October 2007 archive

Today we’ll talk about reference books.

If you like to trade books, try BookMooch.

cfk has bookflurries on Weds. nights
pico has literature for kossacks on Tues. nights

What are you reading?  is crossposted to dailyKos

Being of a certain age, much of my early worldview was shaped by childhood indoctrination about authoritarian states, I guess you could call me part of the “Duck and Cover” generation.  Taught from an early age about the evils of communism and fascism, we were often told that one of the greatest differences between free societies like our own, and evil totalitarian states, was that here in America one was safe to voice political views or dissent without fear of government retribution. We had no Siberian exile, Gulags, or internment camps. The police did not burst into your home in the middle of the night and arrest you on trumped up charges simply for voicing opinions contradictory to government policy.

Yet given today’s current situation, it is no longer quite so easy to draw such simplistic comparisons.

Under the current administration, no thinking person can honestly say that they don’t feel the slow grip of government overreach extending into the fabric of everyday life. An uneasiness has settled across the nation, somehow instinctively knowing that we are teetering on a precipice from which at any moment we could be sent spiraling down into the depths of  a fascist nightmare straight out of the a futuristic novel.

Propaganda has been around since human beings began habituating the earth at it existed in the simplest of forms: the spoken word or the painted picture. But, over time as people have grown more sophisticated so has propaganda and how it is delivered. As the average person has moved away from receiving their news in the printed form to relying on the broadcast media the sound byte has become the outlet of choice for the delivery of propaganda. Considering the power of that medium and the presentation of the news its not surprising then that large majorities would come to believe what was being delivered as news was the truth because no one chose to refute it.

One of the things my club does, and has for the last 40 badump years, is run an Arts and Crafts Show on the Stars Hollow Green.

Taylor Doose hates it because we tear up the turf more than all the Weddings and Concerts and Easter Egg Hunts and Festivals he runs; but you know, that’s just the way it is in Stars Hollow, do something long enough and you have squatters rights and old Taylor can just piss up a rope.

It was a bad year.  We had less than 8 members to cover the whole event and it is our major fundraiser.

At the end of the day we were all pretty beat.  I won’t pretend I worked any harder than anyone else.  I still smoked and I must say I enjoyed it, sitting on the bench.  Still, it was just getting darker and colder and I was just getting stiffer so I mildly suggested-

“Seems to me we ought to get started cleaning up.”

Yes.  Well, it got exactly the kind of response I expected.

It occurred to me some stronger measures might be required, so I bestirred myself, picked up a garbage bag and said-

“Ok, I’m starting at that end”, and I pointed to the shorter and less garbagy part of the green since if you lead you get to do stuff like that, “and we need a team to start over there”, and here I pointed toward the horrendous pigsty, “and we’ll meet in the middle.  Let’s do it!”

And I did an unconvincing little jump and stalked off.

Oddly enough a half hour later the job was done.  The last Crafter on the Green closing up was a person who did tumbled rocks like Emily’s Mom.  Before she finished packing up her van she stopped me and said- “I saw what you did.” and gave me a piece of polished quartz of the type that normally went for a buck, so no big deal.

After all stones don’t bring you luck you make your own.

Link:

Tim Starks of Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to bring the Senate’s surveillance bill up for floor debate in mid-November. That’s despite the hold that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) plans to place on the measure . . .

then Harry Reid can go fuck himself. I will never want to hear another fucking word about how hard Harry Reid is trying. This is unprecedented.

Say it ain’t so Harry, cuz if it is . . .

One of the terms I use for my various sigs is “Never trust any organization bigger than two, and even those are suspect.”  I’ve never read it anywhere, so I think it’s an original (if not, please send me the citation).

Today’s quote for discussion comes from our own Brandon Friedman’s book, The War I Always Wanted, which I highly recommend, and not just because I think he should be rich and famous.

Buy The War I Always Wanted at Amazon.

A citizen of Republican-occupied territory, I frequently tune in to government radio in order to monitor the movements, mental and physical, of the enemy.

This morning I turned on the Grand Poobah of GOoPerdom himself, Rush Limbaugh, and was extremely discomfited to find myself nodding along in agreement, disconsolately reduced to mumbling, in the words of Limbaugh’s own blowharding bumpersticker, “Rush Is Right.”

I reproduce the relevant portions of his monologue below, because I want desperately to be wrong about this. I would like someone, anyone, to show me that, in the substance if not the rhetoric of what he says, Rush is not, in fact, right.