What Waging War on a Noun Looks Like When Kafka Writes the Script

David Axe write on War is Boring and elsewhere. He is also front and center in the movement to use comics as a means of reportage. In both media he is, I think, interesting and worth paying attention to.

However, his most recent comic concerns The Army of God, that merry band of sociopaths active in Africa which was briefly "trending" on twitter and is not roundly and soundly ignored by most of us. Axe's comic, or more precisely its profits, caught the eye of a little-known Federal Agency: the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

They have seized the money, refused to release it and, what is even better, are not required to explain or justify their seizure. Why, you ask? National Security!!! and the War on Terror and other related nouns.

I for one feel safer knowing that a bunch of folks I have never heard of can grab the money of a hardworking and, one assumes, underpaid journalist whose career is dedicated to casting light on parts of the world most of us would just as soon forget.

Happy New Year.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

The Senate passes a flawed bill that offers at least some hope of working.  The Crazy Caucus in the House say nay. Why? Leave it to Nan Hayworth to explain it all:

"We were elected and then re-elected as a majority to bring the federal government to the right size, to respect every tax dollar," said Hayworth, who lost her re-election bid.

She lost, for what it is worth, to an ex-Clinton adviser who, one assumes, is on board with the flawed Senate bill. So in other words, even when the crazies lose they win.

Happy New Year.

UPDATE:

After all manner of unnecessary drama and name calling the bill passed.

Oy

If you read David Brooks today you might find that of all the things he wants cut military spending ain't among them.  Nope, according to the Times second silliest columnist the only solution is the cutting of "entitlements." Why that might be so, oddly enough, he fails to articulate.

Way to enhance the public discussion, Brooksy.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Somewhere in Euro land, Germany in fact, they are making a cardboard bike helmet:

Well not totally cardboard but cardboard is the straw that stirs the drink, as it were.  Oddly enough, at least when I lived there in last century, Germans and most Euros don't require helmets just brakes and the following of traffic regulations.

Gun Control

So here's an interesting little news item, guy made a gun with a 3D printer and is going to make the plans available on line. So far it is a little on the iffy side, it lasted only 6 shots, but you just know that the next iteration is going to be better.

What really sucks about this is that people on the left see a new technology and rejoice at the possibility of freeing the world from want. Other think immediately of the need for more murders.

Peace on earth and etc.

Hypothetically Speaking

Go and watch this film and imagine what might have happened if Hindenburg's son hadn't been a crook.

Laugh All You Want

I have been busy piling up things in expectation of the Mayan Apocalypso, which is like the regular one only with a beat you can dance to. Today  we learn that the it is the arrogance of western science, already  guilty of nearly endless cinemagraphic  destructions of various Hollywoodland lots that look like Terra Firma:

The scientific community is on edge. On Wednesday, a British team of scientists and engineers will use a special hot water drill to bore through to a lake buried under three kilometers of Antarctic ice. Sediments taken from the lake bed could revolutionize what we know about past climates and the fortitude of life forms.

Bolding in original. Yes that's right. They are going to drill right into a certain someones hidey hole and then are we going to get it.

Jill Lepore, God Love Her

Over to The New Yorker, Jill Lepore has another essay on the roots of American Conservatism. Last time it was national health care and the lies they told to defeat it. This time (sub req) it is on taxation and the role of slaveholders and plutocrats in delaying or undermining progressive taxation.

One reason to read Lepore is that she is a great writer and another reason is because she is the quintessence of professional historical writing.

I take minor issue with her claim that no one defends taxation. No one who anyone in positions of power or influence is willing to listen to defends taxation but lots of us have been beating the drum for more taxes and their necessity for a decent society for an awfully long time. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that the critics of neoliberalism get no respect just as the critics of the neocon part of war get no respect. The fact that both sets of critics, and they overlap, have been consistently right only makes the deafening official silence on these criticism more galling.

Ideally these two essays are going to be part of a longer-term and longer-form investigation of the roots and methods of American Conservatism.

Math is Hard

As we now know without a shadow of a doubt the Right in America persists because of and insists on a series of lies and distortions to attempt to destroy the nation because of their unholy loyalty to plutocrats.

In an apparent attempt re-enforce this image, Lloyd Blankenfeind forwarded this wholly absurd claim:

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career.

 Leaving aside the more or less unchanged nature of post retirement life expectancy, who on earth works for 25 years? I mean the average teenager has some kind of job by the time they are 16 and nearly everyone retires between the ages of 62 and 65. If I add 25 to 16 I get 41. Some small time crook who has gamed Wall Street or reaped the rewards of helping other game Wall Street might retire at 41 but you know people become crooks because they are too lazy for honest work.

As near as I can figure the vast majority of Americans work for 49 years or so in a variety of jobs after which they retire and then soon die.

Blankfein is supposed to be some kind of a genius at maths and investment and yet it would seem he can neither add nor does he understand the statistics of life expectancy. No wonder he and his fellow managerial geniuses ruined the economy; they are, in fact, dumb as dirt and twice as filthy.

Let The Healing Begin

In the current The New Yorker there is a profile of Kid Rock, who I think is a bit of a twit, that mentions a video he made with his pal Sean Penn, whoI think is a bit of a twit. Here is the video, which suggests that my claims of twitness are perhaps witless:



You mileage may vary.

Breath Deep

Conspiracy comes from the Latin for breath together. Among many others, with -- one is sure -- many more others to come, Jane Mayer over to The New Yorker speculates speculatively on the possibility of a complex conspiracy of some sort concerning the head of the CIA resigning because of evidence of one or two affairs with married women, one of whom was a member of the military with, so she claimed, a high security clearance, came to light.

There could be all manner of byzantine conspirators breathing together in the corridors of power, while Obama made the executive decision only after 24 hours of indecision. But the smart money is on Petraus making with the old in out where he ought not twice over and having to go for reasons of propriety.

We could argue till blue in the face on the necessity of an apparent adulterer quitting but so far it is SOP to either resign when confronted with evidence or, like Clinton, face impeachment.

The silly, stupid, lazy, sloppy ease with which national pundits, and others resort to Machiavellian, in the vulgar sense, explanations for political actions is beneath contempt.

On the plus side Andy Borowitz sees through the conspiracy.

Village Idiot

Doris Kerns Goodwin is a buffoon.  Tenured, it is true, plagiarist, is also true; however, her most salient feature and the reason she continues to appear on the weekly political shows is because she is a buffoon. As most of us know Mitt Romney and President Obama just waged a campaign in which Romney spent more time lying about Obama then he did lying about his record and his prospective policies.

Today, for reasons of head cold and a consequently weakened ability to think, I watched NBC yak fest. During the course of several conversation both divorced from reality and filled with falsehoods, Goodwin offered Obama this bit of advice:

I think what the president needs to do is to bring some CEOs into his top positions, FDR did that.  He brought in the head of Chrysler.  He brought in the head of Sears and Roebuck.  What about bringing Romney in to deal with this whole problem of how do you keep manufacturing here rather than going abroad?  What incentives to use?  What sanctions to use against countries that are not dealing fairly?  I think you bring people in but you don’t lose your conviction.  So you got to start with what matters to you but then you compromise on everything else.  And I think it can be done.

Yes, the President needs to boldly and decisively bring in the guy that just lost the election and made a career out of screwing America and the American worker to fix the problem his and his caused. It's only fair.

I mean really.What struck me is that none of the other chatterers even looked askance at the abject stupidity masquerading as historically based insight.

Bike Racer

A 15 minute or so documentary of 1970s bike racers, at least one of whom has my mustache.

Ouch

Over to the NYRB Gary Wills takes stock of Romney's future; it is a bleak house.  His conclusion:

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

And there it is.

A Tale of Two Campaigns

It seems that shortly after losing his campaign, Romney canceled the credit cards of everyone associated with, himself -- one assumes -- excepted, the campaign.

Obama gave this speech:



via

For whom would you rather work? To whom would you give responsibility?

As I said it was a war against pricks and lying dicks and the prickily dickly doos lost.

Demography is Not Destiny

It appears that Mitt Romney represents older, white, suburban, and exurban voters who earn more than 50k per year and a smaller percentage of women than men from that demographic. Obama, as per the last link, has super majorities among everyone else.  I understand that a non-trivial percentage of Romney voters are racists fucks but not all of them but the racists fucks, as I argue below, were never Romney's base and they would have voted for a cheese sandwich so long as the black man was voted out and White supremacy with its unearned privilege returned.

This is leading many on the left, the right, and in the center to insist that in these United States demography is destiny. Well, it isn't. All of the groups, whether "racial," "ethnic," or biological, this argument must run, vote as they vote because of some in-born, onto-genetic trait or traits.

This is obviously nonsense. The divide here is between folks who have it made and don't care about anyone else correctly identifing. Romney as one of them. In short, Romney, whose concession speech was the quintessence of dickiness and prickitude, base was never right-wing Evangelicals or Tea Party Patriots, it was always the dicks of the world with the added fillip of those whose idea of a decent argument is them making shit up, bullshitting, and generally lying about the world in order to deny that, just as an example, water is wet. And the rest of us who would prefer our elected officials be competent, more or less honest and generally reliable so that we can go about the important business of having lives and enjoying the refreshing beverages of our choice.

That there are a lot of these horrid people in the world as it is, is evidenced by Romney's "bounce" after the first debate. There his lying prickiness and general dickitude were on full display and many of our fellow citizens lapped it up. The same characteristics, lying, prickitudal and dickital tendencies, are what  makes Paul Ryan Romney's ideal running mate.

If you read around the intertubes in the run up to the election, you know doubt read some of the blather about lesser evilism, this will do for the vote Obama as lesser and this as its opposite. Both sides here missed the fundamental point that this election was about driving a stake through the heart of the rule by privileged lying pricks and the continued elevation of competent managers of a nasty, nasty system.

It may well be that over the next four years the Obama Administration will take steps to ensure that the system becomes less nasty by rolling back the obscene policies of the neoliberals. One can hope; however, any reversal of these policies and a revision to the New Deal, only this time for gays, women and non-whites, is going to be a decade long slog.

One can only hope that the sharp rebuke handed to the lying pricks amongst us leads to a much more rapid decline in horrid little men and women gallivanting around and insisting that America, real honest to god America, is a land of horrid people.

I mean just consider the endless garbage by the horrid people who engaged in official and unofficial voter suppression. They failed and in failing shot themselves nicely in the foot. It is one thing to think that the only way you can win is to cheat it; it is quite another to get caught cheating before, during, and after the election while failing to win. That kind of a situation makes the vote suppressors look like what they are: Horrid people to whom and for whom a lie isn't something shameful but a necessary and honorable act in the service of ruining the lives and stunting the fortunes of their fellow citizens.

What's Yours?

At home a triple or so Breve for breakfast; out and about, a double Macchiato

Yours?

These People Are Crazy

Over to the NRO's Corner and nut case name of Stanley Kurtz argues that because of Benghazi Obama to save his skin ought or will

The answer, I think, is clear. President Obama needs to issue an immediate executive order disbanding Fox News.

You see, he suggests,

it is very likely that an executive order disbanding Fox News would substantially undercut public attention to the Benghazi story, thus restoring President Obama’s prestige in the world.

Kurtz is nutz.

A Tale of Two Advertisements

Lena Dunham made this video



Which is pretty funny and is driving the Right nuts. This ad, on the other hand so far as I can tell has slipped underneath their radar, perhaps because Wheedon is rich:



(via)

Why does the Right hate humor? Why does the Right lie about everything? Because if they told the truth they would be less popular than TB that's why. 

Odd Morning

I was going to comment on David Brooks' attempt to prove that being a moderate meant one agreed with him on all things political and cultural when I was distracted by a headline that read Officer Held in Plot to Cook Women and Eat Them. It seems that a NYC police officer planned to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat women.

Happy Halloween.

War On Women

Indeed:



So vote your conscience.

Debate

I plane on watching but not for long. Why? Because tonight, like last time on drilling and coal , we can expect exactly neither candidate to make this  point:

Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land-young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.”
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.
And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: “A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

via

That's right George McGovern on the war and  the need to not have more wars. Oh, as by the way, he fought the one good war in human history.

David Brooks

likes Mitt Romney because they both lie like rugs. I was going to write something about today's bullshit but this is much better. It has charts and everything. Brooks' is deal is to sound like he 1) has a clue 2) takes the problems confronting the world seriously so that he can 3) prove it is all the Democrats fault.

He likes the way the rest of us breathe and, to be blunt, he needs find a new line of work. I am thinking that he, Mitt, and Ryan can start a road show selling omni-balsamic reinvigorator. Indeed, like the whole panoply of Melville's confidence men, the Three Liepateers and the Right have nothing to sell that doesn't depend out the purchaser's credulity, which is too say their voters have been had.

Also, too.

He's Right, You Know That?

It was true then and it's true now:

The solution?

This:

If that is too much than surely this:

Or maybe just more of this:

Which might one day lead to this:

Conservative Fact Checking

Over to the NRO's Corner Online Eliana Johnson fact checks the Democrats on Planned Parenthood and access to mamograms. According to Johnson five phone calls to some New York state Planned Parenthood offices proves that the claim is nonsense. Two seconds with Google finds specific examples of PP providing free mamograms and pap smears.

It is simply bizarre that a fact so easily checked is twisted into its opposite in a desperate attempt to deny that the water is wet, which is to say that providing funds to an organization dedicated to offering low cost health services to poor and less well off leads to the poor and less well off obtaining necessary medical services at lower costs.