They don’t call it “America’s Shittiest Website” for nothing.

Charles Krauthammer (who is a dead ringer for Wile E. Coyote, amirite?) shot himself in the foot the other day by criticizing CPAC, where Dick Cheney just awarded Don Rumsfeld the “Defender of the Constitution” award, as a conservative “weird fringe group…not Twilight Zone fringe. It’s more off shore, you know floating on a raft out there in the Gulf of Mexico.”  He is still waiting for his slower-than-usual nerve conduction to signal the grave owie in his brain.  There appears to be a concerted effort by some conservatives to distant themselves from Tea Baggers, lest they influence Presidential nominations.  

Pardon me for wasting everyone’s time by remarking that conservatives are dummies, but since I’m on the subject, I can’t help noticing that the geniuses at Red State think that Planned Parenthood is engaged in teenage sex trafficking.  Maybe they’re still star-bursting over the wild successes of Levi and Bristol.

Finally, I know John Cole has turned over a new leaf since the interminable Iraq war began, and I thank him for that, but am I wrong in getting the willies when I see this kind of nostalgia?  Isn’t that a little too close for comfort?

Geithner (via creditwritedowns):

“I take human life seriously.  I’m obsessed with it: death, existence, bankruptcy, God, mark-to-fantasy-values, interpersonal relationships (mostly with bankers and my self-reflective consciousness).  Unlike Woody Allen, I can’t play Dixieland, so I feel uniquely isolated in an indifferent, if not hostile universe; I was simply born into this financial chaos of logical, ontological, and moral non-structure; and while my existence is inexplicable, I face up to it; I take full responsibility for bailing out the profanely wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of humanity.  Life is hard, and inscrutable to rational or empirical scrutiny, so I create my own reality, in deeds.  God and I can’t both be free.  That’s my facticity.  That’s my authenticity.  That’s my freedom.  That is my will, bitchez.  I have no idea what I’m doing, but I decided.  I acted.  When I choose, I choose for the whole world.  It’s absurd, but I open Pandora’s box, in order to create myself.  We’re all terrified about that, but I owe you that much.  Every ethical act I perform is the point of no return.  If I cut Isaac’s throat on God’s command, that will be my decision.  I take human life seriously.”

That possible interpretation of Geithner’s existential epiphany is my roundabout way of asking, “What bong-farts in Hell did Geithner toke from Bernanke’s ass to utter such, “We’re going, like, existential” nonsense?  

Actually, I know what he really means:

For a few dollars more, a few billion per year.

Afghanistan costs $5.7 billion per month.

Obama would rather kill or maim a dozen and a half innocent Afghan civilians per day than help millions of the weakest Americans survive life-threatening thermoregulatory challenges during a savage winter in ever harder times.  At twenty times the cost.  This fits his profile as a “compassionate conservative.”

The good news is that when people freeze to death in their homes, you can just carry them out like luggage, even while they’re shagged in ice.

One must have a mind of winter.  One must have been cold a long time…not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

or just after.

Moe Lane (Turdus turdus) tests the reality of the fields with his sweet questionings:

People ask where Ronald Reagan’s monument is.

To which I say: look around you.

Blammo!

AP:

In a bid to pre-empt popular uprisings from far-flung regions of the imploding empire over which he presides, President Barack Obama has fired his entire cabinet and promised not to run again for President in 2012.  

Srsly!

In reality, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Care Bear has decided to test the Ghandi-an peace dividends of Egyptian blood-letting, in order to, as usual, preserve the status quo.  Gomer Pyle was reported as saying, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”  I suppose Cairo is the New Gaza Annex.

Fuck the U.S., Israeli, and Egyptian governments.  May they get in their asses what they give.  God bless the inevitability of history, and amen.

In related news, today’s quote of the day comes from monsieur IOZ:

Growing up Is Hard to Do

Obviously, Islam needs to make its peace with modernity and democracy.

-Robert Kagan, quoted by Maureen Dowd

This is a standard variant on a common observation in the West, that Islam is effectively unmodern, that it is mired in a sort of pre-Reformation dark age, as opposed to what used to be called Christendom, which through religious reformation paved the way for modern nations and Enlightenment and democracy and all that. Leaving aside the weirdness of this characterization of Islam, as a normative history of the Christian West, it is totally crackpot, an attention-deficient skipping stone leaping from the Henry’s first divorce to the Peace of Westphalia to Jean Monet and leaving out everything else in between. In this history, the wars of religion never occurred, there was no Terror, no Napoleon, no Somme, and no Holocaust. The modern western mind is mostly notable in civilizational history for its colossal contribution of violence and destruction. I mean, I guess it’s true that the occasional stoning-to-death of an adulterer is indicative of a somewhat atavistic mind, but by that light, the principal characteristic of modernity is its commitment to the slaughter of millions through the advent of mechanized warfare. Wait, oh, uh, whut? Hang on guys, there’s a transmission coming through. It’s a little fuzzy. You say . . . you say that is the principal characteristic of modernity. Oh, shit. Europe “made peace with democracy” by slaughtering two generations its youth.

JR Boyd (ladypoverty.blogspot.com) did not explicitly say, “Steal this blogpost!” but that’s what the voices in my head told me he was saying, in fact, urged me to do, implicitly.  And so, bristling with excitement (like a sea urchin stalking the ocean floors stoked on the Bolivian marching powder of Brotherly Love) because  he made good on his promise to his sister to “write something that everyone could understand,” I gave in to my worst impulses and stole his work on behalf of my fellows in the unwashed throng of Homo sapiens and whatever portion of Neanderthal made it into the woodpile.  The purloined letter:

Notes on socialism

New York Times:

Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees, letting them go when they become a drag on profits and relying on remaining workers or temporary ones when business picks up.

Socialism, in a nutshell, is the idea that companies should be owned and operated by their employees, rather than dictating the terms by which they live.  Communities, in other words, would exert popular control over economic decisions — what gets invested, what gets made, how it is distributed, and so on.

That’s old school socialism, and it evolved out of an acknowledgment that “employers” should be the community, not some minority element that tells everyone else what to do because they are rich enough to buy what’s important.

Socialism was aimed squarely at this question of making the economy democratic; it opposed the dictatorship of bosses in the workplace, from whom life itself must be “earned.”  Being able to live decently was always assumed to be a human right by socialists, because threatening someone’s livelihood if they don’t do what you want isn’t an acceptable foundation for liberty in any context.  That’s just a fucked-up relationship — and we know this because that’s exactly what we call it when it happens anywhere else in life, whether the relationship is a marriage or between adults and children or whatever.  You can’t ask people to make choices in a context where one of the outcomes is that they could very well starve, only to congratulate them on their “freedom” to choose.

The idea that you can have a “political” democracy when many of the most important decisions never even enter the political arena because they are “economic” (and therefore private) is perhaps one of the longest standing criticisms of liberal democracy by socialists — “liberal democracy” meaning capitalism with democratic formalities.  If you read Volume 1 of Capital, for example, Marx spends a lot of time on this; even defending Enlightenment conceptions of private property against their industrial counterpart; and ultimately advancing them as communism: he keeps the large-scale industry while jettisoning any “private” claim to it.

Because you are more likely than not a contemporary US audience, when you hear the word socialism, you know it is vaguely bad; perhaps you think it means that the government owns everything instead of individual firms.  I’m not going to get into a whole discussion about government here (read: the state) except to say that there is a distinction to be made between democratic and totalitarian forms.  The socialist argument has always been that liberal democracy isn’t democratic enough: the people who own what matters will inevitably dominate the government, using it for their purposes against whatever the general populace might prefer.  This blog and many others comment on that phenomenon nearly every day.

However, it follows that if the people who own everything are the government, and these people aren’t “the people” but some privileged minority, you end up with the same problem.  Remember how Marx begins his discussion of class: the “haves” are the people who possess their own independent means of survival, the “have-nots” are anybody that doesn’t.  If you look at a country like North Korea, which is nominally communist, you basically have one guy that possesses every means of self-sufficiency while everyone else is dispossessed.  It might call itself “Marxist,” I don’t know.  But the class antagonism is more pronounced than in most capitalist societies.  Marx postulated a scenario like this in Capital, with his idea of having one big company ultimately hold a monopoly on all economic life in society.  That is basically what totalitarian governments adorning themselves with the label “socialist” have produced.  You have to regard them accordingly.

Okay, the next step in our free-market fundamentalist socio-economic ontogeny really is “soylent green is people!”  I mean mother fucker!  JP Morgan is one of the chief causes of putting people on food stamps, AND they are the number one provider of food stamps to Americans.  They profit directly in taxpayer dollars from the destitution they cause us.

Are you shitting me?  Is this the Twilight Zone?

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States.  JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.  JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes.  Yes, you read that correctly.  When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money.  In the video posted below, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is “a very important business to JP Morgan” and that it is doing very well.  Considering the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has exploded from 26 million in 2007 to 43 million today, one can only imagine how much JP Morgan’s profits in this area have soared.  But doesn’t this give JP Morgan an incentive to keep the number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program as high as possible?  

First, who in the world thought that an investment bank would be a provider of food stamps in the first fucking place?  When did that become privatized?  And why the fuck would you privatize food stamps in the first place?  Because everything becomes more efficient when you pay for exorbitant profits and executive bonuses?  How does paying for some cocksucker’s gazillion-dollar house in the Hamptons make feeding the destitute more efficient?  How does everything get fucking financialized?  How does paying rent on every god-damned government function create efficiency?  

When our “legislative engineers” begin engineering solutions to our problems, their first order of duty appears to be mandating conflicts of interest in every blueprint and block of programming code.  Every god-damned flow chart indicates that the person causing the problem for a fee is the person in charge of fixing it for a fee in an infinite loop of corruption.  Every input and output in the declaration file assigns citizens as suckers and Wall Street as benefactors of our largesse.  And if there is a programming bug, such that there is a government function from which Wall Street is not siphoning profits, they send their lobbyist lizards skulking into Congress to get those bugs out.

Food stamp usage went from 27 million to 43 million between 2007 and now, because Wall Street crashed the global economy.  We bailed them out and went on food stamps.  How do they manage to profit off of every god-damned discomfort and distress twice, thrice, really, who knows how many times their profits and bonuses treble for every ounce of woe they foist on us?

Just listen to this Wall Street lizard croaking out his reason for living:

“Volumes [of food stamps and profits] have gone through the roof in the past couple of years.”  Our indigence, misery, and privation are a boon to them, a fucking growth industry.  They’re burning our candle on both ends.  And in the middle.  Fuck.  Them.

How is it that Wall Street and Congress have the balls to do this?

I feel like cold-cocking someone.  How’s that for civility, cocksuckers?   Tunisia, here we come.

It appears Obama is gearing up for 2012 fundraising in earnest, offering a triple-threat of proposals favored by big business: first by promoting attacks on the social safety net, then by hiring two Wall Street mugs as chief-of-staff and economic adviser, and now by comprehensively reviewing and slashing federal regulatory “burdens” on business.

Please note Obama’s hack-kneed genuflection to the free market’s virtuous fountains of “dazzling ideas,” “path-breaking products,” and “vibrant entrepreneurialism,” as he simultaneously derides “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive” with “undue interference,” from a “patchwork of over-lapping rules” and legislative “tinkering,” that need to be “rooted out” when they “conflict,” “are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.”   These are standard right-wing talking points.

However, the cognitive friction generated between Obama’s obtuse insistence that “one of the reasons the free market has worked…” and his acknowledgement of the collapse of the financial markets in the next breath, while forgetting about the BP blow-out of the entire Gulf of Mexico, body-checked the entire order of the universe light years to the right and vastly closer to heat death.

Listen to Obama’s disingenuous logic to get a taste of the crap he plans on feeding us in the State of the Union:

For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste. The EPA wisely eliminated this rule last month.

Let’s change a few words, while retaining the core, business-friendly “logic:”

The FDA has long considered thimerosal, the mercury-based vaccine preservative, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat mercury like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your bloodstream, it is not hazardous waste.

So, yeah, by all means, feed all the mercury you want to your daughters, because if you inject it into your butt-cheeks (under doctor’s orders, no less!), then it cannot be hazardous.  Amirite?  

Similarly, the use of radioactive isotopes in medicine to improve health outcomes, or ionizing radiation used in airports to improve “homeland security,” proves that radiation is not hazardous.  In fact, it is beneficial!  It’s “dumb” to regulate something beneficial.  The president’s argument is simply stupid, if not devious, and indicates how cunning and deceitful the regulatory review will be.

When the president says he wants “a more affordable, less intrusive means to the same [regulatory] ends,” he is simply indicating what neoliberal deregulatory yahoos and cowboys have meant since time immemorial: The federal regulatory environment will become “leaner and meaner,” for businesses and consumers, respectively, until “nothing stands in their way.”  

In response to lamentations about the utter vacuum of serious left-wing discourse in the blogosphere, and the more general neoliberal bent of the nominal left, Kevin Drum replies:

I plead guilty to some general neoliberal instincts, of course, but I plead guilty with (at least) one big exception: I am very decidedly not in favor of undercutting labor rights in order to stimulate economic growth, and I’m decidedly not in favor of relying solely on the tax code to redistribute wealth from the super rich to the rest of us. What’s more, the older I get and the more obvious the devastating effects of the demise of the American labor movement become, the less neoliberal I get. The events of the past two years, in which the massed forces of capital came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the world economy, and yet, phoenix-like, have come out richer and more powerful than before, ought to have convinced nearly everyone that business interests and the rich are now almost literally out of control. If they haven’t, what would?

What indeed would it take to convince Drum that the financial parasites are unequivocally “out of control?”  

Imagine if Jared Loughner had not killed anyone, but only “winged” a few people as he wildly sprayed bullets into the crowd before his spree was temporarily arrested.  Would Drum call that behavior “almost literally out of control.”  Would Drum’s enthusiasm for psychotically-motivated shooting sprees be only somewhat dampened?  Or would he support giving Loughner molecular grade methamphetamine and a larger gun clip?

The fact that Drum remains the least bit equivocal on the question of whether the theoretical basis for the neoliberal agenda has completely and unequivocally de-bunked, shredded, gutted and strangled itself with its own entrails tells you all you need to know about his ability to examine the evidence.  The proportion of bad news accounted for by the neoliberal agenda approaches 1.0, and compared to the Loughners of the world,  zombie money kills real people, on a much, much grander scale.

If you are not pierced in the heart with fear upon hearing Drum’s ambivalent concerns about neoliberalism, and the lack of true left-wing voices, much less the massing of left-wing armies on our ideological borders against the imminent existential threat resulting from financial weapons of mass destruction, don’t even bother to duck and cover when you see the white-hot flash on the horizon.  The annihilation will be systemic and global.

Barack Obama guarantees it:

Barack Obama is 130% pro-parasite.

A working farm village in Tarok Kalache, Afghanistan.

The village of Tarok Kalache was laden with IEDs and homemade explosives (HME) comprised of 50-gal drums of deadly munitions. Special Operations forces conducted a successful clearing raid on the village. Then Flynn introduced the Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC), a rocket-projected explosive line charge which provides a “close-in” breaching capability for maneuver forces. The plan was for one team to clear a 600-meter path with MICLICs from one of his combat outposts to Tarok Kalache. “It was the only way I could give the men confidence to go back out.”

Not long after, Flynn shared one insight into the burden of command: “I literally cringed when we dropped bombs on these places — not because I cared about the enemy we were killing or the HME [home-made explosives] destroyed, but I knew the reconstruction would consume the remainder of my deployed life.”

Unsound, or no method at all?

“I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain– why he did not instantly disappear. `I went a little farther,’ he said, `then still a little farther–till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back. Never mind. Plenty time. I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick–quick–I tell you.’ The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months–for years–his life hadn’t been worth a day’s purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration– like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely, that even while he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he– the man before your eyes–who had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far.

I know, I know.  The heads.  You’re looking at the heads.