The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings at the Ragged Edge of the American Century

Aiieee! Nooooo! Not the exploding underwear!

2009-12-29T21:35:00.006-05:00

Wednesday December 30th, 2009

. . . .This is one in particular that I'm going to ask you to, if you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, that you switch over to the external site, The Desolation Angel, and be able to catch the videos and embedded playlist.

. . . . .I wrote one here a while back about the 25th Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden back on Halloween weekend, and the 4 hour broadcast of the compiled nights, and absolute highlight of the two nights, the penultimate number of the second night, Gimme Shelter, as done by U2, Mick and the Black-Eyed Peas, 3 generations, 40 years worth of genre crossing musicians and how it tore the house down. Well kiddies, here it is. Go up to the uppermost left corner of the webpage, look for the podcast player. Look for the narrow horizontal bar with Podbean on it, go to the three buttons on the left edge of the bar, and push the middle one, that's the pause control for the podcast and playlist, then hit play on the video below, sit back and be in awe. Of all of them, it's Fergie that absolutely tears the shit out of the song. 5 minutes of what rock and roll is. Enjoy.

. . . . .And so, on we go. You know what we're good at in this country? We're great at knee-jerk reacting to symptoms. We're great at instant reactions that don't do a fucking thing for cause, and treat entirely the wrong thing. So now, thanks to an spoiled little rich kid, who ineptly burned his balls off and has gotten the strike-terror-into-your-soul nickname of "The Underpants Bomber", some middle-aged couple with two kids from Des Moines who are flying to Salt Lake City are going to have their underwear searched while waiting in a three hour long line at security. Yeah, makes me feel a lot goddam safer.

. . . From The Brad Blog:

Add this to our post yesterday calling for a 'War on Lightning', since the chances of being a victim of same in any given year (1:500,000) are so much higher than being a victim of terrorism on an airplane in the last ten years (1:10,408,947).

And yet it's those nasty terrorists the cowardly wingnuts are afraid of. Lack of health insurance? Salmonella? Firearms? Not so much.

Blue Texan at firedoglake has more...

. . . .Treating true causes? Understanding causal effect? Doing root cause analysis? We're fucking morons as a country, true mouth-breathing idiots. Understanding the real reasons behind things and complex system analysis, things on a geo-political and geo-economic scale? Nah, we're not so good at that.

. . . And why is the T.S.A. making such idiotic decisions? Could it be because they're overseen and administered by a governmental body almost as inept as The Underpants Bomber, they'd be called the United States Congress. Ezra Klein:

World's most embarrassing legislative body, cont'd

You know what would be good to have right now? Strong and seasoned leadership at the Transportation Security Administration. But the TSA hasn't had a director for about a year. Why? The dysfunctions of the Senate, that's why.

President Obama’s nominee to the post, Erroll G. Southers, has been blocked from confirmation by Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican. Mr. DeMint has asked Mr. Southers, a former F.B.I. agent, to clarify his position on whether T.S.A. workers have a right to be unionized. Mr. Southers is currently the assistant chief for homeland security and intelligence at Los Angeles International Airport and a well-known academic authority on terrorism risk analysis.

And did the attack mollify DeMint? Did it convince him of the error of his hold-happy ways? Not so much. The attempted attack, DeMint said, "is a perfect example of why the Obama administration should not unionize the T.S.A." Sigh.

Photos of the Northwest Airlines Bomb

. . . .I realize full well that the above photos are pretty damn serious, but the more I look at them, the more I just can't stop laughing, and also sticking by what I said yesterday. That is definitely a trigger I won't pull, I like my dick too much to even think about asking it to make that kind of sacrifice.

. . . . . . And what is T.S.A. making these decisions in response to? Why the diabolical Underpants Bomber of course. Bob Cesca chief correspondent Elvis Dingledein:

THEY’RE TERRIFYING BECAUSE THEIR BALLS EXPLODE

By BCAB Chief Teh Terrors Analyst Elvis Dingeldein.

Let’s just take a minute to appreciate the magnificent progress our explodery friends at Al-Qaeda (“Making Terror Terrifying Since 1988”) have made since September 11™, 2001, shall we? While promised 24-style mushroom clouds and dirty bombs capable of reducing panicked Hollywood extras to mildly-glowing human uranium sacks by the Oh Noes, Terror! crew at Fox News, what we’ve uncovered instead is an organization so Wile-E.-Coyote-desperate that they’re mobilizing half-witted Yemeni supervillains whose primary means of inflicting Teh Terrors on us is an exploding nutsac. Faced with this new threat, I think it’s time we peopled 85% of Homeland Security (Motto: “Who Did The What Now?”) with Inspector Clouseauses.

But think about it, seriously: From ingeniously coordinated hijackery to a desperate goon with blasty bollocks. If nothing else, this latest round of Boo, Whitey! nonsense from our cave-dwelling arch enemies should at least—outside of Fox News, of course—remove the Dreaded Mastermind meme from our national discourse about terrorism. Since 9/11™ we’ve been all too happy to assign James Bond Secret Volcano Lair Master Villain status to those bearded Virgin-Lovers who are somehow capable of plotting plotty plots against us using a dirt floor, a few cave drawings and a bit of a stick. “Mastermind” sounds scary, assigns Diabolical Genius to events more driven by Sheer Luck, and gives the mainstream media its classic bogeyman. Post-Christmas-Ball-Bomber, we can finally shed the Mastermind Meme and—for the time being, at least—point and laugh at the guy who strapped some scary powder to his Scrotal Terror Delivery Apparatus and failed to make his plums go pow.
Merry Christmas, al-Qaeda! You’re doing great!

. . . .So, let's see. We had to start taking our shoes off after the failed Shoe Bomber incident. We had to start chucking our water bottles after the failed Liquid Explosive incident. I can hardly wait to see what the permanent response to the failed Underpants Bomber is, and what we'll have to take off before we get to the security checkpoint. Puts a whole new light on your Mom's harping on you to wear clean underwear before you travel now, doesn't it?

. . . .I won't forgive the Clinton and Bush Administrations for having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and not acting on that intelligence (if you're a newer reader, go back to July in the archives where I detail what information they had). As I've begun saying about Obama, he's now SameAsTheOtherGuy, in other words, no different. The following, from The Political Carnival, speaks volumes, and needs no other intro:

U.S. Had Information Before Christmas of a Terror Plot

By GottaLaff

Via an e-mail alert from the New York Times:
Two officials said the United States government had intelligence from Yemen before Christmas that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about "a Nigerian" being prepared for a terrorist attack.

. . . .Like I said, we don't do shit in this country about going after true root causes, about attacking causal effect, about going after the true answers buried underneath the bullshit. Instead we want the Mcdonald's Drive-thru answer, we want the USA Today 30 second read answer. Christopher Hitchens has the best analysis put out yet in the last 96 hours, as picked up by Little Green Footballs:

Again, Christopher Hitchens cuts through the nonsense: The truth about airplane security measures.

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can’t—or won’t. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to “feel safe.” The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens’ toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated “threat level” from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn’t it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets.

Read the whole thing…

. . . .And again, it's because we want simplicity, fundamentalism in our answers. We want boogeman, bad guys, good guys in white hats. We don't want to think, we want our answers given to us, we want all the pictures to be color by number and we want the colors laid out simply for us. We only want 12 crayons in the box. And it stems from how we think and how we view the world. Frank Schaeffer, in his blog today picked up on it, and does a great analysis:

The media-labeled “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have put forward what they regard as the answer to religion: grow up human race and abandon your myths!

Most Americans and maybe even most people around the world, have another answer to the extremes of religion that infect people like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who (allegedly) tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit: hunt down and kill the extremists.

I think just about everyone has missed the real point: religion won’t go away because – like it or not—people are spiritual beings.

Telling religious people to be moderate is not going to solve anything once they are convinced everyone not like them is the enemy of “truth.” Killing more people just makes martyrs. That being the case the way to confront religious poison is to change religion, not try to win by eliminating it. And that change means we have to try and get to the next generation before the fundamentalists do.

The only real solution to religious extremism is to change the conversation about religion altogether.

We urgently need to make that conversation center on embracing paradox rather than seeking – then trying to impose by force and or “reason” – our pet certainties on others.

How do we change the conversation about religion, roll back the violence done in the name of God (be that by gay-hating American “Christian” fundamentalists or world-fearing “Islamic” radicals -- and while we’re at it end the culture war here at home that divides us on everything from the existence of God to abortion and gay rights?

How do we live together in a world where some people fervently believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that gay men and women choose to be gay and can “change” if they want to, that Jesus will soon return (and thus that war in the Middle East is a good thing because it is a “sign” of the much-hoped-for “End Times”) while other people just as fervently believe that people who hold such views are dumb, evil and dangerous?.. . . . .
Does raising the volume help as we shout at each other, mock one another and ramp up our own self-fulfilling “prophecies” of doom? Or is there an alternative?
Would Bill Maher have been able to mock the would-be bomber into a change of heart by making fun of his belief in “imaginary friends?” What if our radicalized and hate-filled American gun-loving, Obama-hating evangelicals with their gay bashing rhetoric could also have once been reached? If so how?

Evangelical/fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists and for that matter atheist fundamentalists who stick with their program are forced to try to reconcile the irreconcilable. That tends to piss them off! That tends to make them look for simple solutions from one line Maher-style punch lines to suicide bombs that will once and for all “answer” people with another point of view and shut them up!

Evangelical/fundamentalists and fundamentalist atheists have bought into an idea that my evangelical missionary mother used to phrase as a dire warning: “If you pick and choose between verses in the Bible, the whole thing will unravel! If it’s not all true, none of it is!”

Because picking and choosing is what thinking is, thinking becomes a threat to people who are certain they are right. Who knows where asking questions might lead?

What Islamic, Christian and/or atheist fundamentalists won’t admit is that all fundamentalists do pick and choose, by necessity, when interpreting their beliefs.

Seen any adulterers stoned to death in a church lately? Somewhat less dramatically, but just as tellingly, if you are an evangelical/ fundamentalist churchgoer, have you recently heard that Bible verse in Genesis about how “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives” preached on? And if you are a Hitchens/Dawkins/Maher follower have you read any good essays by them on the weirdly symbiotic relationship between some bloodthirsty secular regimes (China anyone?) and atheist beliefs?
Is there another way to look at “truth” issues that might not lead to hate? Yes. It’s called apophatic theology and can be applied to both secular and religious ideas.

Evagrius Ponticus (a fourth century monk) summed up this view, saying “Do not define the Deity: for it is only of things which are made or are composite that there can be definitions.” In fact, a whole anti-theology came to be called apophatic theology, or the theology of not knowing, or negative theology. It speaks only about what may not be said about God. And this way of perceiving God is found not just in Christianity but in other religions too.

This theology takes a mystical approach related to individual experiences of the Divine beyond ordinary perception. It teaches that the Divine is ineffable, something that can be recognized only when it is felt, then remembered. And therefore all descriptions of this sense will be false, because by definition the experience of God eludes description.

Apophatic descriptions of God acknowledge (1) that neither the existence of God nor nonexistence, as we understand these words in the material world, applies to God, (2) that God is divinely simple and that one should never claim God is “one” or “three” or any “type” of being, (3) that we can’t say that God is “wise,” because that implies knowledge of what wisdom is on a divine scale, and (4) that to say that God is “good” also limits God to what that word means in the context of human behavior.

If we want to change the religion debate the same could and should be applied to all philosophy and even to science. There is a difference between opinion and changing/evolving information and absolute and changeless fact. If we’d divide the practical everyday “facts” from making huge and out-sized cosmological “conclusions” we’d all be better off.

We’d also be closer to the truth that we can’t know anything conclusively because we are evolving and not “there” yet (wherever there is!) and also we are part of the paradox we’re seeking to unravel. In other words rather than strapping bombs on ourselves to eliminate the other, we might instead “strap” on a bit of humility be that atheist humility in the face of tenacious spirituality or religious humility in the face of the very apparent contradiction of some of religion’s fondest beliefs by science.

Recognizing that paradox is the way things are is about more than theological conflicts.
The point is to agree on a better vision of where we want to evolve to, not just physically but also ethically.

That is a project that believers and agnostics and atheists can and should agree on. We don’t have to “fit” our ideas about how we perceive things together in order to work together. We can be the same “particle” but exist in two places at once.

. . . . .Sound oddly familiar to any regular readers of this column? Just think, that's all I'm asking anyone to do. Just stop, slow down, take a deep breath, and think.

. . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.
. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

There are no endings, only beginings

2009-12-27T22:45:00.008-05:00

Monday December 28, 2009

. . . . . .First up, I need to thank everyone for their kind notes on the last post I put up here in the column just before the Christmas break, most importantly, given that post, I need to say this. . . .

. . . .Best. Christmas. Ever.

. . . .with 2 exclamation points. !!

. . . .Seriously, I, at one point, earlier in the Fall, was ready to have one of my worst Christmases ever, but at some point in there, decided that it would be what I made it, and that I wouldn't let anything or anyone else dictate how I was going to spend this Christmas or how I was going to feel.

. . . .And that I would do everything I could do to rediscover Christmas.

. . . .I gave it up, and Christmas rediscovered me.

. . . The only way to receive is to give. No expectations, no one knowing you're doing it, or why, no even hinting to people about what you're doing, do it not to receive, but to make someone else feel good, and not let them know who did it.

. . . .My kitchen is complete. I have knives again, and matching silverware, and a new toaster, and real glasses, made from glass, not plastic, and a food processor, a coffee carousel for the Keurig, you name it, it is now complete.

. . . .First item made - homemade chicken noodle soup and sandwiches with a mayo-pesto spread.

. . . .I have Trans-Siberian Orchestra tickets for next weekend. Heavy-metal Christmas music, yup, that's me.

. . . . .I have a Kindle now, a dream come true for a reader like me, who travels so much and spends much of his life in airports and hotel rooms.

. . . .What did that get loaded up with right away?

. . . . .Now, in my world, there's always reality. Like I said, we'd fought weather for the previous 2 weeks out where I work, 40 mile an hour plus winds, 12 to 15 foot waves, 40 degree temperatures, 100 percent humidity, and sideways rain. We didn't fly at least 50% of the days, and the day I got in, that we got in, was dicey at best, and it was only a 24 hour window. On Christmas Eve, I got word that a helo had flipped on one of our platforms. I don't have any other details, it's been a holiday weekend, I'll find out more tomorrow.

. . . .We're a pretty tight bunch of rock and roll cowboys from Hell, fairly close knit outlaws, renegades, pirates and bikers. We know the hazards, we know the risks, and we know what we do each and every day to take care of our kids.

. . . .By the way, if you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, switch over to the external site, The Desolation Angel, to pick up on the podcast. The music is brand new, and different as always, and most of it you can't hear anywhere else. There's a lot of unreleased stuff, some alternate takes, some demos, some live stuff off of soundboards in clubs.

. . . .The other part of it is my voice, I'm back doing the intro again. In my world, I stay silent from after Sundance until after Winter Solstice. I'm back.

. . . .Now, 3, not 2, but 3 things of huge import happened over the 4 day Christmas holiday.
(1) The Senate passed their version of the Health Care Reform bill, solidly cementing America as the United States of Corporate America, Inc.
(2) A spoiled little rich kid, (who by the way was also pathetically stupid and inept) tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight.
(3) The people of Iran have risen up, once again, and are dying in the streets trying to overthrow Ahmadenijad and the Mullahs

. . . .I'll tackle these in order.

. . . . . .Health Care Reform. If you don't have a clue that the guy you elected is SameAsTheOldGuy by now, you've got not a clue about anything period. What this bill will do, once the two versions are reconciled and signed is simple. It will not improve delivery or medical care, it will only make the insurers, the medical equipment manufacturers and the pharmaceutical manufacturers much, much richer. As in "Too big to fail" rich. It will mandate coverage, and the type of coverage you'll get. This "marketplace" (love that phrase), will not provide competitive pricing. In other words, what the Senate did was guarantee their lobbyists and campaign contributors everything they'd been told to do. By not removing the anti-trust exemption for health insurers, they've taken Godzilla and given him more radiation.

. . . .Oh yes, if you're a woman, get ready to write two checks per month for your coverage, as the one medical procedure that was controversial enough to need a Supreme Court decision on it to make it legal, isn't covered and can't have any money used for it by your mandated coverage that you'll pay for.

. . . . .If you're a Conservative or a Republican, you should be dancing in the streets. This is the ultimate triumph of capitalism and the "free market" (makes a little vomit come up in my mouth, this is the furthest thing from a free market, this is corporatism at it's finest). This is the members of the Senate not redistributing wealth in a manner of from those who have to those who don't, but redistributing from those who have a little to those who already had a shitload of cash, and further lining their wallets.

. . . .If you're a Leftie, or a Progressive, you should be dancing big circles too. It is a matter of Federal subsidies for those who can't afford this coverage, again, with the government acting as a redistributor of wealth from those who got some, passing through those who got nothing, to be passed to those who have a buttload of cash. That's what a subsidy is. From Yglesias, and Krugman, too:

Via Paul Krugman, a nice chart from the Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator showing federal subsidies as a percentage of premium costs for families at different income levels:

This is in some ways not as generous as maybe it should be to families in the 300-400 percent of federal poverty line range. But you’re looking at very large subsidies for poor and working class families in this legislation, financed by taxes whose incidence will fall overwhelmingly and those with more means than most.

. . . . .Now, on to what happened on that Northwest flight from Amsterdam that was landing in Detroit Metro, let's make a couple of points. The suspect is pathetically inept. He was instructed to set it off while the flight was over land. That's a shitload of land it covered from the time it crossed the East Coast to landing in Detroit, and he didn't do it until landing. He obviously wasn't wearing it properly, and had the detonator too far from the explosive, since due to the amount of explosive that it contained, had it gone off properly, would have blown the shit out of that airliner. The passenger that tackled him, now, that's a hero, folks, and someone needs to find him and buy him some fucking dinner, for a year.

. . . . .The suspect is not Iraqi, nor Afghani. He's a spoiled little banker's son from London who lived in a $2 million dollar a month flat in London and went to a very prestigious university. His Dad gave him up while he was on the way to the hospital . He obtained what he needed in Yemen. The system failed period. He was on a watch list, and was allowed to board an airliner. Just like 9/11, it's turning out that there were a tremendous number of disparate pieces of intelligence about him that were never collated, agencies did not talk to one another, the systemic problem of being unable to collate a picture and no one puts it all together.

. . . . This is what terrorism truly is, and why it's pathetic. It has altered, again, the way we travel in this country. (Youngest son is in Hawaii over Christmas break, same as the Prez, and is flying Northwest home, this oughta be a nightmare.). I travel for a living, on Northwest, what it's going to do is add another couple of hours to my travel days on each side. There a number of new travel restrictions that will make what is already the unpleasant experience of flying even more unbearable. The new travel restrictions being talked about? No blankets on your lap, no carry-ons at all period, and the most amazing one; no bathroom or rest room use. Everyone's underwear will be checked. So people from Des Moines, and Waukesha and Shreveport and Dallas will be put through even more torturous travel experiences, but no one will check a young man from Yemen or Saudi Arabia for fear of being accused of profiling. Get real.

. . . .From Little Green Footballs:

Bruce Schneier is exactly right — the new TSA rule about staying seated for the last hour of flight is completely silly.

And what sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won’t think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight?

For years I’ve been saying this:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

This week, the second one worked over Detroit. Security succeeded.

. . . .Oh yeah, (extreme grossness alert here), expect your underwear to get checked, since that's how the explosive was fitted. I'm sorry, but I am NOT blowing my dick up for any reason, or any political cause, I have way too many issues around that, and way too many practical and fun uses for it.

. . . . .Al-Queada has metastized and mutated, and has now become the enemy it's impossible to fight. They are a virus that has spread, and now can sit in the background and make impossible to detect devices that disaffected little shits can go purchase and get instructions on how to use.

. . . . And if I hear Janet Napolitano say one more time that "the system worked" I'm gonna have a seizure in my chair like John Belushi used to on Saturday Night Live. It didn't work, the man boarded a plane wearing a plastic explosive and there were no air marshals on board. He didn't wear it right and didn't set it off right, and a passenger had to tackle him to save everyone. The system didn't work. Period.

. . . . .The students and young people of Iran have once again taken to the streets, unbowed and indefatigable, and desperately want to overthrow Ahmadenjad and the High Cleric, and we sit here, fat and happy, all filled with Christmas cheer and ignoring it. The populace of that country wants to overthrow the man who is going to nuclear capable within a year, and still we sit in Iraq, which we haven't left yet, and build up troops in Afghanistan and we sit and do nothing for the people dying in the streets in Iran desperately wanting a different form of government and different leaders, wanting to throw off the yoke of Shariiya law enforced by the mullahs. What has Mr. SameAsTheOldGuy have to say? Nothing.

. . . .Mousavi, the oppostion leader's nephew, was assasinated, but that may, according to Andrew Sullivan, have been a bad mistake:

The Assassination Of Ali Mousavi

More details emerge:

Unlike the other protesters reported killed on Sunday, Ali Moussavi appears to have been assassinated in a political gesture aimed at his uncle, according to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an opposition figure based in Paris with close ties to the Moussavi family. Mr. Moussavi was first run over by a sport utility vehicle outside his home, Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote on his Web site. Five men then emerged from the car, and one of them shot Mr. Moussavi. Government officials took the body late Sunday and warned the family not to hold a funeral, Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote.

Juan Cole adds some punch to what we already know about Ali:

Killing a sayyid is a blot on any Iranian government. Doing so on Ashura, the day of morning for the martyred grandson of the Prophet, Imam Husayn, borders on insanity.

. . . .Andrew goes on to make a couple of more salient points this morning as to why this is so important, and why we need to pay close attention to it. It goes far beyond the simple Muslim-Iran-Nuclear Proliferation equation, and draws close parallels to something that is entirely possible in this country, that is the embedding of a theocracy, in our case, a Christian theocracy, as a fundamental form of government, and how dangerous that is to the precepts of liberty, freedom and individual determinism:

There are two critical lines that were crossed yesterday. The first was widespread savagery and violence by the junta on the day of Ashura. This breaks a profound taboo, violates the integrity and core meaning of the religious festival, and places the regime symbolically as the enemy of Shia Islam. This has offended not just the urban elites but the pious poor and rural population. Unrest was all over the country yesterday:
The decision by the authorities to use deadly force on the Ashura holiday infuriated many Iranians, and some said the violence appeared to galvanize more traditional religious people who have not been part of the protests so far. Historically, Iranian rulers have honored Ashura’s prohibition of violence, even during wartime ... Protests and clashes also broke out in the cities of Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz, Arak, Tabriz, Najafabad, Babol, Ardebil and Orumieh, opposition Web sites said.
The second was the calculated assassination of Ali Mousavi, the rightful president's nephew. This creates a martyr connected to the leader of the Green Movement, and provides a cycle of more mourning and potential for unrest. That may explain the following troubling news:

A relative of Iran's opposition leader says the body of the leader's nephew has been removed from a hospital without the family's permission, a day after he was slain in an anti-government protest. Reza Mousavi said Monday that the body of his brother, Ali Mousavi, was taken from a Tehran hospital, possibly by authorities seeking to deter mourners from organizing more protests around his funeral.
With each violation of basic Muslim norms, the regime is revealing itself as a military junta, using religion purely as a means to retain power. Which is what always happens in theocracy. Total power does not feed faith; it destroys it. And then that corrupted faith wages war on its enemies.
There is more at stake here than simply one country. We are seeing the two great forces of our time - fundamentalism and freedom - fight for humanity's soul.

. . . .So, a sampling from around the spectrum, of course, the lead for me, is always the economy. From the New York Times, Krugman, on the decade about to pass, and Thank the Creator it's finally leaving:

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.
It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.
Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.
So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.
For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.
Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration’s top economist), gave in 1999. “If you ask why the American financial system succeeds,” he said, “at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities.” And he went on to declare that there is “an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does.”
So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.
What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.
What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.
Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.
So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

. . . .I'm with Krugman, especially given some of the stats I see. From BuzzFlash, this little one that details how 1% of the population of the United States controls 42% of the wealth:

Many Americans are not buying the recent stock market rally. This is being reflected in multiple polls showing negative attitudes towards the economy and Wall Street. Wall Street is so disconnected from the average American that they fail to see the 27 million unemployed and underemployed Americans that now have a harder time believing the gospel of financial engineering prosperity. Americans have a reason to be dubious regarding the recovery because jobs are the main push for most Americans. A recent study shows that over 70 percent of Americans derive their monthly income from an actual W-2 job. In other words, working is the prime mover and source of their income. Yet the financial elite have very little understanding of this concept. Why? 42 percent of financial wealth is controlled by the top 1 percent. We would need to go back to the Great Depression to see such lopsided data.

Many Americans are still struggling at the depths of this recession. We have 37 million Americans on food stamps and many wait until midnight of the last day of the month so checks can clear to buy food at Wal-Mart. Do you think these people are starring at the stock market? The overall data is much worse:

Source: William Domhoff

If we break the data down further we will find that 93 percent of all financial wealth is controlled by the top 10 percent of the country. That is why these people are cheering their one cent share increase while layoffs keep on improving the bottom line. But what bottom line are we talking about here? The Wall Street crowd would like you to believe that all is now good that the stock market has rallied 60+ percent. Of course they are happy because they control most of this wealth. Yet the typical American still has negative views on the economy because they actually have to work to earn a living:

.. . . .And no day is complete without my daily shot at the wingnuts, the fever swamp dwellers over in their little Teabagging compound barricaded against the forces that have taken away "their America". Let me put this one simple. One of your masturbatory fantasy leaders, Michelle Bachmann, is a welfare queen. From Yasha Levine over at TruthDig:

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.”

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

However, Bachmann doesn’t think other Americans should benefit from such protection and assistance. She voted against every foreclosure relief bill aimed at helping average homeowners (despite the fact that her district had the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota), saying that bailing out homeowners would be “rewarding the irresponsible while punishing those who have been playing by the rules.” That’s right, the subsidy queen wants the rest of us to be responsible.
Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her personal stake in the family farm is worth up to $250,000. They also show that she has been earning income from the farm business, and that the income grew in just a few years from $2,000 to as much as $50,000 for 2008. This has provided her with a second government-subsidized income to go with her job as a government-paid congresswoman who makes $174,000 per year (in addition to having top-notch government medical benefits). “If she has an interest in a farm getting federal subsidy payments, she is benefiting from them,” Sandra Schubert, director of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, told Gannett News Service in 2007, when the subsidies to Bachmann were first publicly disclosed.

. . .So, it's back into the swing, talk to you all tomorrow.

. . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.
. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

Christmas 2009

2009-12-23T09:20:00.003-05:00

Christmas 2009

. . . ..You,ll forgive me, I work in remote places and getting home for Christmas this year was a nightmare, we hadn't flown for 6 days due to storms and high winds, and had a 24 hour opening and shot, and took it and got ourselves home.

. . . . .We got back on land, safely and after essentially only 10 days home in 3 months, and those 10 days split between my Mom's funeral and Thanksgiving, there wasn't a lot of time, oh yes, and I'd moved into a new place in a little village in all that too.

. . . ..So, since I last put something up here a lot has happened, and there will be plenty to talk about, . . . .but we'll talk about all that next week as we close the year and the decade out.

. . . .What we need to talk about today, and it is traditional in this column, is Christmas, and more importantly, how I discovered Christmas in my heart again this year.

. . . .I'm loud, opinionated, cynical and smart as hell, I know that. It reflects and shows through in this column daily. I use it to cover a big heart that wants to believe, badly needs to believe.

. . . . .I live alone in small village, in an old house, beautiful place. I didn't write another column right away when I got home, I didn't get myself busy with work.

. . . .I wanted to believe in Christmas again, needed to believe in it.

. . . .I went all Clark Griswold on the outside of not just this house, but another house as well, lights everywhere. Spent a Saturday night searching two Meijer's and a Target that were out of Christmas lights (Bastards! Unheard of!) Instead got saved on Sunday morning by the little hardware store in town that has everything.

. . . . .I was compelled to put up a tree, to open every box that came with me from the divorce, and finally, after many years, put all the Christmas up.

. . . . .Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

. . . .It is the day that pulls all the years past, all the years to come, together and symbolizes the bonds that we hold as family and friends.

. . . .I drove into town and sought out the tree lot that we'd used for years, Virgil and Jim's. It's still there, though old Virgil is 92 now, and his son-in-law said "can't remember what he can't remember", and it is a beautiful tree, a gorgeous tree, I don't care if no one else ever sees it, I see it, and it's up, and it's my symbol, my faith in renewal, in the years rolling on and meaning something.

. . . .As I put up the Nativity scene that had been in my folk's house forever, put up the Christmas mailbox that had come from my grandparent's house, pulled out the treetopper that had sat on top of our grandparents tree, as I pulled box after box after box out of my village and it's people (I've got a big damn village), I couldn't stop sobbing. I finally understood Jimmy Stewart rushing around his village like a madman, I finally got how the Grinch's heart could grow 3 sizes that day. I got it.

. . . .I believe again.

. . . .When my boys came over on Sunday night to put on the ornaments that were their's, I'm sure they were surprised to see that finally, after a lot of grim years, it was Christmas again, and I'd put the effort into putting things up they remembered.

. . . .So yes, I've got a bit to finish up this morning, and I'll get to that, there'll be time, and it'll all be good.

. . . . .So go be Santa for someone today. Buy someone who doesn't expect from you something, sign it Santa, leave it on their doorstep or on their car, never admit to it and give them a gift, help them to believe.

. . . .Pet a dog, hold a door, be patient, be kind, and believe in one another, and most importantly, believe in Christmas and Santa, it's real because it's what we hold in our hearts.

. . . .Tell your family and your kids that you love them, and believe in yourself, in your own ability to be an angel, to help someone, to carry it all forward.

Merry Christmas

The Desolation Angel

Oh no, there it is??

2009-12-16T12:12:00.007-05:00

Thursday December 17, 2009

. . . . . .Worst sound in the world when you've been out to sea 16 days and are waiting to get back to the beach? . . . .6th day of foghorn.

. . . .Lonesome, ornery and mean, I believe that Mr. Jennings, that's Waylon to most of you, put it best.

. . . .And speaking of Mr. Jennings, Shooter is getting his new album ready, and there's a download of his latest single over at ShooterJennings.com, go there, click and get it. Listen. Hard. It's worth it, and Shooter has a bunch of his old man in him, trust me. He's damn good. He's formed a new band, Heirophant, and the new album Black Ribbons will be available in March of this year. The new single Wake Up is available for pre-order for download on Dec. 22nd in two mixes, the album mix and The Pig Flu mix. Do not screw around, go there, get it.

. . . .Sometimes, Facebook absolutely sucks, as in, I'm stuck out here at work, but I get to keep track of, and hear all about everyone else getting ready for Christmas, which I always pretend to act like I don't like, or don't care about, but truth be told, I'm a big kid at heart, and love the whole shebang of Christmas, and I'm really, really, really excited to be decorating my new place and get my little village up and get a tree up. I want to love Christmas again, and I'm going to start this year.

. . . .I'm going to continue the list of the Top 500 albums of all time. I've run Rolling Stone's Top 25, my own Top 25, now it's time to continue. And it's generating some spark too.

My own 26-50 first.

26. Grievous Angel - Gram Parsons
27. The Ramones - The Ramones
28. Deja Vu - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
29. Let It Bleed -The Rolling Stones
30. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles
31. Moondance - Van Morrison
32. Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
33. Innervision - Stevie Wonder
37. We're An American Band - Grand Funk
38. Devil Without A Cause - Kid Rock
39. There's A Riot Going On - Sly and the Family Stone
40. Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols
41. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars - David Bowie
42. My Aim Is True - Elvis Costello
43. Red-Headed Stranger - Willie Nelson
44. Hotel California - The Eagles
45. Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd
46. Electric Ladyland - Jimi Hendrix
47. 8 Mile (Soundtrack) - Eminem
48. London Calling - The Clash
49. Morrison Hotel - The Doors
50. It's A Beautiful Day - U2

And now, Rolling Stone's 26 through 50

26. The Joshua Tree, U2

27. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 1, Robert Johnson

28. Who's Next, The Who

29. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin

30. Blue, Joni Mitchell

31. Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan

32. Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones

33. Ramones, Ramones

34. Music From Big Pink, The Band

35. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, David Bowie

36. Tapestry, Carole King

37. Hotel California, The Eagles

38. The Anthology, 1947 - 1972, Muddy Waters

39. Please Please Me, The Beatles

40. Forever Changes, Love

41. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols

42. The Doors, The Doors

43. The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd

44. Horses, Patti Smith

45. The Band, The Band

46. Legend, Bob Marley and the Wailers

47. A Love Supreme, John Coltrane

48. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy

49. At Fillmore East, The Allman Brothers Band

50. Here's Little Richard, Little Richard

. . . .OK, officially and for real, a little bit of vomit came up into my mouth at the news that Ben fucking Bernanke was named Time magazine's man of the year, I'm serious, chunky and acidy-tasting and everything. The man at the helm, through 2 administrations, of the out of control Terex earthmover that plowed through the American economy, watched over 17 million jobs lost and made mega-trillionaires of Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citi and Wells-Fargo, was named Time's fucking Person of the Year!!

. . . .Everyone's favorite crusader, Dylan Ratigan, host of MSNBC's Morning Meeting went positively fucking insane over it, and must have sent out 20 consecutive tweets that literally spelled it all out, and reflected his disgust with it. I like Dylan, a lot, and still say that he has become the most unlikely crusader for the middle class, but I love it, and he's not afraid to speak truth to power.

. . . .Now, let me get this straight, Bernanke is named Person of the Year, no one cares that the largest banks in America are paying Christmas bonuses with your money (you don't care, or at the amounts they're handing out, you'd be waiting at their cars to club them over the heads and take some of your shit back), Bernanke gets reappointed Chair of the Fed, so that not only are we happy that the fox gutted every damn chicken in the henhouse, then burned the henhouse down, we not only built a new goddam henhouse, we restocked it with 72 virgin hens for the bastard and. . . . .

. . . . . .The Detroit New reports today that:

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that for the year that ended in September, Michigan's official unemployment rate was 12.6 percent. Using the broadest definition of unemployment, the state unemployment rate was 20.9 percent, or 66 percent higher than the official rate. Since Detroit's official rate for October was 27 percent, that broader rate pushes the city's rate to as high as 44.8 percent."
For a variety or reasons -- access to transportation, job availability and work skills -- an estimated 48.5 percent of male Detroiters ages 20 to 64 didn't have a job in 2008, according to census figures. For Michigan, it's 26.6 percent; for the United States, 21.7 percent.

. . . .He gets reappointed, and gets that damn award yet Shahien Nasiripour reports that:

While the administration and Congress work to increase bank lending, the nation's four biggest banks have collectively cut their loans to businesses by more than $100 billion over the past six months, according to new federal data released on Tuesday.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo cut their commercial and industrial lending by a combined 15 percent from April to October, representing $100 billion, according to the most recent Treasury Department data. Loans to small businesses are down $7 billion, or four percent.

. . . .Not only does he get reappointed, but his pals on Wall Street know just how to reward the American people for that. Ryan Grim reports:

The American Bankers Association issued a "Call to Action" on Wednesday, urging its lobbyists and member banks to make an all-out effort to crush regulatory reform in Senate. As part of that campaign, it lashed out at its community-bank rival, charging it with being too soft on bank reform efforts.

In an unusually frank memo from ABA Chairman Art Johnson, the lobby group congratulates bankers for sending some 300,000 letters to Congress opposing reform, crediting the effort with killing several significant provisions.

And it takes aim at the Independent Community Bankers Association, which endorsed the final bank-reform bill to make its way through the House last Friday.

"To be successful in the Senate, we must have a united message. And that is why I am truly saddened by what I am about to report to you. I do this not to cast blame, but in the hope we can fix this and be united as we go to the Senate," said Johnson.

"Last week, I was on the daily conference call of the ABA lobbying team and the state associations when it was announced that ICBA was supporting the House bill going to the floor. I must say there was shock and disbelief because all the states had just reported that their bankers remained strongly opposed to the bill. All of ABA's officers are community bankers, as are many members of the ABA Board, which voted unanimously to oppose the bill. Many of the states had recently had similar formal votes. A number of the state associations are jointly affiliated with ABA and ICBA, and they all oppose the bill, as apparently do some of the ICBA state associations... ABA will reach out to ICBA; we will work for unity."

. . . . . .Which does bring us to the weakened piece of shit bill that will emerge as Financial Reform from the gang of lobbyist's sluts known as Congress. Robert L. Borosage:

"Enjoy the health care debate? Wait until the Senate takes on the big banks. It already looks like déjà vu all over again. Democrats, bloodied from self-inflicted wounds in the health care debate, may well commit seppuku over financial reform.

The script is in place for a failed sequel. The administration, via Treasury, cobbled together a reform plan that was weaker than it should be. The banks signed up every ambulatory lobbyist in town to gut the central reforms. The House fended off Melissa Bean's attempt to be the Joe Lieberman of financial reform, but ended up passing a bill even weaker than the administration's proposal - with nary a Republican vote.

And so to the Senate. Senate Finance Committee Chair Chris Dodd put out a remarkably strong reform measure. The bank lobby made it clear that was a non-starter, so Dodd decided to begin a "bipartisan" process in the Finance Committee - think Max Baucus redux -- searching for the elusive Republican moderate. Meanwhile Blue Dog and New Dem Democrats - Bayh, Warner, Bennet and others - are openly casting about for ways to weaken the proposed agency to protect consumers from bank gouging. And we have yet to hear from Joe Lieberman, still focused on torpedoing health care, who no doubt will weigh in with his inimitable combination of pious corruption and treacherous venom.
This isn't a game. The banks must be curbed if we are to build a new economy that works for most Americans. As finance was deregulated beginning with Reagan, we've experienced a series of financial crisis - with ever greater frequency and severity. Now the big banks are emerging more concentrated than ever, with an explicit promise that they are too big to fail - meaning that they are free to gamble with taxpayers standing by to cover their losses. This is a poisonous stew. We simply can't afford to let the banks dilute the reforms, or let those too conservative or too corrupt to stand in the way. Make the stakes clear. Take the debate out of the back rooms. Draw the damn line."

. . . . .Which of course leads us to the political mess that we're in right now, and that has developed over that last 30 years, and of course, I will be the first to tell you that there is no difference between the two parties at all:

Given my profession people assume I'm a Republican. After all, I work with business on a regular basis to lower their overall tax liability. However, I'm not a Republican for the following reasons. First, they have a clear anti-intellectual bent. Given the Republicans' complete denial of climate change and their embrace of the creationist movement, it's no wonder that a mere 6% of scientists consider themselves Republicans. And that goes to the larger point -- the Republican party has a clear anti-fact bias. Secondly, Republicans clearly want women to be nothing more than wombs with legs. Ever notice how Republican men love to talk about abortion but never seem to volunteer for a vasectomy? Finally, Republicans have embraced a talking/chattering class (Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity) that are nothing more than non-educated fear mongers. If these people are your spokesmen, you've got a series problem.

However, the last six months have demonstrated the Democrats are no better. What it really comes down to is the Democrats do not know how to lead. The latest example is the "compromise" legislation on health care that was created by the whiny baby Lieberman. Three months ago, Lieberman was all for a Medicate buy-in. Now he's not. Why? Because it gets him attention. His stance has nothing to do with ideology. However, notice how the Democrats -- who are in the clear majority -- can't seem to get anything done on this matter? The reason is simple: they can't lead. Reid, Pelosi and Obama have demonstrated they are unwilling to make the necessary decisions to get anything accomplished.

But at the heart of the matter is the central problem with US politics: binary thinking. Why are Republicans against health care reform? Because the Democrats are for it. Why are Democrats not interested in talking about entitlement reform? Because Republicans are for it. The list goes on forever. When a Republican says x, the Democrat will respond with the polar opposite. It's that simple. And that's the problem.

In the hyper-partisan environment of Washington we have in essence a giant conflagration of wind-up dolls who say things on cue. Anytime a reporter goes to a Republican you know you're going to hear "low taxes ... government bad ... socialist " When a reporter asks a Democrat anything you're going to hear "Wall Street bad ... tax the rich." It's that simple. There is not a single ounce of creative thought that goes into anything that comes from Washington. I have not heard an intelligent, free-thinking statement from anyone in Congress for so long I am now convinced it is not possible in the current environment. And that is the real problem. Intelligent thought is no longer possible in the current political environment; both parties are so tied-in to their ideology that they can't see beyond themselves. And that is very concerning.

. . . .And of course, who's leading the charge in all this. Mr. Hope and Change himself, the man who has turned out to be the capitalist, corporatist tool for Wall Street and all corporations, and part 4 of Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone on Obama's Big Sellout:

Obama hasn't always toed the Rubin line when it comes to economic policy. Despite being surrounded by a team that is powerfully opposed to deficit spending — balanced budgets and deficit reduction have always been central to the Rubin way of thinking — Obama came out of the gate with a huge stimulus plan designed to kick-start the economy and address the job losses brought on by the 2008 crisis. "You have to give him credit there," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, an advocate of using government resources to address unemployment. "It's a very significant piece of legislation, and $787 billion is a lot of money."

But whatever jobs the stimulus has created or preserved so far — 640,329, according to an absurdly precise and already debunked calculation by the White House — the aid that Obama has provided to real people has been dwarfed in size and scope by the taxpayer money that has been handed over to America's financial giants. "They spent $75 billion on mortgage relief, but come on — look at how much they gave Wall Street," says a leading Democratic strategist. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion. And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team of Rubinites have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place.

The push for reform seemed to get off to a promising start. In the House, the charge was led by Rep. Barney Frank, the outspoken chair of the House Financial Services Committee, who emerged during last year's Bush bailouts as a sharp-tongued critic of Wall Street. Back when Obama was still a senator, he and Frank even worked together to introduce a populist bill targeting executive compensation. Last spring, with the economy shattered, Frank began to hold hearings on a host of reforms, crafted with significant input from the White House, that initially contained some very good elements. There were measures to curb abusive credit-card lending, prevent banks from charging excessive fees, force publicly traded firms to conduct meaningful risk assessment and allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation. There were even measures to crack down on risky derivatives and to bar firms like AIG from picking their own regulators.

Then the committee went to work — and the loopholes started to appear.
The most notable of these came in the proposal to regulate derivatives like credit-default swaps. Even Gary Gensler, the former Goldmanite whom Obama put in charge of commodities regulation, was pushing to make these normally obscure investments more transparent, enabling regulators and investors to identify speculative bubbles sooner. But in August, a month after Gensler came out in favor of reform, Geithner slapped him down by issuing a 115-page paper called "Improvements to Regulation of Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets" that called for a series of exemptions for "end users" — i.e., almost all of the clients who buy derivatives from banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Even more stunning, Frank's bill included a blanket exception to the rules for currency swaps traded on foreign exchanges — the very instruments that had triggered the Long-Term Capital Management meltdown in the late 1990s.

Given that derivatives were at the heart of the financial meltdown last year, the decision to gut derivatives reform sent some legislators howling with disgust. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of all derivatives could remain unregulated under the new rules, went so far as to say the new laws would make things worse. "Current law with its loopholes might actually be better than these loopholes," she said.

An even bigger loophole could do far worse damage to the economy. Under the original bill, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were granted the power to ban any credit swaps deemed to be "detrimental to the stability of a financial market or of participants in a financial market." By the time Frank's committee was done with the bill, however, the SEC and the CFTC were left with no authority to do anything about abusive derivatives other than to send a report to Congress. The move, in effect, would leave the kind of credit-default swaps that brought down AIG largely unregulated.

. . . . .Part 5 tomorrow.

. . . .Whilst I've been on a climate change roll for the last few days, I'll stay with it. From Yglesias today, again, the numbers speak for themselves:

Wednesday Arctic Ice Blogging

To follow-up on yesterday’s Gore Derangement Syndrome post, my colleague Joe Romm has a post featuring a graph Gore showed, a release from several scientific institutions, illustrating the arctic ice volume situation:

As you would expect, there are a few different ways you can project the trend, but the projections all go in the same basic neighborhood—frightening levels of ice loss.

Meanwhile, as you’ve no doubt noticed health care has tended to overshadow the climate policy debate in the United States this year. I think that’s too bad, but that’s the decision the powers that be made. So this week, my blog has been much more health care than Copenhagen. But both Climate Progress and the Wonk Room have lots of Copencoverage.

. . . .Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Ain't I just a ray of regular fucking sunshine. It does tend to make your head explode to try and boil it all down and ingest it, but we have to. There isn't any other choice, no choice at all.

. . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.
. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

And the countdown begins. . . .

2009-12-14T20:48:00.007-05:00

Tuesday December 15, 2009

. . . . .So the Rolling Stone top 25 of the Top 500 greatest albums of all time did stir some reaction. As promised, just for a little insight, here's my own Top 25 of all time.

1. Let It Be - The Beatles
2. Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin
3. Who's Next - The Who
4. Sticky Fingers - The Rolling Stones
5. Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
6. The Joshua Tree - U2
7. Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan
8. Live at the Fillmore East - The Allman Brothers
9. Are You Experienced? - Jimi Hendrix
10. L.A. Woman - The Doors
11. Before the Flood - Bob Dylan & The Band
12. Exile on Main Street - The Rolling Stones
13. The Beatles (White Album) - The Beatles
14. The Last Waltz -The Band
15. Darkness on the Edge of Town - Bruce Springsteen
16. King of the Delta Blues Singers - Robert Johnson
17. Music From Big Pink - The Band
18. Fables of the Reconstruction - R.E.M.
19. Back in Black - AC/DC
20. Layla and Other Love Songs - Derek and the Dominos
21. What's Going On? - Marvin Gaye
22. 461 Ocean Boulevard - Eric Clapton
23. Purple Rain - Prince
24. The River - Bruce Springsteen
25. Astral Weeks - Van Morrison

. . . .And yes, tomorrow, I'll continue the Rolling Stone list, and put their numbers 26-50 up.

. . . And a word here for something upcoming this spring. FX Networks, which has become the home of quality television and carries shows like Rescue Me and Sons of Anarchy, announced a new one coming in March, Timothy Olyphant, another great actor (Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood, the bad guy in Live Free or Die Hard, he seems to be everywhere) will star a Deputy Raylan Givens in a new FX networks show, Justified. If the name Raylan Givens seems a little familiar, he's a character that pops up from time to time in Elmore Leonard novels. A federal marshal who is dry, ironic, and lives thoroughly by his own code and is firmly on the side of justice, and not necessarily the law, and who only draws his weapon when he has to kill someone. From the previews and available clips, it looks to be smart, funny and worth the time. Keep an eye out for it.

. . . .I need to thank Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs for turning me on to this one. Like him, I needed convincing around climate change, and it was the numbers, which I run all the time, that did that for me. Now, he's turned me on to the cool little video by science teacher Greg Craven, which has been running around YouTube for a couple of years. From my standpoint what makes it so intriguing is this guy's approach, which is from a complex, chaotic system theory starting point, which really is the only way to look at massive, dynamic systems. What I'm asking you to do is not make a predisposed decision about anything, and watch with an open mind and some clear eyes. I think it'll open yours up too, and give you a fresh perspective.

Look. Anyway you look at the question of global warming, the stakes seem to be the whole world.

The skeptics promise global economic DOOM if we take hasty action on an unproven question. The activists warn of global climate DOOM if we don't take immediate action on an imminent threat. And the only way to know for sure who's right is to let the experiment play itself out.

Unfortunately, we're in the test tube. So there's got to be a better way to go about this besides shouting at each other.

I'm no expert, but as a high school science teacher, I am pretty familiar with how the lay person intersects (wc***) with science. So in an online video two years ago, I offered a suggestion for how to cut through the shouting match and draw your own conclusion in the debate, without needing to decide which side to believe. It centers on a simple little 2-by-2 "decision grid," and I asked for suggestions on how to improve it.

Two years later, "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" has collected over 7.5 million views, spawned 7 hours of follow-up videos, led to an offer of my own t.v. show (thanks, but no thanks), and ultimately resulted in a book. (Geez. I was just trying to offer a suggestion.)

I guess there must be something to that little grid.

And in the meantime, the stakes have only gotten higher. After the brush with the Next Great Depression in 2008, no one can deny that the economy is more delicate than ever before. Yet the updated science suggests that the global climate may be the same type of "non-linear" system that the global financial system is--capable of sudden, unexpected lurches set off by seemingly small bumps.

So with stakes like that, isn't it worth spending just a couple minutes looking at the issue in a new way? Why not watch the video now and see what you think of this approach?

Turns out, the reasoning in that video has a hole in it large enough to drive a Hummer through, which is what led to all the follow-up material.

I don't have all the answers. But together, we might. So if you are intrigued, share this video with others, and ask them what they think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

I believe that process--of proposing an idea and enlisting many people to find problems with it and suggest fixes--is the best way of getting closer to the truth. And so the basic idea in the video--trying to come up with a method for tackling a complex, uncertain problem when you have little expertise and even less time--has evolved as well. Way, way beyond the thinking presented in "The Most Terrifying Video." That evolution of an idea continues to this day.

That's why I ask you to sign up for the newsletter [link], so I can let you know of new developments, improved approaches, and additional thinking tools for tackling the most thorny question--of what (if anything) we should do about climate change--that humanity has ever faced.

In addition, I'll toss you fun little "gimmees" as I produce them, from a deal on the upcoming eBook (containing the material that didn't make it into the book), to the secrets of the explosions and puzzles in the "How It All Ends" videos [link], to updates on where the book and the videos (or even me, Greg Craven) are getting featured. Rest assured, I won't share your email address with anyone, and it will be easy to unsubscribe if you ever become discontented with my infrequent mailings.

If you're curious about the holes and the fixes that arose from my 2-year back-and-forth with the Internet community, then check out what came next. The "How It All Ends" video series resulted from several months of me combing through tens of thousands of online comments for every single objection, question, "How About," "Yeah, But," and "You Missed a Spot" that I could find to "The Most Terrifying Video." And the book, "What's the Worst That Could Happen? A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate," went a step beyond that, enlisting the critiques of dozens of leading scientists, economists, authors, and analysts in the climate change debate. (I may not be right, but no one can say I'm not excruciatingly thorough.)

The videos are available online for free, or you can purchase them all on a single DVD [Buy Now], which also throws a few pennies my way. And if you decide to buy the book, then doing so through one of the links on this page [Buy Now] would help me tremendously, because I receive a small percentage of the order, with no difference in cost to you.

Whatever the outcome of all this, one thing is for certain. We are all in this together. There are no emergency exits to either the global economy, or the global climate. So let's enlist as many people as we can, to make the most solid decision we can. I hope you'll agree that we owe ourselves--and our kids--nothing less.

. . . .That's all I ask, watch it, think about it from a rational, sane perspective and then give it a second thought.

. . . . .Because it's simple. If the climate change experts are right, the truly evil part of it is that we, our generation, won't be around to see it, but it would be a legacy that we left our children and grandchildren and would have had the chance to do something about it, but did nothing. No, I don't believe in cap-and-trade, I don't believe in government finding the answers. I do believe that people can, if allowed to.

. . . As for you skeptics, I leave you this one, again, from LGF:

New Scientist turns the tables on climate skeptics, in an article that documents a few of the many examples of lies, distortions and disinformation emitted by the global warming denial industry - lies and distortions that never seem to result in any consequences for the liars, and are endlessly repeated by denial websites long after being thoroughly debunked.

“Climategate” has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions.

If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behaviour of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behaviour of a few of those questioning the scientific consensus. There are many similar examples we did not include. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who to trust.

Read the whole thing, and for much more information on the people and groups involved in this massive campaign of confusion, I highly recommend: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming.

. . . .And today continues Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone on how Obama has sold out America. Yes, he has. I believe that, fully. He has, throughout, sided consistently with the corporations that run and own this country and government and backed them, dealt with them, and sold us, the American people, the citizens of this country down the river. Far from being a communist or a socialist, far from being the Anti-Christ the Teabaggers (by the way, did anyone ever tell Michelle Bachmann that The Charge of the Light Brigade, which she compared today to the Teabagger rally she was leading, was a total disaster leading to complete annihilation due to the deluded decision making of their leaders?) portray him as, he is the ultimate capitalist, insuring the this country's wealthiest "citizens", it's corporations continue on upward in their rise towards the top of the coporatocracy and the plutonomy. Do I trust him? No. Do I support what he's doing? No. Would I vote for him against Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee? Yes.

. . . Taibbi:

The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. "Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals," says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. "These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else."

Even the members of Obama's economic team who have spent most of their lives in public office have managed to make small fortunes on Wall Street. The president's economic czar, Larry Summers, was paid more than $5.2 million in 2008 alone as a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and pocketed an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from a smorgasbord of future bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. At Treasury, Geithner's aide Gene Sperling earned a staggering $887,727 from Goldman Sachs last year for performing the punch-line-worthy service of "advice on charitable giving." Sperling's fellow Treasury appointee, Mark Patterson, received $637,492 as a full-time lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and another top Geithner aide, Lee Sachs, made more than $3 million working for a New York hedge fund called Mariner Investment Group. The list goes on and on. Even Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has been out of government for only 30 months of his adult life, managed to collect $18 million during his private-sector stint with a Wall Street firm called Wasserstein-Perella.

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. "You can't expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street," says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama's first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. "Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money." A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.

. . . .Dylan Ratigan turned me on to this one, it comes from a guest editorial over at ZeroHedge, whose tagline on his particular blog reads "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero". Love it. From his guest Mac Slavo

Sometimes, a bailout is not enough.

When Dubai World black swanned global investors last month with what amounts to be a reported $80 Billion in debt liabilities, it sent shivers down the spine of many a financial manager and stock trader. For those who were paying attention, Dubai’s troubled assets were no surprise, it was simply a matter of time. Oft repeated by contrarian analysts and investors like Dr. Doom Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Jim Rogers, and Karl Denninger, the mathematical certainty of the economic crisis would play out - eventually.

It was a year ago that the entire global financial system, spear headed by the USA, faced the real possibility of total meltdown, that is if you trust the motivational fear tactics employed former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

This week, the American public received word that the banks once deemed too-big-to-fail will be paying back their TARP funds, ostensibly because they are now cured of the financial contagion that threatened sudden death, economic collapse and the implementation of martial law.

In addition to Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, we have commercial real estate powerhouse and partially owned subsidiary of Warren Buffet Enterprises, Wells Fargo, which announced it will sell $10.4 billion in stock and exit the TARP bailout. According to a company statement, the bank plans to pay back $25 billion in taxpayer funds. CEO John Stumpf, presumably also doing gods work, says “we’re ready to fully repay TARP in a way that serves the interests of the U.S. taxpayer, as well as our customers, team members and investors.” Management did not comment on whether the share sales totaling around $14.8 billion, when you count additional plans to raise capital, will devalue, by way of dilution, the amount of market capitalization held by shareholders.

Citibank, who also committed to repaying $20 billion in TARP funds yesterday saw a stream of positive news throughout the media when they announced their intentions. Just 24 hours later, Bloomberg reports that Citigroup’s Exit From the Bailout is Clouded by Citi Holdings Assets. It seems that CEO Vikram Pandit failed to mention that his company is “emerging from a U.S. bailout with higher capital levels and loan-loss reserves than any peer.” That amounts to somewhere in the area of $617 billion.

Dubai showed how investors and traders are ready to run at the first sign of trouble. As has been the case for the last nine months, however, the Dubai crisis was quickly subdued by stories of bailouts from their sister city, Abu Dhabi. And indeed, Dubai has been rescued with what amounts to be a $10 billion bailout that should help the former real estate Mecca of the Middle East make at least a few payments to keep it a float for a little bit longer. Regional investment firms will receive some of their funds, but as for non-Middle Eastern investors, the verdict is still out, though, as Abu Dhabi’s rulers said, “they will not necessarily just bail out everyone across the board. They will be selective.”

This seems to be the norm these days, so it’s no surprise. Certain entities, for whatever reasons, are bailed out, while others suffer the collapse of their wealth for trusting in the belief that asset prices always go up forever.

As Real Estate Collapse (Wave One) in the US proved, no asset will appreciate all the time. Like Dubai, the underlying assets in America, Europe, and even China have been slowly simmering for the last year or so. And once the public gets a taste of the toxicity, there will be no stopping the panic as everyone in just about every asset class decides to run for the exit.

When the panic does start, it may be an event perceived to be too-small-to-matter, like a Dubai that exposes several larger global players, which leads to a domino effect that will echo through the entire financial markets. It may start with debt defaults in an Euro Zone country like Greece or Hungary, or maybe with commercial real estate or Wave Two of the Mortgage Meltdown in the US. It could be a geo-political event with Iran and Israel, or a terrorist attack on a Saudi Arabian pipeline.

Right now, the world is on edge. The citizens of the US, as well as the global public don’t really know who to trust to tell them the truth. They are on alert, consciously or subconsciously, and if they perceive even a small threat, the fight-or-flight system will be activated.

Some say that a year ago we faced economic disaster on a massive scale. In one year, governments around the world have printed money, and done little else, except to provide daily lip service and commentary. The contagion has been lying dormant and will become an epidemic.

No bailout will stop it.

. . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.
. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

Jeeez, does the weekend really have to be over. . . .??

2009-12-13T09:41:00.008-05:00

Monday December 14, 2009

. . . .No day but today, no time but now.

. . . .Since I think by now, most everyone knows that I'm an old rock and roll cowboy, it was interesting to read Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, (click the link to see the whole list), I thought I'd start by rendering you the Top 25 here (we'll keep going) and see what you all think.

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys

3. Revolver, The Beatles

4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan

5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles

6. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye

7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

8. London Calling, The Clash

9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan

10. The Beatles ("The White Album"), The Beatles

11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley

12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis

13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

14. Abbey Road, The Beatles

15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

16. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan

17. Nevermind, Nirvana

18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen

19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison

20. Thriller, Michael Jackson

21. The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry

22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon

23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder

24. Live at the Apollo (1963), James Brown

25. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac

. . . Way to Beatles-centric in the Top 25 for me, personally I was always, and still am, a Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones and Who guy. but at any rate, here's the deal, I'll put my own Top 25 up there, and if you feel so inclined, you can of course submit your own and I'll run it, and we'll continue to run that list till we get to 500 and see where your Top 25 or 50 shake out comparatively, when it's all said and done.

. . . .And since the end of 2009 does mark the end of the decade (how come so many of you don't get that? If it started on a "00" then it ends on "09", that's 10 years and that makes a decade) let's go one further and present the list of the Top 10 best television shows of the decade, entirely subjective of course, since it's my take on it, but again, if you want to submit your own list feel free. The rules are simple: (1) It had to be airing with new episodes after Jan. 1, 2000. (2) It doesn't matter if it's still on the air or not (3) it doesn't matter what network or channel it was on (4) Doesn't matter if it was cancelled and (5) It doesn't matter how long a run it had.

(1) The Wire

(2) Deadwood

(3) Sons of Anarchy

(4) NYPD Blue

(5) Rescue Me

(6) The Shield

(7) Lost

(8) The Black Donnellys

(9) Battlestar Galactica

(10) The Sopranos

. . . .Yes, The Sopranos is all the way down in 10th spot and it almost got beat out for that by Rome, the HBO series that ran in its timeslot in the Fall/Winter of 3 different seasons. No, there are no comedies and no medical shows.

. . . .Well then, I started getting reaction to the weekend posting that was just about immediate, if not sooner. No, I still can't support this Administration due to very reasons I listed, primarily, it's continuation of the financial destruction of America, (see the post just below this one), and I'll continue Taibbi's article today on how Obama sold out America (Part 2 in this posting further down) as to exactly how; the names, dates and facts behind it. But. . . .I do have to give credit where credit is due, and the real meaning of fair and balanced is to present both sides of the issue, (someone does need to remind the Fox News zombies of that from time to time) and I also need to look at the alternatives to what's there presently, so the first two today, one a listing of exactly what this President has done that is in the positive column, and secondly, a look at the alternative that we'll probably be stuck with in 2012.

. . . Reader Barbara V. sent this along to me, a list of just what this President has done so far, it's quite lengthy. It's from Robert Watson, a university professor and former writer for the New York Times, and he comes from a stance that is very classically liberal, left of mine, so his stance and the phrasing reflects that, but it's a summation of just what he's done so far in 1 year:

1. Ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending

2. Ordered a review of all federal operations to identify and cut wasteful spending and practices

3. Instituted enforcement for equal pay for women

4. Beginning the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq

5. Families of fallen soldiers have expenses covered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB

6. Ended media blackout on war casualties; reporting full information

7. Ended media blackout on covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover AFB; the media is now permitted to do so pending adherence to respectful rules and approval of fallen soldier's family

8. The White House and federal government are respecting the Freedom of Information Act

9. Instructed all federal agencies to promote openness and transparency as much as possible

10. Limits on lobbyist's access to the White House

11. Limits on White House aides working for lobbyists after their tenure in the administration

12. Ended the previous stop-loss policy that kept soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan longer than their enlistment date

13. Phasing out the expensive F-22 war plane and other outdated weapons systems, which weren't even used or needed in Iraq/Afghanistan

14. Removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research

15. Federal support for stem-cell and new biomedical research

16. New federal funding for science and research labs

17. States are permitted to enact federal fuel efficiency standards above federal standards

18. Increased infrastructure spending (roads, bridges, power plants) after years of neglect

19. Funds for high-speed, broadband Internet access to K-12 schools

20. New funds for school construction

21. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is being phased out

22. US Auto industry rescue plan

23. Housing rescue plan

24. $789 billion economic stimulus plan

25. The public can meet with federal housing insurers to refinance (the new plan can be completed in one day) a mortgage if they are having trouble paying

26. US financial and banking rescue plan

27. The secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are being closed

28. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with the Geneva Convention standards

29. Better body armor is now being provided to our troops

30. The missile defense program is being cut by $1.4 billion in 2010

31. Restarted the nuclear nonproliferation talks and building back up the nuclear inspection infrastructure/protocols

32. Reengaged in the treaties/agreements to protect the Antarctic

33. Reengaged in the administration

34. Visited more countries and met with more world leaders than any president in his first six months in office

35. Successful release of US captain held by Somali pirates; authorized the SEALS to do their job

36. US Navy increasing patrols off Somali coast

37. Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles

38. Cash for clunkers program offers vouchers to trade in fuel inefficient, polluting old cars for new cars; stimulated auto sales

39. Announced plans to purchase fuel efficient American-made fleet for the federal government

40. Expanded the SCHIP program to cover health care for 4 million more children

41. Signed national service legislation; expanded national youth service program

42. Instituted a new policy on Cuba, allowing Cuban families to return home to visit loved ones33. Reengaged in the agreements/talks on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions

43. Ended the previous policy of not regulating and labeling carbon dioxide emissions

44. Expanding vaccination programs

45. Immediate and efficient response to the floods in North Dakota and other natural disasters

46. Closed offshore tax safe havens

47. Negotiated deal with Swiss banks to permit US government to gain access to records of tax evaders and criminals

48. Ended the previous policy of offering tax benefits to corporations who outsource American jobs; the new policy is to promote in-sourcing to bring jobs back

49. Ended the previous practice of protecting credit card companies; in place of it are new consumer protections from credit card industry's predatory practices

50. Energy producing plants must begin preparing to produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources

51. Lower drug costs for seniors

52. Ended the previous practice of forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug manufacturers for cheaper drugs; the federal government is now realizing hundreds of millions in savings

53. Increasing pay and benefits for military personnel

54. Improved housing for military personnel

55. Initiating a new policy to promote federal hiring of military spouses

56. Improved conditions at Walter Reed Military Hospital and other military hospitals

57. Increasing student loans

58. Increasing opportunities in AmeriCorps program

59. Sent envoys to Middle East and other parts of the world that had been neglected for years; reengaging in multilateral and bilateral talks and diplomacy

60. Established a new cyber security office

61. Beginning the process of reforming and restructuring the military 20 years after the Cold War to a more modern fighting force; this includes new procurement policies, increasing size of military, new technology and cyber units and operations, etc.

62. Ended previous policy of awarding no-bid defense contracts

63. Ordered a review of hurricane and natural disaster preparedness

64. Established a National Performance Officer charged with saving the federal government money and making federal operations more efficient

65. Students struggling to make college loan payments can have their loans refinanced

66. Improving benefits for veterans

67. Many more press conferences and town halls and much more media access than previous administration

68. Instituted a new focus on mortgage fraud

69. The FDA is now regulating tobacco

70. Ended previous policy of cutting the FDA and circumventing FDA rules

71. Ended previous practice of having White House aides rewrite scientific and environmental rules, regulations, and reports

72. Authorized discussions with North Korea and private mission by Pres. Bill Clinton to secure the release of two Americans held in prisons

73. Authorized discussions with Myanmar and mission by Sen. Jim Web to secure the release of an American held captive

74. Making more loans available to small businesses

75. Established independent commission to make recommendations on slowing the costs of Medicare

76. Appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court

77. Authorized construction/opening of additional health centers to care for veterans

78. Limited salaries of senior White House aides; cut to $100,000

79. Renewed loan guarantees for Israel

80. Changed the failing/status quo military command in Afghanistan

81. Deployed additional troops to Afghanistan

82. New Afghan War policy that limits aerial bombing and prioritizes aid, development of infrastructure, diplomacy, and good government practices by Afghans

83. Announced the long-term development of a national energy grid with renewable sources and cleaner, efficient energy production

84. Returned money authorized for refurbishment of White House offices and private living quarters

85. Paid for redecoration of White House living quarters out of his own pocket

86. Held first Seder in White House

87. Attempting to reform the nation's healthcare system which is the most expensive in the world yet leaves almost 50 million without health insurance and millions more under insured

88. Has put the ball in play for comprehensive immigration reform

89. Has announced his intention to push for energy reform

90. Has announced his intention to push for education reform

91.Ended the previous practice of forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug manufacturers for cheaper drugs; the federal government is now realizing hundreds of millions in savings

. . . .Now as for an accurate picture of what we could have wound up with, and most likely, will have come 2012, we turn to Cenk Uygur, and I'm with him, I really hope that from now on, all I have to do is point to his piece to end any argument, and if someone doesn't get it after reading and watching it, it's not worth the time of day to talk about it with them anyhow:

The Irrefutable Stupidity of Sarah Palin

"From time to time, I'll get into a debate with a right-winger about whether Sarah Palin is actually stupid or if liberals are just hopelessly biased against her. They claim this bias comes from the fact that liberals are scared of her electability, her charm, her looks, her femininity, her Christianity, her ability connect to the common man and her overall wonderfulness. So, the theory is that we have all collectively decided that she is the best Republican candidate in some secret liberal meeting and are conspiring against her because we are afraid of how brilliant and electable she really is.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this theory. There are no opinion leaders on the left with Rush Limbaugh-like authority who can command all other progressives to think the same thing and use the same arguments against one person. In other words, we all think she is stupid because she is in fact stupid, not because some liberal cabal told us to think that.

How come we don't call Newt Gingrich stupid? Or Dick Cheney or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Elizabeth Dole or Dennis Hastert? And the list goes on and on of heinous and deplorable right-wingers who are not stupid. We don't make those charges against those people, because as much as we might not agree with them or like them, we know that they are not dullards. They're all clever in their own way. Mitt Romney is greasy, Michael Steele is a clown and Tom DeLay is dirty, but we don't go after their mental acuity like we do with Sarah Palin because they're not as dumb as her (not even Steele).

So, finally we get to the evidence. I thought I'd just do it here and be done with it. Then I can just point people to this post from now on and end this senseless argument.

Now, there are a million examples of this, but I thought I'd go with three knockout punches here. In the first video, we have the classic Bush Doctrine answer, where she does not know the basic foreign policy of the Republican president at the time. How could she possibly be running for vice president and not know this? The only thing more unconscionable is the sad excuses her supporters make for this terribly botched answer.

In the second video, we have a largely overlooked example of her pathetic lack of foreign policy knowledge. She has no idea what Hamas is or what they have to do with the Gaza Strip. If your next door neighbor or plumber doesn't know this, that's fine, but they weren't running for Vice President of the United States. This should be game set and match for anyone, especially self-respecting conservatives, thinking of supporting her. This is when you have to walk away embarrassed.

But remarkably, they didn't slink away embarrassed after this answer, so we have the latest example of her buffoonery. In this interview with Bill O'Reilly, he asks her if she is smart enough to be president. Her answer has to be seen to be believed. Don't get me wrong, just because you see it won't mean you'll understand it. So, I put a transcript of her answer below so that you can try to decipher it in your spare time.

Bill O'Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I'm not saying that that has to be me.

Can anyone really be biased enough to think that was a smart answer? The great irony is that he asked her if she's smart enough to be president and she gave what might be her dumbest answer yet. That answer was so bad it almost made George W. Bush look smart. Can anyone in good conscience defend that answer and say with a straight face that she should be this country's leader?

If you say yes, then there is no sense in talking to one another anymore because we are not operating in the same reality, or planet. We'll never be able to agree on anything if we can't agree that was just about as incomprehensible and stupid an answer as you can possibly come up with. And that settles the debate, because you either live in the reality based world and realize she is obviously not qualified, or in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert you believe that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" and she would make a great president."

. . . But then of course, Sarah supporters don't like me for the same reasons that they don't like anyone at all like me; I don't have a screaming fit at the sight of two women kissing, or two men holding hands, I don't believe in hell and I use big words that have more than two syllables, I don't believe in the rapture, or Armageddon or a second coming, I actually use fact and data, I believe that all people's blood is red when exposed to air, and all hearts are the same, whatever their skin color and I find the missionary position pretty damn boring.

. . . And speaking of Sarah, Russell Simmons weighs in on another of the 3 Stooges, our old buddy Rush:

This week, Rush Limbaugh made a sickening comment in his attempt to interpret the words of Rev. Jackson, when he said that the "black frame of mind" is "terrible" and that "Tiger Woods choice of women sure didn't help it." When three Republican U.S. Senators and half a dozen evangelical preachers do it, why isn't he saying it depresses the white race? Limbaugh's bringing in Tiger's infidelity as if it's related to black culture goes back to an old and deeply evil racist connection of black men and sexual promiscuity. To use the image of the black man as the sexual predator is the oldest form of race baiting, dating back to Emmit Till and before that, the slaves on the plantation. Moreover, Rush is using Tiger as an Obama surrogate, using Tiger as a way to say that these men cannot be trusted. Rush knows exactly what he is doing by being the first to link the plight of the black man to the sorrows of Tiger Woods.

. . .No, the real reason to be unhappy with this President and to not trust him has a hell of a lot more to do with white collar crime (pun intended), and I think the real reason that the ReThugLicans don't like him is pure and simple. Jealousy, he's beating the hell out of them at their own game, that of high rolling, high stakes, old line money Wall Street connected insider sliding money, and the level he's doing it at, and the amounts that he's doing it with, make them look like exactly what they are; sweaty, broke-ass impostors and posers who get one trip to Vegas a year, watched a hell of a lot of Celebrity Poker on TV, think they're somebody losers. Matt Taibbi, part 2, from his Rolling Stone article:

At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner's "counselor" — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner "counselors" — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.

As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin's protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin's Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. "The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement," U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.

The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so."

Joining Summers, Furman and Farrell at the NEC is Froman, who by then had been formally appointed to a unique position: He is not only Obama's international finance adviser at the National Economic Council, he simultaneously serves as deputy national security adviser at the National Security Council. The twin posts give Froman a direct line to the president, putting him in a position to coordinate Obama's international economic policy during a crisis. He'll have help from David Lipton, another joint appointee to the economics and security councils who worked with Rubin at Treasury and Citigroup, and from Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin's whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance.

Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented regulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin's Hamilton Project. Orszag once succinctly summed up the project's ideology as a sort of liberal spin on trickle-down Reaganomics: "Market competition and globalization generate significant economic benefits."
Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."
While Rubin's allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama's meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America's never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel "Siberia."

Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had "excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system." That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn't even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.

. . . .Part 3 tomorrow

. . . .Over at Black Sun Gazette, buelahman contributes a great piece on what it means to be someone who has a realistic view of just how things are, and to have a sane viewpoint on what tools that conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, Tea partiers, birthers, truthers, the whole flippin' lot anyone who actually believes in the current political scene are:

Yes, Sheople (excuse me, People), the conservatives like Erick don’t think you are “conservative” enough. He thinks that the solution is to be even more vicious red-meaters and to rebel against the rest of the “Party”.

Well, I hope you get your wish, because it will simply highlight what blathering, slathering, atrociously stupid people you have following a dying meme.

But, let me make one suggestion. Take each and every demoRAT with you. Find some way to attract them, too, and as you all form your own ignorant-assed party, maybe the sane people can take back this country from the likes of you and the soulless demoRATS indebted to the Corptocracy you endorsed while a THUG was POTUS and now disallow when a RAT is POTUS.

You see, the real problem has nothing to do with “con” vs “lib”. The real problem are the fools like Erick, or John Amato, or Markos or O’Reilley or any stupid ass who wants to perpetuate and continue the bogus two party Corptocracy ruling our way of life.

Once these fools finally figure out that they are keeping us screwed by drowning us in this never-ending battle between forces that are basically identical in the ravaging of our resources, our treasury and most importantly, our men and women ready to fight and die to protect us. These fools would rather protect and continue the bogus scam than actually come together and fix this mess.

Fools.

Oh no, there he goes. . . .oh, crap!

2009-12-11T11:00:00.012-05:00

Saturday December 12, 2009

. . . ."Some things under heaven are just cooler than hell" - Ray Wylie Hubbard and Cody Canada

. . . . And today, a quote from Viggo Mortensen, a vastly underrated actor, (that'll probably change after The Road, opening next week), patron of the arts, and a stunningly complex thinker:

. . . . .people respond to these voices in profoundly personal and emotional ways. They take inspiration from seeing how people struggled in the past, often against far greater odds than we face today, to make their voices heard and to right historic wrongs. They find insight from these expressions of the past into how they feel and live in the present. And they also find hope for a different future.
As Howard Zinn has often pointed out, history told from above -- from the standpoint of generals and kings and presidents -- encourages passivity, a sense of helplessness. In this version of history, "great men" make history, not ordinary people. But looked at from below, history has another lesson. Whenever change as happened, it has been through protest, dissent, struggle, social movements, ordinary people picketing, striking, boycotting, sitting down, sitting in. All this means that we make history, history is effected by our everyday decisions. And we have a responsibility to speak out when we see injustice. We can't wait on others to "lead" us or solve our problems for us. We have to participate, to engage, every day and not just once every four years.
Howard Zinn's work also reminds us that we always need to ask: what stories am I not hearing? Whose voices am I not hearing? And that if no one is telling our stories, we need to find ways -- creative, dynamic -- ways of telling them ourselves.

. . . .Full piece here.

. . . .'S matter of fact, two more underrated actors that don't get enough attention for their work are Bob Balaban and Eric Bogosian. Check some of their work out.

. . . .If you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, switch over to the external source site, The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings and you can get today's music to rock and roll on through with.

. . . . .I'm going to warn you right now, before you ever start heading through this, I'll probably piss you off while you're reading this, and I guarantee that I'll lose a few readers, but since there's a million and a half of you daily, with the numbers growing, oh well.

. . . .It's why I don't have advertisers or sponsors, or make anyone pay. It allows me to be completely independent.

. . . . .Just so's we're clear. Today will be crystallized around why I can no longer support this President's policies, nor his Administration, and why the time has come to start the countdown, just like we did with GWB.

. . . .For those of you on the Right, don't start celebrating, or think I'm on your side. I still can't stand you, and I stand by my post from last week, which you can read just below this posting, as I keep the last week and a half up always, as to why I parted ways with the conservative movement. I think yours is a sick, corrupt movement and philosophy, devoid of thought, intelligence, depth or soul. I stand by both Andrew Sullivan from the Daily Dish as to why he left the Right, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs as to why he left the Right. There is no room whatsover in the Conservative movement, in the Republican party, in the Right for knowledge, investigation, political discourse or debate, scientific thought or anything resembling the American political process. There is only the Stalinist collective of dogma and ideological purity.

. . . .From a good friend, and great brother of mine on Twitter/Facebook simultaneous feed, @michaelbigley: "Profound! Reply to @npenny You can safely assume that you created God in YOUR own image when He hates the same people you do."

. . . . .For those of you on the Left, don't get all wonky and spazz out on me because I'm leaving the "big tent". It has nothing to do with the fact that he's not progressive enough, or didn't move fast enough on DADT, gay marriage or anything else on the progressive agenda (read that nanny-state that thinks it knows better than I do what's "right" and "good" for me) that he promised while being a great orator on his way to White House.

. . . .For you Teabaggers, climate change deniers, birthers, truthers, creationists, and the rest of your ilk; the followers of Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, you sheeple. I'm not even going to debate anything or lay it out. You are morons, imbeciles and mouthbreathing meatpuppet cretins. You don't deserve citizenship in this great country and you need to leave, now. Yesterday, if not sooner.

. . . .And another note for you Teabaggers and Alaskan-quitter attention-whore devotees; Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Jim Jones, Osama bin Laden. . .the list goes on and on. You are all smart enough to realize that you wouldn't even know these names, would never have even heard of these assholes if it were not for the millions of sheeple who willingly gave up their minds, their spirits, their choices and gladly swallowed the KoolAid, believed the dogma and did and believed as they were told. These men wouldn't have even been a whisper on the graph of history if it were not for the millions who believed them, supported them, held rallies for them, and followed their line of egotistical, self-centered, attention deficit disorder, anti-knowledge bullshit.

. . . .Just like the Right is doing with Palin, just like the Left is doing with Obama.

. . . .It's easier to let people do your thinking for you, and "they" know that. They know that the majority of people would much rather believe a convenient 30 second sound bite filled with buzz words and completely full of shit, rather than do the investigation, do the math and make some decisions and make their own minds up for themselves.

. . . .I've railed from Day One about the idiocy of calling the biggest capitalist corporatist to ever occupy the White House, (and that's saying something, it's a long line that stretches back from Bush Jr. to Clinton to Bush to Carter to Reagan, the line of succession that has destroyed this country's financial system and it's middle class) a "communist" or a "socialist" or a "fascist", just more proof of the dumbing down of America.

. . . .I'm not going to rehash everything I've written since May, if you're a new reader, the last 10 posts are always below this one, and the archives are on the left hand side.

. . . .My reasons that I can't support this Administration are simple and have been laid out in an airtight case, supported by fact (as opposed to the Fox News lunatics; Beck, Hannity and the fever swamp whackjobs like Palin and Bachmann)

. . . . .It's about a Health Care Reform bill that in no way shape, manner or form resembles Health Care Reform. That system is broken, completely. This Administration doesn't care about a public option, will add even more people to a Medicare system that is headed for disaster and does not one thing to address the single largest item in broken gears of health care, the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by health care insurance companies, and the incredible profit margin that they are protected and enjoy. Again, corporations in the United States of America are viewed as "citizens", enjoy the same rights and are seen as legal entities. When another "citizen" enjoys protections, subsidies and exemptions that you or I cannot, this is not free-market capitalism. The bill does nothing to address the administrative paperwork nightmare that adds 30% of the staff to any clinic or doctor's office and takes up 30 to 50 percent of a doctor's time straightening out claims. What this bill does do is guarantee even more obscenely large profits for health insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers. It does nothing for doctors and nurses, does nothing for the people of this country, and does nothing to fix an incredibly broken system.

. . . .The price was simple. A $150 billion dollar mutual "silent handshake" between the White House by PharMa and AHIP.

. . . .Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Clinton:

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other. According to data from the American Medical Association, only a handful of insurers dominate most states. In 9 states, 2 insurance companies control 85 percent or more of the market. In Arkansas, home to Senator Blanche Lincoln, who doesn't dare cross Big Insurance, the Blue Cross plan controls almost 70 percent of the market; most of the rest is United Healthcare. These data, by the way, are from 2005 and 2006. Since then, private insurers have been consolidating like mad across the country. At this rate by 2014, when the new health bill kicks in and 30 million more Americans buy health insurance, Big Insurance will be really Big.

In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws, so the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission could prevent it from combining into one or two national behemoths that suck every health dollar out of our pockets (as well as the pockets of companies paying part of the cost of their employees' health insurance). But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.

. . . Entire piece here.

. . . . .It has to do with this Administration abandoning the hunt for the criminal terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, exactly like the last Administration did, and deciding to go on a nation-building exercise in Afghanistan, just like Bush did in Iraq, in a war that has now lasted longer than Vietnam, and drop 30,000 troops in there 2 days before Christmas and head on off to Christmas dinner with Michelle, Sasha and Malia; exactly the same thing Bush did every year while heading off to Crawford for Christmas dinner with Laura and the twins. Both men, doing the same thing, putting our young men and women in harm's way for an exercise in nation-building in a country that doesn't want us there.

. . . .It has to do with this here. Click the link and check it out, it's a bit busy, but it's a real time clock of everything that is counterbalanced and leveraged against one another right now in the financial world, and it shows the same thing that I've been screaming all along, that this guy is no different than the last 5 we've had in that seat, and is merely the capstone in the building of the plutonomy that started with Reagan (And no, I don't want to hear your bullshit about how Reagan was a conservative champion. He started this shit by repealing Glass-Stegall to clear all of his Republican Senator buddies, including McCain, who were caught in the Savings and Loan collapse. On top of that, under Reagan, Federal Spending as a percentage of GNP actually rose from 21.3% to 23.4%. He grew government, and as a result of the Laffer curve (Reaganonomics), a completely discredited economic theory drawn on the back of a country club cocktail napkin for God's sake, the dismantling of the middle class started). Anyhow, like I said, click the link, and try to absorb what it's telling you about where we're headed.

. . . .And finally, it has to do with this, the big enchilada, the thing I've been railing about from before the election, the crumbling of the American economy, the destruction of the middle class and the sell-out of this Administration to Wall Street, and everybody's old friends from the CFR and the Trilats; Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

. . . .It's about Citi's bold declaration of a plutonomy, and their widely published white papers, knowing full well that this Administration is the first truly openly corporatist administration where the rights of the individual, the citizen of the Republic are second to the rights and needs of the corporations that now fuel, fund and run Washington.

. . . .Remember September of '08, pre-election. September 15, to be precise, the day AIG blew a $50 billion dollar (real currency) hold in the fabric of the Universe? The Wall Street Journal hasn't forgotten.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. played a bigger role than has been publicly disclosed in fueling the mortgage bets that nearly felled American Insurance Group Inc.

Goldman was one of 16 banks paid off when the U.S. government last year spent billions closing out soured trades that AIG made with the financial firms.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of AIG's trades, which were on pools of mortgage debt, shows that Goldman was a key player in many of them, even the ones involving other banks.

Goldman as Middleman

Goldman originated or bought protection from AIG on about $33 billion of the $80 billion of U.S. mortgage assets that AIG insured during the housing boom. That is roughly twice as much as Société Générale and Merrill Lynch, the banks with the biggest exposure to AIG after Goldman, according an analysis of ratings-firm reports and an internal AIG document that details several financial firms' roles in the transactions.

In Goldman's biggest deal, it acted as a middleman between AIG and banks, taking on the risk of as much as $14 billion of mortgage-related investments. Then Goldman insured that risk with one trading partner—AIG, according to the Journal's analysis and people familiar with the trades.

The trades yielded Goldman less than $50 million in profits, which were mostly booked from 2004 to 2006, according to a person familiar with the matter. But they piled risks onto AIG's books, which later came to haunt the insurer and Goldman. The trades also gave Goldman a unique window into AIG's exposure to losses on securities linked to mortgages.

When the federal government bailed out the insurer, Goldman avoided losses on its trades with AIG covering a total of $22 billion in assets.

. . . .Now, any regular reader here knows of my admiration for Matt Taibbi, possibly the best investigative journalist today. That fact that he happens to write for Rolling Stone, as far as I'm concerned just makes it that much better, since he is so damn fearless and outspoken, and is willing to painfully tell the truth, that no other publication dares to touch him. It's been Matt, leading the charge all the way, who has exposed the ties between Goldman and it's hand in every American crash, bubble, recession, depression and the rape of the middle class since the 20's. It's been Matt who know that Health Care Reform was dead before it ever hit the floor of the Capitol Building, and it's been Matt who's been willing to expose the ties between AIG, Goldman-Sachs and the Big 5 "too big to fail" banks. In the newest print edition of Rolling Stone, Matt lays out the case that very simply, Obama has sold out America to Wall Street, in the largest capitalist, corporatist, money scheme ever. I'll print this article over the next several days in pieces.

. . . .Taibbi, on Wall Street and Obama:

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.
Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.

That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize — for evil."

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush — still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.

So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."

It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government's bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. "Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he's already co-managing what's happening now," observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.
Left unnoticed, however, was the fact that Geithner had been hired by a sitting Citigroup executive who still had a big bonus coming despite his proximity to Obama. In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.

The irony of Bob Rubin: He's an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.

As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi's board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.

Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year's crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.

There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation. The team Obama put in place to run his economic policy after his inauguration was dominated by people who boasted connections to at least one of these four institutions — so much so that the White House now looks like a backstage party for an episode of Bob Rubin, This Is Your Life!

. . . . .Continued tomorrow, full piece here.
. . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.
. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.5

Who knew??

2009-12-10T11:49:00.008-05:00

Thursday December 10, 2009

. . . . .And so it goes, the wheel just keeps on turning away, the sun comes up every morning, despite our little egocentric desire that it notice us, and the moon just does it's thing, cycling through and cycling through.

. . . .And we just keep churning away here in America, just another night, just another day of not paying attention, blindly believing that we're the center of the damn universe. Well, in a way, we are, most people I know are the center of their own damn universe.

. . . .That's what's truly insane about the "wonderful" variety of choice that we have in information technology. It's entirely possible to build an entire world that's very real, depending on the inputs that you allow into it, and reflects absolutely nothing but your own personal bias. It then builds on itself and becomes a closed system, kind of like The Truman Show. However, (he said, true believer in the Laws of Physics, Mathematics and Thermodynamics) this is where the basic education in science and math, and it's pathetic position in this country shows through. Anyone at all, with the bare minimum of education in these can tell you one natural law that cannot be defeated or denied. Any system, any system at all that works in a closed loop feedback, and provides only positive reinforcement, will eventually oscillate in a sine wave manner out of control and destroy itself. The only systems in the universe that are sustaining and dynamic are those with an external, outside feedback loop, to provide input and feedback from entirely outside the system, which acts as a governor and allows slow, steady expansion into a dynamic, vital system. Applies to anything, and it's always true. Think about a little bit, and apply it to your own life.

. . . .It is getting closer to the holidays, so people are drawing inwards towards what they know and what they're familiar with. Snowpocalypse '09 has had quite an impact up at the house (anyone want to talk Climate Change right now?), and all over the nation. While you're sitting warm and dry, with some coffee on and reading this, try to think of those who have been impacted by this nation's financial crash, and are cold, hungry, wet and exposed to the wind. I know that cable news has had an impact on everyone, and no one wants to trust anyone, but get off your butt and go ahead and drive on the snowy roads, and give out some of the best Christmas presents you ever will be able to. Head down to the mission, and serve up some hot soup, clean that closet out of those coats, sweatshirts and boots that you were going to get rid of and head over to the VA. Take those old kid's toys that you were going to throw out and head to the shelter. Go to your cupboards, and take half of the food in there, since we all have pretty much fat asses and could eat a little less and go give it to your local food gatherers or community pantry. Better yet, buy one less thing for everyone, and put a card under the tree and let them know that one of their presents helped someone stay warm or get a meal. Don't goddamn well wait to do it, or say the weather's too shitty, or depend on someone else to do it. If not you, who? If not now, when?

. . . .I'm working some pretty remote places last week, this week and next, so I apologize for the infrequency of the posts, but I'm doing the best I can. I've found that that I've grown addicted to little things like food, a roof, lights and a furnace and I need to earn the cash to make those things happen for myself, and concentrate while I'm doing that. I know, I'm a whore, and probably should find a 12-step group for that type of thing, but for now, I'll just stick to earning.

. . . .Oh yeah, if you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, thanks, but switch over to the external site, The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings at The Ragged Edge of the American Century, and get some music pumping to go along with the read. Trust me, it's worth it.

. . . .On occasion, I give a peek into the The Grand Plan. That's the place where I start to tie together everything I talk about, and how it's truly all connected, all pieces of the same puzzle. Like how the financial crash has devastated the Middle Class, and left more people hungry and homeless together, and how that ties to my smart-ass remark about getting half the food out of your cupboards, which ties to health care reform, which isn't really health care reform at all, since all we have in this country, and seem willing to live with is a disease management system, which is engendered by the food we eat, which is all genetically and biologically engineered to keep growing and making profits for the agribusiness corporations, whose diseased food chain, which we must keep in place since we're destroying the planet (see climate change), so we can keep getting sick to make the pharmaceutical corporations and health care insurers richer (see plutonomy, corporatism and health care reform). You get the picture. The best part of it all. . .we're suicidal, as a species and as the population of a nation.

. . . .Oh, and another point, I get taken to task constantly for being "dark and scary". Well, the world is a pretty shitty place right now, and a lot of dark and scary shit is going on. Witness the number of anti-depressant pharmaceutical commercials that you see everyday, the number of commercials on depression. It's that uniquely American brand of self-deluding bullshit that says that (1) everyone should "feel good" (and somehow has a right to that? I don't recall anyone's grandparents talking about The Depression of the 30's and stating that it was bad because everyone didn't "feel happy") and (2) if you don't, there's a pill for that, and if you take enough of those, and go pay a therapist to rehash the shit you don't feel good about so you can not feel good about all over again, and then join any number of 12 step groups that have sprung up around the original concept and rehash your shit enough with a bunch of people so that why you're not feeling good is fresh in your mind, then you won't feel good, but at least you'll have some rationale around why you don't. It's a lot fucking simpler than that. For me, I feel good a lot of the time. Part of it is, and I quote an old dear friend of mine "You have to be the most autocratic person I've ever met" and the other part of it is I don't fear death, it's a part of life, and only one step along the road. Put simply, I ain't afraid of dyin', so it's not a problem for me to take a realistic, pragmatic look at things as they really are. Now, as for that, going back to my constant thumping the tin drum of the Laws of Thermodynamics, Physics and Mathematics, I refer to one of the world's leading thinkers, Robert Lanze, M.D., who is the author of the book Biocentrism, which basically is a theory of everything, and Lanza is considered one of the world's leading scientists. Lanza lays out the simple theory that death just simply doesn't exist, period:

Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). A new scientific theory - called biocentrism - refines these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (an old friend) "has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

. . . Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., on what I mentioned before, our suicidal tendency as a species and a nation, and the foremost way we're killing ourselves. It would involve high fructose corn syrup, and manufactured food.

You may be one among millions of people who are suffering from a health problem that is now epidemic in our country. Your doctor might have diagnosed you with one of many seemingly different diseases. He may have said you have:

• Insulin resistance

• Pre-diabetes

• Metabolic syndrome

• Obesity

• Syndrome X

• Adult onset diabetes

• Type 2 diabetes

What he likely didn't tell you is that ALL of these conditions are basically the same thing--just with varying degrees of severity. The underlying causes of ALL of these conditions are the same. And because they are all the same condition, the treatment for all of them is also the same.

That is why I have set aside these conventional diagnoses in place of a new name that more accurately defines the health problems you may suffer from. That term is diabesity. (i) Diabesity is the condition of metabolic imbalance and disease that ranges all the way from mild blood sugar imbalance to full blow diabetes.

Whether you are suffering from a little extra weight around the middle or you have been diagnosed with insulin resistance or even type 2 diabetes, the fundamental underlying biological causes of ALL of these conditions are the same. This is what I've discovered in over 20 years seeing thousands of patients.

Diabesity, in its various forms, affects over 1 billion people worldwide. It is a massive global problem, and our current approach to prevention and treatment is obviously not working because millions more are affected every year in a dramatic increase of a condition that was once very rare.

Diabesity is also the leading cause of most chronic disease in the 21st century. (ii) Those with diabesity are at an increased risk of heart disease (iii),(iv) , stroke, dementia (v), cancer (vi), high blood pressure, blindness, and kidney failure. Nervous system damage also affects 60 to 70 percent of people with diabetes and can lead to a loss of sensation in the hands and feet, slow digestion of food in the stomach, carpal tunnel syndrome, sexual dysfunction, and other nerve problems. . . . . .
. . . . . .
The reason our current approach to treating diabesity fails is because it focuses on treating the symptoms or risk factors of the disease rather than the causes. All of our attention is on treatments that:

• Lower blood sugar (diabetes drugs and insulin)

• Lower high blood pressure (anti-hypertensive drugs)

• Lower cholesterol (statins)

• Thin the blood (aspirin)

But we never ever ask the most important question: Why is your blood sugar, blood pressure, or blood cholesterol too high and why is your blood too sticky and likely to clot? Put another way: What are the root causes of diabesity?

Answering that question must be the focus of our diagnosis and treatment of this disease if we are going to solve this global epidemic.

In truth, diabetes, elevated blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol are simply downstream symptoms that result from problems with our diet, lifestyle, and environmental toxins interacting with our unique genetic susceptibilities. These are the real causes of diabesity. Unfortunately, few are taking the time to treat them.

Using medication or surgery to treat symptoms like imbalanced blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and the other complications of diabetes is like mopping up the floor while the sink overflows.. . . . . .
. . . . . . .Full piece here.

. . . .And I'll continue this series from Hyman over the next series of posts, and offer some solutions, that are proven to work.

.. . . .Because what it's about folks, is the shit we put in our bodies that the manufacture and sell. It's about the shit they grow and pump full of chemicals, antibiotics and steroids that were never designed to be put in our bodies, but it's all about the profit margin on a vital necessity, food, for the corporatists and their share price on Wall Street.

. . . .And you didn't think for a minute in your valiant effort to reform health care that the citizens of this country would wind up the winners, c'mon now, really, you didn't, did you? It's what it's always been about, the health care insurers and the pharmaceutical companies getting a lot richer on that same street, so JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs can trade their shares amongst one another.

. . . .But you can't see it yet, can you? Can't see the spider's web that connects all of it. You're still living in the Matrix, and you're happy about it.

. . . .Well, how about letting my favorite gonzo investigative journalist, Matt Taibbi, chime in on the latest revolting development coming from the Gang of 100 Lobbyist's Sluts that masquerade as Senators up on Capital Hill on all the latest coming out of the obscene piece of feral pig shit known as a Health Care Reform Bill:

Health Care For Almost One-Third of Everyone (Who is Left-Handed and Over 50)!

The short answer — subject to Senate revisions — is that those without employer-provided insurance would have more options for buying coverage, but if they are younger than 55, their money would go to a private insurer, no matter what. Rates would be more competitive than what they are offered now, but possibly less so than under a “public option.” And if they are between 55 and 64, they might be able to buy into Medicare early, though at what prices remains to be seen.

via What the Senate health-care deal would mean for consumers – washingtonpost.com.

The race to revamp the American health care system and turn it into an even bigger and more incomprehensible mess than it is today continues. Watching the congressional back-and-forth on this is a fascinating comic exercise, sort of like putting a chess board between a pair of beached Beluga whales and waiting for a game to break out.

If you start with the basic premise that by far the biggest problem with the American health care system is the bureaucracy and the paperwork — I talked to one set of hospital officials in New Jersey who said that half of their administrative personnel were devoted exclusively to chasing claims from all the various insurance companies — then this galactic battle going on right now is already hilarious. Congress is basically arguing over what the best kind of system to install is without addressing the paperwork/bureaucracy problem. To use a very hokey medical metaphor, this is sort of like a bunch of doctors arguing over how to cure the hangnail on the left hand of a patient dying from a gunshot wound to the face.

Okay, fine, so single-payer is off the table, no use continuing to whine about that, even though it’s the obvious solution to all of the biggest problems and congressional aides in private admit this. So your next-biggest problem is cost, and you can try to address that with some kind of public option, which would force private companies to take a bite out of their own profits or their own inefficiency to drive down rates in order to compete with the naturally cheaper public plans.

But we can’t have that either, of course, because the name of this game is passing something the Obama administration can call health care while preserving massive subsidies to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. In that regard, the government under the new plan will continue to be barred from negotiating bulk rates for pharma purchases for Medicare, while insurance companies won’t have to trim profits or paperwork to compete with a real public option. The Obama administration also recently reversed itself on yet another campaign promise and decided to come out against plans to allow pharma purchases from Canada, further protecting the pharma industry.

So the old system of inefficient bureaucracies and artificially high prices has basically been completely protected. What we’re left figuring out is exactly how to pay for a hugely expensive new program without taking significant money out of the pockets of these industries. The other challenge for the Obama administration is how to unite Congress enough to pass this gigantic new venture that really doesn’t achieve much, and the strategy there is turning out to be just what you’d expect: rather than pushing a single cohesive plan that makes sense in the long term, party leaders are putting forward a confused mish-mash of non-plans and trying to buy off the various segments of the Congress with pork and other forms of bribery as a means of solving the extremely short-term problem of how to pass this bill in time for the 2010 elections.

This latest plan to reduce the Medicare age is a great example. Rather than put forward a real public option that actually lowers costs and gives people everywhere the ability to buy into a plan, the Democrats are now pushing a plan to offer Medicare to people age 55 and over. The idea here is to include something that sounds enough like a “public option” that the liberals will be placated and ultimately vote for the bill. It shouldn’t escape anyone’s notice that under this arrangement, all the younger, healthier people who are just starting their careers and most need cheap insurance will be forced to buy private plans while older citizens will be offered the public teat just as they start to become very expensive to their insurers.

I get that some people think this is a good idea, and it’s hard to argue that any kind of expansion of Medicare is a bad thing, given that the program has been popular and successful throughout its history. But this move just smacks of the bass-ackwards Solomonesque bargaining that has marked this whole health care effort from the start. If expanding Medicare is good for people aged 55 and up, why isn’t it good for everybody? Why isn’t it a good idea to provide cheaper insurance for people in their preventive care years, so that they cost Medicare less as they do get older?

Answer: because it’s a political non-starter, because hospitals and doctors won’t tolerate having to take Medicare rates from everyone, nor will the pharma companies or the insurance companies tolerate having to compete with Medicare for their most profitable customers.

So what they’ll do instead is expand Medicare for people aged 55 and up in exchange for the preservation of subsidies everywhere else in the system, as well as an individual mandate that increases the revenue flow for private insurers by forcing millions of new (and relatively young and healthy) customers their way. This isn’t a health care strategy, it’s a big baby that’s been hacked up into parts and fed in descending size order to the administration’s weightiest political lobbies. I almost can’t wait to see what the next “compromise” is.

. . . .And from The Brad Blog, this little summary piece on what health care reform, climate change legislation, all of it, what's it's all really about once it starts passing through the Capital Building:

One BILLION Corporate Dollars Spent Lobbying Congress in Ads This Year, Mostly on Health Care

But you ain't seen nothin' yet. Just wait for Climate Legislation...

David Kurtz at TPM avers "It never stops":

A whopping $1 billion was spent this year --- a non-election year --- on political ads, according to a leading political advertising expert. Most of the money was spent on issue ads, the biggest chunk of that going to health care reform ads, pro and con.

And, guess what? If you think that's bad, just wait until we get to Climate Legislation proper, where the Petroleum Industry, some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the history of civilization --- in no small part, thanks to enormous federal subsidies --- have a direct financial stake in the outcome.

(Yes, the world's most profitable corporations benefit mightily from U.S. government welfare, your tax-payer dollars, to the tune of some $72 billion over the last seven years in permanent subsidies. See the handy chart below the fold to see how those subsidies stack up against other energy industries, such as renewables. Never mind the worldwide recession. Exxon Mobil profited more than $45 billion last year, Chevron $23 billion, and the federal subsidies keep coming nonetheless, even as their stooges in the Tea Party denialist "ClimateGater" crowds have been duped into mindlessly continuing their dirty work for them.)

The Oil and Coal (Fossil Fuel) Industries have played no small part in ginning up the tea bagging fight against health care reform if only because it further serves to stall Climate Legislation.

It's horrible, an abrogation of what the Founding Fathers likely had in mind (nowhere, to my knowledge, does the support for unbridled corporate spending as "free speech" come into play in the Constitution at last read) and yet all signs suggest it's only going to get far worse before it gets any better --- if it ever does.

See the chart below to understand how the federal welfare queens from Exxon Mobil and Chevron et al. make out, thanks to your hard-earned tax dollars, and keep it in mind every time you hear yet another global warming denialist out there --- and even here in comments at The BRAD BLOG --- hoping to punk the world for more such free money and endless, record corporate profits...

Source: Environmental Law Institute [PDF]

. . . .Now, he said, since it's all about me, we'll veer off into this little section. Many readers, many of them, believe that my constant war with the Christianists, my battle with those who would inject religion into government and public life, my absolute faith in the Laws of Physics, Thermodynamics and Mathematics, means that I'm an atheist at worst, an agnostic at best, and someone who is faithless and soulless.

. . .Wrong moosebreaths, entirely wrong.

. . . .What it does mean is that (1) I'm an American citizen who lives in the United States of America, which is founded upon the Constitution of the United States, the greatest living document ever written, which was put together by our Founding Fathers, but chief amongst them was Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest thinkers and greatest men of all time. What that Constitution guarantees is that I can worship as I wish, and you can worship as you wish, and that right is protected Constitutionally. That same right also has some obligations, one that Jefferson put in there on purpose, that of keeping the influence of religious thought out of governance and public policy, lest the prejudice of dogma and blind faith turn this nation into a theocracy. What my political knowledge and belief then give me is the absolute knowledge that I would take a bullet for your right to practice your faith, or put a bullet in anyone who threatened your right to do that. Got that?

. . . .As someone who's been clean and sober for 29 years this coming January, it's absolutely impossible for me to live day to day without a firm belief in something greater than myself, I proved a long time ago, that on my own, I'm prone to be a drunken, drugged out idiot who can take myself and everyone around me to rock bottom in about 2 seconds flat.

. . . .As someone who is privileged enough to be welcome out on the Rez, and someone who is privileged and lucky enough to be allowed to practice and learn his religion from them, one whose practices and beliefs are, oh say, at least 10,000 years old, I've been lucky enough to have some very cool elders. One of whom, was up until his passing this last fall, was the only one of two, the other being Leonard Crow Dog, of the original Sundance Chiefs and interpreters. Now, that lays a background for my next statement. The difference between me and Christians is simple. I firmly believe that you've got a right to what you believe, and that whole chunks of it may be right, and it's a live and let live situation, believe and don't believe. It's that simple, all I ask for, but cannot get from Christians is the same in return, but there's no allowance for that in their world. Now me, I got no problem with the little Jewish rabbi rabble-rouser and original outlaw, not me I don't. I think he was pretty cool.

. . . .And as I said, I'm prone on occasion to tie everything up, and this is all groundwork for something else that readers ask me about. Yes, I'm a former conservative, yes, I'm a former member of the Right, but I can't go there with them, and the reasons are sooooo simple.
(1) I can't support a movement and a philosophy that has become a socio/political religious dogmatic ideology based on a perversion of Christianity
(2) I can't support a movement and philosophy that willingly wants to pronounce a death sentence on the human race as a species by denying the unalterable facts that support what's happening to the climate on this planet. I don't care how it happened, it's happening, and it's been happening. It was serious enough during their poster boy's 8 year run in the White House, that George had the National Security Adviser and the Pentagon deliver a report to his desk every morning on the National Security implications of global climate change.
(3) I can't support a movement that now puts it's ideology and platform above the interests of the Nation and the workings of a Republic and has instituted "purity testing".

. . . .When it comes to Religious Right, I fall back on Frank Schaeffer, one of the original founders of the Religious Right and one of the principal architects of how they worked their way into the Republican political structure. He's gone off the reservation, and gone all broken arrow and is really regretting it these days, and doing all he can to reverse it. Frank:

Open Letter From Jesus to "Christian" America
Woe to you American Christians! You say I'm the "son of God" and yet you bully the defenseless in my name.

Do you understand the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Let me refresh your memory:

One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?” The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!” The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then replied with a story:

“A Jewish man was traveling on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road. By chance a priest came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Temple assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side. Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’ “Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked. The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.”

In case you missed the point of that parable as I'm quoted as telling it in the book of Luke it was that the theologically correct evangelical born-again "saved" passed by on the other side of the road when confronted with a human being in need. It was the "unsaved" theologically incorrect foreigner, today's equivalent of your atheists or Muslims or gay men and women, the unloved and the outcast, who stopped and did my Father's will and took care of the injured man.

Put it another way: Did you miss the point when I said that those who come to me saying "Lord, Lord we followed you and believed correctly" are the very ones that I will cast out of the Kingdom of Heaven, since they did not care for the least of these, the downtrodden, the poor and the oppressed?

Did you get it when I said that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the humble, and the outcasts; those who mourn and to the poor in spirit? Gay couples are who are being denied their civil rights are such as these. What are you doing to defend them?

Who do you think will inherit the earth: the wealthy leaders of your giant churches or the downtrodden gays scorned and mocked by society? Who's side do you think God is on: the bullied and outcast or the powerful religious leaders with their false smiles?

Who will qualify for calling themselves my sons and daughters: The meek who mourn or the proud who say: "Lord, I thank you that I'm not like these gay men and women and these illegal immigrants, and these lazy poor people who deserve no health care and these Muslims?"

You hypocrites! Don't you get it?

You say you take everything in the Bible seriously and yet you ignore all the many verses about divorce and somehow paper that over because a majority of America buys into divorce now and you don't want to lose your congregations. And half your pastors and religious leaders are divorced and remarried. But you stick it to gay men and women because they are a minority and easy to pick on! Why wax moralistic about one thing you call sin (though I have no problem with divorce per se) and yet stick it to a minority?

So you quote a few dumb passages about gay love while ignoring all the many more moral teachings you find inconvenient, say about greed and not caring for the poor or fighting unjust wars.

Look, I'm not against picking and choosing Bible verses! It's called thinking! I never stuck to everything the Bible myself either.

For instance I broke the biblical law when I said that the people who brought me the adulterous woman should not stone her to death. In other words I said: "forget what the Bible says, only kill her if you're perfect." Well, no one was so they quit picking on her and left her alone. Since then I've given my followers that as a reason to ignore the dumb harsh parts of the Bible. That is my message: pick the good, leave out the bad. The Bible is just a book, and words are just metaphors so get a life and worship the God of love not some imperfect book!

Did you get it when I said that if you lust in your heart it's the same as committing adultery? You twisted my words to make it seem as if I'm a moralistic "Church Lady" like you idiots, but I intended the exact opposite!

What I meant was that since everyone lusts; therefore the difference between how we think and feel and temptation and what we do is meaningless in terms of how God sees us. The whole point was that we're not to judge other people because we ourselves think the same thoughts. So no one is better than anyone else.

You judgmental holy rollers are like banks always making a mistake in their own favor! Why do religious so-called conservative Americans always pick on the little guy, the disenfranchised, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, pregnant women, gay people? I'll tell you why!

Because you are bullies!

You are the Pharisees passing by on the other side of the road, those who are so sure you're saved because of some nonsense that you believe in my name.

Wrong!

You American Christians utterly defaced the name of Christianity with your racism, your slavery and your bigotry against women. And now you're doing it again in your war against gay men and women and in your war against the poor who have no health care. Some of you even have had it as part of your wicked program to reestablish the Biblical law demanding death to gay people that I clearly showed must be broken by the greater law of love. Well, as you judge so you will be judged. Good luck with that!

Do you think the Kingdom of God is more likely to belong to, a wealthy "Christian" leader who preaches hate and exclusion (even when saying "I love everyone and only hate the sin") or to the least of these, the disenfranchised who want nothing more than to enjoy the same rights of other citizens? Do you think God does not see that the poor have no care and die because your greedy (lying) insurance lobby has your so called congress in their pockets?

You hypocrites and liars! You say you're preaching my gospel when my gospel never was about correct belief or correct behavior. My gospel was about not judging others, making room for everyone at the table, loving your neighbor as you love yourself. If gay men and women are your enemy then as you know I commanded you to love them! And if they are asking to be allowed to marry I commanded you to give to him who asks of you! Besides, you don't own America. This is a democracy and yours is just one opinion.

How did it come to this?

How do those who claim that they serve and represent me misuse the Bible to the extent that they make bumper stickers and coffee mugs calling for the death of the President by misquoting Psalm 109.8? (By the way, in case you want to know he's doing his best to follow the law of love right now, even though its almost impossible to do that because the fool who ruled before him -- talk about a burning Bush! -- left the biggest mess since the fall of Jerusalem in the year AD 70!)

Do you think I am on the side of a those who want to make the First Lady of the United States (who happens to be a favorite daughter of mine!) a widow and the daughters of the President (very lovely children!) orphans as this Psalm is misconstrued to "call" for?

There is no Hell or Heaven other than that we create for ourselves here on this earth and in the next life. But I'm tempted to ask God to create a real hell for you damnable hate mongers!

You are like the Pharisees I used to know and who strained out the least gnat of others' so-called misbehavior while turning a blind eye to their own wickedness, hypocrisy and lies. Remember my sayings about taking the beam out of your own eye before removing the speck from your brother's?

Quit worrying about gay people and start to worry about your so-called churches, those ash heaps of stinking bigotry and hate. The way you hate your first black president is all I need to know about you. So stop worrying about other people's "sins" and start worrying about all the lies you are telling your children in my name!

And all your talk about patriotism will do you no good unless you love every American as you love yourself -- including gay Americans, poor people the disenfranchised and yes, women who have abortions and the illegal immigrants.

They ask mercy of you! Give to them! Or did you miss that part of my teaching too?

Do you really think I'm on the side of those who hate the "other"?

You are killing me again!

The point is to have a chance to sanctify love in every generation.

If I walked here on Earth again with you, you'd kill me again, just as you are going to kill all that is good in my name, just as some of you are praying for the death of your president who you even call "Anti-Christ."

Let me tell you who is Anti-Christ: Christian "saved" America. Depart from me!

Please come up with a new name for whatever you are. Drop the word "Christ" out of your name. You've destroyed my reputation.

. . . .And on point number 2, the denial of global climate change, one of the favorites over here in the land of the rational, Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, on the climate change deniers and how they're being duped:

You're Being Duped By the Climate Denial Industry

Environment | Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 9:00:32 pm PST

Since a whole lot of right-wingers gleefully trumpeted George Monbiot’s article in which he called for CRU head Phil Jones to resign, I wonder if they’ll be equally eager to promote his latest article — which documents the enormous amounts of money the climate denial industry is spending to trick people into believing there’s no threat from global warming: The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it’s working.

I’m guessing … not.

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the Earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for man-madeglobal warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to Aids.

The third observation is the contrast between the global scandal these emails have provoked and the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. I have placed on the Guardian’s website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.

Two of them are drawn from Climate Cover-Up, the fascinating, funny and beautifully written new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. If every allegation it contained could not be traced back to leaked documents (I have checked all the sources), their findings would be unbelievable. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit’s server is one tenth as bad as the least of these revelations.

When I use the term denial industry, I’m referring to those who are paid to say that man-made global warming isn’t happening. The great majority of people who believe this have not been paid: they have been duped. Reading Climate Cover-Up, you keep stumbling across familiar phrases and concepts which you can see every day on the comment threads. The book shows that these memes were planted by PR companies and hired experts.

The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach – “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower income women” – and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues”.

Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal. As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator – including the Guardian – has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Michaels is one of many people commenting onclimate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares” turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like and to doctor official documents about climate change.

. . . . . . . Get the hint? Follow the money, it'll lead you to the truth everytime.

. . . And that's how it is today.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.5

The denial of fact amounts to insanity v1.1

2009-12-04T23:22:00.008-05:00

Monday December 7, 2009

. . . .Happy start of the week to everyone, I hope that you're not driving yourself too insane with holiday parties, families, gifts, obligations and the rest.

. . . .Yes, the number of assaults and homicides does rise during this season.

. . . .I get it

. . . .That's why I have the job I have now

. . . .If you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, go ahead and head over to the External Site, same content, but the external site has music and all kinds of goodies.

. . . .I've been asked to re-run the piece that I did earlier on the Top 15 albums that you should be listening to, but probably aren't as we get nearer to Christmas and people are looking for other gifts, or stocking stuffers. So here goes:

- The Black Crowes Before The Frost - Definitely the Robinson brothers in peak form, all Crowes, rock and roll with that true American feel with a touch of the Rolling Stones and The Band kicked in, recorded up in Woodstock, NY in Levon Helm's studio that he hold his Saturday Night Rambles in.
- Sonny Landreth From The Reach - Quite possibly the best living guitar player that you've never heard of, everyone, and I mean, everyone, showed up in the studio to help out this Cajun in his hometown with some killer cuts
-Derek Trucks Band Already Free This guitar prodigy, Butch Truck's nephew and Susan Tedeschi's husband, the Allman's able replacement for Dickie Betts is wonderful with his own band, which has a much more Third World music flavor to it.
-Robert Earl Keen The Rose Hotel America's best songwriter, Lyle Lovett's college roommate at Texas A & M with another beautiful collection of songs reflecting the human condition, and of course another Robert Earl classic, Is There Wireless in Heaven
- The Zac Brown Band The Foundation What Kenny Chesney and the all the rest of the country crossover wannabe's should really sound like, solid chops and a great funky feel behind some good slide playing and country shuffle beats.
- Cross Canadian Ragweed Happiness And All Other Things Red Dirt's first and foremost most prominent band steps out again with their unique '70's vinyl rock and roll LP flavored sound. Whenever the members of the band are asked whether they play rock and roll or country, they normally just grin and say "Yes".
- The Band of Heathens One Foot In The Ether Austin, TX's best house band just gets better with each outing, tight, rhythm driven music. Cut you have to hear L.A. County Blues
- John Fogerty and The Blue Ridge Rangers Ride Again Fogerty, once upon a time, after leaving Creedence and settling the legal problems went into the studio and recorded a straight up Americana album with The Rangers. They ride again, with a fine collection of Americana roots music. Have to have cut - When Will I Be Loved dueting with Bruce.
- The Drive-By Truckers The Fine Print A great collection of B-sides and covers from Patterson Hood and the folks from Alabama, which allow them to cut loose from their normal narrative driven single story format of other Trucker's albums.
- Michael Stanley with Just Another Night in America has delivered, again, a tour de force of songwriting that captures the Midwestern ethos, and truly puts some soul behind heartland rock. Not to be missed is the 9 minute tour-de-force at the end, Winter, which so bleakly captures the empty feeling of loss.
- Delbert McClinton with producer Don Was, brings his Grammy winning voice, after a 4 year absence to Acquired Taste. A beautiful, gritty, well-crafted blues album, with a distinctive sound and feel. You can almost taste the sawdust and stale beer in these songs.
- Roseanne Cash brings The List to life. She recorded this one, her emotionally toughest one to do, as a tribute to her Father, Johnny, who had given her "the list" a long time ago of his favorite songs. This album of covers, done with help from a lot of other artists, brings forth a lot of the influences that Johnny had in his own life.
- Kris Kristofferson is certainly Closer To The Bone with his latest. Kris remains one of America's greatest songwriters and storytellers (with it's worst voice), but this set of spare, lean tunes, written and performed simply now that Kris is in his 70's gives a revealing glimpse into the state of mind of one of the last of America's true outlaws.
- Lyle Lovett with Natural Forces takes a step back from the big production and arrangement of his last effort and dips back into that natural well of other Texas songwriters to bring his talents and The Large Band's expertise to bear on the songs.
- Guy Clark's title to his latest effort, just out, is Sometimes The Songs Write You. Guy would know, being now at the master craftsman stage of his life. His songwriting and playing ability continue unabated. Must have track? The Guitar.

. . . .I'm never really pleased unless I can continue to expose the rat bastards who wrecked the American economy and still continue to drive the ship up onto the shoals:
From Ezra Klein:

Will AIG have its revenge?
from Ezra Klein by Ezra Klein

Gabe Sherman's look at the tussle over whether AIG's traders should get fat salaries seems to come down to this:

The company is scheduled to pay another $198 million in retention payments to some 240 remaining FP employees in March 2010. Right now, according to AIG executives and Treasury sources close to the talks, the issue is that Feinberg wants FP’s traders to return the rest of the retention money that was pledged to be returned in March of this year under pressure from Cuomo. FP executives say the contracts are outside Feinberg’s jurisdiction. Feinberg counters that he could use the contracts as a factor when determining a trader’s base salary for next year as indicated in the statute set by Congress. In theory, if an FP employee is due to receive $1 million on March 15, 2010, Feinberg has the authority to compensate by cutting their salary to $1. Of course then, the employee could simply quit.
Senior AIG executives contend that an exodus of traders over punitively reduced contracts risks blowing up the $1.1 trillion derivatives portfolio still left to be unwound, destroying the taxpayers’ $180 billion investment in the company and potentially dragging the fragile economic recovery back into the abyss. “I’m trying desperately to prevent an uncontrolled collapse of that business,” then-CEO Ed Liddy testified last March. “The financial downside for taxpayers is potentially very large and it’s very real.” The AIG executives see Feinberg’s efforts to save a few million in retention payments, given the billions at stake, as a terrible business decision. “I just don’t understand why you would treat people this way,” one AIG executive says. “It’s economic and financial terrorism on the government’s own investment, by the government.”

So do you need these guys? Their contention is that you do. The $1.1 trillion that their unit has left on the books could blow up if the guy watching it doesn't know which wire to cut. Folks I talk to say you probably don't, but it would be a problem to have them all walk out of the office on the same day (which they're threatening to do). And it's not clear that you can replace them with people who are cheaper. But anyone else have an informed take on this?

. . . . .So, health care, the gang of 100 whores on Capitol Hill is working furiously through the weekend, let's start off with this little opinion piece from Krugman, brought to us via Cesca:

Paul Krugman:

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of "centrist" senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.
But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Of course it's not about fiscal responsibility. It's all about contributors and lobbyists.

But let's take the fiscal responsibility argument on its face. Who is confronting the Lieberdogs with the savings in the bill? If we argue on this basis, there is no counterpoint. The conservadem argument is all about fiscal responsibility, yet their efforts are putting fiscally responsible healthcare legislation in jeopardy.

Fact: the healthcare reform bill, along with the public option, reduces the deficit and saves money. Meanwhile, the conservadems are using a Bush-style opposite-day argument and, to date, I haven't seen them seriously confronted about this.

If only the corporate press were as diligent about this as they are about Tiger Woods' underpants.

. . . Sticking with Cesca:

"What’s really great is if you’re really sick anywhere in the world, this is the best place to be sick, it just costs too much." —Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Yep, we only bankrupt and destroy the lives of people who become sick or injured.

Best system ever!

. . . .And since Bob is on a roll:

I hope you're not an Aetna customer.

Health insurance giant Aetna is planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.
In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts.

Best healthcare system ever! Hey, I wonder how many wingnut teabaggers are Aetna customers. Good luck to any of them who have preexisting conditions.

Also, I wonder if anyone will ask Joe Lieberman about this since he's taken $112,000 from Aetna over the years. His ninth largest contributor.

. . . . Ezra Klein tackles something that I've often wondered myself when talking to people about issues, and in this case, an issue that affects them so directly and personally. The answer is what I thought it would be:

I've long wished polls did more to question how much the American people know as opposed to what they believe, or think they believe. For instance, we've had dozens, maybe hundreds, of polls assessing the public's beliefs on the public option. These polls probably began during May, or maybe even before that. It's December now, and Vanity Fair finally had the bright idea to ask, "Could you confidently explain what exactly the public option is to someone who didn’t know?" The answer:

And so far as health-care reform goes, the public option is fairly simple, and undeniably prominent. Imagine how many could explain the exchanges, or the mandate, or the benefit package ...

. . . .I have found that most people, even when presented with fact and data, refuse to accept it if it goes against their predisposed position, and if it disturbs their equanamity inside their own comfort zone. In short, most people, once their minds are made up, even if presented with fact, data and evidence would rather be bat-shit crazy. It's what they're comfortable with, and their own hubris prevents them from believing or admitting that they may have been "wrong" in some way or fashion.

. . . .It's been a while since we took on climate change, and the scientific theory behind it. We're going to now. I live and work out in the elements, on the ocean, on oil platforms, pulling oil and gas up from the depths, if anyone is exposed to it, I am.

. . . . .In two years now, it has snowed in south Louisiana, the Gulf Coast of the United States, in the first week of December. Two years in a row.

. . . .I'm occasioned to it by something a young acquaintance of mine is plastering all over the web. Calling climate change a "hoax". Now, I've known this young man for quite some few years. He doesn't have the mathematical ability, nor scientific mind of a feral weasel. He couldn't pass a basic algebra class, much less the large model statistical modeling, differential equations necessary to understand climate on a geo or paleo scale. He doesn't have any understanding of scientific method, nor modeling, nor hypothesis building. Yet, as an ardent Teabagger, he strokes himself regularly at the mention of Sarah Palin's name, vomits back every talking point that Beck and Limbaugh can make and ardently, veins throbbing, screams that climate change isn't occurring.

. . . .The best part is, he's typical of the kind of moron that will show up at my door when the shit hits the fan, knowing full well that I know how to purify water, grow food, make shelter, start fire and live on the barest necessities.

. . . .Bad move, he's also typical of the person who forgets that I'm not some pussy liberal, but a Second Amendment believing and carrying anarchist libertarian, and I'll shoot him and his family on sight, regardless of past relationship or history. When it all comes down, it'll be about me taking care of my own, not everybody else that wanders along. Besides that, I'll need their bodies for fertilizer for the garden.

. . . .Now, I really, really don't care about "Climategate". I don't trust hacked e-mails, especially from the bunch that it's coming from, who will fabricate anything to make their case. I don't trust journalists, pundits or politicians, who are untrained, and mathematically and scientifically unsound to interpret any data, at all. That would be journalists (who are entertainers fighting for ratings), pundits or politicians of any stripe at all to know, understand or apply scientific method.

. . . .As pointed out to my by my friend John, the scientific journal Nature finds nothing notable in the stolen e-mails from the CRU.

. . . .Scientific method? Remember that from high school. It's the foundation of all rational thought. Formulate a hypothesis, measure, analyze and attempt to disprove the hypothesis with irrefutable, unarguable evidence and data.

. . . .Whether you're a person of faith, an agnostic or a an atheist, it's the only way to prove or disprove anything. If you are a person of faith, your belief in a Creator or Higher Power leads logically to an understannding that the laws of physics, thermodynamics and mathematics, true as they are throughout the Universe were put in place by something greater. If you're an agnostic or an atheist, well, in data we trust, all others bring cash.

. . . .Which brings me to the data, and what's happening now, what's real. I don't care, nor care to debate it's causes. It may be man-made from the last few decades, it may be merely a phase during an eons long cycle, but regardless, it's happening, and personaly, I don't believe that there's a damn thing we can do about it at all, the engine is turned on, and is far more powerful and larger and unstoppable than any of us can do anything about, except prepare.

. . . .Like I say, don't come to my back yard when it does. I'll take care of my own, my family and those I love, if you fall into the acquaintance category, you're only setting yourself up for something severe.

. . . . .NASA has released the Goddard data for this year ending soon, and the data is irrefutable.

. . . . .I use a site called Skeptical Science, a group of scientific data geeks, who deliberately approach everything with skepticism, and attempt to disprove climate change, using rigorous scientific method, in hopes that those people who have knowledge and ability are wrong. They're not:

Over the past 25 years, global temperature has warmed at a rate of ~0.2°C per decade. Superimposed over this long term trend is short term variability. Most of these short-term variations are due to internal oscillations like El Niño Southern Oscillation, the 11-year solar cycle and volcanic eruptions. Over periods less than a decade, such short-term variations can outweigh the anthropogenic global warming trend. For example, El Niño events can change global temperature by up to 0.2°C over a few years. The solar cycle imposes warming or cooling of 0.1°C over five years. However, neither El Niño, solar activity or volcanic eruptions make a significant contribution to long-term climate trends. Consequently, over the past decade (1999-2008), the warming trend is 0.19°C per decade. consistent with the long term trend.

Figure 2: Global temperature according to NASA GISS data since 1980. The red line shows annual data, the red square shows the preliminary value for 2009, based on January-August. The green line shows the 25-year linear trend (0.19 °C per decade). The blue lines show the two most recent ten-year trends (0.18 °C per decade for 1998-2007, 0.19 per decade for 1999-2008).
Satellite and tide-gauge measurements show that sea level rise is accelerating faster than expected. The average rate of rise for 1993-2008 as measured from satellite is 3.4 millimeters per year while the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) projected a best estimate of 1.9 millimeters per year for the same period. Actual sea level rise is 80% higher than the median projection. Sea level is likely to rise much more by 2100 than the often-cited range of 18-59 centimeters from the IPCC AR4.

Figure 3: Sea level change. Tide gauge data are indicated in red and satellite data in blue. The grey band shows the projections of the IPCC Third Assessment report.
Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. The area of sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models. The thickness of Arctic sea ice has also been on a steady decline over the last several decades. September sea ice thickness has been decreasing at a rate of 57 centimeters per decade since 1987.

Figure 4: Observed (red line) and modeled September Arctic sea ice extent in millions of square kilometers. Solid black line gives the average of 13 IPCC AR4 models while dashed black lines represent their range. The 2009 minimum has recently been calculated at 5.10 million km2, the third lowest year on record and still well below the IPCC worst case scenario.
Some more observations from the latest research:
Recent studies have confirmed the observed trends of more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes.
Rains have become more intense in already-rainy areas as atmospheric water vapor content increases. Recent changes have occurred faster than predicted by some climate models, raising the possibility that future changes will be more severe than predicted.
Conversely, there have been observed increases in drought in some latitude bands. The intensification of the global hydrological cycle is expected to lead to further increases in very heavy precipitation in wet areas and increased drought in dry areas.
Several studies since the IPCC AR4 have found more evidence for an increase in hurricane intensity over the past decades.
There have been recent increases in the frequency and intensity of wildfires in regions with Mediterranean climates (e.g. Spain, Greece, southern California, south-east Australia) and further marked increases are expected.
Rapid degradation and upward movement of the permafrost lower limit has continued on the Tibetan plateau. Observations in Europe have noted permafrost thawing and a substantial increase in the depth of the overlying layer.
The contribution from shrinking glaciers to sea level rise in 2000 was about 0.8 millimeters per year. New estimates show that glacier mass loss has increased 50% and now contributes about 1.2 millimeters per year to global sea levels.
There have been a number of recent studies reinforcing the conclusion that the rate of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are increasing. Recent observations have shown that changes in the rate of ice discharge can occur far more rapidly than previously suspected. Dynamic ice sheet uncertainties are largely one-sided. They can lead to a faster rate of sea-level rise but are unlikely to significantly slow the rate of rise.
Observations also show deep-ocean warming is much more widespread in the Atlantic and Southern Oceans than previously appreciated.

. . . . .Little Green Footballs found and contributed this one to the blogosphere about the stolen e-mails:

Environmentalist Peter Sinclair’s new video is about the most absurdly overblown phony scandal in a year overflowing with phony right wing scandals, drearily dubbed “Climategate” by right wing blogs and Fox News, in hopes that it will turn out to be a death blow to global warming.

It’s not a death blow. It’s not even a stubbed toe. It’s a big nothing, a yawning chasm of foolishness filled with idiocy and hot air. The screaming from every right wing blog over this nonsense would actually be funny, if it weren’t so utterly, shamefully pathetic.

Sinclair puts some of the emails most distorted by the deniers into their proper context, and shows the incredibly dishonest tactics they’re using to continue trying to pump up this non-story, by fooling the gullible.

. . . .Like I said, it's coming, that's real, and can't be argued with. What caused it, I don't know, nor do I think that we can ever really know. What we can do about it, will be feeble attempts at best, since once an engine like that is turned on, it's hard to turn off.

. . . .The question that you have to ask yourself is simple. What are you willing to do for your children and grandchildren? If you're a skeptic, or a denier at this stage, I can only hope that whatever God you pray to has mercy on your soul as you dig those childrens graves.

. . . .And while we're talking about wingnuts and idiots; seems Crybaby Beck is being faced with the stark reality that people don't like him outside of his own little Fox bubble. Despite heavy whoring on his show, theater trailers, etc. Glenn has only sold 17, yes, that's right, 17 tickets to his show The Christmas Sweater in Boston, 17 in New York and 30 in Washington D.C. Seem people don't really want to spend a holiday night listening to an unmedicated lunatic cry about a fucking sweater.

. . . .This one goes without comment:

"They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous, so she came home." —Sarah Palin's father, Chuck Heath, describing how Sarah Palin dropped out of Hawaii Pacific University because of the Asian people there

A minority type thing?

. . . And another favorite of the Right Wing, Mike Huckabee. Remember him? Presidential candidate in 2012? Heavy duty man of faith? Former governor? Shitbag who paroled a murderer to another state who then killed 4 cops because he didn't like cops? Yeah, that's him. Frank Schaeffer on Huckabee and the influence of fundamentalist religion on policy:

Mike Huckabee broke his silence on Monday and defended his decision to give clemency to a convict said to be responsible for the ambush murder of four Seattle police officers. I have an odd connection to Huckabee. He told Katie Couric, during the 2007 primary race, that the book by my Religious Right leader father, Francis Schaeffer, titled How Should We Then Live?, was his favorite book. The book is credited (along with others my father wrote) for starting the evangelical wing of the anti-abortion movement.

In Huckabee's more than 1000 pardons of criminals that prosecutors and victims objected to in Arkansas, Huckabee most often cited his belief in "redemption" as his "reason." This was a weird flip side to another born-again governor -- George Bush -- never pardoning anyone, of which more in a moment. (I have an odd connection with W. Bush too in that my parents were friends of President Bush Sr.)

Huckabee's extreme and literal born-again fundamentalist views about people's path to God led to tragic real world consequences. His religious views obviously trumped common sense. And this was a direct result of a theology known as "Dominionism" (or "Reconstructionism") where believers want to not just believe their religion privately but "take back America for God"; in other words, rule on the basis not of American law but the Bible. I explain this trend in my book Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism).

Huckabee freely mixes his ideas about church and state and how religion should shape policy. That brings up a question: should any religious fundamentalists ever be elected president by Americans who want them to do a good, sensible, moderate job, not use their office for expression of their pet religious fanaticism? And another: wasn't one already more than enough?

It seems to me that Huckabee's absurd record of unwarranted pardons of dangerous criminals including killers and rapists is just another example proving that the heart of the Republican Party is now in the hands of religious extremists. (Jeff Sharlet makes the same point in his excellent book The Family, as does Max Blumenthal in his book Republican Gomorrah).

We have heard Sarah Palin saying that health care reform will lead to "death panels." We had George W. Bush saying that he felt God was leading him to go to war in Iraq. We have Christian Zionists like Rev. John Hagee rooting for Armageddon in the Middle East so Jesus will return all the sooner and then endorsing figures like John McCain who -- until called out on Hagee's crazy anti-Catholicism -- accepted the endorsement!

And now four police officers are dead because Huckabee (the not-so-covert Reconstructionist) takes every word of the Bible more seriously than the advice of prosecutors and victim rights groups.

It is clear that Huckabee is unfit for any national office and was unfit to ever be a governor. It is also clear that his record of insane irresponsibility was well known by the evangelicals that supported him for theological reasons in the 2007 primaries leading up to the '08 race.

It's interesting to note that using the same Bible Huckabee and George Bush Jr (as governors) both fell into the same fallacy with opposite results while each was equally nuts in his own way. They put their religious ideas ahead of good sense and loyalty to the Constitution, let alone to the law. Church trumped state. The idiocy that followed produced mirror opposites from the same source: a fundamentalist literalistic interpretation of the Bible.

Born-again Bush took the harsh eye-for-an-eye Calvinist approach and never pardoned anyone on death row and was gleefully executing more people than any Texas governor in modern times. Conversely born-again Huckabee grabbed hold of his version of "redemptive" "biblical" incoherence by carrying his religious theories of redemption to a crazy level and thus pardoning just about anyone his Southern Baptist fellow pastor cronies recommended.

The Bush/Huckabee contradiction shows two things.

1) The Bible can "tell" you anything you want to believe...

and

2) the Bible is a terrible substitute for the rule of law.

What Bush and Huckabee did share however was the arrogance reserved to those convinced they and they alone are doing God's special work. Huckabee was known to actually mock those who questioned his descisions. And Bush took it a step farther and actually mocked a condemned death row inmate who pleaded for her life.

Clearly the evangelical crowd that gave us 8 years of George W. Bush doesn't vote on the basis of facts. Nor do they care about someone like Huckabee's dismal record. They vote for "correct" theology and damn the real world consequences.

Four thousand Americans were needlessly killed in Iraq because the born-again, born again's president was in control. More that 50,000 were wounded because of the way Bush thought he heard God's voice. Hundred's of thousands of Iraqis are dead because Bush thought God had chosen him to lead a holy war for American exceptionalism and "democracy." Sarah Palin is also hearing voices and waiting in the wings to "lead" according to what God is "telling" her.

Four officers in Seattle are dead today because of Huckabee's allegiance to his interpretation of the Bible rather than to the U.S. Constitution.

How many more godly goofs can this country afford?

. . . And that's how it is today.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.5

Damn it Jim! I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker!

2009-12-02T23:04:00.004-05:00

Thursday December 3, 2009

. . . .Really crappy mood tonight. Long way from home, longer time till I get back there (just before Christmas), not feeling the best physically, it'll all probably leak through, so be it.

. . . .Playlist has finally changed up. A lot. Enjoy, and some of you will catch on quick to the opening tune that will stay there a few days. Go Big Kenny, only you can combine a Sundance entrance song, Irish instrumentals, electric guitars and one hell of a thought to spread out into the world. Well, that and Track 3 on the CD, The Quiet Times of a Rock and Roll Farm Boy which contains an absolutely amazing lyric. "If you want to get that girl in bed, eat some fried corn and chicken bread". And the last track, Track 11, which is the entire CD, recapped, with Big Kenny's fevered brain at work in between the tracks.

. . . .The shopping season is here, you can look in the archives for the Top 15 albums of music you should be listening to, but probably aren't, they make great gifts.

. . . .Now that Season 2 of Sons of Anarchy is over, a couple of notes. The season finale beat every show on television in it's time slot. That's right, every show on television, and it has become The FX Networks and cable's highest rated show. Season 3 was announced the morning after, next September, and Kurt Sutter's contract with FX as creator/director/head writer/showrunner was extended for 2 more years. You know who Kurt Sutter is, you just don't know it. He plays Otto in the show, the locked down brother. His wife, Katey Sagal, who plays Gemma, and is one hell of an actress deserves an Emmy for this season's protrayal, and her bringing Gemma out as one of the strongest characters in television. You can keep up with Kurt in the off-season at his blog, SutterInk, or on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

. . . . .Yes, I am looking forward to Avatar on December 18th, I like James Cameron movies, big, over the top and audacious. But I'm looking forward more to Daybreakers.

. . . Set in the year 2019, most of the human race, due to a viral outbreak is vampires. Sounds boring right? Wrong, with the human race vanishing and dwindling, this guarantees extinction for everyone, once the food supply is gone. That, and Willem Dafoe as the crossbow wielding leader of the resistance makes it that much better. Sounds cool to me. I like last stand shit.

. . . .So, the ridiculous-ass "jobs summit" was going on while the chief architect of the crash was going through his opening round of confirmation hearings. I don't know what's more disgusting, the fact that he lets the drivel he spews come straight out of his mouth and expects people to believe it, or the fact that the Senate knows full well that he's a bought and owned puppet Wall Street and through 2 Administrations was and is the chief architect and arsonist behind the crash, or the fact that everyone is just sitting idly by and listening whilst he freely states that his buds on Wall Street won't only not pay for what they've done, but will be rewarded and the money that he wants for even more bailouts will be raided directly out of Social Security and Medicare.

. . . .My favorite crusader, Dylan Ratigan, on Bernanke:

You want to do something about jobs? Well, considering a different Fed Chairman might be a good place to start.

Nothing would more clearly display the inability of our leaders to deal with the disastrous state of our economy than easily reconfirming Ben Bernanke for another round at the Fed on the same day that they hold a "job summit" in a harebrained attempt to try to figure out how to create jobs in this country.

So far in his tenure, Chairman Bernanke has already told us that housing prices won't go down, the subprime market will be "contained", unemployment won't get to 10% and that instead of regulation, those responsible Wall Streeters who used credit derivative swaps could just be trusted to use them "properly". Of course, he thinks this performance should be rewarded with more power and utter secrecy.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, does that make Bernanke crazy for still basing our nation's economic policies on his terrible predictions? Does it make Congress crazy for reconfirming him? Or does it make us crazy for voting these people into office??

Defenders like to point out what a fantastic job Chairman Bernanke has done "rescuing" our economy from supposed CERTAIN DOOM, utilizing his formidable expertise on the Great Depression as his guidance (or cover) for providing an infinite supply of money to our most culpable banks with no strings attached. Dropping the future wealth of America from the sky is a pretty easy way to put out almost any economic fire, but in this case our superstar fireman also happens to be one of the primary arsonists.

So what does Bernanke's failure to be a proper steward of our nation's banks have to with jobs?

Unlike any other business, banks and insurance companies are the only companies that do business with the wealth of others. Banks are also the only business granted a list of special privileges and responsibilities. This was done to encourage banks to take the savings of others and lend it out to American businesses and individuals, with the goal of helping grow new ideas and businesses that serve the current and future needs of society and, in the process, create jobs that help fulfill those needs.

But our banks haven't been serving the interests of the broader economy for quite some time.

Instead of being incentivized by the government to lend money to all the innovators, investors and workers in this country, our banks are either hoarding cash, playing the spread between low interest government loans and higher yields or just flat-out gambling through the giant and ongoing insurance fraud that is the derivatives market.

The Federal Reserve and other government programs are literally pouring a potential $23.7 trillion of taxpayer money into bucket with a giant hole in the bottom and wondering why there are no jobs.

Would you work if you could steal money without consequences? Would you do the hard work of lending money to the small businesses of America if you could just make more gambling it in swap markets of New York and never have to worry about the losses?

This economic model is not geared towards jobs. This is not capitalism. This is not American. This is a crime.
So when the very same government proclaims today at a so-called "jobs summit" that, by golly, they really want to try and come up with some ideas to help you get a job, tell them a good place to start would be to deal with the recent job performance of one of our economy's chief arsonists.

. . . .And one of the other sharpest young minds around, Cenk Uygur, on the same man:

I had large misgivings about Ben Bernanke before his hearings began. He's given credit for steering our economy to safe shores after we hit an enormous economic iceberg. First, I would argue we are nowhere near safe shores. Second, why are we rehiring the guy who steered the Titanic into the iceberg in the first place?

But despite all of that, I wasn't dead set against him. He does have Republicans and Democrats who believe in him. He obviously has the confidence of President Obama (though, so does Geithner and Summers, so that might not tell you much). He is an expert on the Great Depression. The problem is he was at least partly responsible for creating the situation that called for his expertise. His knowledge in handling depressions might not be so handy if he hadn't gotten us into one.

So, I was not predisposed to support him but I was not dead set against him, either. Until now.

He just said in his hearings that he would get more money by going after Social Security and Medicare. When Sen. Reed suggested that we could also get the money by taxing some of the richest people in America (some of whom got rich causing the economic crash in the first place), all of sudden he demurred. He says that's not his place to say if we should ever raise taxes. But apparently it is his place to encourage going after your retirement money. So, taxing the rich is never under consideration, going after the retirement money of the middle class is his first option. Sorry to be blunt, but fuck that.

He even has the nerve to quote famous bank robber Willie Sutton by saying that he would go after Social Security and Medicare because "that's where the money is." Well, give him points for honesty. He plans on robbing more of your money to give to his Wall Street friends - because that's where the money is. As if they haven't taken enough of our money.

First of all, this shows that it was not a coincidence that George W. Bush selected him as the head of the Fed. He has a bipartisan reputation in Washington. But going after these programs shows you his inclination is unmistakably Republican. Screw the middle class first and protect the rich at all costs. But more importantly, it's a matter of perspective. From his perspective, he doesn't consider raising taxes of the wealthiest people in the country, or even more pertinent the taxes on financial transactions, as even a remote possibility. His perspective is to protect Wall Street, not you. He views you as the bank that they withdraw from.

On top of all this, he refuses to disclose where the Fed distributes its money and says we shouldn't audit the Fed to find out where they send trillions of our dollars to. Is this a joke? This guy is going to have enormous power to distribute our currency and unlike Congress he doesn't even have to account for the money. And we're going to hand over the keys to the economy to a guy with this perspective? Hell no! We'd be crazy to agree to this.

Is Ben Bernanke the change we voted for? How can anyone believe that? What is the matter with Obama? Picking the same guy as Bush, and the same exact guy who was at the helm when the economy crashed, is definitely not change we can believe in. Ben Bernanke is the definition of the status quo. He is part and parcel of the Washington and Wall Street establishment that caused our economic problems in the first place. Why the hell would we put this guy back in charge?

. . . .Robert Reich (remember him? Secretary of Labor under Clinton, when we had jobs and money, remember that?) on the true reality of what's happening in this country economically:

But here's the real worry. The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that's been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.

Under the pressure of this awful recession, many companies have found ways to cut their payrolls for good. They've discovered that new software and computer technologies have made workers in Asia and Latin America just about as productive as Americans, and that the Internet allows far more work to be efficiently outsourced abroad.

This means many Americans won't be rehired unless they're willing to settle for much lower wages and benefits. Today's official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which Americans are already on this path. Among those with jobs, a large and growing number have had to accept lower pay as a condition for keeping them. Or they've lost higher-paying jobs and are now in a new ones that pays less.

Yet reducing unemployment by cutting wages merely exchanges one problem for another. We'll get jobs back but have more people working for pay they consider inadequate, more working families at or near poverty, and widening inequality. The nation will also have a harder time restarting the economy because so many more Americans lack the money they need to buy all the goods and services the economy can produce.

So let's be clear: The goal isn't just more jobs. It's more jobs with good wages. Which means the fix isn't just temporary measures to accelerate a jobs recovery, but permanent new investments in the productivity of Americans.

What sort of investments? Big ones that span many years: early childhood education for every young child, excellent K-12, fully-funded public higher education, more generous aid for kids from middle-class and poor families to attend college, good health care, more basic R&D that's done here in the U.S., better and more efficient public transit like light rail, a power grid that's up to the task, and so on.

Without these sorts of productivity-enhancing investments, a steadily increasing number of Americans will be priced out of competition in world economy. More and more Americans will face a Hobson's choice of no job or a job with lousy wages. It's already happening.

. . . And Elizabeth Warren, the only straight voice in this administration about what's happening economically, and how devastating it is, and will continue to be, and it's long-lasting, generation spanning (and soul sucking) effects:

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

. . . .No middle class anymore? We've faced that situation twice before. In the 1840's and in the 1930's. The Administrations at the time had a novel way of shoring up the nation's facilities, getting them pumping again and finding jobs for everyone, and a ready made workforce. They were called the Civil War and World War II. Looks like this Administration has hit the history books and studied hard and is ready to do whatever it takes to get America working again, like having eveyone who doesn't have a job join the Army.

. . .Bob Cesca, on the edge of Occam's razor that the President is now walking, and how the Left, which is now reeling in feigned, shocked horror at the President's announcement of a 30,000 troop increase in Afghanistan will take place just 2 days before Christmas, and how they've had their heads up their asses all along:

Whether you like it or not, if you voted for President Obama last year, you are partly responsible for this strategy. That's not entirely a bad thing depending on your position on the war, but it's worth repeating that the president never spoke of drawing down our forces in the Af-Pak region during the campaign, nor did he mention such a thing during his first 10 months in office.

So last night's announcement shouldn't come as a shocker.

Admittedly, during the campaign, he never specifically said that he would drop 30,000 additional soldiers into the war. And while he never specified the exact "30,000" number, he also never said anything about a July, 2011 date for beginning the withdrawal either. In other words, and unlike the Bushies, he's making adjustments to his strategy based upon what's happening on the ground rather than holding himself to a firm "smoke 'em out" meets "bring 'em on" endless and unchanging war policy. And, suffice to say, this underscores his considerably non-Bushie penchant for thought, rationality and informed deliberation.

Nevertheless, this thing is painfully confounding.

Yes, I obviously voted for President Obama. Yes, I understand how this strategy is, in fact, a vast departure from the Bush administration's conduct and strategic planning (insofar as the Bushies "planned" anything -- all gut). Yes, I understood the president's hawkish language about "the good war."

But I'm very reluctant to support this decision, because history has proved that similar plans have too easily gone horribly awry. Be that as it may, I just don't see how the president's solution can be avoided.

The war in Afghanistan is like a terrible form of cancer. No one wants it, but I don't know how we can avoid dealing with it without facing serious consequences. I don't want an escalation. I don't want more casualties. I don't want more spending when Congress is being miserly on domestic programs. I want the thing to end. I didn't even want it to start in the first place.

Regardless, it seems as though the president's announcement is a prescription for radical chemotherapy, complete with a start date and an end date. Vomiting, pain and ugliness ensue, but with light -- and perhaps a cure -- on the horizon. I think.

The diagnosis was reiterated and clarified by the president last night.

How did the cancer metastasize? We're all too familiar with how the Bushies made a series of historic blunders over there. They let Bin Laden escape. They failed to crush the Taliban. They rushed to abandon the mission in lieu of invading and occupying Iraq. They further destabilized an already unstable region -- a region in which there are several nuclear powers, one of which being Pakistan. The Taliban and others want those nukes and they shouldn't be allowed to attain them.

The impossible conundrum is whether we, as a nation, are willing to allow eight years of mistakes and mismanagement to go unmitigated knowing the long-term risks of an immediate withdrawal, or whether we risk more lives trying to at least clean up some of the mess before we bug out. Clearly, the president has opted for the latter with an eye on the former. And while I despise this war, I can't wrap my head around any other more reasonable solution.

There are historical lessons from Vietnam (more on this presently), but, likewise, there are lessons in the story of Charlie Wilson and our intervention during and following the Soviet occupation. But the added layer of several nuclear powers in the region, including Pakistan, raise the stakes and augment the risks in leaving without some kind of reconstruction as we go.

Our failure in the 1980s to provide the civilian population with even the most rudimentary infrastructure following the Soviet withdrawal eventually helped to create al-Qaeda and this current FUBAR crisis. If we don't withdraw smartly, we risk decades of blowback -- or, I should say, additional blowback beyond that which has already been sowed. Yet if we leave behind some stability, as opposed to abandoning the region in its present state of chaos, we might actually ameliorate some of the anti-Western piss and vinegar that's been stirred up over the years. Then again, occupation is occupation -- a choice between "awful if we get out" or "awful if we stay."

And then there's Pakistan's nukes. Outside of the purview of the American national security apparatus, the rest of us probably won't know for sure how close the Taliban is to absconding off with a nuclear weapon, and we probably don't entirely know how unstable Pakistan's government is. One way or another, I can't imagine a better sales pitch for Republican slash-and-burn foreign policy than a Democratic administration summarily withdrawing and consequently allowing a hostile Islamic regime to acquire a nuclear device from a destabilized Pakistan and to use it. This doesn't seem acceptable to me, but what will it cost to prevent it? I have no idea.

Again, this is the cancer. This is a big steaming bucket of crap. It's not a Truman A-bomb choice, but it's not too far down the list.

No matter what the cable news people suggest, though, this will never be "Obama's War." However, it will be "Obama's Chore" to repair the, pardon the language, impossibly fucked. And so I reluctantly support this plan with many, many concerns and caveats.

Mainly, this has to remain a clean-up and not evolve into a reboot. If it becomes a reboot of the war, it will fail. If the situation cascades out of hand, we could very well have the Vietnam that the president seemed to dismiss last night. (I disagree with the president's "it's not Vietnam" argument. While the specifics are different, the broadstroke similarities remain: escalation is escalation, endless war is endless war. If he loses control of the plan, Vietnam is what could very well happen.)

Ultimately, this is the policy we voted for last year. We voted for a pragmatic president who would carefully deliberate the war, a president who would make decisions based upon reason and reality -- a president who has been unwavering in his determination to repair the Bushie mistakes in Afghanistan and, once this was accomplished, to withdraw. This is precisely who and what we heard last night.

Hang the chemo bag and let's get it over with. Here's to hoping the road to July, 2011 is speedy and the casualties are minimal.

. . . Frank Schaeffer, author of on how the Left is just as blind, hypocritical and stupid as they accuse the Right of being:

When President-elect Obama said he'd reach out to the Republicans and all Americans, he was telling the truth. Apparently some people on the left hoped he was lying. Obama's "sin" in their eyes is that he is keeping his promises.

Other than the perpetually aggrieved paranoid cranks on the far right -- FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, James Dobson etc., -- most Americans (no matter who they voted for) are just glad that someone brimming with confidence, intelligence and good will is in charge of our rescue, at last! (Watching President-elect Obama's recent press conferences, one could hear a collective sigh of relief from sea to shining sea.) Nevertheless, a few critics from the left are now demanding progressive purity from President-elect Obama that is not in keeping with his clearly stated campaign promise to bring all Americans together, and to put governance and competence ahead of ideology. In that sense they are working against the aims of his presidency.

A few progressive critics are bewailing the fact that President-elect Obama's cabinet is "too centrist," or made up of "too many former Clintonites," or that he's working with the Republicans, or that he is "too hawkish on Afghanistan." Turns out some Pharisaical progressives are into guilt by association; "Look at the bad company he's keeping!" they groan. General Jones?! Clinton?! Gates?! The sky is falling!

As someone who escaped the fever swamp of the Religious Right many years ago -- I know fundamentalism when I smell it, be it religious or secular. And the criticisms of President-elect from the left stink to high heaven of fundamentalist orthodoxy, albeit with a "progressive" twist.

Here are a few examples of the fundamentalists of the left trying to make Obama fit their political "theology:"

Chris Bowers writing in Open Left (Nov 21):

"I know everyone is obsessed with the 'team of rivals' idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated... Why isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely."

Cris Hayes writing in The Nation (Nov 21):

"Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one."

William Greider in the The Nation ( Nov 25)

" A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page, his campaign declaration seemed to promise a fresh start for Washington. I, for one, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward... Obama's [cabinet] selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies of George W. Bush."

And this from Noam Chomsky, the grand old man of the left himself, on Democracy Now!. (posted on Alternet Nov 28)

"Rhetoric we know, but what are [Obama's] actions?... The first choice was the Vice President, Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq... The first post-election appointment was for Chief of Staff, which is a crucial appointment; determines a large part of the president's agenda. That was Rahm Emanuel... again, a longtime Washington insider. Also, one of the leading recipients in congress of funding from the financial institutions hedge funds... Obama's choices... [include] Robert Rubin and Larry Summers... among the people who are substantially responsible for the crisis. One leading economist, one of the few economists who has been right all along in predicting what's happening, Dean Baker, pointed out that selecting them is like selecting Osama Bin Laden to run the war on terror..."

What is the message from these cheerless Scrooges of the left? Joy? Celebration? The hard work of actual governance? Ba Humbug! We don't do winning! We don't do actual governance! We only do permanent opposition! Coal in everyone's stockings... again!

Before I continue please note: There is a line between opposition to say, a specific policy and undermining our new President-elect's overall efforts by casting doubt on every selection he makes (or doesn't make) for his team, let alone pitting his rhetoric against his actions in a manner that implies he is lying. This "line" matters, even if it's fluid and hard to pin down because this is a critical -- perhaps fatal -- moment in American history.

That said... There is a reason that the likes of Saints Kucinich (from the left) and Huckabee (from the right) are not the President-elect: most Americans don't want the Church Ladies of the right or the left running the country. Sunday school is one thing, the presidency another. Our country is not so much "center-right" or "center-left" as fundamentally anti-ideological. (Which, by the way, is one reason why the Sarah Palin nomination backfired so badly for McCain.)

There are two kinds of people, those that allow reality and experience to define and constantly modify their ideas and those who insist that their ideas define reality. The first kind make things work. The second type (be they right wing creationists, or progressive purists) stand on the sidelines wringing their hands and criticizing the doers for their "heresy," because doing anything in the real world always equals compromise, learning and change.

What they of the purist left want from Obama is an ideological orthodoxy of thought and action that does not actually exist, except in their imaginations. And where do they think they are living? This is America and that means that Obama will be trying to govern a country so diverse that Sarah Palin and Noam Chomsky both have a fan base here!

Moreover many of Obama's legion of young and energetic supporters have not heard of, nor do they care about, the Noam Chomskys or James Dobsons of this world. History is moving on. Obama is bigger than the pundits. He's bigger than the movements that have divided us. Believe it or not -- this is a new day.

As Thomas B. Edsall wisely noted in the Huffington Post (Nov 29) in Battle Royale: Center-Right Versus Center-Left In the Democratic Party:

"A close examination of the data suggests that the political and policy-making environment is more complex than either side [in the left/right debate within the Democratic Party] acknowledges, and that thinking in terms of a left-right dichotomy may distort policy options."

Under the surface gloss of the left wing criticism of Obama there is, I suspect, something else: the critic's psychological need to feel indispensable, not to mention superior to those of us who like, trust and will follow President-elect Obama because he strikes our gut as likable, trustworthy and deserving of loyalty based on the self-evident merits of his outstanding character. It's just not in their genes to ever be so "ordinary" as to become team players, even when their side has just won. They would rather be in permanent opposition than ever be accused of -- horrors! -- being mainstream.

Again; I know about this form of messianic mental illness all too well from my own delusional days as a leader in the fundamentalist evangelical world back in the 70s and early 80s. We were proud of being outsiders, yet resentful of not being included, and yet again weirdly and moralistically haughty because of our self-imposed outsider status.

For the fundamentalists of the left, it's no good just getting the job done, let alone doing it in a way that mirrors this diverse, complex and one-size-does-not-fit-all country we live in. From the point of view of the ideologically pure of heart, the only way to get the job done is an in-your-face crusade that humiliates former opponents. This is the don't-forgive-Lieberman "reeducation" theory of political change: it's not enough to just win then change things, you need to do so in a way that leaves anyone who ever disagreed with you punished and out in the cold, furious and plotting your downfall.

Here's the right wing ideologue's nightmare:
What if President-elect Obama keeps being truthful and doing what he said he'd do? What happened to all those on the right who have been proven wrong about things they said during the campaign, for instance the right-wing Jews who said Obama would be surrounded by anti-Semites, and then the first thing he does is make Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff? And what are the right-wing evangelicals, who said he'd be a socialist appeaser and friend to terrorists, to do now that President-elect Obama has appointed a pragmatic economic team, and persuaded Gates to stay on for a year at Defense and General Jones to advise him? And what will the anti-abortion community do when Obama does what he said he'd do and initiates programs that actually reduce abortions by lifting women, families, teens and children out of poverty?

Here's the left wing ideologue's nightmare:
President-elect Obama does not bring the emotional and psychological baggage of my boomer generation's schoolyard fights with him. He meant it when he said he doesn't see a "red" or "blue" state America but the United States of America. He's of the left but without the I-told-you-so smarminess of we boomer culture warriors. He's progressive but without the need to punish former opponents. He won handily but is not interested in putting his political foes in their "place." He actually seems to want to serve all Americans, even the "wrong" kind, even the "other."

President-elect Obama is smarter than his critics and a better and more strategic politician than his rivals. As my friend (blogger and commentator) Frank Gruber wrote to me;

"Every move he makes is confident. He is in charge and thinking ten moves ahead. If I was a rival politician, left or right, I'd feel overwhelmed -- what's he going to do next? It's even more baffling because Obama tells you in advance not only what he's going to do, but what you're going to do. Think about that debate when he told Senator Clinton he was looking forward to getting advice from her after he became president. At the time I'll bet she dismissed that as mere rhetoric. Wrong! Who is going to be Secretary of State? Or what about when he gave that speech at the beginning of the summer of 08 outlining every tactic the McCain campaign would use against him?"

As for we self-proclaimed commentators, we have a President-elect who has more intellectual firepower than all the punditry put together. How confusing! That's good for America. But that's something a whole class of professional carpers will never forgive. And so expect mirror image left/right attacks from the class of talkers to whom the glass is always half empty, because they insist that any water that might be in the glass is inferior if they didn't personally invent it!

One reason that President Obama is going to be a very successful President is precisely because his understanding of the cosmos is that his ideas (political, philosophical or theological) do not define it. That's called wisdom. That's called humility. And that is the very wisdom lacking in Obama's ideologically driven left wing critics, who never seem able to complete a paragraph with the words, "But I could be wrong." That is why their posture is already a crouch of disappointed expectation, even before President-elect Obama has been sworn in!

When President-elect Obama said that he will try to do what works, regardless of the ideological label or where a good idea comes from, he was telling the truth. Most Americans know how lucky we are to have this remarkable, pragmatic, subtle, thoughtful man for our President-elect. Most of us also know how lucky we are that our next president -- unlike our current White House occupant -- is more interested in being a good president than in proving his "side" right about everything. And most of us also know that the stakes are sky high and that now is a time to stand with our new President-elect, come hell or high water or, perhaps, because of the hell and high water we're already neck deep in.

. . . . .Now, there's a little bit here that I want to go into concerning the absolute fever swamp bat-shit crazy that comes out of the Right Wing these days. Don't know if you've heard it or not, but Uganda just passed a law that gives the death sentence to homosexuals. Africa you say? Not that related to us, you say? Wrong, it was American influence that brought it about. From Chez, over at Deus ExMalcontent:

Taking the Horror Show on the Road

Yesterday, I posted a quick quote from Mediaite that referenced the fact that Pastor Rick Warren -- the Oprah of pop-Christianity and very wealthy author of those insipid Purpose-Driven Life books -- apparently has close connections to a Ugandan minister who supports a bill that would impose the death penalty on homosexuals in that country. Well, without really meaning to, I stumbled across an article in Politics Daily that takes a close look at the Ugandan Final Solution, and details the link that some ultra-conservative American Evangelicals have to the East African government now considering it.

It's honestly shocking, eye-opening stuff.

Basically it works like this: In much the same way that Naomi Klein made the case that American intervention in Iraq was aimed at least in part at creating a blank-slate state where multinational business interests could flourish without any of those pesky regulations that can occasionally stand in the way of good, old-fashioned unfettered greed -- Uganda and emerging Third World nations like it are providing the perfect petri dish for ass-backward far-right religious ideals that have for the most part been laughed out of Western society. The piece explains how guys like Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries -- an organization which believes it can "cure" homosexuality -- are traveling to Uganda to help sow the seeds of zero tolerance abroad, since they can't seem to do it here at home. They're even preaching the need for Ugandans to stand firm against the influence of "anti-family Western agitators" who they claim are trying to spread godless sexual deviance throughout the developing world.

But if Uganda -- remember, the country that gave the world that warm and cuddly humanitarian Idi Amin -- starts executing gays, how much if any responsibility will the American Evangelicals who helped stir the pot of hatred in a foreign land bear for such a reprehensible injustice?

Trust me -- read this article:

Politics Daily: If Uganada Executes Gays, Will American Christians Be Complicit?/12.2.09

. . . .And there's more than enough American Christian Right bullshit to spread around. I'm going to take a moment here to give some nods to Little Green Footballs. A former conservative and member of the Right, just like Andrew Sullivan, just like me, has parted ways with them over the insanity that spews forth from them every day. LGF on the American Christian Right-Uganda-Homosexual Death Sentence connection, and more importantly to me, another outing of The Family:

Here’s a great example of what I mean when I say the religious right has a stranglehold on the GOP: NPR’s interview with Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power — a book I highly recommend. This is no conspiracy theory; it’s all very well-documented and very disturbing.

Among other subjects, Sharlet discusses The Family’s influence behind an effort in Uganda to institute the death penalty for homosexuals: The Secret Political Reach Of ‘The Family’.

Bad craziness on steroids.

. . . . .And one more from him. Like him, I once was a climate change skeptic, but being of scientific, mathematical and engineering background, the math and the science convince me, as it should you:

Scientific American has an excellent article debunking seven of the main climate change denial talking points promoted by people like James Inhofe: Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.

The introduction to the article draws the distinction between honest skeptics and deniers, a topic that’s frequently raised in our threads about climate change:

On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Sen. James R. Inhofe (R–Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”

Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses inthe science behind global warming.

What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot of good information about the role of CO₂ as a greenhouse gas, the “hockey stick” graph, the influence of the sun on global warming, and the false claim that global warming “stopped a decade ago.”

(The comments for the article are overflowing with deniers and contrarians, spouting the very talking points the article debunks, of course.)

. . . . .I think I just wet myself a little. My political wet dream is actually going to happen, and I can't stop giggling. CNN reports that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann will headline the 1st National Tea Party Convention. Please, please, please form a party and run bitches, please! And if there is a merciful God, the Repubs really will draft Dick Cheney, as reported and rumored, to run. Oh God, my brain is writhing in delicious, ironic ecstasy.

. . . .And yes, Righties, your other poster boy, Mike Huckabee did pardon the man who walked into a coffee shop in Seattle and blew away 4 cops because he didn't like cops. Seems the man convinced the then-governor of Missouri of his "religious conversion" and his "finding Jesus". What do I say over and over and over again about religion corroding and destroying public policy and that it has no place there, and Founding Father's fear of that? About Jefferson's feeling strongly enough about it to draft and pass Virginia's Freedom from religion Act?

. . . And that's how it is today.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.5

Meet the new boss. . .same as the old boss

2009-12-01T20:17:00.004-05:00

Wednesday December 2, 2009

. . . .First up, I want to send out a very Happy Birthday to my son Caleb, who turns 22 today. I love you so fuckin' much I can't even sometimes describe it, and I'm so proud of you. Love you son, have a good day. You are one of the two brightest lights in the sky to me.

. . . . .Second up, a very Happy Birthday to my sister, Kyle, who turned (nope not saying, it's 39 and holding from here) yesterday Tuesday, December 1. Happy birthday girl, it's been a tough year, but it's starting to come around.

. . . .Got out Sunday night to catch some music, damn good music to end the holiday weekend up. I love getting out to small clubs and catching hard working touring bands, for a couple of reasons, bands that do put out albums and have a following and still work the small clubs are normally dynamite to catch, and their opening acts inevitably fall into one of two categories, they suck canal water, or you can tell that you're catching something that's going to be special at it's inception. In this case, a band from the Ozarks in Southern Missouri made their first trip up to Michigan to play an 8 song half-hour opening set. It was well worth it, 4 fine voices that do well in a capella harmony, a psychotic Southern growl of a guitar underneath well-crafted lyrics and a solid rhythm section and possibly the only band I've ever heard that crafted a damn fine song about a 12-inch 3-speed oscillating fan. Ha Ha Tonka is their name, and look out for them, they play far beyond their only 4 years together. They're coming back up to Michigan in the month of February to play a free show at the Foundry brewery, if you get the chance go check them out.

. . .As for the boys from Oklahoma, Cody, Jeremy, Grady and Randy; Cross Canadian Ragweed, they did what they always do. Walked into a small joint in the upper Midwest far from home on a cold Sunday night at the end of a holiday weekend for 150 people and tore the joint up for 3 hours and 30 songs, giving it all they had, just like they do night after night after night. A lot of people haven't heard of them, because they wear the label "country". Too bad for you. CCR is one of the finest rock and roll bands that this old rock and roll bad boy has ever heard, and will always get my support and acknowledgement. "country"?? Sure, every country band has someone as their lead vocalist and lead guitarist who is listed by Guitar Player magazine as one of the Top 10 rock guitar players on the planet today. Every "country" band plays odes to Dimebag Darrell and Kurt Cobain. Every country band writes epic songs about mushroom trips punctuated with screaming Hendrix style solos. Every country band has a technical jazz bassist as one of their founding members who is prone at any moment to take off on Stanley Clarke or Charles Mingus like solos, playing a fretless bass and carrying a melody line. It's every country band that can pull an old chestnut out of their closet, and turn it in the middle to an Allman brothers jam. They managed to mix it up a bit covering Robert Earl Keen and Chris Knight as well. Of course, they were a bit surprised too, an old friend of theirs, about my age, Vinnie the Shark, made the trip up from Texas to see them. And they surely didn't expect a bar in Grand Rapids, Michigan to be filled with 150 patrons that came to see them who could sing the choruses to "Boys From Oklahoma" and "Crazy Eddie's Last Hurrah" as well as any group of 1,000 or so back in Texas or Oklahoma can. Yes, they are friends of mine from the road. Yes, they are the essence of what rock and roll should be. Yes, I have the show, the whole show straight off the soundboard, and no, none of it is going to go into the playlist. There's unreleased material in there, and on top of that, they play small bars. Next time they come around, get out to see them.

. . . .If you're reading this one the Facebook notes page, switch over to the external site, The Desolation Angel, and you can get the music too.

. . . .Last night, Tuesday was the season finale of Sons of Anarchy on FX. As the second season has progressed, Kurt Sutter, it's creator, writer, director has gone beyond making a damn fine show, to making what is the finest show on television period. Fierce and fearless, filled with actors who inhabit their characters and make you care on a visceral level what happens to them. If you didn't watch the show, catch it on DVD when it comes out next summer, but don't rip yourself off, and give yourself a chance to get involved with a show that brings out very real human emotions in people. Last night's episode trumps last season's finale and brought home, with a hammer, what the nature of the relationship between fathers and sons, between mothers and sons really is.

. . . .So, tonight, at West Point, the President that was elected on a promise to get out of Iraq (we're not) and end the war (it's far from ending, it's just beginning) and close Gitmo (it's still open) will announce a 34,000 troop increase in Iraq in 22 days. While George W. Obama is opening Christmas presents with Sasha and Melia; while Barack H. Bush is enjoying his retirement Christmas dinner in Crawford, Texas our sons and daughters will be freshly deployed to Afghanistan with targest painted square on their backs.

. . .When are you ever going to get it through your heads? This country has elected the same man as President since Ronald Reagan took office. It doesn't matter what party they're from, what age they are, what race. It's the same damn man that this country keeps putting there.

. . . Why am I opposed to increasing the troop level in Afghanistan? It's simple. Al-Queada isn't there anymore, they've moved to Pakistan. Alexander the Great lost his empire in Afghanistan, as did Genghis Khan. The British went in there 100 years ago, with what was then the world's finest and most feared military machine, and left in a shambles, lost most of the empire soon after. Russia went in there 30 years ago with what was then the world's finest military machine, far superior to ours at the time, post-Vietnam, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, and broke the Soviet empire there (hint, it wasn't Reagan). We're next. For anyone my age, watching what's happening, there's only one thing I can say. .

. . .Goodnight, Saigon.

. . . .Everyone wanted another FDR, another Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They wanted someone to take action in the first 100 days. He did. They wanted someone to solve the financial crisis; by being the biggest corporatist capitalist to ever inhabit the White House and giving away the country's entire wealth to Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. What everyone forgot was the rest of the FDR legacy. How did the largest, up until then, worldwide depression, The Great Depression get solved? How did we experience the growth of the middle class and the largest increase in personal income and GDP as a percentage in the late 40's and 50's. Well kiddies it was fueled by a little thing called World War II. Some years from now, if you're one of the lucky survivors of WWIII, while the ultra-rich continue to frolic, ask yourselves one question. Was it worth it getting all worked up over the political theater and the non-issues and the things that didn't really count, and losing track of the shit that counted? Even better, speaking of WWIII, go pick up a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or go see the movie version coming to theaters here in a couple of weeks with Viggo Mortenson and ask yourself that question I just asked you.

. . .Cenk Uygur summarizes it far better than I can:

Until about a month ago, I agreed with Barack Obama's strategy in Afghanistan. I thought we should have concentrated on Afghanistan from the beginning. We should have brought in so many more troops. We owed it to the Afghan people to do the best we could for them since we happened to invade their country. I think the Taliban is the scourge of the earth, and the idea that they might take over after we leave is abhorrent to me. We had to stay and get it right.

So, what happened?

The Afghan elections.

Over one million votes were fraudulent. 1.3 million fake votes were thrown out to be exact. That's out of only five million votes. That's ridiculous. Obviously the current government of Afghanistan is a sham. The key to "winning" in Afghanistan is to convince the Afghani people to work with us. They have to side with us over the Taliban. If they don't, we're not helping them, we're fighting them. And that's just about where we are now.

What's the long term strategy? Kill all the Taliban? Do we even know who is Taliban and who is not? Matthew Hoh, the US diplomat who resigned his post in protest of the war, points out that "valleyism" reigns supreme in Afghanistan. That means if you come into my valley, I will fight you. They don't care if you're Russian or British or Persian or American or even an Afghan from the central government. You step into their valley, and they will fight you to the bitter end. And there is no end. They're fighting us because we're fighting them.

Yes, that's all good and fine. The Karzai government has no legitimacy or broad popular support. We can't possibly "win" and we don't even know what it means for us to "win." But what about the Taliban? We can't let them take over Afghanistan. But who is to say they would? Here's what I realized recently - when we leave, it'll be them fighting in the valleys.

The Taliban never had full control of Afghanistan, and they never will. The minute they try to take charge, the Afghans - as is in their nature - will rebel. They'll fight back. They'll fight for their valleys. They'll fight to the bitter end. And there is no end.

How about Al Qaeda? There are very few Al Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan. And drone strikes work just as well in Afghanistan as they do in Pakistan (or just as poorly, depending on your perspective). Let's focus on getting those guys - remember they're the ones who actually attacked us. But we don't have to occupy a whole country (and rebuild it, too) while we hunt for Al Qaeda. If you think that we do, then under that logic, we should invade Pakistan and occupy it until we capture Osama bin Laden who is hiding in that country.

And we recently showed in Somalia that we can eliminate Al Qaeda operatives with Special Ops Forces on targeted missions. When we went after the Al Qaeda leader in that region, we swooped in with a small team, took out the target and took back off. Imagine if we invaded Somalia instead. Would anyone in their right mind be in favor of that as an alternate policy? So, is the difference in Afghanistan simply that we're there already? Is that a good enough reason to continue a policy that we otherwise would not and should not carry out?

Finally, the amount of money we're spending on these wars is insane. In Iraq and Afghanistan combined, we have so far spent $937 billion. For that kind of money, we could have already given everyone in the country health care - and not even paid for it. The wars, unlike the current health care proposals, are not deficit neutral. They are enormous budget busters and suck the funding from everything else. Is there really anyone in America who believes a few more years of the Afghanistan war is worth not getting health care coverage for themselves or their family?

The bottom line is that we don't have a viable partner in Afghanistan and we don't have the legitimacy that is essential to rebuilding the country. The Afghans don't view us as their saviors. They view us as the latest intruder in their valley. That is not a visit that is going to work out for us. That's not a visit that's ever worked out for anybody.

. . . . Andrew Sullivan summarizes the numbers we're talking about tonight, and puts some meat behind the numbers:

Ackerman calls out the WSJ:
[H]ow is this a “limited” troop increase? The Journal says that the troop increase will total around 30,000. The Washington Post’s headline says 34,000. If either figure is correct, that means Obama will order tonight a greater troop increase into Afghanistan than President Bush ordered into Iraq in 2007 for the iconic troop surge. What’s more, there are about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today, versus about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2007, so relative to the existing base total of troops, this Afghanistan troop increase is way bigger than the Iraq one. Agree with it or disagree with it, there’s nothing “limited” about it.
The degenerate right has to find a way to attack Obama even if he is doing what they support. That's why I assume and hope that Obama is not fool enough to believe that the GOP will ever ever back a Democratic war president - even if he does everything they want. Their partisanship is total, as Cheney demonstrates. Cheney, the de facto GOP leader on the war, could even interpret the biggest proportional surge in either Iraq or Afghanistan as "weakness". It may be madness; but it's a funny form of weakness.

. . . .Lest you think this is some kind of indictment of the Dems (I already do that daily) and some kind of shift to the Right, get it straight, I'm not a Repub, not a conservative and not a Rightie. I am Anarchist Libertarian, and those of you on the Right don't get that at all, and don't get what that means. My disagreements with this President center around the same two things that I took every Republican President to task for; the wholesale fire sale of this country's middle class to Wall Street and depending on that same middle class and Main Street to fight their wars for them. Andrew Sullivan, again, summarizes and says it all:

For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul"). Here goes:
I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.
I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.
I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.
Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.
To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.
And increasingly, I'm not alone.

. . . .I'm right there with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, a conservative blogger who has broken with the Right, with a public posting on his site titled Why I Parted Ways With The Right:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

. . . .Now, onto another of my favorite right out in the open targets. Thieves so bold and so crass that they no longer even deign to disguise it, the vampirish bastards at Goldman-Sachs. Taibbi:

Goldman Sachs Arms Itself

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

via Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder – Bloomberg.com.

I’m reading this article on Goldman executives applying en masse for gun permits and I’m trying to decide exactly how funny it is on a scale of 1 to 10. Reader assistance here is definitely appreciated.

On the unfunny side: it’s never good when anyone buys guns, particularly not rich weenies with persecution complexes. Also, it might possibly be true that people have threatened Goldman bankers physically, which would really not be all that funny and would make me personally feel somewhat uncomfortable, although it would probably never be very high on the list of things I have to lose sleep over.

On the funny side, there are several things to consider. There’s the image of Goldman guys walking into Dean and DeLuca’s nervously grabbing at their holstered nines as they buy espresso and soy waffles. There’s the idea that some of these dorks might actually think that they’re going to forestall proletarian rebellion by keeping guns in their Hamptons beach houses. There’s even the impossible-to-resist image of a future accidental shooting of some innocent hot dog vendor on Park Avenue, followed by the inevitable p.r. response from Goldman in which the bank claims that the only thing its employees are guilty of is “being really good at shooting people.”

Certainly, there are things to ponder on both sides. Right now I’m leaning toward making this a seven on the funny scale, trending toward eight. Advice more than welcome.

. . . .And on to the bastards in Government they own (besides the White House) Bernanke, Geithner and Summers. There was a reason that Goldman was the Obama campaign's single largest contributor. Economic minds who would have brought Wall Street under control, who would have made some real advances in job creation like Paul Volcker and Austen Goolsbee were left behind at the inauguration and put in exile never to be heard from again. Instead, one of the architects, Bernanke, keeps his same job with this administration and gets fucking reappointed! Nassim Taleb, one of the 5 economists that I respect:

What I am seeing and hearing on the news -- the reappointment of Bernanke -- is too hard for me to bear. I cannot believe that we, in the 21st century, can accept living in such a society. I am not blaming Bernanke (he doesn't even know he doesn't understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical); it is the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible -- as if we promoted every doctor who committed malpractice. The world has never, never been as fragile. Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

No news, no press, no Davos, no suit-and-tie fraudsters, no fools. I need to withdraw as immediately as possible into the Platonic tranquility of my library, work on my next book, find solace in science and philosophy, and mull the next step. I will also structure trades with my Universa friends to bet on the next mistake by Bernanke, Summers, and Geithner. I will only (briefly) emerge from my hiatus when the publishers force me to do so upon the publication of the paperback edition of The Black Swan.

. . . . .Why should we be so worried about Bernanke and the policies that he, Geithner, Summers and the crowed engendered. Because it's a big fucking con game, that's why:
Nomi Prins on the con being played on us now by the banks, and why it will make Enron look small when it all collapses and caves in bigger than anything in history:

Enron was the financial scandal that kicked off the decade: a giant energy trading company that appeared to be doing brilliantly—until we finally noticed that it wasn’t. It’s largely been forgotten given the wreckage that followed, and that’s too bad: we may be repeating those mistakes, on a far larger scale.

Specifically, as the largest Wall Street banks return to profitability—in some cases, breaking records—they say everything is rosy. They’re lining up to pay back their TARP money and asking Washington to back off. But why are they doing so well? Remember that Enron got away with their illegalities so long because their financials were so complicated that not even the analysts paid to monitor the Houston-based trading giant could cogently explain how they were making so much money.
After two weeks sifting through over one thousand pages of SEC filings for the largest banks, I have the same concerns. While Washington ponders what to do, or not do, about reforming Wall Street, the nation’s biggest banks, plumped up on government capital and risk-infused trading profits, have been moving stuff around their balance sheets like a multi-billion dollar musical chairs game.

I was trying to answer the simple question that you'd think regulators should want to know: how much of each bank’s revenue is derived from trading (taking risk) vs. other businesses? And how can you compare it across the industry—so you can contain all that systemic risk? Only, there's no uniformity across books. And, given the complexity of these mega-merged firms, those questions aren’t easy to answer.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, for example, altered their year-end reporting dates, orphaning the month of December, thus making comparison to past quarterly statements more difficult. In the cases of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, the preferred tactic is re-classification and opaqueness. These moves make it virtually impossible to get an accurate, or consistent picture of banks ‘real money’ (from commercial or customer services) vs. their ‘play money’ (used for trading purposes, and most risky to the overall financial system, particularly since much of the required trading capital was federally subsidized).. . . .
. . . . . .
With taxpayers now on the hook, we need an objective, consistent evaluation of bank balance sheets complete with probing questions about trading and speculative revenues, allowing for comparisons across the banking industry. This lack of transparency leaves room to misrepresent risk and trading revenue.

The long-term solution is bringing back Glass-Steagall. Being big doesn’t just risk bringing down a financial system—it means you can also more easily hide things. Remember the lesson from the Enron saga: when things look too good to be true, they usually are.

. . . The entire article, with details on how Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup are scamming the system and lying is here.

. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.

. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.

. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.5