http://rawstory.com/2009/10/gops-facebo
To summarize: somebody posted on the Republican National Committee's facebook page an incredibly racist picture of Obama eating fried chicken with the caption that interracial marriage was a crime and that the court case that overthrew laws banning it should be overturned.
It also appears that this picture was up on the RNC page for 5 days before the outrage raised about it generated a lot of bad press, after which it was taken down.
Now, the process of this fascinates me in how it played out, but some of my own thoughts about this.
1. Personally, I don't care if people post such racist things up. I believe in free speech and think that people can put up as much offensive stuff as they want.
2. I have heard, although not confirmed, that such racism is against facebook rules, and therefore they may be able to force people to take it down. That's also fine with me--it's their website, they make the rules.
3. I do find the picture vile, but more importantly, I find it stupid. If the person posting it was serious, they really are displaying a level of ignorance that does nothing to impinge on the stature of Obama, but much more says how small they are.
4. It is not a sure thing in my mind that this was done by someone who was really a racist. It could, theoretically, have been done by someone who was a liberal trying to make the Republicans look bad. I acknowledge this fact and keep it in mind, but this caveat is really strongly overwhelmed by the next point....
5. The 5 day period that it remained on the RNC website is really amazing. The conclusions that I come up with are:
a) The people running the site didn't know it was up there and really aren't paying much attention to what's going on in the site. This is an amazing level of incompetence and looks really bad for the Republicans.
b) The people running the site did know it was up there and really didn't think it mattered that much. This is a sign of some serious levels of ignorance and is a demonstration of how out-of-touch many such high-level Republican operatives are to the average American. This also looks really bad for the Republicans.
c) The people running the site did know it was up there and thought it was cool. This reveals a truly audacious level of racism on their part that is not going to help them at all in the long run, but will only doom them all the more quickly.
Needless to say, this incident really makes it look like looks like the Republicans are either totally incompetent or totally racist. The fact that it took a storm of interweb criticism and major press release to lead to the removal of the pic (a point I don't really care about--they could have left it up forever so far as I cared--it only confirms many of my opinions of where the majority of Republican leadership is at right now...) really looks bad..
Please feel encouraged to discuss...
It has been a long week.
But before I do that--I must work extra special hard to catch up on teaching, since my 62 students turned in 62 first essays on Thursday (via email), and I need to finish organizing their semester.
Thus, at the moment, I only have this truly bizarre link about how the conservatives who started Conservapedia have decided that they now need to provide a conservative interpretation of the Bible in order to remove all the liberal bias that is in there.
This effort, I must add, is not just about retaining the original male-oriented gender designations--that I can actually see and support--but also includes removing actual text and passages that don't conform to conservative viewpoints.
Oh, and pointing out how Jesus supported Free Markets.
I am not making this up.
Okay.. now I must do push ups. Good Morning!
It appears that the recent bill to defund ACORN--i.e. keep it from getting gov't money--because of the corruption of some of its members has been written so broadly that it could be used by any prosecutor to defund ALMOST ALL MAJOR DEFENSE CONTRACTORS if ANYONE in their organization was found to have committed some instance of fraud.
Acorn deserved all that's coming to it, so far as I can tell, but in the rush to punish it, it seems like we may actually be able to fuck up the evil military-industrial complex that has been up to no good for like, maybe, the last 60 years.
This is so fucking hilariously beautiful, I cannot stop laughing!
hahahahahahahahahahahahaha...
Watch it.
Always reminds me of that American Beauty quote: "Never underestimate the power of Denial."
For those who want more info:
Intermediate Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlin
But I'm doubting that it would be hard to find the evidence in the US senate committee report listed below...
Text: THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defense Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs.'
This assistance, according to the report, included 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment'.
Donald Riegle, then chairman of the committee, said: 'UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs.'
Riegle added that, between January 1985 and August 1990, the 'executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record'.
Also.. something I got from here:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/t
It's something I've argued before with people after I did some number crunching--and that is that Republican Administrations have rarely shown themselves to be fiscal conservatives, whereas the "spendy" Democrats have.. (at least in a relative sense)...
Data:
The last Republican who left the office of the presidency with the federal public debt as a percentage of GDP less than when he entered was Richard Nixon (FY 1975). The last Republican who left the office of the presidency with a federal deficit less than 2.7% of GDP was Dwight Eisenhower (FY 1961). Since WW II no Democratic president has ever left office with the federal public debt as a percentage of GDP more than when he entered. And since WW II no Democratic president has ever left office with a federal deficit more than 2.6% of GDP.
Food for thought..
Yesterday I stopped in to chat with Sandy C. I was actually going to get some late afternoon chocolate to help me along in working on my Syllabus, and I stopped by to say hi to Sandy, with whom I've worked before. She asked me about my summer and what I was doing and I told her about it and mentioned that I was teaching EPD 155 again like last year. I also mentioned that I was an instructor for InterEGR 101--and described the duties there. In passing, I mentioned that these added up to a 60% appointment and that I was probably going to end up working for Union Cab to make some extra money this semester.
Well.. that one sentence made all the difference. That one visit made all the difference... because in the middle of the night Sandy woke up and realized that this problem that she'd been worrying over--namely that of trying to find the time to handle teaching 2 classes and manage 2 NSF projects in their final stage and being on a search committee--could be solved. She figured out that she had enough funds from one of these NSF projects to "buy out" one of her classes--and that basically opened it up for me to teach it. She texted me this morning--I saw it--said "HELL FUCKING YES" (or something less crass but to the same effect)--and it made its way through the bureacracy this morning completely.
So today, instead of teaching 2 courses and having to worry about finding work soon, I taught three courses and will have enough money for all my bills and then some.
Not TONS of money, mind you, but enough with my 85% positions.
This is only for this semester, of course, but I am going to work on finding the 50% more I need for next semester in like 10 minutes.
Luck--I has it--but more than that.. I had the luck to seize an opportunity and run with it.
It's been a good day.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/t
Reading this on a computer screen? Thank Alan Turing. Not reading it in German? Thank Alan Turing again. Turing's theoretical work in the 30s laid the foundations for computer science; his more hands-on efforts as a codebreaker at Britain's Bletchley Park helped ensure that the Allies could read enciphered Nazi messages. Turing's reward for these services to his country—and species—was to be prosecuted for "gross indecency" after naively disclosing his homosexuality to police. He was subjected to chemical castration, had his security clearance revoked, and within two years took his own life by swallowing cyanide.
Now, more than half a century later, a British computer scientist has launched a campaign to secure a formal apology and posthumous pardon for Turing. It would be a small and purely symbolic gesture, but it seems like an appropriate one. Readers who hail from that side of the pond can join more than 24,000 signatories on a petition to the Prime Minister.
------------
Things like this, and many others (like, say the Black Death), always make me appreciate how awesome it is that I'm alive now, and not in the past.
http://www.infidels.org/misc/humor.arch
it's a satiryical page dedicated to those who make arguments about how "anti-christian" the United States is...
very funny...
So we went on a bikeride earlier in the evening.. then I made up some food (homemade guacamole & a salad), and then we settled down around 10pm to watch the "True Blood" series that we had gotten on Netflix--the first three discs.
We then proceeded to watch all of the first 7 episodes of the first season... finally going to bed around 5 am.
Weird thing is--neither of us actually thought it was super good. In fact, we both thought it was incredibly cheesy, with so-so acting, some stilted dialogue, and just generally that it was nothing comparable to our other favored series--such as 6 Feet Under, BSG, or Dexter.
Quite literally--it was a vampire soap opera.
Of course, perhaps that is what got us.. the whole soap opera aspects.. still.. it was quite odd.. I don't know if I'd recommend the series to anyone.. but I still would like to see the next episodes... Perhaps that will change if it remains at this level of cheese.. time will tell I guess..
The post was created as a response to Megan McArdle's blog post against National Health Care. McArdle is a "libertarian"--and I use those quotes purposely because relatively few libertarians advocated going out and hitting anti-war protesters with 2x4's during the Early Bush Years like she did--and main business editor at The Atlantic and one of their main bloggers.
Overall, I think McArdle argues far too much in a kind of "libertarian-deductive" fashion--where she has notions in her head of how things are (or supposed to be) and then makes unfounded assertions and deductions based on these views. (Obviously, not all libertarians--in fact a majority I'd wager--are not like this.. but are more inductive and tied to facts..)
In any case--here's the post.
http://newledger.com/2009/07/how-medica
ps-
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voland, I'd be quite interested in your views here..Overall, it took me about 1/3 longer on this trip as I read over labels to check for ingredients and see just what exactly we were eating. In a few cases, I was utterly astounded and made changes to what I bought--for the most part the changes did not usually cost that much more in the grand scheme of things. Instead of Dean Sour Cream (Ingredients: Cultured Skim milk, cream, contains 2% or less of each of the following ingredients: whey protein concentrate, food starch-modified, sodium phosphate, maltodextrin, sodium citrate, potassium sorbate (preservative), gellan gum, carrageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum, calcium chloride), I bought Daisy sour cream( Ingredients: Grade A cultured cream.). The price differences was like $2.39 to $2.59--so about %10 to get something that was actual food as opposed to a synthetically constructed imitation.
In the end, I think I was mostly successful. I only had to switch about 5 products and as i tallied up my results today, it was heartening to know that I normally spent most of our grocery money on what I would consider food. The most shocking and annoying thing was trying to find real bread--even almost all of the "natural oven" breads go through a process of taking bleached flour, enriching it, and adding preservatives--so they can get bread to last for weeks in the store.
Newsflash--bread should be eaten within a week, tops. Germany is really on the right path when they require that bread that is a day old be sold at half price (they have special bakeries for it--because it cannot be sold in regular bakeries where Germans get 99% of their bread).
Anyway.. I broke down my shopping list into categories of "food", "mostly food" (a preservative in canned goods, but otherwise no strange ingredients), "quasi-food" (has more than 5 ingredients, and although most ingredients seem to be food rather than chemicals, the mix is suspect), and "imitation food" (Contains High Fructose corn syrup, tons of artificial chemicals, etc.)
This is what my list ended up being out of around $190.
Food: ~$130: blue and white tortilla chips, pickles, canned spinach, rice noodles, tahini, dry beans, peanuts, organic peanut butter, almonds, raisins, macaroni noodles, apple juice, cooked shrimp, cucumbers, tofu, bananas, nectarines, craisins, apples, carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, hot peppers, avocados, zucchini, portabello and regular mushrooms, onions, cilantro, plain whole milk yoghurt, sour cream, butter, feta, string cheese, mozerella, pepper jack cheese, whole milk, frozen vegetables, limade, organic wheat bread, french bread.
Mostly Food: ~$36: chick peas, diced tomatoes, pace picante sauce, canned artichokes, prego spaghetti sauce, chicken boullion, hard salami, bacon, low-fat peach, raspberry, and strawberry yoghurt, silk soy milk, skim milk, low-fat milk
Quasi Food: ~$21: corn flakes, semi-sweet chocolate chips, dirty rice mixes, Bolthouse Farms Mocha, Vanilla, and Chocolate shakes, brownberry 12 grain bread, generic wheat bread.
Imitation Food: ~$3: Knorr Cheese sauce, Turkey Franks.
I didn't actually buy much out of the ordinary. I did skip a couple of possible items--such as frozen pizza and tater tots--but more because I was out of space in my cart than anything else.
Now.. I do realize that there are levels higher than "food" that you get at a shopping market. Getting food from a farmers market or growing your own would fall into a category of "Real Food" for me.. but that's going to be a longer term process. As it stands right now, my biggest goals are to get into the habit of making bread again and learning new recipes to make things like cheese sauces for pasta so that I don't buy mixes. Additionally, we are going to transition back to whole milk in this household--after I learned that skim milk is generally created by adding back dried milk solids to try and get the consistency right.
Anyway.. just thought people might be interested. Comments and suggestions welcome!
It is what all freshmen are being given to read--a common reading for all of them.
In my honest opinion--It is totally awesome.
I got it today and am done with it.
He states his main point on the first page. People should, in his view:
Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.
The explanation of these points takes up the next 200 pages--and in the course of reading it, I found it to be one of the best syntheses--and most stinging indictments--of the current industrial agricultural system found in the United States.
His biggest critiques are for the vast amounts of damage that the nefarious relationship between Big Agriculture and the Federal Government have wreaked upon our health--but he is also not above pointing out--if more implicitly than explicitly--that we have been semi-willing participants in a process that is leading to our own destruction and that of the environment around us.
( On page 160, he has an awesome section on the problems of having such a long industrial food chain.. )
avdi...(who regularly gets my mind thinking about this stuff..)Check out this page: http://freetheanimal.com/2009/07/my-rev
perhaps I need to see the film he's talking about.. but it doesn't seem like the act of "regulation" is so much the problem--because abolishing all regulation doesn't necessarily seem like a solution (I'm willing to bet that incidence of food-borne pathogens and outbreaks back in the 1880's was much higher than today.. but more accurately, go to other countries (like China or Mexico) where regulation is worse and see if the outbreak situation is better or worse..)..
but rather that the real problem is that when large-scale corporate capitalism cuts a deal with government--rather than the two of them acting as counter-weights to each other--then you see problems.
Thus--the problem is rooted at least as much in the corporate capitalist aspect (if not more so) as it is in the regulating aspects of government.
To follow up--if you just reduced the scale of government--made it smaller and less capable of regulating--it is unclear to me that large corporations would somehow suffer or be less capable of imposing their wills onto local markets.
To give an example that I know very well--Standard Oil became dominant by using various deceptive and/or unfair tactics to become extremely large, extremely fast. Once it was that huge--there was absolutely no way a local government could stand up to it, and thus it could crush other private competitors at will. It created a number of similar effects (basically the result of monopolistic type dominance in a market) that led to a huge reaction amongst small business owners--which pushed the populist and progressive movements and led to a federal government that was strong enough to at least powerful enough to push through anti-trust regulations and was powerful enough to enforce them. This progressive movement died in the midst of WW1 and, as a result, the 1920's saw the rise again of massive corporate control and collusion with government.
This collusion and ineffectualness played not a small part in the creation of the great depression--as people running the financial sector fucked things up big-time and then used parts of the Hoover government to fuck them up more (Hawley-Smoot Tariff).
The result was the rise of the New Deal which was not so much socialist, but rather a believer in strong government to act as a counterweight to massive corporations. New Dealers weren't anti-capitalists--but rather more connected to small-business capitalism and regulated capitalism. Look into the big Democratic Powers in the Senate in those years--like Joseph O'Mahoney (from that Communist State of Wyoming!) as well as the Progressive Republicans like Harold Ickes--who came from Illinois... They didn't want government ownership of industry--but rather to make sure that government could help curtail unfair monopolistic practices of corporate capitalism and to level the playing field.
On a broad scale, the New Deal was about the government acting as a large enough--but restrained--Hobbesian Leviathan to counteract the various large corporate factions that were--through there rational self-interested actions--helping to break down the overall economic structure.
Now.. this original New Deal outlook obviously did not last forever. It was WW2 that helped bring about the conglomeration of large corporations and the government again--which has helped lead to many of the problems we face today (subsequent wars have only added to that..each and every one of them..). To partially offset the large reliance on mega-corps that the government needed for war production--they also helped to empower big-labor--but such steps were relatively half-hearted and came nowhere near the power that labor had in any Western European Democracy..
In any case--over time, the battle over regulation and reform seem, to me, to be about making sure that the people regulating big business ARE DISTINCT from those businesses. The problem of corporate heads shifting in and out of government seems really problematic to me when it concerns their own industries. This is not to say that business leaders shouldn't take part in government orgs, not at all. During WW2, FDR got William Jeffers--the president of Union-Pacific Railroad to come in and take over the Rubber Reserve Corporation (RRC)--the producer of synthetic rubber--because he was known as a hard-nosed and effective leader. The RRC had previously been run horribly by Rep. Jesse Jones--who was a Texas Oilman and close friend of FDR (his Commerce Sec. also), but Jones was not the right choice for this position--he was too wedded to the idea that private industry would just solve the situation at the time--a time when larger-scale planning was needed that no one firm or industry could manage.
Finally.. perhaps it time again a new kind of progressive reform movement--but it seems to me that the real goal should be to create transparent governance and regulation--rather than just perceiving it as a problem of dismantling governance and regulation without addressing the power of corporate capitalism..
I'm a firm believer that regulated capitalism is the best possible economic system out there... and it has been achieved in the past to great success--so it should be possible again in a manner that allows for less concentration and more distributed economic power.
I'm not joking.
From the description of an image used in a Ford ad, the NYTimes notes:
A model depicting Antonella, the imaginary woman who was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that was the basis for the new Fiesta.
Okay.. I understand trying to understand your audience/customer--but seriously--if they spent half as much time working on quality management and paying attention to future energy concerns and their impact on their cars as they do letting the Marketing department engage in circle-jerks, then they might not be collapsing in front of our eyes.
At this point, I want them gone. I thought they could use a support earlier because of the depth of their penetration into the economic structure.. but this is seriously ridiculous. We need an amputation and research on a replacement.
A final quote from the second page of the article:
“Before, all our cars in Europe were taken as Germanic,” he said. “So we dialed up the style.” Ford in Europe rolled out a more emotional exterior design language, called the kinetic look.
That's right. Before, your cars were perceived as being very much like German Automobiles--which is terrible, because we all know how horrible the world thinks Mercedes, Audis, Porsches, and BMW's are.
They are so fucked.
6/20/09
We might get a Tiannemen.
We might see less bloody, but still deadly clashes.
We might see the people wimp out.
We might see them overcome security forces and/or have the security forces fail to stop them.
It's a cusp point methinks.
Go Iran, Go.
Personally, the key to thwarting fundamentalist islam has always been Iran. Persia has generally been the most advanced country in the region for, let's say, the last 2500 years. Yes, Egypt was into civilzation earlier, and once those Central Asian guys--you know--the Turks--conquered Anatolia, they got to be big stuff for a while--but Iran has possessed a very educated and impressive culture for thousands of years.
Furthermore, they are religious splitters in terms of Islam. States dominated by Shiites (within the middle east proper at least) have been far more accomodating to women than Sunni states. Additionally, geopolitically speaking, Iran was long connected to the West and it is the only really large state in the region that has a significant middle class with some influence and power.
I don't know what's going to happen there--but there is the distinct chance that this could be the start of a profound realignment. I'm not saying Iran's going to become our best buddies and what not.. but if you saw a real shift in power and a collapse of the more radical clergy in favor of a sympathetic and not-unfriendly-to-dealing-with-the-reali
Evidence for this possibility can be found here:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/t
As I note--this isn't the end of islam there.. nor should it be.. but when you have figures this big in the clergy undermining the main regime--the openings for pluralism are real.
Go Iran, Go.
His Take on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in front of a military audience IN IRAQ.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Formidable Opponent - Don't Ask, Don't Tell | ||||
| ||||
Fucking awesome
