Categorical Aperitif

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// posted by nash @ 1:50 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 3:36 PM 0 comments

For what it's worth*, I got 15 out of 15 on the Pew Forum Religious Knowledge quiz (h/t Attaturk). Let's just say I fit the ironic pattern of atheists/agnostics doing better than believers on tests of religious knowledge, particularly re. other religions, you know, the WRONG/HEATHEN ones.

*(not much, 'cause the questions are pretty freaking easy, but oh well)

// posted by nash @ 3:27 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:37 AM 0 comments

Don't miss yesterday's DN! segment on the recent FBI raids on antiwar activists in Chicago and Minneapolis.

Boy, it sure is good that we elected an anti-war, pro-civil-liberties Democrat in 2008, huh? Otherwise, gosh, just think about how different things would be right now with the wars and the government powers and the economic policies and whatnot.

Irony: the other white meat.

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// posted by nash @ 9:46 AM 0 comments

Michael Moore will receive the John Steinbeck "In the Souls of the People" Award:

The Steinbeck award is given to writers and artists whose work captures the spirit of Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes.

“Courage is 75% of art,” states Thomas Steinbeck, noted author and the son of John Steinbeck. “Michael Moore is a courageous man and a great selection for the John Steinbeck Award. My father would have loved him; my father was the Michael Moore of his time.”

Noted as the “who’s who of disturbers,” previous recipients include Bruce Springsteen, Arthur Miller, John Sayles, Jackson Browne, Garrison Keillor, Joan Baez, and Sean Penn.

"I am truly grateful to the Steinbeck family and the Steinbeck Center for their generous acknowledgment of my work,” says Michael Moore. “The works of John Steinbeck have been a singular and powerful inspiration to me all of my life. Steinbeck believed that a story could change the world. He spent his life telling the stories of the powerless and the exploited. Through him, they had a voice. Today we are sadly, once again, witnesses to another Grapes of Wrath."

// posted by nash @ 2:36 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 2:21 PM 0 comments

Today's Democracy Now!: Robert Scheer on Why Lawrence Summers Is Not All That And Never Was and Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef on "barefoot economics."

AMY GOODMAN: And if you’re teaching young economists, the principles you would teach them, what they’d be?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle. One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

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// posted by nash @ 7:27 PM 0 comments

You wouldn't think that a guy named Percy Schmeiser—a Canadian, no less—could be such a badass, but check out last week's Democracy Now! segment on this mild-mannered farmer and his mild-mannered wife and their long battle with Monsanto, the corporation that messed up the Schmeisers' crops and then made the mistake of giving them sh*t about it, from lawsuits all the way down to brute physical harassment. And all over crap like this:

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean by a terminator seed.

PERCY SCHMEISER: A terminator gene basically, quite simply, is a gene that’s put into a seed. And when the seed becomes a plant, all seeds from that plant are sterile. And so, it cannot be used the following year for seed. But the danger also of the terminator gene, it can cross-pollinate into indigenous crops, heirloom crops, and render those seeds from those plants also sterile. So it’s a termination of the future of life.

AMY GOODMAN: So it forces farmers to buy seeds every year, rather than to conserve seeds so that they can be used every year.

PERCY SCHMEISER: Exactly. And that’s why we say it’s the greatest assault of life we’ve ever seen on this planet, where you terminate the future of life. Farmers would be forced to buy the seed each year, whether you’re a gardener, a tree planter or a grain producer.

Hey, wait a minute....

// posted by nash @ 7:23 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 6:48 PM 0 comments

Drew Westen and George Lakoff on what the Dems can, but almost certainly won't, do to stave off defeat in November.

Yeah, well, almost two years in, we could barely talk Obama into giving Elizabeth Warren a job; I won't be holding my breath waiting for a stirring embrace of New Deal protections for working people, a paring back of the military-industrial corporate welfare state, etc.

// posted by nash @ 6:43 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:10 PM 0 comments

Don't miss Jay Bookman's quick fack-check on the real record of supply-side economics:

IT'S A BIG FREAKING LIE.

(h/t Dean Baker)

// posted by nash @ 7:09 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:10 AM 1 comments

Speaking of the Julia Roberts vehicle Urgh Grunt Splash Eat Pray Love, PR Watch has an interesting look at the merchandising effort that accompanied this ostensible pretty-woman's-quest-for-enlightenment story. Kitchenware! Shower gels! T-shirts! Gelato makers!

It's just like The Noble Eightfold Path...if it led to the Galleria.

// posted by nash @ 9:49 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:37 AM 0 comments

John Cole made the mistake of watching one of my favorite films with teabaggers on his mind:

Somewhere around the time I cracked the second bottle of wine I started watching Blade Runner, and the scene where Leon was told “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping…” I yelled out “give the fucker a tax cut and tell him to pull himself up by his boot straps.”

// posted by nash @ 9:31 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:38 AM 0 comments

Another h/t to PZ for this tale by Science-Based Medicine blogger Harriet Hall recounting her brief and utterly unfulfilling stint as a science columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. The problems started right away: a 200-word limit, graciously increased to a whopping 250. (As Chomsky has said of the time constraints that govern "discussion" in the corporate media, it's almost impossible to do critical thinking in a few minutes between commercials; this format encourages the repetition of conventional wisdom and discourages the questioning of assumptions, the raising of inconvenient facts, etc.) Rigid editorial control over which health myths Hall could write about. Relentless editorial nitpicking. Incompetent fact-checking. Editors dodging her emails. Finally, Hall gave up on the big O:

I had gotten to the point that when I saw an e-mail from the magazine I would get a sinking feeling and dread opening it. It has become clear to me that I don’t have what it takes to be a media whore. I’d much rather write independently without pay for a select few readers than be controlled and abused for $2 a word with an audience of millions.

I’d be willing to bet that Dr. Oz has had a very different experience with the O editors.

// posted by nash @ 9:32 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 10:10 AM 0 comments

I was going to mention the Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right conference about the great conspiracy to keep the truth of geocentrism from the public (h/t PZ), but I just tried to take another look at the conference page, and

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

// posted by nash @ 10:06 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:03 PM 1 comments

A colleague passes along a bit of Patton Oswalt:

If I ever have a child, I am naming him or her "Sky Baklava."

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Watch Dean Baker eat George Will for breakfast and then spit out chunks of his prissy little horn-rims.

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I haven't had a chance yet to peruse Tim Noah's new look at income inequality in the US of A—I'm still a bit shocked that anti-oligarchism has apparently become contrarian enough for Slate—but Michael Tomasky does a great job today of summing up the political realities of "The Great Compression," which unfortunately looks increasingly like a freak historical anomaly rather a defining feature of modern American civilization:

The evidence couldn't be clearer. Income inequality shrank or remained stable at tolerable levels in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and again (a little) in the 90s. That's five decades. Democrats were making policy in four of them. In the other one, the Republican president was an economic moderate who'd embraced the New Deal and did nothing to lower top marginal tax rates.

In the 1920s, 70s, 80s, and 2000's, income inequality increased. Republicans in charge in every decade, except for the Carter four-year stretch. Could this really be an 80-year coincidence?

// posted by nash @ 3:49 PM 0 comments

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It's a rainy one here. John Nichols wishes that Obama would take a lesson from what FDR did in Wisconsin on Labor Day in 1934:

In Green Bay, in the summer of 1934, the 32nd president needed to explain to a crowd that was sympathetic but worried that the economic wrangling in which he and his administration was engaged had to be seen in perspective – not just the perspective of the presidency of the man he replaced, Herbert Hoover, but the perspective of the long American struggle between a privileged few that engaged in the “private means of exploitation” and the great many that had “waged a long and bitter fight for (their) rights.”

Roosevelt did this with a history lesson, of a sort, in which he traced back to the founding of the republic in to recount the long fight “against those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows.”

That fight between patriotic proponents of economic justice and the Tory defenders of an old economic royalism had, Roosevelt argued, come to a head with the arrival of the Great Depression.

Recalling the 1932 election that swept Democrats to power and ushered in the New Deal era, the president argued, “In the great national movement that culminated over a year ago, people joined with enthusiasm. They lent hand and voice to the common cause, irrespective of many older political traditions. They saw the dawn of a new day. They were on the march; they were coming back into the possession of their own home land.”

“As the humble instruments of their vision and their power, those of us who were chosen to serve them in 1932 turned to the great task,” Roosevelt continued. “In one year and five months, the people of the United States have received at least a partial answer to their demands for action; and neither the demand nor the action has reached the end of the road.”

The primary barrier to action, the president explained, was erected by those who still entertained the fantasy who argued that FDR could restore confidence only by “(telling) tell the people of the United States that all supervision by all forms of Government, Federal and State, over all forms of human activity called business should be forthwith abolished.”

So, like Obama, Roosevelt faced an opposition that claimed government was the problem.

Unlike Obama, however, Roosevelt refused to even entertain – let alone embrace – the absurd constructs of the private-sector fabulists who “would repeal all laws, State or national, which regulate business—that a utility could henceforth charge any rate, unreasonable or otherwise; that the railroads could go back to rebates and other secret agreements; that the processors of food stuffs could disregard all rules of health and of good faith; that the unregulated wild-cat banking of a century ago could be restored; that fraudulent securities and watered stock could be palmed off on the public; that stock manipulation which caused panics and enriched insiders could go unchecked.”

“In fact,” the president continued, “if we were to listen to (the anti-government crowd), the old law of the tooth and the claw would reign in our Nation once more.”

“The people of the United States will not restore that ancient order,” thundered Roosevelt. “There is no lack of confidence on the part of those business men, farmers and workers who clearly read the signs of the times. Sound economic improvement comes from the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof.”

With those words, Roosevelt took a side.

He did not imagine that it was possible to compromise with those who wanted to return to the “tooth and claw” past.

No, he would stand against the Tories and for the new order where it was understood that the purpose of government was to achieve “the improved conditions of the whole population and not a small fraction thereof.”

Were Obama to take a similar stand this Labor Day, were he to echo Roosevelt’s call for economic justice, the energy of this election year would shift – in Wisconsin and nationally – because voters would know, finally, which side their president was on.

// posted by nash @ 7:40 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 4:41 PM 0 comments

Busy week here—I hope everybody is enjoying the Labor Day weekend.

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