Quote of the day

'I turned 50 last fall - that's half a century not understanding who I really was. There's something liberating about finding out. After all, it was Marx who said that above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can't have a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." No, wait, those were NASA scientists. The same people who faked the moon landing. This is a complicated world; I'm going back to the baseball game.' - Bill McKibben, in response to Glenn Beck calling him a communist because of his climate activism

Excerpt of the day

"You do not understand," he said. "It is too big for you to grasp, but I will try to explain it. Barsoom, the moons, the sun, the stars, were created for a single purpose. From the beginning of time Nature has labored arduously toward the consummation of this purpose. At the very beginning things existed with life, but with no brain. Gradually rudimentary nervous systems and minute brains evolved. Evolution proceeded. The brains became larger and more powerful. In us you see the highest development; but there are those of us who believe that there is yet another step - that some time in the far future our race shall develop into the super- thing--just brain. The incubus of legs and chelae and vital organs will be removed. The future kaldane will be nothing but a great brain. Deaf, dumb, and blind it will lie sealed in its buried vault far beneath the surface of Barsoom--just a great, wonderful, beautiful brain with nothing to distract if from eternal thought."

"You mean it will just lie there and think?" cried Tara of Helium.

"Just that!" he exlaimed. "Could aught be more wonderful?"

"Yes," replied the girl, "I can think of a number of things that would be infinitely more wonderful."

-- Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Chessmen of Mars

Mental health break

I'm taking this week off from blogging to mentally recharge my batteries. Blogging will resume Monday with two long overdue book reviews.

In the meantime, one can usually find quasi-pithy comments, the germs of future posts, at my twitter page.

Quote of the day

"Individual passions, except in lunatics, produce only the germs of myths, perpetually neutralised by the indifference of others; but collective passions escape this corrective, and generate in time what appears like overwhelming evidence for wholly false beliefs." - Bertrand Russell, Justice in War Time

A perfect example of why I abhor Glenn Beck

On Glenn Beck's radio program today, I forced myself to listen to Beck and co-host assert that Nir Rosen's thoughtless, cruel and insensitive twitter comments about Lara Logan being sexual assaulted and beaten at the hands of an Egyptian mob are prototypical evidence of how hateful "the Left" is; that this is just how "these people" act.

Beck had not heard of Nir Rosen and was not familiar with his work, but was willing to confidently assert that his comments are representative of an entire category of persons. Nevermind that you will find almost universal condemnation of the attacks on Logan from across the political spectrum and the same for Rosen's remarks, let's take this reasoning at face value for a moment.

Beck acts as if Nir Rosen is the only person who said anything trivializing about Logan's traumatic experience. Yet conservative bloggers Gateway Pundit and Debbie Schlussel made remarks about Logan that could fairly be described as hateful. By Beck's "logic," wouldn't these comments mean that "the Right" is full of nothing but hate?

Schlussel:As I’ve noted before, it bothers me not a lick when mainstream media reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are peaceful get a taste of just how “peaceful” Muslims and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my heart ...

...Hey, sounds like the threats I get from American Muslims on a regular basis. Now you know what it’s like, Lara.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and Correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

I just love it when the people of the profession of “the public’s right to know” suddenly want “privacy.” Tell it to your next interview subject, Lara. Of course CBS has no further comment. Wouldn’t wanna impugn the “peacefulness” of “Religion of Peace” animals, would we? Now, if they were Christians or Jews, well, then there would be comments galore.

So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only does the story of Logan's sustained sexual assault and beating at the hands of hundreds of men "kinda warms [the] heart" of Schlussel, but Schlussel says that as a result of that trauma of which Logan is lucky to be alive, Logan now knows how tough Schlussel has it because of the hateful/threatening e-mails she gets. This is a bewildering absence of basic levels of human decency on the part of Schlussel; and after reading her final shot at Logan - "How fitting that Lara Logan was 'liberated' by Muslims in Liberation Square while she was gushing over the other part of the 'liberation.'" - I find myself seconding the question of Mary Elizabeth Williams: "Debbie Schlussel, what's it like to be so liberated from the burden of having either a mind or a soul?"

Nir Rosen, an obscure figure that Beck had not heard of, has since lost his job as a result of his comments and has issued an apology and explanation of his remarks. Just to be clear: Rosen had to resign from his job at NYU ONE DAY after his remarks. This is the incident that Beck wants his audience to believe indicates how hateful "the Left" is.

While Rosen's comments about Logan are not typical nor indicative of the type of the work he does as a foreign policy analyst, prominent leaders of the conservative movement traffic almost exclusively and routinely in ad hominem and generally repulsive attacks and yet their career never suffers for it. For example, just days before this attack occurred, Ann Coulter expressed - to wild CPAC applause - the contempt and lack of sympathy she has for the well-being of journalists like Lara Logan (who previously was detained by Egyptian security forces) when she said that she believes there should be more jailed journalists. This is years after Coulter responded to the terrorist attack of Timothy McVeigh which killed 168 people that her "only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." She later qualified the remark: 'Of course I regret it. I should have added, "after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters."'

Coulter is no exception. Take Rush Limbaugh for instance

On November 29, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh read an Associated Press report about the apparent kidnapping of four Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) activists by an Iraqi insurgent group. Limbaugh announced that "part of me likes this." He explained: "Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality."

As an aside, and to demonstrate that I can and do hold a grudge against those who demonstrate a lack of intellectual decency, I'd like to take a moment and remember Laura Ingraham having had the nerve to lecture actual journalists on how to do their job in a war zone, when the closest Ingraham ever got was taking a brief military embedded guided tour of Iraq. Here is Logan's eloquent response to such nonsense criticism:

CPAC conservatives demonstrate their love of freedom

"I think there should be more jailed journalists," Ann Coulter said to wild applause. Because there is nothing more American and freedom-loving then persecuting journalists.

Previous Coulter quote: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

Quote of the day

"Although each side in the modern debate claims to be faithful to the historical Second Amendment, a restoration of its original meaning, re-creating the world of the minuteman, would be a nightmare that neither side would welcome. It would certainly involve more intrusive gun regulation, not less. Proponents of gun rights would not relish the idea of mandatory gun registration, nor would they be eager to welcome government officials into their homes to inspect privately owned weapons as they did in Revolutionary days. Gun control advocates might blanch at the notion that all Americans would be required to receive fire arms training and would certainly look askance at the idea of requiring all able-bodied citizens to purchase their own military-style assault weapons. Yet if the civic right to bear arms of the Founding were reintroduced, this is exactly what citizens would be obligated to do. A restoration of the original understanding of the Second Amendment would require all these measures and much more." - Saul Cornell, A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America

Quote of the day

"[T]he educated only are free." - Epictetus, Discourses

Another open letter to one of the "worst of the worst"

"Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached?" - Franz Kafka, The Trial

Dear corpse of Mr. Gul,

Shucks. We sure are sorry that we "indefinitely detained" you - for eight years without charges, much less conviction, for any crime until you definitely died of a heart attack in prison - in order to protect & preserve important liberties like the right to a fair trial and habeus corpus. Golly, gee, it sure does eat us up that we have created a kangaroo legal system that was going to keep you in prison no matter what, but you have to admit, you were held in prison until you died, and you do have a Muslim name, so you must have been guilty of something.

As we put it to Mr. Odaimi:

[Y]ou were transfered into our Kafka-esque prison camp, which is your fault and not ours, but rest assured that we'll put this behind us by Looking Forward, Not Back ... We are sure this will be a great comfort to you, to know that we will not think of this again, and to help us not think of it again, we will make an exception to our Looking Forward, Not Back motto, to persecute anyone who has the nerve to bring to our attention any other such perfidy. With a little bit of time, we'll be able to forgive you for getting yourself ... locked up in Guantanamo all those years, giving people the silly notion that we're the sort of country that goes around locking up Muslims while denying them due process. Shoot, some of us will probably have already done you the favor of never even having heard of you, as is a habit with such matters.

You are welcome.

Were you alive and not dead, I am sure that it would come as a great comfort to you to know that the vast majority of Americans were not troubled by your death, nor were their consciences troubled with questions as to your innocence or guilt; we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were guilty (of something.) You need not worry yourself that you have caused us any stress as a result of your inability to escape the legal blackhole like conditions of Guantanamo. We are more than willing to extend this courtesy to you and other such individuals.

So don't mention it, thanks is not necessary.

The end of the world. Again.

On my twitter page today I observed that 'In two years of watching Glenn Beck on Fox "News", his Islamic caliphate dominoe theory from today is the most absurd thing I've seen.' Michael Moyniham apparently agrees.

You can see the insane segment of Beck's program today where he asserts Egyptian unrest proves that some kind of Marxist/progressive/French anarchist/Muslim/communist/anti-Christ New World Order caliphate is imminent and that ACORN is linked to it.

Rachel Maddow's take on this tonight was excellent

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also see Dave Neiwert's take - and then Media Matters to wonder if Beck's remaining audience members have some kind of long-term memory damage.

Babel fish translation of Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh: "We do know Obama has been focused on changing America. We do know that Obama has spent his time abroad apologizing for our past. And he's been lauded for doing this by our media, the Left ... the likes of Colin Powell.* If he were a traditional American president, Obama would have been using our authority - our moral authority - and experience to ensure our best interests remain intact."

Babel fish translation: "We do know Obama has been focused on changing America. We do know that Obama has spent his time abroad apologizing for our past. And he's been lauded for doing this by our media, the Left ... black people. If he were a white president, Obama would have been using our authority - our moral authority - and experience to ensure our best interests remain intact."

What was it that Chris Hedges was saying?

*Relevant background context.

The talent of AM radio hosts

I didn't have pen and paper on hand as I watched Chris Hedges discuss The Death of the Liberal Class on BookTV yesterday, so I was unable to transcribe this entire quote, but I thought it worth noting what I was able to get down.

He said that the "one talent" of idiot demagogues on AM radio and elsewhere is "to mobilize hatred with under-currents of racism."

Indeed.

And today the book gods smiled upon me

After randomly being overtaken with the urge to stop by the discount book store at the public library today, I left with:

East of Eden (pb) by John Steinbeck for 1/2 dollar.

The Trial of Socrates (hc) by I.F. Stone for 1 dollar.

The Name of the Rose (hc) by Umberto Eco for 1 dollar.

I was extremely pleased to find a copy of The Trial of Socrates, which I have been meaning to read for a number of years now, inspired both by the kind words Paul Woodruff had for the author in First Democracy (I was very impressed to hear that Stone taught himself ancient Greek specifically for the purpose of doing research for the book) and by Stone's pioneering work as a journalist and proto-blogger.

Welfare Queen Rand

"In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.” - Michael Ford, on Ayn Rand accepting Social Security benefits

How does Megyn Kelly take herself seriously?

As noted the other day, Megyn Kelly childishly declaring "you're wrong" to a guest who stated that Fox News personalities regularly invoke Nazis to attack Democrats and liberals is an utter joke.

But leave it to Jon Stewart to really demonstrate the utter absurdity of Kelly's assertion. (h/t Massimo Pigliucci)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
24 Hour Nazi Party People
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Within 3.5 hours of Kelly's claim, Glenn Beck was doing exactly what Kelly said doesn't happen at Fox "News." But, better yet, is footage of Kelly herself interviewing Bernie Goldberg as he calls opponents "brown shirts."

As Mark Vuletic notes, perhaps a more pertinent question is, how is it that Megyn Kelly's audience takes her seriously?

Gulet Mohamed allowed back into the US

The US citizen who was being denied his right to return home to the United States has been allowed home after a month of detention in Kuwait.

Just another casual incident in the never-ending war on "terror" in which rights take a backseat to the government's desire to use extralegal, sometimes both Orwellian and Kafkaesque, actions against its citizens.

More evidence of the vast distance between Earth and Bizarro World

On Bizarro World, Megyn Kelly authoritatively tells a guest "you're wrong" when he says that Fox News personalities invoke Nazi imagery to attack Democrats and liberals. On Bizarro World, she is correct.

On Earth, however, Fox News personalities regularly invoke Nazi imagery to attack Democrats. A sample:

O'Reilly: Huffington Post Uses "Same Exact Tactics That The Nazis Used." On March 5, 2008, O'Reilly said "And I said that these tactics that are being used on this website, The Huffington Post, are the same exact tactics that the Nazis used in the late '20s and early '30s to demonize certain groups of people, so it would become easier for them, the Nazis, when they took power, to hurt those people." Earlier, on February 27, 2008, O'Reilly said that "I don't see any difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis. ... I don't see any difference." O'Reilly later said: "I didn't say she was a Nazi. ... I said there's no difference between what the two do. I want everybody to know that." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 3/10/08, 2/28/08]

O'Reilly Compared Tim Robbins' Comments To Those Of "Von Ribbentrop In The Nazi Hierarchy." On December 13, 2007, Jane Hall said that comments made by actor Tim Robbins while campaigning for John Edwards were "valid." In response, Bill O'Reilly said, "But Von Ribbentrop in the Nazi hierarchy made valid points, Jane." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 12/14/07]

O'Reilly: Daily Kos Is "Like The Nazi Party." On July 16, 2007, O'Reilly said that the Daily Kos is "like the Ku Klux Klan. It's like the Nazi party. There's no difference here." A day later, O'Reilly said "That website traffics in [hate], as do the Nazi websites. No difference." On July 19, 2007, O'Reilly said of Daily Kos: "The hate this website traffics in rivals the KKK and Nazi websites." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 1/16/07, 1/17/07, 1/19/07]

On Bizarro World, Kelly declares that "I'm an anchor" to portray herself as some kind of above-the-fray, straight news reporter; while back on Earth, Kelly routinely works herself into a partisan rage, to the point that you can almost imagine seeing cartoon steam billowing out of her ears.

Behold the vast gulf between Earth and Bizarro World

On Bizarro World

Jimmy Carter is an evil man. It is painful to label a past president of the United States as a force for darkness. But it is dangerous to let a man like Jimmy Carter stalk around the globe cloaked in the garb of American royalty, planting the seeds of Western civilization's destruction.

Meanwhile, back on Earth

In the 1950s the 3-foot-long guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people, forcing victims through months of pain while the worm exited through a swollen blister on the leg, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops. By 1986, the number dropped to 3.5 million. Last year only 3,190 cases were reported.

Today the worm is even closer to being wiped out. Fewer than 1,700 cases have been found this year in only four countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan, where more than 95 percent of the cases are. The worm's near-eradication is thanks in large part to the efforts of [Jimmy] Carter and his foundation.

On Bizarro World, Newt Gingrich can be heard on Sean Hannity's radio program talking about how conservatives are disadvantaged by their respect for truth because liberals and Democrats lie ruthlessly and without conscience.

While back on Earth, Newt Gingrich, when not demonizing Democrats with rhetoric similar to which the Nazis employed against Jews, can be heard demonizing Democrats as merchants of death with pure lies for the sake of partisan gain; and when he's not doing that, he can be found telling lies about other matters: the consistent thread being telling lies.

Betraying our own laws and values - and hypocritically, too

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 13.

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

From the US State Department

The protection of fundamental human rights was a foundation stone in the establishment of the United States over 200 years ago. Since then, a central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been the promotion of respect for human rights, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States understands that the existence of human rights helps secure the peace, deter aggression, promote the rule of law, combat crime and corruption, strengthen democracies, and prevent humanitarian crises.

From Unclaimed Territory

I've written several times about the plight of Gulet Mohamed, the American teenager detained without charges more than three weeks ago in Kuwait by unknown captors, relentlessly interrogated about numerous matters of interest to the Obama administration, and, he claims, severely beaten and tortured ...

[...]

Last night, the Kuwaiti deportation officers took Gulet, along with the ticket, to the airport and were prepared to send him back to the U.S. But when he attempted to board the plane, he was told that he was barred from doing so. According to Mohad, no reason was given, but it is presumably due to the U.S.'s placement of him on the no-fly list (which State Department officials, to The New York Times, previously confirmed they had done). As a result, Gulet -- thinking he was finally headed home -- instead was returned to his detention facility, where he remains, and his prospects for release are now very unclear.

What's going on here is a pure travesty. As an American citizen, Gulet has the absolute right to return to and re-enter his country. But by secretly placing him on the no-fly list while he was halfway around the world -- and providing no information about why he was so placed -- the U.S. Government is denying him his right to return. Worse, they know that this action is not only preventing him from returning, but is keeping the 19-year-old in a state of absolute legal limbo, where's he imprisoned by a country that admits it has no cause for holding him and does not want to hold him, yet which cannot release him. The U.S. government has the obligation to assist its citizens when they end up detained without cause; here, they are doing the opposite: they're deliberately ensuring it continues.

Quote of the day

"[Leibniz's] capacity for study and learning would seem terrifying were it not so spectacular." - Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of the Modern World

More crypto-antiSemitism from Glenn Beck

From Media Matters

And then there was tonight's episode, the theme of which was that the 20th century should be seen as "the era of the big lie." According to Beck, during the past 100 years a loose association of shadowy figures who believed themselves to be the "intelligent minority" infected the country with their notion that the people are "animals" who can be controlled through propaganda. He further warned that this same elite was leading the modern progressive movement and would similarly seek to manipulate the masses in the twenty-first century.

So who are these nefarious figures from government, finance, media, and academia who believe they can and should control everyone's choices, "not just in politics, but everywhere"? In tonight's episode, Beck singles out nine of them.

And,in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, surprise, surprise, surprise - eight out of the nine are Jewish. Of course, international financier George Soros - who Beck has previously characterized as being the "pupper master" perpetrating a Protocols of Zion type conspiracy against the planet - made the list.

To summarize: Beck believes that George Soros and a bunch of Jews Progressives secretly control President Obama; white supremacists believe that George Soros and a bunch of Jews secretly control President Obama.

Quote of the day

"[Conservative demagogues] should ... stop inadvertantly plagiarizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the venomous material attacking Democrats as traitors out to destroy America. Words have consequences." - Chip Berlet

A pathology of descent

Shortly before this new year began, Chris Hedges, unleashed this monster of a column, both fantastic and depressing. In it, Hedges notes the two contrasting visions of totalitarianism of Orwell and Huxley, but where as the tendency is to usually pick one as having been more correct than the other, Hedges argues that the Huxley style amusing ourselves to death distraction of our entertainment driven culture is itself opening a path to more overt and Orwellian forms of oppression.

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

Hedges notes that while a consumerist public has been distracted by a corporate state which marginalizes voices of dissent like that of Noam Chomsky, our country has increasingly come to resemble Orwell's Oceania, where perpetual war leads to perpetually abrogated liberty; and where Manichean dichotomy is used to justify extralegal excess

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

...

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

Update: Glenn Greenwald on a government induced climate of fear

Anyone connected to WikiLeaks -- even American citizens -- are now routinely detained at the airport and have their property seized, their laptops and cellphones taken and searched and retained without a shred of judicial oversight or due process. And this treatment extends to numerous critics of the government having nothing to do with WikiLeaks. In the past month, I've spoken with American writers, photographers and filmmakers -- who are not ready yet to go public -- who have experienced similar and even worse harassment when entering the U.S. Notably, like anyone remotely connected to WikiLeaks, all of them -- given the government's broad surveillance powers -- insist upon communicating only behind multiple, highly fortified walls of encryption. The U.S. Government plainly wants any genuine critics to feel fear, and is willing to use any means -- no matter how lawless and extreme -- to induce it.

Yesterday, computer security expert Chris Soghoian documented how little the DOJ can hope to learn from the court-ordered Subpoena issued to Twitter (given how limited is the information stored on Twitter). But that's the point: the goal of that Order isn't to learn anything; it's to signal to anyone who would support WikiLeaks that they will be subject to the most invasive surveillance imaginable. I met two months ago with a former WikiLeaks volunteer who believes as fervently as ever in its cause, but ceased working with them because his country has a broad extradition treaty with the U.S. and he was petrified that his government, upon a mere request by the U.S., would turn him over to the Americans and he'd disappear into the world of the Patriot Act and "enemy combatants" and due-process-free indefinite detention still vigorously applied to foreigners.

This is the same reason for keeping Bradley Manning in such inhumane, brutal conditions despite there being no security justification for it: they want to intimidate any future whistleblowers who discover secret American criminality and corruption from exposing it (you'll end up erased like Bradley Manning). And that's also what motivates the other extra-legal actions taken by the Obama administration aimed at WikiLeaks -- from publicly labeling Assange a Terrorist to bullying private companies to cut off ties to chest-beating vows to prosecute them: they know there's nothing illegal about reporting on classified American actions, so they want to thuggishly intimidate anyone from exercising those rights through this climate of repression.

How I'm starting the New Year

I took The Life You Can Save pledge to donate an appropriate amount - the site has a built in calculator that considers your income and provides you with a target figure - to charity.

I dare you to watch Peter Singer's lecture on his book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty - and see if you can resist the urge to donate, too.

Here is a clip:

Quote of the day

"We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as a part of it." - John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction

Constitutional doubt

"The writers of the Constitution knew of the value of doubt. In the age that they lived, for instance, science had already developed far enough to show the possibilities and potentialities that are the result of having uncertainty, the value of having the openness of possibility. The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way some day. That openness of possibility is an opportunity. Doubt and discussion are essential to progress. The United States government, in that respect, is new, it's modern, and it's scientific." - Richard Feynman

Party like it's 1993

I'm finishing up a couple of book reviews that I'll have up after the new year starts, but I'm checking out for a few days until then, so happy New Year and let's keep rockin' in the free world ...

Quote of the day

"Solipsism is unusual in the history of philosophy in that there are no famous solipsists. Just about every conceivable crazy philosophical position has been held by some famous philosopher or other, but, as far as I know, no famous historical philosophers have ever been solipsists. Of course, if anyone were a solipsist it would hardly be worth his or her time to tell us that they were solipsists, because on their theory we don't exist."" - John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction

The ascendance of the Perpetual Lie

Over at Attywood, Will Bunch has written about the deleterious effects of the Tea Party counter-factual belief that the Obama administration is determined to confiscate the weapons of patriotic Americans, something Bunch examined at length in his excellent book on the rise of backlash politics.

I heard this not once but again and again in the fall of 2009, that Obama had a secret plan to confiscate guns or at least ammunition, that if he wasn't doing it in his first year in office then he was biding his time until after the 2010 election (which seemed just as silly than as it does now, knowing how the 2010 election actually turned out). Meanwhile, the fear of the coming Obama gun confiscation was having real-world effects. A rumor that Obama wanted to tax or seize people's ammo caused the price of bullets to skyrocket in 2009 way past what the government's ability to tax them would have been. Gun manufacturers -- who were supposedly going to be crushed by the Obama administration -- reported record profits. The worst impact was several lunatics whose mounting fear of the looming firearms crackdown caused them to go on shooting sprees -- most notably Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski, who fatally gunned down three police officers.

In the reality-based world, Obama is doing nothing and saying nothing about guns. It's been that way for a long time; in the 2008 campaign, when he had occasion to be pressed on the issue, he blandly noted that he supported the Second Amendment (PDF file) just as any elected official from a duck-hunting prairie state might do. What's happened with guns on the federal legislation since he became the 44th president in January 2009? Obama signed bills that made it easier -- that's right, easier -- to bring guns into national parks and even on board Amtrak trains. That's the Obama gun confiscation, folks.

It's Big Lie -- and the sad truth is that the Big Lie still works.

Big Lie doesn't quite cover what the conservative movement has done to American politics. It's not just that Big Lies work, but that we have a political faction with a hardcore base that lives in a hermetically sealed world of almost complete fiction, a land of the Perpetual Lie.

Take a look at the number four story in Discover's 2010 top 100 science stories, for example. Despite being vindicated by FIVE different inquiries, the public perception of the state of climate science suffered as a result of the criminally manufactured scandal surrounding out-of-context quote-mined e-mails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Five separate investigations have found the claims of scientific misconduct leveled against the involved scientists to be specious yet it is now an established bizarro fact in conservative world that these e-mails are "proof" of a global warming hoax. There is virtually no engagement with the reality of the situation.

And these are not isolated incidents, but indicative of how the conservative movement operates in general. Just look at the sort of people who are chosen to represent conservatism at the annual CPAC events. Serially reality divorced individuals like Ann Coulter (Joe McCarthy was a hero and right about commies), Glenn Beck (George Soros secretly/nefariously runs the world) and Rush Limbaugh (cigarettes aren't deadly).

Any movement that can take such individuals seriously is not a movement that takes truth seriously. Indeed, or hardly can acknowledge it at all.

Update: I was remiss in not linking to this recent example of the Perpetual Lie from Chris Rodda, debunking the so very ridiculous claim of David Barton and Glenn Beck that 94% of the Founder's quotes came from the Bible; and this omnibus post of Rodda's responses to the lies and fantasies of Barton and Beck.

Top science stories of the year

Discover's top 100 stories of 2010

Scientific American's top ten stories of 2010 slideshow

Baleful quote of the day

"Those who mistreat foreigners, abuse citizens, and commit heinous crimes under the guise of national security are rarely held to account for their misdeeds through any process." - Scott Horton

What do Harry Potter and Jesus Christ have in common?

Derek Murphy, of Holy Blasphemy, alerted me via email about a book that he has written that will be published early next year which may be of interest to readers. It is provocatively titled Jesus Potter, Harry Christ and is, in the words of the author, "mostly about viewing Jesus as a literary creation through the lens of Harry Potter, a similar but obviously fictional character. It's a thorough, non-threatening introduction of the literary (non-historical) Jesus Christ aimed at the general public."

To promote the book, Holy Blasphemy is holding a $500 dollar contest. To enter the contest, post a 500 word or less review of the book either on Amazon (when the page becomes available) or directly on the book's webpage above. Of course, to review the book one would need a copy of the book: click here to download a review copy (Chap. 1 is available online.)

Quotes of the day

"William James used to preach the 'will-to-believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt.'"

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."

-Bertrand Russell, "Free Thought and Official Propaganda"

Quote of the day

"[It] says something miserable about the state of our political discourse." - NPR guest, commenting on Wikileaks being described as a terrorist organization

The quote may be slightly off as I am quoting from memory. The guest was discussing this Columbia Journalism School letter speaking out against prosecution of Wikileaks.

Steven Johnson on the origin of good ideas

As usual with Fora, click the "Watch Full Program" button to view the entire hour long lecture.

Four dollars, five books

Here are my latest discount book buys:

Cradle (pb) by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee - $0.50.

The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President (pb) by Vincent Bugliosi - $0.50

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (hc) by David Hajdu - $1.00

The Assault on Reason (hc) by Al Gore - $1.00

Five Complete Miss Marple Novels (hc) by Agatha Christie - $1.00

I only purchased Cradle out of a slight interest in the book, but mainly because I didn't feel like getting fifty cents in change back from my purchase. Upon scanning the web I see that the book did not receive favorable reviews and I may end up donating it back to the library after I finish it (if I even try.)

I have already read and reviewed The Assault on Reason; as well as owning a Kindle edition of it, but could not resist having a hard cover edition for my book shelf. It is one of the best defenses of Enlightenment values that has come out in recent years, an exemplary example of the sort of cultural criticism that we need more of - and all the more impressive having come from a former Vice President. [Which reminds me that I've neglected to add Gore's blog to my Blog roll, which is now rectified.]

The Ten-Cent Plague is another book that I have already read, but the pop culture geek in me would not allow me to pass up a chance to add it to my collection. In it, Hajdu recounts a forgotten period of 20th century censorship, a history that is not well known outside of hardcore comic book fans, in which a 1950s McCarthy style witch hunt led to the effective dismantlement of an art form.

I have never read Agatha Christie before, and have frankly never had the desire, but had my interest piqued by Joshi's comments about her work in his curmudgeonly Junk Fiction and will give it a go in the same spirit.

Baleful quote of the day

"Cheap news is a major reason that every day we are failing in our core mission of providing people with the knowledge they need for our democracy to function." - David Cay Johnston

Bipartisan feudalism

From Democracy Now

AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston, when we’re watching television, tell us what are the bullet points to watch for of the misrepresentations or outright lies that the journalists continually reiterate when talking about this [Obama administration tax proposal].

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, failing to report that this is a tax increase on the bottom roughly 45 million households in America, close to 150 million people, that’s number one. This is a tax increase for those people. Secondly, that the more money you make, the bigger your tax cut under the Republican plan. Thirdly, that the estate tax reductions to 35 percent and a $5 million, or for a married couple $10 million, exemption involve money, in many cases, that has never been taxed. When very wealthy people die, the reason they’re wealthy is they’ve reported, legally, less income than they made on an economic basis, so they have lots of money that was never taxed. And now it will never be taxed, up to $5 or $10 million, because of these changes. And those are key things that I would watch for.

The other one is, we’re going to cut spending. Well, there are only four big areas of federal government spending: interest, which is low right now because interest rates are low, that will go back up; the military, the Republicans are not exactly known for wanting to restrain military spending; Medicare, Medicaid, that is, government-provided healthcare for the elderly, the disabled and the poor; and then Social Security, which people paid into and expect to collect in their old age. So what are they going to cut? Are they going to cut food safety inspection, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of a penny, and worsen a situation in which food-borne illness occurs in this country at something like—I think it’s 20 times the rate in France and seven times the rate in England? Are we going to further take away education from poor children? Are we going to raise the cost of a higher education, which reduces the value of the most valuable asset we have—young minds, that we should be training and developing so we have a prosperous future?

Chris Hitchens on the unreason of Glenn Beck

Hitchens in Vanity Fair

Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.

So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

Quote of the day

"We humans can take almost any evidence and distort it in support of our point of view when we care more about that point of view than we care about the truth." - Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt

Can we get Tom Joad to primary challenge Obama in 2012?

My Sisyphean struggles to blog about Glenn Beck

I've been meaning on writing a post about why I feel it necessary to blog about Beck since at least July, when I read this post at Rationally Speaking (you'll notice I show up in the comments there), but keep putting it off. A major reason why is that I am simply unable to keep up with the pace of stupid, deranged, hateful, crazy nonsense that Beck generates on a daily basis.

For months now I've bookmarked or made a note about something Beck has said, intending to write something about it in the next day or so, only to get up the next day to be confronted by something else Beck has done that I feel worthy of a response. It's impossible to keep up with.

And still is. So this post will still not be the meta-post on Beck that I intend to write someday.

But I will make note of the irony today of a person who believes the utter nonsense of the Joseph Smith story, despite Smith being a known charlatan in his day, making fun of someone else for an allegorical reference to a Mayan deity in order to make a clever point.

Of course, underlying the irony is the ignorance, childishness and cultural bigotry.

Yet Beck, along with fellow high school graduates Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, is one of the top conservative pundits. That speaks so much for the cult of anti-intellectualism at the heart of movement conservatism.

Today's discount book buys

Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (hc) by Robert Frank for two dollars.

Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon (hc) by A.J. Rossmiller for one dollar.

I've previously read and reviewed Rossmiller's excellent Still Broken but didn't own a copy.

Hedges on the Death of the Liberal Class

Click here for an excerpt of the book.

Puppy update

Found the stray I took home a new home which she will be joining Friday.

Quote of the day

"Two Worlds, One Sun" - Inscription on the MarsDials

The Mars Exploration Rovers each carry an identical sundial, approximately three inches square. Space artist Jon Lomberg (a Planetary Society Advisor) designed the face of the MarsDial, and Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society, coined the MarsDial's motto: Two Worlds, One Sun. Their primary function is as calibration targets for the high-resolution Panoramic Cameras aboard each rover, so they are imaged frequently over the course of the mission. But these thousands of images of the MarsDials with their moving shadows calso serve to remind the public that Mars and Earth truly are two worlds with one Sun.

The idea of using the calibration target as a Martian sundial was a brainstorm of Bill Nye the Science Guy, then a Planetary Society board member.

For more on the inspiring story of the Mars rovers, see the 2006 Doubter Book of the Year pick Postcards from Mars.

Palin Beckifies feminist history

Glenn Beck has a terrible habit of trying to invoke figures who held views he regularly attacks as representatives of views that he holds. The ultimate case in point being Martin Luther King, who Beck has made a centerpiece of his anti social justice cause despite MLK being an advocate of social justice.

Michelle Goldberg has been looking through Sarah Palin's new book and sees that Palin shares the trait in common with her anti-intellectual pal Beck:

[Palin] sets earlier feminist heroines, who she seems to imagine were a lot like Sarah Palin. “What is hardest to take about liberals calling the emerging conservative feminist identity anti-feminist or even anti-woman is that this new crop of female leaders represents a return to what the women’s movement originally was,” she writes.

The historical revisionism here recalls that of Christian conservatives who try to paint our deistic Founding Fathers as devout evangelicals. At one point, Palin refers to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” which came out of the historic 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton deliberately echoed the language of the Declaration of Independence, referring to the rights that women are entitled to “by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” To Palin, this mention of God proves that Stanton shared her faith: “Can you imagine a contemporary feminist invoking ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God?’ These courageous women spoke of our God-given rights because they believed they were given equally, by God, to men and women.”

Not really. Stanton was a famous freethinker, eventually shunned by more conservative elements of the women’s movement for her attacks on religion. In one 1885 speech, she declared, “You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women.” Ten years later, she published the first volume of The Woman’s Bible, her mammoth dissection of biblical misogyny. Stanton was particularly scathing on the notion of the virgin birth: “Out of this doctrine, and that which is akin to it, have sprung all the monasteries and nunneries of the world, which have disgraced and distorted and demoralized manhood and womanhood for a thousand years.”

Delayed by dog

I had hoped on trying to get some posting done today, but, as I say in the post title, that has been delayed by dog.

While out for a run earlier today on a local path I noticed an apparently stray/ultra-friendly dog running up to every person in sight trying to get someone to take account for it. Walking up to the path start a girl who the dog had been following told me that it had been following people all morning.

I started my run and as I jogged by the dog it began to run along with me, then sprinted out ahead of me for a bit, looking back over its shoulder every now and then to keep track of me. As it tired out it began to fall behind but would catch its breath then sprint up to me in an effort to keep up. This went on for a literal mile and a half, at which point I had to stop running (had planned on doing 4 miles) otherwise the dog would have run itself to death trying to keep up with me.

So I took it home and will be trying to find it (actually, her) a home or the original owner. And instead of blogging I'm babysitting. A dog.

Quote of the day

"Our natural tendency is to value our countrymen and co-religionists more than others, and we expect God's loyalties to reflect our own. How many times have you seen a sign that says, 'God Bless America'? How many times have you seen one that says, 'God Bless the World'?" - Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light

Once upon a hack ...

I've been busy taking a mental health break this week (and will get back to blogging maybe tomorrow,) but for those still checking in I present for your perusal The War Room Hack Thirty list of the most hackish pundits.

The War Room Hack Thirty is a list of our least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences, ranked roughly (but only roughly) in order of awfulness and then described rudely. Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.

And as Eric Boehlert noted on his twitter feed, the list marks a good point to remember his chapter on The Note from Lapdogs.