Quote of the day

'The Master said, "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."' - The Analects of Confucius

Quote of the day

"Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically - never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don't ever forget that." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Quote of the day

"That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth." - Friedrich Nietzsche, praising Montaigne

Via How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

Living in fear

In the home of the brave, where the Bill of Rights supposedly guarantees inviolable rights that the government can not abrogate, the national security state continues to eat those very liberties.

In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy).

But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.

Yes, I am so very proud to live in such a "brave" country.

Terrorists flew planes into building in 2001, and the fear of that is used in 2012 to justify the oppressive harassment of citizens and violation of rights that those terrorists themselves would never be able to take from us.

Previous Doubter book-of-the-year on sale

Inaugural Daily Doubter Book of the Year Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht is currently available for $2 in Kindle edition (h/t Mark Vuletic).

Not only is this a great, magisterial book (it inspired the title of this blog) but it's also a great value, as that's a lot of book (over 500 pages) for two dollars.

Quote of the day

"There's always someone willing to believe malicious rumours." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Bill O'Reilly: man of Christian principle

Given that Bill O'Reilly has previously said that there is "no difference between what [Arianna] Huffington and Nazis do" and that Daily Kos is a hate site no different that the KKK because of distasteful comments left in response to posts on those sites I expect that he will soon be resigning from Fox News, only after passionately denouncing the organization on-air as a hate network no different than Nazis and the KKK, as a result of these hateful and racist comments that were left in response to an article at Fox News about Trayvon Martin.

I am sure this will happen, because if there is one thing I have learned after years of watching Bill O'Reilly's program, it is that he is a man of integrity and intellectual honesty; a good Christian "T-warrior" who leads by example.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." - Matthew 7:1-5

Quote of the day

"[Ayn Rand's] acolytes, not fully comprehending the nature of her dogma, blithely accepted her vision of an American Gulag archipelago. Then they used it to rationalize another kind of oppression: the economic subjugation of the poor by large corporations." - Gary Weiss, Ayn Rand Nation

It did what?

Flipped on the Glenn Beck radio show today be be greeted by Beck telling me that "the progressive movement killed my country." After a few minutes of rambling about progressives and the 1oo year path of destruction that they wrought Beck said that he's rectified their damage on a personal level by educating himself about American history.

I went through a full public education and never heard of who Robert Green Ingersoll is, nor did I know of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, so I guess that was part of the progressive plan to install One World totalitarian tyranny, too.

Excerpt of the day

From Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul by Gary Weiss

In 1975, Stanley Marcus, chairman of Neiman Marcus in Dallas, decried corporate obstruction of social legislation. "Who among the business community today," he asked, "would seriously propose that Congress repeal our child-labor laws - or the Sherman Antitrust Act? The Federal Reserve Act, the Securities Exchange Act? Or workmen's compensation? Or Social Security? Or minimum wage? Or Medicare? Or civil rights legislation?

"All of us today" he said, "recognize that such legislation is an integral part of our system; that it has made us stronger."

That may have been true in 1975, but not today. The credit, or blame, lies squarely with Ayn Rand.

Baleful quote of the day

'[Attorney General Eric] Holder was referring specifically to Executive Order 13222, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which says, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” But as with so much U.S. national-security legislation, this order turns out to be far less than meets the eye. Simplified, the present law of EO 13222 could be summarized this way: “No one shall be assassinated—unless the president authorizes it, in which case we will refrain from calling it an assassination.”' - Scott Horton

Quote of the day

"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michael Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Perigord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592." - Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

I can say to anyone that obtains a copy of Bakewell's Montaigne biography: reader, you have here a great book.

Quote of the day

"Our current wingnuts are truly some of the dumbest fucking people on the planet." - John Cole

It truly is bewildering the level of stupidity and ignorance that Rush Limbaugh and apologists have displayed in service of misogyny.

This is the intellectual leader - and exemplar of the rot - of the conservative movement

Last week House Republicans held a hearing on contraception as it relates to President Obama's health care plan that featured an all-male panel. House Democrats responded with a hearing of their own, featuring a female Georgetown law student who was not allowed to testify in the Republican hearing. NPR described her testimony thus

"Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school," she said. "For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's practically an entire summer's salary."

And the policy has hurt not just those who want the pill to prevent pregnancy, she said. One friend — a lesbian — needed oral contraception to control ovarian cysts.

But while the Georgetown plan includes a medical exception, her friend never got the medication. "Despite verification of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy," she said.

She eventually stopped taking the medication when it became too expensive, grew a cyst "the size of a tennis ball," and "had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result," Fluke testified.

And when others ask what she expected when she chose to attend a Jesuit university, Fluke replied that she and her fellow women law students:

"[R]efused to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that in the 21st century anyone thinks it's acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women."

Here is what Rush Limbaugh, the radio demagogue that Republican officials bow down before, had to say in response.

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

Right. Isn't that exactly what you heard when you saw her testimony? That she's a whore who expects the US taxpayer to pay her for sex? - not that she's suggesting that access to contraception is an important means to providing equal career/educational opportunity for women and also protecting their health.

Rush Limbaugh is a terrible, horrible human being who traffics in incoherent, hate-filled rants like these, that only can sway his audience because they appeal to prejudices that short-circuit rational thought.

And what really disgusts me is people like Brian Williams who think that they can demonstrate what good journalists they are by pretending that Limbaugh is something other than the hate-filled idiot that he is.

As an aside: It's stuff like this that has had me place Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind towards the top of my list of books to read. (See here for a typically interesting example of Robin's work on the subject.)

Post Script: I almost forgot: The Rush Limbaugh with the nerve to call a female law student who testified about the difficulty of affording both education and contraception a "slut" is this same Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh was traveling with four other men--including the producers of the hit show '24'--when he was detained over a mislabeled bottle of Viagra found in his luggage during a Customs search. A Department of Homeland security passenger manifest shows that Limbaugh and his four buddies flew from the Dominican Republic on a Gulfstream IV jet owned by Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates his radio program. Limbaugh returned to Palm Beach, Florida on June 26 with Joel Surnow, '24''s co-creator and executive producer and Howard Gordon, another of the Fox hit's executive producers (Hollywood agent Jeffrey Benson was also part of the Limbaugh quintet). With all those guys in tow, it is unclear what Limbaugh needed with those 29 100mg Viagra pills.

Yes, what would he be doing with Viagra pills in a location notorious for sexual tourism.

JFK should have promised to follow orders from the Vatican

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has stated that his initial reaction to JFK's famous speech assuring a largely Protestant America that Kennedy, as a Catholic, would not put his religious views and the dictates of the Catholic Church hierarchy above his duties and responsibilities as America's chief constitutional officer is that he "almost threw up."

Perhaps this judge who threw out an harassment charge against a Muslim who attacked an atheist for dressing up like Muhammed on the grounds that the atheist's actions are not protected by the First Amendment would agree with Santorum. I am sure that Afghan president Hamid Karzai who has called for a trial against those who burned copies of the Koran would agree; it goes without saying that the violent protestors would, too.*

*Although one should note that the protests likely have other roots, as well.

What George Washington might have to say about Koran burning

Rioting and violence has broken out in response to reports that Korans were recently disposed of by burning in Afghanistan by NATO troops. President Obama has apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karza, for which I expect he will receive criticism from the sorts of individuals who believe that America should never apologize for anything - and who have already created a false narrative around the fictitious notion that that is all that President Obama does.

I would further suspect that there will be overlap between those who are critical of an apology for Koran burning and those who think that US marines urinating on corpses is a laudatory act.

The following passage from The New Hate: Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, by Arthur Goldwag, seems particularly relevant, in light of these events

On November 5, 1775, General Washington issued orders forbidding soldiers in the Continental army to observe that "ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the Pope" - an act that could only insult and alienate the ex-colonies' potential allies in Franco-phone Canada. "At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused," he expostulated."

Book watch: Enemies

Tim Weiner has written a history of the FBI - FBI - Enemies: A History of the FBI - based upon his access to FBI documents as a follow up to his history of the CIA.

Civil libertarians will want to read this book.

Justice

I'm not sure how it escaped my attention, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realized that Michael Sandel's Harvard introductory philosophy "Justice" course lectures are freely available for online viewing and via iTunes U.

Having so far watched 7 of the 12 hour long lectures (each broken into two parts) I can not highly enough recommend these lecture to anyone interested in philosophy or, more precisely, anyone who wishes to be interested in philosophy. Sandel manages to bring philosophy to life by presenting concise and easily understood (but not dumbed down) descriptions of philosophical ideas and then demonstrating with thought experiments and examples how they relate to the real world and our everyday lives.

The course has also been converted by Sandel into a book - Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - which I have added to my exponentially expanding to-read book queue.

Latest discount book buys

Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (hc) by Garry Wills for 4 dollars.

An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (hc) edited by Lewis Lapham for 10 dollars and fifty cents.

Quote of the day

"Who the [expletive] is Saul Alinsky?" - Bill Maher



See also the Media Matters comparison of Saul Alinsky and the bogeyman "Saul Alinsky" who only exists in the imaginations of movement conservative media figures.

Trivia of the day

Question: How many times has The Daily Doubter been cited in print?

Answer: Twice.

Once in Zay Smith's Quick Takes column for the Chicago Sun-Times and a second time in The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right by Arthur Goldwag which was released today. (The email quoted in this post is the one that made it into the book.)

To give one a flavor of the book, a great excerpt of The New Hate can be read at the Atlantic.

Possibly my favorite line in a book review ever

David Frum has written a critical response to the latest effort of David Brooks to promote the work of Charles Murray.

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees.

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

That last line perfectly captures how absurd this focusing on Piven or Alinsky or ACORN as the root of all evil in America has been.

Quote of the day

"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian." - Diderot, The Encyplopedie

Allen West's eliminationist message

Via Hullabaloo

This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

What really demonstrates just how demented the Republican party has become is that this belief in how un-American the Obama administration and Democrats is is a reaction to a Democratic party which has implemented what a few decades ago were Republican ideas (e.g. a health care plan which was previously advocated by the conservative Heritage Foundation.)

Don't mess with the Muppets

Via Media Matters

Despondent

A couple of days ago the manager of one of the local tv news stations gave an editorial (he's the only one who ever gives editorials, almost always some rant derivative from the bowels of AM radio) excusing marines urinating on dead corpses, saying that they deserve a slap on the wrist at best and that everyone who hasn't fought in a war needs to shut up about it.

It really pains me that this is what is being broadcast to my community as news - and I just haven't felt like blogging much lately.

Excerpt of the day

From Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

"The opponents of the New Deal, backed and funded by the business elite, announced that President Roosevelt had permitted communists to infiltrate the government and government-funded programs, such as the Federal Theatre Project. And that project was the first target of the Dies Committee, led by Texas Democrat Martin Dies. The theatre project was denounced in a series of hearings in August and November 1938. The Dies committee eventually became HUAC. [Hallie] Flanagan [head of the Federal Theatre Project] was asked about an article she had written titled "A Theatre is Born," in which she described the enthusiasm of the federal theaters as having "a certain Marlowesque madness."

"You are quoting from this Marlowe," observed Alabama representative Joseph Starnes from the committee. "Is he a Communist?"

The room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh," Flanagan remembered. "Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so prejudged us that even the classics were 'communistic.' I said, 'I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.'"

"Tell us who this Marlowe is, so we can get the proper references, because that is all we want to do," Starnes said.

"Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare," Flanagan answered.

By 1939 the theatre project was killed.

Republican audience boos the Golden Rule

During a Republican presidential candidate debate last night in South Carolina, Ron Paul (R-Texas) got boos from the audience when he suggested that the United States should apply the Golden Rule to its foreign policy.



The Guardian provides fuller context with an extended clip and notes that this comment from Paul was a follow-up to his belief that the U.S. could have (and should have if possible) captured Osama bin Laden rather than assassinate him.

Ron Paul was also booed when he attempted to explain why the US did not need secretly to enter Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Paul pointed out that the US had managed to capture Saddam Hussein alive, and that the Iraqi government had put him on trial. The line did not go down well with the audience or his Republican rivals.

and

Here's the transcript of Ron Paul's comments, after being asked about his opposition to the US assassination of Osama bin Laden:

There is proper procedures rather than digging bigger holes for ourselves. That's what we have been doing in the Middle East, digging bigger and bigger holes for ourselves and it's so hard for us to get out of that mess. And we have a long ways to go. We are still in Iraq and that's getting worse and we are not leaving Afghanistan and the American people are sick and tired of it, 80% of the American people want us out of there. I am just suggesting that we work within the rule of law. Like only going to war when you declare the law.

Given the probability that many of those Republican voters who booed identify themselves as Christians, one might wonder if they experience any cognitive dissonance at booing what is supposed to be one of their bedrock moral precepts.

Three hours with Chris Hedges

Pulitzer prise winning journalist Chris Hedges has become one of the most acute critics of America's corporate and imperial state, writing fiery and blistering columns that express the indignation and outrage at the dismantlement of our democratic institutions that is almost entirely absent from mainstream media discourse.

Which I why I would recommend taking advantage of the opportunity presented by C-Span2's BookTV to watch and listen to his three hour discussion of his books for In Depth, which can be viewed online at the link.

[Blogger's Note: I haven't gotten far enough into the video to see what Hedges has to say about his book I Don't Believe in Atheists, but would note that I had some issues with that particular work.]

Say what?

"I don’t get involved in politics." - Glenn Beck

Heard this self-delusional statement today while listening to Thomas Frank talk to Amy Goodman for Democracy Now. The following exchange takes place after Goodman plays audio of Beck saying he's not into politics, into endorsing candidates, but that Rick Santorum may be the next George Washington and will be able to resist the great urge to become a dictator. An urge, apparently, that only Santorum can resist.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Glenn Beck. Talk about the significance of Glenn Beck, forced off of Fox. You’re talking about the comeback of the right and the significance of the role he plays, the role the Koch brothers play.

THOMAS FRANK: Well, those are some of the biggest actors in what I’m talking about here. But I just wanted—I was struck by what Glenn Beck was saying there, that whenever you listen to him, even if it’s a short snippet like that, there’s always this incredible sense of dread that hangs over every sentence he utters. He said that, you know, the temptation for the next president to not turn over the reins of power back to the public is going to be great? What is he talking about? Dictatorship? That’s like—that’s—and Santorum is the one guy in America that can resist the urge to become a dictator? I don’t—I don’t get things like that. I mean, I do get it. I just finished writing a whole book about it.

There is a way that Glenn Beck really caught the cultural sensibility of 2009 and 2010, you know, this very unlikely—the first time I ever tuned him in, in 2008, he was on CNN at the time, and I was—you know, I had the same reaction to him that I just had when you brought up Rick Santorum. It’s like, how could this be? You know? Who would hire this man to be on television? It just seemed preposterous to me. And he really caught the wave in 2009, that when the—after the thing that really—you know, the economy fell apart in 2008, and you had the government stepping in with the enormous bailouts, you know, this completely unaccountable just spending of taxpayers’ money to get their Wall Street buddies off the hook, you know, stand the banks back up and let them go back to their—and this was—this was a shocking moment. You know, it’s the kind—I say in the book that it was the sort of moment that crushes the faith of a nation, you know? And Glenn Beck was there with this very dark vision that he has where things are always, you know, we’re on the verge of tyranny, there’s conspiracies everywhere. And there he was with this trademark vision of his, and it really seemed to catch the public mood in those days. And so, in my mind, he was one of the most important figures in the comeback of the right, because he really gave the—you know, if you would go to Tea Party rallies in those days, and I went to a bunch of them in order to write the book, the language you would always hear from the podium and the theories you would hear from the podium, the peculiar ideas, the visions of history that you would hear from the podium, were all recycled stuff from the Glenn Beck program. He was really the—he was really the one with the ideas.

Will Bunch noticed the same thing, with Beck being the backbone of the conservative backlash, in his own book on the subject.

Indeed, if you've read Beck books, listened to his radio show and watched his tv show the last couple of years, you'll know that he's dedicated his media fiefdom to being a political activist with the dedicated goal of mainstreaming the fringes of American paranoia. Presumably, if you're a critic of Beck and have followed him you're aware of that; if you're a fan then you apparently have a tremendous capacity to compartmentalize: to take him seriously when he says he's not involved in politics yet to show up at his 9/12 rallies with the plan of taking back your country from "them."

To think of Beck as someone who doesn't get involved in politics requires to forget the role he has played in politics the last couple of years.

Baleful quote of the day

"We live in a country where law professors advocate torturing and murdering people ... people are then duly tortured and murdered per their official and unofficial recommendations, and there are no subsequent legal or even professional consequences to anyone involved in any aspect of these proceedings." - Paul Campos

Remember the good old days of wage slavery?

Historian Rick Pearlstein noticed the other day Rick Santorum waxing nostalgic for those halcyon days when his own grandfather was a wage slave:

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it "by far the best speech Tuesday night." Santorum's address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called "freedom." A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family's one-time economic privation. It wasn't off the cuff. "As you know," he said, "I do not speak from notes, but there's a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I'm going to read them as I wrote them." And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: "because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them." He came because—why else?—he loved freedom.

[...]

"He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them."

Let us dwell on that. Grandpa Santorum lived in a company town where he was paid in "scrip" in lieu of cash. That means what his grandson calls "freedom" was, well and truly, something more like slavery.

Pearlstein goes on to note the irony of Santorum relating a story of his grandfather becoming a wage slave in order to sell free market fundamentalism to voters when it was government regulation that did more to give workers like his grandfather freedom than the "free reign of property."

The key point, and one that is not likely to find an effective messenger in Democrats beholden to the same wealth that Republicans are, is "that sometimes—frequently—it takes government to establish liberty where none existed before."

Beck still has Nazi Tourette's

Yesterday I did a little intermural travel and visited AM radio world, particularly the Glenn Beck radio show. I was met by Beck informing me that President Obama is a dictator and is installing a dictatorship. Enough of that. I turned the radio off.

A hour or so later I tuned back in. Beck was describing his family Christmas in which he and family gave each other books about the Holocaust. Apparently, in the universe that Beck inhabits - some kind of Philip K. Dick if-he-was-a-member-of-the-John-Birch-Society type universe - reading books about what the Nazis did to Jews prepares one to understand what is currently happening in America because of progressives.

In fact, Beck was particularly enthusiastic about How Do You Kill a Million People? because it is "one of the best explanations of what we're facing right now in the country."

Beck then did his trademark incoherent denial of what he just said, claiming that he's not calling Obama a Nazi, just that progressivism is the disease and that Newt Gingrich is just as bad. (FYI, in Beck-world, Newt Gingrich is a leftist).

Whether or not Beck believes his own nonsense, I can not tell. But what I wonder is: does his audience have some sort of memory deficit? Surely I'm not the only one who can hear such a denial and recall, say, this

The "Final Chapter" of Glenn Beck's Fox News run kicked off Friday with Beck warning that a plot to "collapse the system," "redistribute the wealth," and create an Obama-centered empire was based on a willingness to kill "25 million Americans."

Like Lewis Black said, Beck has Nazi Tourette's.

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Quote of the day

"I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things" - Ecclesiastes 7:25

This quote appears on the back cover of the hard cover edition of A.C. Grayling's The Reason of Things: Living With Philosophy.

How I'm starting 2012

[Blogger's Note: I posted this exact message last year, but I see no reason to change it.]

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:

Michelle Bachmann: Liar for Jesus

You may recall that the Obama administration, citing the same sort of "common sense" rhetoric that the Bush administration used to use to rationalize political decisions at odds with the science of an issue, recently overruled the FDA to prevent making Plan B pill an over-the-counter product available to those under 17 years of age.

Obama defended the decision of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, saying that she "could not be confident that a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drug store would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteriers be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect."

Nevermind the nonsense of that response given the science the FDA based its decision on has already found that Plan B does not pose a health risk to minors. Let's look as what Michelle Bachman had to say in response to this at an anti-abortion group sponsored GOP presidential candidate town-hall last night.

Each of the candidates, who spoke separately and took a couple of questions each, took the same hard-line position. The differences were on the margins. Bachmann distinguished herself with her dishonesty, claiming at one point that Obama is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.” (Obama, of course, recently overrode an FDA recommendation to make emergency contraception available over the counter for all ages, infuriating women’s-health activists.)

Wow. Three staggering lies in one: 1)Plan B prevents pregnancy, it is not an abortifacient. 2)President Obama's administration blocked Plan B access to minors 3)President Obama defended that decision on the grounds that Plan B shouldn't be available to minors on the bubblegum aisle.

Really. The magnitude and audacity of this dishonesty is overwhelming - what can one even say to this, say to the fundamentalist base Bachmann is speaking to that has so worked itself into an alternate universe that it tolerates such lies as a virtue - and worse - accepts them as a truth more accurate than reality?

How ironic that a self-professed Christian who cries persecution that the Ten Commandments aren't featured in public schools and courtrooms can't seem to remember the injunction against bearing false witness.

Transposed hate

I've written numerous posts over the years here arguing that often the derogatory rhetoric directed towards "liberals" by movement conservatives looks and sounds like more obviously prejudicial hate rhetoric of the past; that this is part the result of parallel thinking, part meme evolution which finds a more socially acceptable target for hate.

I now have a perfect example of exactly what I've been talking about.

In at least three instances, Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website has used an image connected to a Nazi-era German magazine noted for anti-Semitic cartoons and pro-Hitler leanings.

At that Media Matters link you will see that what Big Journalism did was post a slightly modified version of an anti-Semitic cartoon from a 1942 issue of a pro-Nazi magazine. In the original art, the American news press is depicted as being controlled by a giant Jewish figure (complete with a Star of David tie and a hook nose). In the Big Journalism version the Star of David has been removed,the nose has been straightened out, and the the phrase "Media Bias" appears on the figure's shirt.

Let's take a moment to look at the response from Big Journalism's editor, in which she asserts that there was no anti-Semitic intent in the cartoon and that it was taken down at the request of one of Breitbart's editors when he suspected it was a recycled anti-Jewish cartoon.

This misses a more interesting point: the users of the doctored image were attempting to spread the same prejudice towards Liberals that the original pro-Nazi German cartoonist was trying to spread towards Jews. That their new hate can be so easily transposed on old hate of the past is quite remarkable.

Speaking of which, I don't believe I have yet to plug Arthur Goldwag's next book, The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right. Dealing with this subject in depth, it will be out Feb. 7th and has gotten great advance reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly.

See here and here for sample excerpts.

[Disclosure: I've been informed that this blog is mentioned in the book.]

Good environmental news: new mercury and toxins regulations

Dave Roberts at Grist writes

Wednesday, at long last, the EPA unveiled its new rule covering mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

Anyone who pays attention to green news will have spent the last two years hearing a torrent of stories about EPA rules and the political fights over them. It can get tedious. After a certain point even my eyes glaze over, and I'm paid to follow this stuff.

But this one is a Big Deal. It's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made. Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.

Despite being deeply troubled by some of this administration's recent actions degrading scientific integrity for political reasons (see here for example) I must credit it for these new standards.

Credit where credit is due

From The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb

Consider ... what [John Philoponus (AD c.490 - c.530)] had to say about Aristotle's assertion that unsupported bodies fall towards the earth with a speed that is proportional to their weight - i.e., that heavy things fall faster than light ones:

But this is completely erroneous, and our view may be corroborated by actual observation more effectively than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the ration of the weights, but that the difference in time is a very small one.

Philoponus' own theory of falling bodies was not quite right, but the experiment he describes here (which does at least refute Aristotle's view) was heralded as a momentous scientific breakthrough when it was repeated in the seventeenth century. Nowadays the experiment is traditionally credited to Galileo, who lived more than 1,000 years later than Philoponus (and who knew his works well.)

Newt for dictator (to save the Republic!)

Steve Benen

Just so we’re clear, this week, a leading presidential candidate articulated his belief that, if elected, he might (1) eliminate courts he doesn’t like; (2) ignore court rulings he doesn’t like; and (3) take judges into custody if he disapproves of their legal analyses.

I hope it’s unnecessary to note that Gingrich’s vision is stark raving mad.

I’ll just conclude with this observation: Newt Gingrich believes Barack Obama is a wild-eyed fanatic, guided by an extremist ideology, hell bent on overseeing a radical overhaul of the American system of government.

The irony is rich.

I call it depressing - and a sad reflection of how poorly major news media is serving this country.

Anaximander of Miletus as First Scientist

Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American writes

Modern science is a vast activity which has many fathers. Many could be named “the first scientist,” and I am sure you have your favorite one. By focusing on Anaximander, I wish to illustrate and emphasize one characteristic of scientific thinking that is even more fundamental, I believe, than Galileo’s introduction of modern experimentation, or Newton’s dynamical laws, or even Ptolemy and Ipparchus’ predictive mathematical astronomy or Aristotle’s keen observation of nature. What Anaximander started is the process of questioning common knowledge in depth, subverting the shared vision of the world, and proposing a novel conceptual structure for understanding reality. Observed from the particular perspective of a scientist of today, the ideas of Anaximander acquire a new sense, and the immensity of their legacy becomes evident.

Anaximander lived 26 centuries ago in Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of modern Turkey. He understood a surprising number of facts that we consider obvious today, but which had taken humanity millennia to figure out. Foremost, he is the one that first realized (and who was able to convince the world) that the Earth is not lying on something else (columns, turtles, an ocean, earth down forever), bur rather it floats free in space. The sky is not just above our heads: it is all around us, including under our feet.

Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, called this idea “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.”

There is much more at the link explaining why Rovelli considers Anaximander to be exemplary of the core of the scientific endeavor ("the process of questioning common knowledge in depth ... and proposing novel re-conceptualizations of the world"; "a deep acceptance of our persisting uncertainty, and our vast ignorance").

Rovelli covers the topic in even greater depth in his newly released book The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy.

As an aside, note that Rovelli draws a link between the birth of science and democracy

[S]cience started precisely at the same time when democracy was being born. Anaximander was a contemporary of Solon, who wrote the first democratic constitution in Athens. Anaximander’s Miletus was part of the Ionian league, whose delegates met in the Panionium sanctuary: perhaps the first parliament in the history of humanity. At the very same time when they get rid of kings and emperors, people started looking the world with new eyes and discovered something very new about it. The idea that common decisions are better found in an open discussion where everybody can listen to others and is ready to change his (and, later, her) mind was born together with the idea that we can increase our knowledge by observing, discussing and by changing our minds about the world. Democracy and science are close sisters.

Timothy Ferris argued a similar point in his excellent The Science of Liberty, but focused on the modern birth of democracy at around the time of the scientific revolution.

Bill O'Reilly's crybaby conservatism

One of the character defects that seems to be nearly universal to many of the conservative media stars that dominate Fox News and AM radio is an ability to be brutally mean-spirited and vicious towards others, only to then turn around when called on it or when someone responds in kind and cry about how mean and unfair and hateful that person or category (e.g. "liberals") is.

Witness Bill O'Reilly, who routinely sends out slimeball producers to stalk and confront people going about their normal business, like when he had Jesse Waters stake our Amanda Terkel's apartment, follow her several hours across state lines, then start questioning her after she checked into a hotel; or when Jesse Waters confronted a judge in a gas station, then stuck his foot in the judge's car door in an attempt to prevent him from driving off. (In both instances, O'Reilly and partners were dishonest.)

So imagine what Bill O'Reilly's reaction was when he walked out of a hotel in D.C. and was approached by an Occupy Wall Street protester with a camera asking him if he attended a Newt Gingrich fundraiser. O'Reilly shoved his umbrella into the guy's face, then he tried to have him arrested by White House police. Then he went on his tv show and complained that if he had punched the protester like he wanted to he would have been charged for assault. My favorite part, though, is O'Reilly asserting that had the person identified himself before asking the question he would have been glad to respond.

So O'Reilly is perfectly fine with sending his minions out to interrupt people's lives and put them in extremely uncomfortable situations, but when someone tries to ask him a single question after accidentally coming across him (as opposed to the deliberate stalking that O'Reilly's team engages in) he considers it a criminal threat to himself and laments that the law doesn't enable him to physically assault the individual.

I actually do sympathize with O'Reilly's fear that some random person could come up to him and do him harm. I detest the tactics of paparazzi and believe the protester who approached O'Reilly could (and should) have identified himself and asked O'Reilly if he minded being asked a question and/or filmed - to which O'Reilly almost certainly would have said yes. (Or would have done the same exact thing, regardless, I'm guessing.)

But what bothers me is O'Reilly's own inability to take the feelings he has about being confronted and extend them to others put in a similar situation by his own crew. In other words, to empathize and exercise the Golden Rule which a self-proclaimed Christian like O'Reilly is supposed to hold as the bedrock foundation of his ethics.

More Bizarro Change

Obama administration continues Bush administration policy of Plan B restrictions for political, not scientific, reasons

In 2005, Susan Wood resigned her job as the top women’s-health official at the FDA, claiming that the agency’s refusal to allow over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception was the result of political pressure by the Bush administration. “The decision, which left women of all ages without appropriate and timely access to emergency contraception, was a clear rejection of recommendations that had been based on extensive review and evaluation of the pertinent data,” she wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This controversy was constantly cited in feminist indictments of the previous president. It was usually mentioned in critiques of Bush’s ideological, anti-empirical approach to science. That’s why women’s-health advocates and other progressives were so shocked yesterday when the Obama administration overruled an FDA recommendation to expand over-the-counter access to Plan B One-Step, a type of morning-after pill.

Quote of the day

"Plato's invention of Atlantis was so vivid that scholars and lunatics have looked for it ever since." - Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance

Garry Wills reviews Doonesbury

Somehow it had escaped my notice until now that the eminent historian Gary Wills wrote a review of one of my all-time favorite comic strips - Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury"- in The New York Review of Books for 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective celebrating four decades of the strip. (Also see Slate's 40th anniversary celebration.)

An excerpt

There have been other comic strips that dealt with politics, but they did so sporadically, and as one-trick diversions—Al Capp satirizing the welfare state with his schmoos, Walt Kelly turning Senator Joseph McCarthy into Simple J. Malarkey—but Trudeau has reflected on politics at a depth and with a breadth no one else has achieved. No wonder he won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a comic strip (in 1975). When Nixon bombed Cambodia without telling Congress that he was invading another country, Trudeau sent his terrorist character Phred to the bomb site. When he sees a couple standing American Gothic–style before a leveled museum, he asks if this happened during the secret bombing of Cambodia. The man says it was no secret. “I said ‘Look Martha, here come the bombs.’” Nothing could say more succinctly that many of our national security secrets are not meant to deceive the enemy, but to keep Congress and the American people in the dark about what our government is doing in our name. (I liked this strip so well that I asked Trudeau for the original, and it now hangs on my wall.)

Over and over Trudeau pinpoints governmental absurdities. After Mike and a friend have discussed the casualties of the Iraq war, in a strip that ran in 2005, they wonder if the dead cause any anguish in the President. The last panel shows voices coming from the White House in the night. Laura asks, “What’s wrong, dear?” and Bush answers, “It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.” Another strip shows a soldier coming home. His wife asks who that is arriving with him. He says it is the terrorist following him home, as Bush had claimed they would.

Blog interrupted

I've been working much overtime recently, which has been good for my pocket, terrible for my neglected blog. I have however, finished Glenn Greenwald's Liberty and Justice for Some and drafted out an outline of notes for a review which I hope to write as soon as my batteries recharge.

I also have my 2010 Book of the Year pick (I know, inexcusably late) which I've drafted up but have found many excuses to hold off on finishing that I would like to have up soon.

Those two items and another post about Rush Limbaugh and another about what really bothered me about President Obama's response to Donald Trump's bitherism are in the pipeline. I may end up working a good deal more overtime before the end of the year, however.

In the meanwhile, I can whole-heartedly recommend NOVA's The Fabric of the Cosmos series. Very well done; entertaining and inspiring.

I can also note that if you have a mobile device that you read texts on and have not already downloaded a Google books app, you may want to add that, as I've been able to find a couple of e-texts that I had been having difficulty locating. Namely: Justice in War Time by Bertrand Russell, The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, and An Historical and Critical Dictionary by Pierre Bayle.

Rush Limbaugh's Other-World

As I turned on Rush Limbaugh's radio program today - randomly - I was met by Limbaugh saying that liberals have been openly advocating communism for two decades now and that Barack Obama wants to be re-elected so that he can install a communist regime.

I'm not sure how to respond, as having never visited this parallel, alternate dimension Earth that Limbaugh broadcasts from, I'm not really in a position to comment.

On this Earth, however

A new report shows that despite a campaign pledge to get lobbyists out of Washington, the Obama White House has weakened regulation in favor of corporate interests more than the Bush administration. The study, "Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Public Health, Worker Safety, and the Environment,” examines more than a thousand meetings that took place over a decade between lobbyists and a little known regulatory office, then checks to see how proposed rules were weakened to accommodate industry requests. It found the Obama White House changed rules 76 percent of the time, while Bush changed them just 64 percent of the time. EPA rules were changed at a significantly higher rate — 84 percent.

And the President Obama on this Earth kept in key financial positions in his administration the men responsible for this

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

Richard Nixon versus Richard Nixon

From "What Happened to America?" (1967) by Richard Nixon

Our teachers, preachers, and politicians have gone too far in advocating the idea that each individual should determine what laws are good and what laws are bad, and that he then should obey the law he likes and disobey the law he dislikes.

From the May 19, 1977 Frost/Nixon interview

FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

Nixon: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

[...]

Frost: The point is: the dividing line is the president's judgment?

Nixon: Yes ...

Baleful quote of the day

"[W]hen did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?" - James Fallows

Update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

Today's addition to the New American Newspeak Dictionary is:

Lawfully coerce: illegally torture

Via the Washington Post's liar torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen