Want to

see some cool pictures of bikes and cycleing? Of course you do:

More here.

Thinking Ahead

Today one of the NRO buffla-heads discovers the horrible situation in Uganda. Way back when Obama sent troops to Uganda to help stop the horrific situation in Uganda caused by Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, horrid little man and vile lying lunatic Rush Limbaugh accused the President of waging war on Christianity.

It's not just his lies and vile rhetoric about Fluke and contraception, the man, if that's the word I want, is a walking talking example of all that is wrong, vile, and destructive in America's public discourse. And, whatismore, it is not a mistake that he is a conservative culture warrior. All that is vile, wrong and destructive in America's public discourse grows out of the need of the "cultural war" for lies, vile rhetoric, and wrong-headedness.

Rights, Responsibility, And Boycotts

This  vile, lying, cretin, both Maher and Sullivan, "think" ought not be punished because speech is a right. Liberty, the 18th century liberals and radicals, used to say is not  license. Here is a taste of his vile lies and bullshit:



Not one word he utters here about the pill or Fluke is true or has any basis in reality. He is a horrid little man.

see also.

Andrew Sullivan

is just plain silly. Watching how a democratic polity polices unhealthy and undemocratic speech he finds that although

[i]t's a free country. . . [he] get queasy with boycotts to target disgusting but free speech.

So if vile, lying, vindictive, morons spread malicious lies and vitriolic bile on their fellow citizens, Sullivan suggest, the solution is to live and let live; after free speech. This is the kind empty-headed  silliness that insists that the existence of a natural or man-made right means that there can be no consequences for its exercise. Clearly this is wrong. Worse yet just today Limbaugh, show that his infinite capacity for growth is all about girth, (allegedly) read a book and didn't like its conclusion and so he complained of about

all of these young, single, white women, overeducated — doesn’t mean intelligent.

If the man isn't show the error of his ways day after day he will continue to poison the well.

Indeed

Obama, we are told, is a push over for the tough-talking Right wingers:



(video via)

How To Win a Culture War

If the Right loses the ability to lie about other people and then pour vitriol and vile language on their  fellow citizens, the phony "culture war" disappears. Obama, for all his faults, understands or seems to understand this:



Who knows maybe things are look up, all evidence to the contrary.

(video via)

Religious Exceptions

The Right want's to allow moral and religious standards to govern obedience to secular law, at least when it's their ox being gored. How, one wonders, do they view (via) this particular case of the religious objections:

Dozens of Israel Postal Company employees in Ramat Gan refused to distribute thousands of copies of the New Testament to city residents. They claimed such distribution is forbidden according to the halacha laws, and might even be illegal.

This is the kind of situation that arises when nut jobs seek to Balkanize  one nation under God, as it were. On what level do they think that dividing us against ourselves on narrow theological grounds represents 100 percent Americanism.

Failure to Communicate

Over to the NRO Jason Lee Steorts misses the point about the Rights "culture war." He warns that 

[t]he article by Angela Morabito to which Kathryn links is a good example of how conservatives must not sound if they wish to win the debate over the HHS mandate. It suggests that Sandra Fluke has too much sex, says she speaks for “skanks who don’t want to take responsibility for their choices,” and rebukes her for having “missed the ten commandments.” Maybe the author was trying to be funny, but instead she conveys arrogance, condescension, and a total lack of manners. 

But it’s not just about manners. It’s also about making the right arguments. Nothing in this debate hinges on the particular sexual choices of Sandra Fluke, whatever they may be. (She might have been a married student who wished to use contraception with her husband.) And nothing hinges on whether the Catholic teaching about contraception is sound. The fundamental point is twofold: that the government should not dictate to private institutions what sort of health-care coverage they must provide, and that the government should not force a religious institution to violate its conscience. There are a great many people who hold this position but are disgusted by remarks like Morabito’s. They are people we need on our side

.

The Obama administration would like nothing more than to drag opponents of the HHS mandate into debates over the character of a particular young woman or the moral permissibility of contraception. These are traps. Don’t walk into them.

They vitriol and vile name calling are ancillary to the "culture war"; they are the the "cultural war." A reasoned debate about the state's power to set standards for health insurance and the limits of religious and moral convictions in evading these standards is an argument the Right loses, at least in part because of the hysteria they have been whipping up over Sharia.

The non-existent "culture war" can only be waged in the twilight of lies, distortions and invective; once mannered debate and facts come into play, the Right loses its base of rageholics and fails to persuade the average American, who really doesn't care what its neighbors get up to. Most of the Right now this and that's why they lie, distort, and use vile  invective, like the horrid little men and  women they are.

Set For Life

Oddly enough this ended up in my Spam:

Attention:

My name is Mr Ibrahim Abdullahi Lamorde the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) New Executive Officer in Nigeria. I was until  my appointment the Director of Operations of the EFCC. I understand you were expecting your fund sum to be wired to your bank account for so long but your expectation was not met.

I am contacting you to let you know the truth because i know how far you must have gone in trying to get your funds paid out to you under  the leadership of the erstwhile Chairperson Mrs Farida Waziri. Which  has caused you to pay huge sums of money into wrong hands most  especially to Fraudsters who frequently impersonate the identity of real Government and Bank Officials to help make themselves and their  scam appear legitimate.

I will be ready to help in delivering your fund sum to you with your honest and sincere co-operation with my Office.

Sincerely,
Mr Ibrahim Lamorde,
Chairman,
EFCC.

Free at last.

Now That's A Recovery

Via we learn that the top 1 percent absorbed 93 percent of the wealth created during the recent "recovery." Let's hear it for expansionary austerity and Neoliberalism more generally.

Odd Choices

Dr, Suess, it seems, once wanted to be taken seriously as an adult author.  Consequently, he wrote and illustrated a book on the Godiva sisters. The book disappeared without a whimper. Suess claimed that

[he] attempted to draw the sexiest babes [he] could, but they came out looking absurd.

Judge for yourself:

Neoliberalism Explained

Robert Walser[1] once wrote:

I only know that all the poor people work in the factory, perhaps as a punishment for being so poor.

The consensus is that he was being ironical; the Republicans, conservatives, the Right, and Neoliberals more generally mean it and, consequently, work is the punishment for not having Romney's parents.

[1] About whom more later.

Culture War

Rush Limbaugh sort of apologized for being a vile, lying, cretinous bastard, which is to say a proud member of the Conservative Movement. In the course of that apology he continued to distort reality and consequently implied that that his cretinous and vile lies and language we're, in fact, the result of the target of his hate-filled lying and vile nonsense. Some see this as a step in the right direction; others think, rightly in my opinion, that the response is simply one more example of the shameless lying and vileness without which the "culture war" could not continue.

And this is, I think, the point that has to be emphasized: Limbaugh constructed a lie and then became enraged about his lie and consequently attacked an innocent human being in the vilest way he could think of. That he was telling one lie after another is obvious. As one example, there is no  correlation between the number of times anyone has sex and the amount of birth control pills needed. It's not, in other words, like condoms.

The fact of the matter is that there has never been a "culture war" in this country but rather a bunch of dishonest, vile, and contemptuous conservatives who fear freedom and liberty used one lie after another to whip up a  minority of the population.

This isn't, I know, news. It does, sort of, help to remember that the only way the Right wins is to lie in the vilest and most obvious way possible.

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