Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime
Jessica Wolpaw Reyes NBER Working Paper No. 13097
Issued in May 2007

Abstract : Childhood lead exposure can lead to psychological deficits that are strongly associated with aggressive and criminal behavior. In the late 1970s in the United States, lead was removed from gasoline under the Clean Air Act. Using the sharp state-specific reductions in lead exposure resulting from this removal, this article finds that the reduction in childhood lead exposure in the late 1970s and early 1980s is responsible for significant declines in violent crime in the 1990s, and may cause further declines into the future. The elasticity of violent crime with respect to lead is estimated to be approximately 0.8.

If it is true, even partially, let's put one more nail in the coffin of "tough" law enforcement and high-incarceration rates of non-violent criminals as the cause for dropping crime rates. Like so many things, crime is a complex system with phyical and social environmental factors. Three-strike laws are easy sells, but they are hard to prove effective.

Lou Dobbs and Cancer

Since spurious correlations have been on my mind this week, I thought I would bring up another one.

Lou Dobbs has made himself more popular these last two or three years by consistently bashing immigrants and telling people (while quoting only part of the statistical evidence) how much they are hurting the American worker. While most people don't see the wool being pulled over their eyes as this neo-liberal journalist diverts our eyes from real global trade issues, there can be no doubt that he is putting on a populist show that in the end always promotes an increased security apparatus for poor folk and increased liberty for the flow of goods and capital.

Anyway, right now he is quoting a completely debunked study about how Mexicans are bringing leprosy to the U.S. Just add it to the list of items he uses to manipulate the public into thinking he is a man of the people.

My own spurious but funny correlation, you ask. Well, last year my mother died of a brain tumor. She was a wonderful, generous person, generous to a fault, almost, and to say that she had more than a few friends would be an understatement. The number of people that she helped in her life cannot be counted, really. What's more, she was a Democrat and proud of it. That said, as she grew sicker and the cancer spread, she also gained an intense, cult-like interest in Lou Dobbs. His word became gold. For a while, I would quote statistics and argue with her. Eventually, I realized I was being silly: she was sick. I decided to just let her be and enjoy the last part of her life as she struggled to survive.

Now I would like to go on to say that maybe brain tumors cause you to put undue belief in jingoistic, unsubstantiated and hate-mongering punditry. Statistics would not bear me out here, though, as that would mean that nearly every Republican in America has a brain tumor. What I will say, metaphorically, is that we all suffer from the cancer that is 90% of CNN and 99.9% of Fox.

Republicans and Sunspots

Unlike the author of Freakonomics, gavin, over at realclimate, really knows the value of correlations: comic fun.

Here's a sampling:

We are forever being bombarded with apparently incredible correlations of various solar indices and climate. A number of them came up in the excoriable TGGWS mockumentary last month where they were mysteriously 'improved' in a number of underhand ways. But even without those improvements (which variously involved changing the axes, drawing in non-existent data, taking out data that would contradict the point etc.), the as-published correlations were superficially quite impressive. Why then are we not impressed?

To give you an idea, I'm going to go through the motions of constructing a new theory of political change using techniques that have been pioneered by a small subset of solar-climate researchers (references will of course be given). And to make it even more relevant, I'm going to take as my starting point research that Richard Lindzen has highlighted on his office door for many years:




Go give this a read! It's worth the time just to think about the stats.

Sex scandal about to explode in Washington...

And look at this: another Al Qaeda person killed in Iraq.

Is is it me, or do these big "kills" always happen at a convenient time? It'll be interesting to see how many Dems are on the DC Madam's list, because there have to be some. Will they be blue dogs? Or will it be them thar librulz who are tearing at the country's moral fabric?

I'll dedicate this post to prostitutes: those who work in the government, and those who work under them.

If drinking, fat food and sex don't kill you...

then what does? The answer here:

Violence

Violence, in the U.S., is an institution unto itself. So I think we have to be careful not to let our grief for the victims become an inadvertent homage to the criminal act or the criminal actor. Our loathing of the perpetrator blinds us. We see madness--a complex condition with individual and social origins--and call it "evil." We see television and movies, and call them "fun." We see poverty, hunger, starvation, death, repression, and call them, alternatively, "business," "democracy" and "economics."

In a society in which the cult of the individual explains all, Americans too often come to the conclusion that the anecdote is more important than the trend. Because of the insanity of one person (to the degree to which such a thing exists), we will be told how violence is getting worse when in fact it is getting better:



New rule for journalism school: several courses in social statistics.

Meanwhile, how far has the gap between rich and poor grown? How many people have died trying to cross the border? How many Iraqi children are in their graves? How many American's are without insurance? The perpetrators of these crimes have no courts, except those for which they appoint the judges.

Quote du jour

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. Walter Benjamin. Thesis on the Philosophy of History (1940)