You Are Welcome

As a year-round, decades-long every-day cyclist let me just say you are welcome for my percentage of the billions saved.

Memorial Day

Ernest Hemingway on war and heroism:

I wouldn't mind being wounded again so much because I know just what it is like. And you can only suffer so much, you know, and it does give you an awfully satisfactory feeling to be wounded. It's getting beaten up in a good cause. There are no heroes in this war. We all offer our bodies and only a few are chosen, but it shouldn't reflect any special credit on those that are chosen. They are just the lucky ones. I am very proud and happy that mine was chosen, but it shouldn't give me any extra credit. Think of all the thousands of other boys that offered. All the heroes are dead. And the real heroes are the parents. Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more. When a mother brings a son into the world she must know that some day the son will die, and the mother of a man that has died for his country should be the proudest woman in the world, and the happiest. And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.

So thanks one and all for your service.

Almost Friends

Dogs and cats living together; the crazy little dog just wants to been friend:

Unfortunately the cat is too proud to play.

Memorial Day Come Early

As promised to some:

meat:

Potatoes:

Veg:

Beer:

Wine:

Where were you?

I did not know

that the pope had a butler; let alone a leaky one. I guess that this is just one more example of no man is a hero to his valet.

A Prophet in His Own Land and All That

I linked to the speech in the post immediately below; but here is the whole thing.



Of course he had just recently oked the Bay of Pigs.

The Real Road to Surfdom

While we are on the subject, over to Crooked Timber there are a series of posts on Hayek's idiotic idea that authoritarianism grows out of either socialist central planning or the welfare state. The discussion there is if Hayek did, in fact, make such an idiotic claim -- he did.

What baffles me is that right now we are watching not just here in the good Ol' US of A, long may she be united and free, as result of the militarization of state and society the not gradual but rather rapid expansion of a surveillance state, an increasingly powerful  executive, the erosion of citizens protection from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, plus and also the repeal of the prohibition of using propaganda on American Citizens.

This is not unexpected. From the reign of that dangerous radical DDE, sensible people have known that in addition to America's authoritarians coming flag wrapped and cross bearing, they will enter swords drawn and insisting on the need to  fight those bastards over there while cleaning house over here.

Which is to say, we are half-way to "serfdom" precisely because those granted the privilege of steering the ship of state have decided that the nation and the wider world do not want economic equality and effective, functional democracy but rather permanent war, an increasingly power plutocracy and, for good measure, a state that monitors women's healthcare while seeking out internal enemies.

Enjoy the holiday.

Post Human

One aspect of the world as currently constituted is that machine labor in factories has replaced human and this is making it ever harder to find decently paid work. It is also the case that the US military has embraced the productivity fetish and is constantly trying to use ever more machines to replace humans. There are two obvious advantages for the military.

The first is that with smaller number of actual people involved while a majority of Americans oppose the various freedom bombing forays into the wider world, the direct impact, in terms of honored dead, grows ever smaller.  The second advantage is that at some point in the future war can be waged without people, which is perfectly consistent with the neoliberal project of creating a world designed to protect plutocrats from the rest of us.

The other day I posted this video:



The other day, via War is Boring, came this video of a half-way measure:



  Most of us remember, either from the unintentionally -- I assume -- campy movie or the deeply perverse Heinlein book, the dystopic future where men and women in suits of similar nature fought for earth and the right to vote. It is odd, isn't, how it all the promises of a future made pacific and equitable through the use of technology are proven time and again to be false while the the actual critiques of the policies that led to this neoliberal, neocon nightmare are proven right.

Memories, Memorials, and Poppies

For years now I have been buying a poppy on or around Memorial Day attaching it to the bike and removing one year later. For me, it is a symbol of the First World War in all its murderous fatuousness, silly stupid slaughter, and pointlessness and, consequently, a nearly perfect example of the misrule of the 1%, whether old school aristos or new  model plutocrats.

In that spirit some musical to contemplate the unnecessary misery imposed on most of us by a thoughtless, heedless, and  feckless minority:








Enjoy your weekend before the forces of reaction take it away.

Accidental Zen

Recently I overheard someone explaining relative states of foreign language skill,  which arose, the explanation ran, because

she only knows what she has  been taught while I only know what I have learned.

Some People Say

that a little knowledge is a dangerous think.  I say being stupid is a dangerous thing. As an example:

A group of fraternity brothers from Lousiana [sic] Tech University burning their textbooks in celebration of the end of the school year are believed by local authorities to have caused a fire that burned down their fraternity house.

I am confident that one or another of these frat boys will grow up to the next columnist for the NYT.

Slipppery Slopes

There is an article in the current The New Yorker on the unpunished murder and rape of lesbian, gay men, and the rest, one assumes, of South Africa's LGBT citizens. This is an actual, as opposed to hypothetical, slippery slope argument. Narrow-minded bigots who assume that their sexual orientation and aesthetic judgements are normative have been beating the drum of need if not necessity of excluding gay men and women as well as the rest of the LGBT community from the community of citizens. These bigoted wretches are a danger to us all.

In the US right now there are maniaca insisting on the creation of LGBT concentration camps because they are hate filled nut jobs. I would argue that Obama has nailed his colors to the mast and it is now time for Romney and the rest of the Right to insist that they will not participate in a campaign designed to "improve" by "corrective rape, " which is the South African term for assaulting and murdering lesbians, reparative therapy, or the extirpation our fellow citizens because of the wholly legitimate objects of their sexual or aesthetic desires.

To say nothing of an equally strident repudiation of neoliberal capitalism and then we can have nice things.

Appologize, Damn It

Some time ago the Right, like NRO whackdoodle Mona Charon, were lambasting Obama for his "disgraceful abandonment" of Chinese civil rights lawyer Chen Quangchen. Today we learn that he and his wife are on their way to America, land o the free.

It takes real skill to wrong about everything.

One Other Other Thing

I first stumbled on Sterling Hayden in Asphalt Jungle and ran across him in some book or another on naming names. Recently I watched some god awful movie in which he rescues a damsel from Colonel Klink. I got his autobiography from the library and, to be blunt, the man whose acting was all twitches and muttered intimations of unknowable violence, he writes like Kerouac or better yet like Cassady's First Third; his Wandering is work of unusual genius and provides page after page of unexpected pleasure. Plus also even too and in addition , the man was a certified war hero who regretted with every ounce of his being his failure to stand up to the bullying bastards led by the unAmerican nutcase McCarthy. For at least a week he is my hero. 

One Other Thing

People often, well not really, ask me how do stay so cheerful, the occasional deranged rant at sociopathic motorists to one side, when things aren't going so well. It is stuff like this:



The whole song makes nothing like sense and yet watching it makes me, in any event, aware of the fact that outside the stupidity of neoliberalism and the deranged antics of the Right more generally that the world is filled with people whose first commitment is to joy and nonsense.

To Tell The Truth Or Parsing the 99%

Jacques Brel, who we have discussed before, was a wildly popular singer/song writer. In this song he, I think, makes a point about the constant grinding misery of being an unwilling pawn of a bunch of rich bastards who, like Mitt Romney, despise those of born to poor parents while also articulating the single most heartfelt desire of the rest of who squirm under their unfeeling thumbs and boot heels: to no longer be victims while refusing to be executioners.



And yes, if you are interested, I think there is  a link between Camus, and the Jansenists, notion of Deus absconditus and Brel's work, which is to the extent a better world awaits it awaits on some collective action that I, like Sterling Hayden, doubt will or can succeed.

spring break

I am on one.

I, For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords

From Terrifying Robot Update comes this terrifying robot update:



Obviously there are endless civilian uses, replacing workers, getting rid of non-robotic citizens, and related etc, but the fact that this is a DARPA project suggests that they are working toward taking the human element out of war, which can only be a good thing.

Performance Art

I am assuming that this is a parody:

There’s no better way for President Obama and his administration to celebrate Earth Day than to embrace a real, environmentally sound commitment to energy independence instead of relying on foreign countries that lack environmental safeguards. One aspect of the “all-of-the-above” approach I have been discussing for years involves, of course, the necessity to “drill, baby, drill.”

It’s no secret that throughout America, including the very wealthy state of Alaska, we find a storehouse of natural resources that God so benevolently dumped underfoot, just waiting to be tapped. ANWR, for example, is screaming to be used to help bring prosperity and national security to America. Indeed, there is an inherent link between energy and prosperity and energy and security. On this day, as many are focused on preserving the planet, environmentalists need not fear that the land or wildlife would suffer from the wise decision to drill here. As Alaskans know, ANWR is not some luxurious vacation spot teeming with Bambi and friends frolicking through waterfalls and flower-strewn mountainsides, as environmentalist fundraising advertisements depict it. It is a vast, remote, desolate, frozen area available to be used with a tiny drilling footprint to bring the country closer to what is clearly needed: commonsense, money-saving, job-producing energy independence. Believe me, I live in the Last Frontier because I cherish the earth and thrive in the clean air and fresh water amid our plentiful wildlife. I don’t want to mess this up for future generations.

I mean to say the whole thing reads as if one of the more literate NRO interns had one or two too many and decided to make Palin sound like an deranged maniac.

Should it turn out to be an authentic example of one or another of Palin's ghost writers babbling incoherently I apologize to all involved.

Knowledgeably Ignorant

The first stage of the French presidential election was today. According to a  24 year old Frenchman and student, who voted for Sarkozy because of fear of turmoil in the "financial markets" -- whatever that might mean,

[n]obody knows exactly what’s going to happen whoever is elected,” Mr. Hustaix said. “Hollande is not going to be able to enforce his program, and Sarkozy didn’t disclose specifics on what he is going to do, aside from immigration and security.

He is certain that the future is uncertain except to the extent that the socialist will be gridlocked and Sarkozy threaten immigrants and "terrorists," which appears to be a coded French discourse for more discrimination against Muslims and "mild" Le Penisme.

In other words, other than knowing exactly what would happen and voting out of fear of international finance capitalism, the poor lad is in the dark. It is almost like he realizes that the State's economic policies is in the hands of the ruthless capitalists of the Bourse, the City, and Wall Street but is afraid to admit it.

Punditry is Another Word For Ignorance

Ross Douthat wrote a book. Some like it; others, who have some knowledge of the issues Douthat considers, think it is bosh and twaddle. Still yet others point out that Douthat misreads his source material. Interesting the last link is by the author of a book on which Douthat relies to distort the past. Perhaps having been given a pulpit that he uses to disseminate distortions and lies, it never occurred to Douthat that facts and fair readings are an important part of argument making.

Post Racial

You know how Conservatives like to say that people who worry about racial discrimination and racism more generally are the real racists? They lie:

That is the Swedish Cultural Minister cutting a cake while all around her hilarity ensues. Picture and story via

Education

David Brooks is as dumb as a box of rocks. You cannot improve students' ability to read and write while simultaneously refusing to fund the humanities. It, after all, the humanities that require reading and writing. No test replaces semester long projects and no neoliberal university gives a good god damn about reading and writing.

Great

It is one of the greatest songs ever:



Although more complicated, historically speaking, another great song:

Mandates

 Over to the NYRB, Ronald Dworkin makes what seems to me to be an air-tight case for the constitutionality of the ACA.