R.I.P.

Andrew Brietbart died recently. I think this post says all that needs to be said.

Snow Job

Olympia Snowe will not run for reelection. She made noises about the horrors of partisanship in the current Senate. She is a "moderate" Republican, which means she laments having to vote for bat-shit crazy legislation even as she votes for it. Snowe, I would venture, is known to nearly no one outside of Maine except for news and politics junkies. America Elect is a doomed attempt at electing someone as a third party candidate who holds Democratic Party policy positions. Using his acute skills, Jon Chait, who once wrote about how Trump was a real candidate for President, thinks, if that's the word I want, that Snowe is cleverly positioning herself for a run on the AE ticket.

I really doubt that that small state and unknown senator would quit a life-time sinecure for the opportunity to make an ass of herself. But who knows, maybe all evidence to the contrary Chait knows something.

Horrid Little Woman

Megan McArdle has a long post up explaining how income loss really only matters when it happens to the riches. In what she seems to think is a QED moment, she appends this from a "bankruptcy attorney":

Another factor I've noticed with my bankruptcy clients is that a very rich person whose income takes a sudden precipitous drop to a still-pretty-good income can actually wind up in more financial trouble, faster, than a very poor person whose income drops to zero.  If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year, unless you have substantial liquid savings or are able to sell your house and your car and your boat yank your kids out of private school REALLY fast, you're going to wind up in bankruptcy in a fairly short space of time.  A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt.   Not that it's not still ultimately much better to be the rich person, but the rich person does get hit with a more panic-inducing financial calamity in the short term.

Having fallen so far, the riches have it much worse, even thought they still earn 125k per annum, because of panic induced by not having 200k per annum anymore. Meanwhile, our poor is home with her family plus her husband and kids but that dislocation doesn't matter because? And what if the parents live month to month in one bedroom apartment? Where do the poors go? What if only one of the poors loses their job? 36k with two kids to 18k with two kids say. Somehow or another staring homelessness and food deprevation in the face is less panic inducing than structured bankruptcy and a decent life on 125k?

Actually and to be fair, the bankruptcy attorney seems to think that poors are single and so they don't have to worry about kids, which is totally bullshit and emblematic of the horribleness of the defenders of the  riches.

It's not a case of no sympathy for the riches when things go bad; it's the case that the poors need help now while the riches have a whole system in place to protect them from the "creative destruction" of a neoliberal economic system come undone.

Fight

Obama responds to Romney and Cos lies about fixing the auto industry.



I like the value stuff @1:59

He Has Met The Enemy And His Is Them

David Brooks has a column up in which he laments the crazification of the Republican Party and castigates those mealy-mouthed RINOs who signed the Party's death notice by either moving to the right or tacitly endorsing the Tea Party/Glenn Beck crazies.

Well, you know if you, David Brooks, spent your career courageously standing up for reasonable conservatism then reasonable conservatism is another way of saying middle-brow bullshit enabling crazy talk. Just the other day, Brooks was lamenting the moral failure of the poors because it meant that they weren't able to get the jobs he and his fellows had shipped to China.

He writes columns based on serious misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of his source material; he writes books based on a serious misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of reality and science. His foray into castigating the poors' moral decline led him into further idiocy. The man is a walking, talking, living, and breathing advertisement of the complicity of the "reasonable" Republican elite in the creation of a small and growing ever smaller Party of racists, thugs, and war mongers.

More likely than not, he wrote this column because he decided he needed to pretend to abhor the situation he created. Why that is, I have no idea. The man's ignorance, mendacity, and intellectual dishonesty have so far served to make him one of the highest profile horrid little men in these United States, where laughter shall always be the best medicine. You would think now that his particular flock of chickens are coming home he would openly celebrating.

But maybe a lifetime spent in spewing squid ink hither and yon has made it impossible for the horrid little man to tell the truth.

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that he is just the right height.

Just Dessert

The other day I made a dessert that was so bad the squirrels wouldn't eat it:

I got a different recipe and tweaked it:

Dutch By Design

The Dutch are cool and, of course, just the right height. Here is an English-language blog on Dutch and others' plans for cycling friendly cities.

One Other Thing

The whole, entire, and complete reason for the folderoll about contraception on the Right's part escapes me. Do they really think that this country is populated by small-minded puritans for whom the best of times grows out of denying the pleasures of the flesh to others? It makes no sense. The vast majority of the human race is pretty pleasant; it's the one percenters like Santorum and the Koch Brothers who hate humanity and would be happiest, so their preferred policies suggest, when the world is a smoking ruin. How it is that they expect to survive the neoliberal apocalypse escapes me.

Human Resources Is a Misnomer

I recently applied for a some kind of a job. I got an email the other day explaining that all the applications had been feed into a computer which then didn't select me. The email, which is about was bog standard as it could be, came from a real person and asked me to log into the company's webpage to acknowledge having received the email. What is the point of a HR department that uses machines to make the important decisions and people to fulfill the routinized functions, you ask. It seems to me that by automating the process of selecting winners and losers the system forces us to think like machines. No longer will the cover letter matter but rather it matters that a machine reading your resume finds the various words,whatever they may be, that tell a machine that you can handle the job. It is, in other words, another step in dehumanizing humanity in the service of greater efficiency. Indeed, were I the HR human who wrote the bog standard letter, I would be busy changing careers as all HR humans are now redundant.

What's French For Bicycle?

If you need to get from here to there in France on a bike, here's the map for you. Also French guy on a Mixte:





 See also Scottish guy:

Horrid People

It isn't a secret that because of Citizens United and massive wealth, people like the Koch Brothers are running the Republican Party. Their front group ALEC writes anti-American and anti-Human legislation which their bought and paid for legislators duly submit. For anyone interested in the future of democracy as a going concern this kind of influence is beyond troubling. And rightly in my view,  President Obama is using these plutocrats undeserved political influence to run against robotic sociopathic plutocrat Mitt Romney.  Megan McArdle sees this and tries to mock the idea that anyone whose livelihood depends in total or in part on Koch cash is in the pay and pocket of these bloated plutocrats.

Why, one wonders, is necessary to hate America in order to be a spear carrier for authoritarians? Well, actually, I guess, the question answers itself.

Hoarding

Know someone who hoards? Maybe there is hope:





Source

Oh For Dumb

We joke about Mitt Romney being a robotic sociopath but this video (via the known universe) is an example of a man who has no idea what he is saying, how he sounds, or what well self fashioned humans say about the world around them:



Which trees, one wonders, are the wrong height? Bonsai? Islamofascist? Obama's? The man defines uncomfortable in his skin and filled with an empty void.

UPDATE:
A square foot of car quiz.

UPDATE:
Seriously, the right height? What does that mean? How can anyone construct a sentence like that? I love my kids they are just the right height. Honey, I love you, you're just the right height. Those Alps sure are lovely because they are just the right height.

The man belongs in a cage.

Name That Pie

Here we see the Wisconsin Republican Party pushing an ALEC inspired mining bill:




Here we see my latest attempt at pie:

 It's called frog or jagger pie, anyone have a better name?

What's The Matter With Republicans

Gerald Ford, by today's standards, was a moderate Republican. However, he carried within him the seeds of all that is wrong with the Republicans and the Neoliberals more generally. He hated pleasure and, consequently, failed to understand that there is more to life. How do we know? His

habitual lunch: “a ball of cottage cheese, over which he pours a small pitcherful of A.1. Sauce, a sliced onion or a quartered tomato, and a small helping of butter-pecan ice cream.” Eating was, Ford said, “a waste of time.”

Anyone who thinks like that ought not be allowed to vote let alone run a country.

Consider this epic assault on humanized economyfrom the NYT. It's no doubt true that if Germany undertook to "liberalize" its national economy it would become more "efficient," where efficient stands for increased poverty among the workers with a larger percentage of wealth going to a sliver of Germans. We know this to be true because it is the Neoliberal response to the success of the post-War prosperity caused by the mild social democracy then rampant.

It makes much more sense to insist that Germany give over its commitment to imposing Neoliberal austerity on the rest of the world in the hopes that more social democracy will again lead to a prosperous and happy society.

The Honored Dead

When Steve Jobs died everyone and her brother leaped to heap praise upon him. They conveniently ignored his warts, as is the practice when it comes to the dead. Here is a nice job of rewarting Jobs. The man was an asshole, his products are overpriced and overrated, he underpaid his employees and benefited from the neo-slavery imposed on workers in China.

A Quick Word

I've been to New York City recently and, much like the myth of Germanic humorlessness, the idea that New Yorkers are misanthropes is a lie: New Yorkers are among the nicest people in the world.

Higheightus

I'll be away for the next couple of days; no posting.

Choose Life

The audio is a Republican "pro-life legislator" explaining his vote for marriage equality:

The Real Solution

When it comes to Greece it's time to think big:

WWJD?

These two posts (the second via) do a nice job of making clear how little David Brooks knows about the ubiquity of athletes as aggressive Christians. There something else that bothers me. Brooks goes on about how

[f]or many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue.

And he seems to think that Jeremy Lin is trying to be authentically humble and live for God. Humility in action:



The fact of the matter is that no athlete is living for god or asking themselves What Would Jesus Do because if they did they would listen to Jesus and follow his advice for the riches of the world:

21Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. 22And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.
23And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! 24And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. 26And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved? 27And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

 It's just not that hard. Take care of the poor and work to create a world in that cares for the poor and the downtrodden regardless that's WJWD.

Reality Drives Reputation

I mentioned the other day that arguments that selfish multimillionaires acting like selfish multimillionaires isn't an example of "reputation" but rather of the reality that the very rich don't think like the rest of us. From Think  Progress comes evidence that a CNN poll indicates that 65% of Americans think that robotic sociopath Mitt Romney "favors the rich." This is another example of people knowing how the world works not that multimillionaire and robotic sociopath Mitt Romney has a "reputation" for "favoring the rich." It might even be, lord let's hope so, evidence that neoliberalism is losing its hold on the American political imagination.

Speaking of the latter point, over to Crooked Timber, there is post that offers a create your own adventure text on the Greek crisis. Here is it with hyperlinks.  The thing that struck me about the exercise is the inherent technocratisme  and the refusal to think about some non-neoliberal solution(s) to the problem  and the extent to which the whole discussion leaves the Greeks as citizens out of the discussion.  There are all manner of stories of riots, mayhem, theft, and exodus coming out of Greece. Here's a sort of sampler. Any solution to the problem that doesn't take seriously the plight of the average Greek isn't a solution; it's a means of punishing Greeks for neoliberalism's crimes.

Interviewed

Below are links to the two part Graeber interview. Here, however, is Mark Twain's rejection of transcribed interviews:

In a nutshell, his view was that the transcription of his was "like most interviews, pure twaddle and valueless."

Privilege

John Cassidy exposes the fundamental nature of privilege among the 1%. In a stupid and pointless exercise he offers various candidates for the presidency of the World Bank and the reasons why they would be or not be the next. When writing about Timothy Geitner, the presumptive favorite, Cassidy "argues" that

[h]aving already said he is leaving the Obama Administration after the election, he needs a new job. His father worked for the Ford Foundation in Asia, so he is familiar with foreign countries and development issues.

What better reasons could you ask for? He needs a job and his father was  a big deal. News flash, knowledge is not inheritable and Geitner doesn't need a job. There is no understanding here that the WB pursues a narrow neoliberal agenda that has hamstrung economic recovery and the possibility of living a decent life. No understanding that the conventional ideas shared by the vast horde of neoliberal technocrats not only led to the current mess but that it is curtailing meaningful reform and, oddly enough, restraining any attempt to get the old version of winner take all capitalism wheezing its way forward.

This is the kind of thing that makes reasonable people despair of our future. 

Perverts

This is the kind of interspecies rom-com future from which brave truth telling nut case Rick Santorum is trying to save us: