The People vs G-man Sachs

Matt Taibbi/RollingStone:

""They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.




Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.


The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008..."

BLANKFEIN! Taibbi's one of a very few authentic gonzo-scribes remaining (among hundreds of dyslexic HS Thompson wannabes)

Snitch Act extension

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
James Madison


PatAct/LA Times

...""Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, proclaimed that the Patriot Act's surveillance powers are being used far more expansively than most Americans realize. But they can't disclose what they know, they said, because the documents that detail how the Obama administration implements the act are classified. As members of the Intelligence Committee, Wyden and Udall are privy to secret briefings.


"Today the American people do not know how their government interprets the language of the Patriot Act," Wyden said. "Someday they are going to find out, and a lot of them are going to be stunned. Some of them will undoubtedly ask their senators: 'Did you know what this law actually did? Why didn't you know? Wasn't it your job to know, before you voted on it?'"..."

Another victory for J-Edgarville, with barely a squeak from the demopublican blog-gangsters. Why trouble yourself with "transparency"--or Due Process-- when the partay's rollin'--ahhyeahh.

Exit bags for the peeps

SuicideKits/LATimes

""Sharlotte Hydorn peddles a product touted for its deadly simplicity. Inside her butterfly-decorated boxes are clear plastic bags and medical-grade tubing. A customer places the bag over his head, connects the tubing from the bag to a helium tank, turns the valve and breathes. The so-called suicide kit asphyxiates a customer within minutes.

Orders come from all over the world, from people young and old, depressed and terminally ill. "People commit suicide by jumping out of windows and buildings, and hanging themselves," said the 91-year-old former elementary school science teacher. Her product, she says, ends lives peacefully, leaving people "eternally sleepy.""

There you have it, Bubba. Do the world a favor.
Mo' on the metaphysics of "To off, or not to off"

Sabado gigante

Hegel out west

DoD phunn

Korb/HuffPo:

""Less than a month after Obama got Osama, House Republicans still don't trust the president to safeguard U.S. national security. At least, that's only possibly explanation for this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House yesterday and is now headed to the Democrat-controlled Senate.


While the NDAA is intended to define the budget of the Department of Defense, this year's bill includes provisions that, if signed into law, would undermine a number of President Obama's signature national security initiatives, including his repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," efforts to reign in wasteful defense spending and, most significantly, the implementation of the New START nuclear agreement with Russia.


Approved by a bipartisan majority in late 2010, the New START nuclear arms control treaty requires the United States and Russia to reduce their arsenals to 1,550 deployed, strategic nuclear weapons. Considering that nearly all of these weapons are far more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such an arsenal would provide more than enough firepower for the United States to meet any conceivable national security threat. If you're not going to be deterred by 1,550 nuclear weapons, you're not going be deterred by anything. Perhaps most importantly, the treaty replaces the verification system that expired with the START I treaty, thereby providing an element of stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship.


The NDAA, however, attempts to hamper President Obama's nuclear policy in three ways. First, it bars funding for New START reductions until the Secretary of Defense and Energy Secretary certify to Congress that that the administration is on track to invest $180 billion in nuclear modernization over the next 10 years.""

What's $690 billion between friends.

the key.........

what's that patch on GlennBeck's sweater??

Mo' masonic phunn

The argumentative theory of reasoning

Win the argument--advance the gene pool

""Communication is hugely important for humans, and there is good reason to believe that this has been the case throughout our evolution, as different types of collaborative—and therefore communicative—activities already played a big role in our ancestors’ lives (hunting, collecting, raising children, etc.). However, for communication to be possible, listeners have to have ways to discriminate reliable, trustworthy information from potentially dangerous information—otherwise speakers would be wont to abuse them through lies and deception. One way listeners and speakers can improve the reliability of communication is through arguments. The speaker gives a reason to accept a given conclusion. The listener can then evaluate this reason to decide whether she should accept the conclusion. In both cases, they will have used reasoning—to find and evaluate a reason respectively. If reasoning does its job properly, communication has been improved: a true conclusion is more likely to be supported by good arguments, and therefore accepted, thereby making both the speaker—who managed to convince the listener—and the listener—who acquired a potentially valuable piece of information—better off.""

Logic--it's in your best interest, say the experts. Or at least, far superior to an Eddie Joonley  attitude adjustment lecture. 

+ + + + + + + + +

Feliz cumpleanos a Bob Dylan

ἀποκάλυψις

BookOfRev./HuffPo

""Numbers are language, and John of Patmos, author of The Revelation of John, loved numbers. Sixes, obviously, in triplicate, a few 10s, and sevens -- especially sevens: Seven messages to seven communities, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. It is the author's "single most insistent motif," writes Jonathan Kirsch. Adele Yarbro Collins calls it "an organizing principle" of the whole of the work." But why sevens? Why not twos, eights or nines? Collins tells us that the late Pythagoreans as well as Philo of Alexandria, Jewish biblical interpreter and philosopher, agreed that "all reality is ordered and that order is expressed in patterns of seven ... [because] ... [t]he symbolic significance of this number is cosmic." And, as Kirsch points out, it was God's resting on the seventh day that signified creation's completion, making seven a "symbol of divine wholeness in Judaism."

All this would have made sense to the seven communities John had in mind and as he took up his pen, around the year 95 C.E., he was writing to them, not to us, and in a language of symbol and imagery that were as current and familiar to them as it is ancient and weird to us. Which brings me back to Fred, an obviously bright fellow, yet whose assumption about the meaning of 666 is characteristic of the inevitable flattening-out that results when ancient, complicated texts are read as if they are stories from old newspapers. """

========================

Sabado gigante

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"

Happy B-day David Hume

belatedly, like

P.K. Dick vs. Lincoln and Hegel

Amer.Con.*

"SLASH: What’s your prognosis for the next 25 years? Do you think things are going to get real dismal?
DICK: No! No! I think things are going to get really good. I think we’re going to see a great decentralization of the government, which is good. The government is just failing to solve the economic problems and it will devolve to the state.
SLASH: States? That’s what Ronald Reagan is after, isn’t it?
DICK: Yeah. I think he’s right about that. If you got really sick now it’s the state of California that’s going to pick up your bill … not the federal government. We could survive much better without the federal government than without the state government.
JETER: It’s like those forces in the Brown administration who want to conclude a separate treaty with Mexico for petroleum products. What the hell! California is the sixth largest industrial nation in the world …
DICK: I know where my state taxes go. They don’t buy weapons with that. I would like to see this country break up into individual states.
SLASH: Wouldn’t that mean some pretty piss poor states?
DICK: Yeah, but presumably you’d still be free to travel. I spent years and years studying the war between the states and as much as I admire Lincoln, I think his philosophy was wrong and they should have let the South secede. That would have been a much wiser decision.
SLASH: What would things be like now? Would the South still have slavery?
DICK: Definitely not. Civil rights would be much worse for Blacks in the South than they are now but … on the positive side … uh I have books written during the war of speeches made by General Sherman have the right to self determination.
SLASH: Sounds more Socialist.
DICK: Well, actually they influenced the Germans on that. The North adopted the Hegelian view of state as a real entity rather than an abstraction which has led to the massive centralized government as bad as the Soviet Union. The original model for the U.S. was modeled by Jefferson after the models of the American Indian Federations. There is no doubt that the founding fathers were designing a system of independent and allied states based on these Indian models. Jefferson would have been appalled by Lincoln’s contesting the supremacy of states rights."

*Not an endorsement of American Conservative, or PK Dick's pro-Confederate, libertarian politics as expressed herein.

the Spuds

Queen Liz II visits Eire--

"Sometimes words aren’t necessary. That was the case Tuesday when Queen Elizabeth II placed a wreath in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance to honor the Irish rebels who lost their lives fighting for freedom — from Britain.

The queen became the first British monarch to set foot in Dublin for a century. Her four-day visit is designed to show that the bitter enmity of Ireland’s war of independence 90 years ago has been replaced by Anglo-Irish friendship, and that peace has become irreversible in the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland."

"Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. "


Edward Gibbon

adios, Trump

HuffPo--

""Donald Trump is out but the memory of the Trump-for-President era will, I hope, live on.

We've learned a lot. The public, for instance, has been educated to understand that you can't trust a thing the guy says.

"I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election," Trump said in a statement.

Is it possible he really believes that? If so, would you buy a used apartment building from this man?

The Trump presidential campaign should go down in history as a huge warning sign for other rich, high-profile jerks who think they can notch their name recognition up to even more astronomic levels by pretending to be presidential timber and making outrageous, headline-grabbing allegations about whoever's running the country."

Tax increases...

without a public vote...

LA Times/Brown

""""Gov. Jerry Brown, facing mounting pressure to walk away from his stalled budget plan, is refusing to yield and will seek to reinvigorate his campaign for a public vote on taxes with the revised spending package he releases Monday.

But there will be a new twist.

Having failed to win enough Republican votes to put the taxes on the ballot in June, the governor is expected to ask lawmakers to impose at least some of the levies first and seek Californians' blessing after the fact, said officials with knowledge of Brown's plan.

The governor faces rough seas in his quest for billions of dollars in additional income, sales and vehicle taxes.

GOP lawmakers' resolve to block both a legislative vote for the taxes and a public referendum has intensified with recent news that state revenue is outpacing projections. The uptick could continue, they say, erasing billions from a $15-billion deficit.

Even Democratic leaders and the governor's union backers, doubting the odds of a tax measure passing at the ballot box, are pushing Brown to break his pledge and forgo voter input.

"Go get a deal done," said David Kieffer, executive director of the state council of the influential Service Employees International Union, in a challenge to Brown and the Legislature. Californians "would vote the taxes down," he said, and "they don't actually need to be involved in this decision."""

That's how the State works.

Civil War/150

Irish soldiers

"Though parades, battle reenactments, and speeches will be common to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the mission of members of the 69th Pennsylvania Irish is different:

They find the burial spots of Civil War soldiers whose families could not afford gravestones. They sift through Philadelphia death records and look up cemetery plot maps. When they find a soldier, they file the required paperwork to get a headstone for the unmarked grave.

"We have located 350 of our soldiers around the country. Of those, we have put stones on 66," said Don Ernsberger, former Council Rock High School history teacher and author of five Civil War books, including Paddy Owen's Regulars about the 69th's Irish volunteers from Philadelphia...."

Sabado gigante

Music is the melody whose text is the world.


 Schopenhauer

Paraskevidekatriaphobia

fear of Friday the 13th:

...""The sixth day of the week and the number 13 both have foreboding reputations said to date from ancient times, and their inevitable conjunction from one to three times a year (there happens to be only one such occurrence in 2011, in the month of May) portends more misfortune than some credulous minds can bear. According to some sources it's the most widespread superstition in the United States today. Some people refuse to go to work on Friday the 13th; some won't eat in restaurants; many wouldn't think of setting a wedding on the date.

How many Americans at the beginning of the 21st century suffer from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of phobias (and coiner of the term paraskevidekatriaphobia, also spelled paraskavedekatriaphobia), the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he's right, no fewer than eight percent of Americans remain in the grips of a very old superstition. ...""

In the words of Penn Jillette...bull-shit.

for a conservative Christian viewpoint on Friday the 13th: click-a-nate

Floods--climate change in its early stages

McKibben/LA Times

"There are no grounds for optimism in this fight against the weather. So far we've only increased the temperature of the planet about a degree, and that's been enough to set the Arctic to melting, turn the ocean 30% more acidic and make the atmosphere about 4% wetter, loading the dice for floods. Climatologists predict that unless we kick oil, gas and coal habits very, very fast, the increase in temperature will be 4 or 5 degrees before the century is out. If one degree does the damage we're seeing at the moment, we'd be fools to find out what 4 degrees will look like.


But foolishness is carrying the day at the moment. Consider the fecklessness Washington has shown on climate. Just last month, the House voted by a 56-vote margin to deny that climate change was real. It's like an entire chamber full of Neville Chamberlains, hopeful that they can wish trouble away.


There's no one we can shoot to make global warming disappear. But we could, if we wanted, devote the scale of resources we've spent in the last decade invading Iraq and Afghanistan to the task of retooling our energy infrastructure. That's the kind of commitment it would take, an effort we usually seem to muster only in the face of military threat. But the danger that comes from climate change is every bit as real, and in the long run far greater, than anything Al Qaeda could throw at us. We're really fighting for our civilization, as people in the lower Mississippi will spend the next few weeks finding out.""

Let's not forget that the Teabugger-led House recently voted to deny that climate change was occurring .

J-Edgar Feinstein

From a WSJ article scrawled a few months ago by Senator Dianne Feinstein, arguing for vigorous prosecution of Wikileaks leader Assange--overlooked by most of the blogger "liberals":

""When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.


The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."

The Espionage Act also makes it a felony to fail to return such materials to the U.S. government. Importantly, the courts have held that "information relating to the national defense" applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.""

Pig Oil, continued

End Big Oil Tax Breaks/NY Times

""Linking two of the politically volatile issues of the moment, Senate Democrats say they will move forward this week with a plan that would eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies and divert the savings to offset the deficit.




With high gas prices and rising federal deficits in the political spotlight, senior Democrats believe that tying the two together will put pressure on Senate Republicans to support the measure or face a difficult time explaining their opposition to voters whose family budgets are being strained by fuel prices.


President Obama and some top Congressional Democrats have said they want to take some of an estimated $21 billion in savings from ending the tax breaks and steer it to clean energy projects. But the Senate’s Democratic leadership is calculating that using it to cut the deficit instead makes it a tougher issue politically for Republicans who are trying to burnish their conservative fiscal credentials.


“Big Oil certainly doesn’t need the collective money of taxpayers in this country,” said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the authors of the legislation that Democrats intend to showcase. “This is as good a time as any in terms of pain at the pump and in revenues needed for deficit reduction.”""

~(meaninglessness)

Reverend Aldous Huxley, First Church of the Ekstacy Contingent takes on the"Philosophy of Meaninglessness"---

"From the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified private universe of things possessing only... elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to mathematical treatment. By using this technique of simplification and abstraction, the scientist has succeeded to an astonishing degree in understanding and dominating the physical environment. The success was intoxicating and, with an illogicality which, in the circmstances, was doubtless pardonable, many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as actually experienced contains intuitions of value and significance, contain love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead. Science did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to deal with thses aspects of reality. Consquently it ignored them and concentrated its attention upon such aspects of the world as it could deal with by mean of arithmetic, geometry and the various branches of higher mathematics. Our conviction that the world is meaningless lend itself very effectively to furthering the ends of erotic or political passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error -- the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning and value has been deliberately excluded, with ultimate reality."

Sabado gigante

Satie

"The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods” Veblen

Uncle Abe

Writing-the-civil-war

Nathaniel Hawthorne meets Abraham Lincoln--an essay censored by The Atlantic, in July 1862--Hawthorne wrote the bogus editorial notes as well:

How To Read the OBL Coverage

Shafer/Slate

"The snuffing of Osama Bin Laden has already filled the Snake River Canyon with a torrent of coverage from newspapers, the Web, and television. The news output will only expand in the coming days, and as it does, remain skeptical about it. As we know from the coverage of other major breaking-news events—the Mumbai massacre, the death of Pat Tillman, Hurricane Katrina, the rescue of Jessica Lynch, to cite just a few examples—the earliest coverage of a big story is rarely reliable...."

commando morning

LA Times/OBL dead

"It was a huge million-dollar enclave in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with far too much security and 18-foot high walls, way taller than necessary to protect the two couriers who allegedly lived there alone. (See raw video footage below.)

That in the end is what brought the sudden end to Bin Laden's life with a U.S. bullet into his head, among other places, after a circuitous 10-year hunt for the spiritual leader of the global Al Qaeda terrorist franchise and the master plotter of the 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The hunt began to narrow several years ago when interrogations of Guantanamo Bay detainees produced the nicknames of a pair of highly trusted couriers, used by the captured 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Bin Laden, who had learned his electronic communications could be monitored by the U.S.

It took nearly two years of CIA analysis to determine the men's real names and to begin ...."

Allah akbar

Sabado gigante

jazz y...ajedrez.

Brim-day

England/Ezra-Pound (NSFW. We don't condone EP's message--rather  obnoxious at times--but it does show a certain historical perspective on the UK, that "outpost of Yankee-Judaea").




 

Death-bed non-conversions

Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer,  on not keeping the faith:. 

Dear fellow-unbelievers,




"Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit…) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson’s wall of separation. And don’t keep the faith."

Sincerely,

Christopher Hitchens

yes, milady

Why, the entire affair has us simply snackered.

HG Wells on the French Revolution, for yokels:

""And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the Marseillaise and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite clear in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée, where the people rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing royalists...... "

""Obama must lose in 2012""

Ian Welsh

"America is in terminal decline. There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, as Keynes said, but that amount is not infinite. The next chance you get to turn this around you will be starting from a much worse position. A lot more pain will be unavoidable.

Obama is not turning things around, what he is doing is negotiating with Republicans how fast the decline will be, and how much and how fast it is necessary to fuck ordinary Americans in order to keep the rich rich. If Obama wins another term, he will continue to negotiate the decline, then, odds are very high, a Republican will get in, and slam his foot on the accelerator of collapse.

This is why Obama must lose in 2012. I would prefer that he lose to a Democrat in a primary, then that Democrat wins, but he must lose regardless. If he loses to a Republican, then 2016 you get a chance to put someone in charge who might do the right things (or even just some of them.)""

Last of a dying breed--Democratic male, opposed to corporate finance, apparently ..hetero, with some spine

sabado Gigante

y........nuestro hermano, Jesús       

a weapon

"A weapon that costs more than Australia"

""The F-35 is designed to be the core tactical fighter aircraft for the U.S. military, with three versions for the Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps. Each plane clocks in at around $90 million.

In a decade's time, the United States plans to have 15 times as many modern fighters as China, and 20 times as many as Russia.So, how many F-35s do we need?

100?

500?

Washington intends to buy 2,443, at a price tag of $382 billion.

Add in the $650 billion that the Government Accountability Office estimates is needed to operate and maintain the aircraft, and the total cost reaches a staggering $1 trillion.

In other words, we're spending more on this plane than Australia's entire GDP ($924 billion).

The F-35 is the most expensive defense program in history, and reveals massive cost overruns, a lack of clear strategic thought, and a culture in Washington that encourages incredible waste.""

slouching towards Bethlehem, y'all
* * * * * * * *

related---columbine day

"storm toxin"

Methamphetamine/LA Times

""It's well-known that highly addictive methamphetamine wreaks havoc ....But faces, and brains, aren't the only parts of the body the drug affects, researchers at the University of Illinois in Champaign said Wednesday. Studying meth exposure in fruit flies, the team showed that meth also alters chemical reactions in the body associated with generating energy, forming sperm cells and regulating hormones and muscles.

"We know that methamphetamine influences cellular processes associated with aging, it affects spermatogenesis, and it affects the heart," said University of Illinois entomologist (and study lead author) Barry Pittendrigh, in a statement. "One could almost call meth a perfect storm toxin because it does so much damage to so many different tissues in the body."....

Just say no to Cranktianity.

the Obama regime

Oliver Stone/New Statesman

""Instead of modelling himself after Gorba­chev and boldly championing deeply felt convictions and transformative policies, Obama has taken a page from the Bill (and Hillary) Clinton playbook and governed as a right-leaning centrist. While trying naively to ingratiate himself with an opposition bent solely on his defeat, he has repeatedly turned his back on those who put him in office.

Surrounding himself with Wall Street-friendly advisers and military hawks, he has sent more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan; bailed out Wall Street banks while paying scant attention to the plight of the poor and working class; and enacted a tepid version of health reform that, while expanding coverage, represented a boondoggle for the insurance industry. And he has continued many of Bush's civil rights abuses, secrecy obsessions and neoliberal policies that allow the continued looting of the real economy by those who are obscenely wealthy."

Jackbooted neoliberals:  as dangerous as  jackbooted yokel repugs and TPsters, though with  "people skills", wearing kevlar, GPS,  and  carrying a lot more gear. 

Super rich see fed. taxes drop dramatically

Yahoocracy--–

"As millions of procrastinators scramble to meet Monday's tax filing deadline, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.


The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.


Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.


The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so little in taxes? The nation's tax laws are packed with breaks for people at every income level. There are breaks for having children, paying a mortgage, going to college, and even for paying other taxes. Plus, the top rate on capital gains is only 15 percent."

The ostentatiously wealthy paid more in capital gains taxes under Reagan than they do now-- 20 percent in 1981, then increased in 1986 to 28 percent. Another GOP-TP myth, debunked.

sabado Gigante

edit IV-----------------------
piano music/Schubert


El sueño de la Razon produce monstruos...

Dogs that can't bark

In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures/NYTimes

""It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?


Answering such a question — the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark — is anything but simple.""

Πλάτων

Symposium: Plato's Cave, 2011


"Socrates (470-399 B.C.) – a renowned Greek philosopher from Athens who taught Plato – Plato taught Aristotle and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. Socrates used a method of teaching by asking leading questions. The Greeks called this form dialectic – starting from a thesis or question, then discussing ideas and moving back and forth between points of view to determine how well ideas stand up to critical review with the ultimate principle of the dialogue being Veritas – Truth. "

Platonisme es no perfecta pero se puede ayudar con La Muerta de la blanca basura

Stewart does...Glenn Beck

LA Times

Hehheh. Holy LDS chalkboard ratman

sabado Gigante

uno mas

“America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society.” Kropotkin

Charts-Co

n-gram for.......stalinist, bureaucrat, nazi, yokel, aunt jemima

buh bye Glenn Beck

El Lay Times

Completing a swift rise and fall from TV stardom, the controversial mormon buffoon  Glenn Beck will lose his once-popular Fox News "show" later this year, the network announced Wednesday.

"Thank your lucky stars for that," said Daisy Mae Pudanellia, an office worker at Fox News's downtown LA location. "That confused fat bitch should have been given the axe a year ago", Pudanellia continued.


Beck's 5 p.m. program, which earned scorn from intelligent humans everywhere for its attacks on reason, science and human values as well as its devotion to a variety of  criminal psychotics, was a top cable draw in 2009 and a signpost for the misguided, dimwitted "tea party" movement in last year's midterm elections.

But ratings plummeted and advertisers bailed as Beck — a cherubic, salt-and-pepper-haired semi-dyslexic blowhard who has compared himself to a rodeo clown — increasingly pursued a hard-to-follow agenda that many found too pathetically simple-minded to believe. He also chafed the money men at Fox News, who faulted him for spending too much time on his far-flung bunko operations and not enough on honing his communication 101 skills.

Both sides cobbled together a diplomatically worded statement Wednesday that noted Beck would be "kicked the fuck off, ASAP" his daily program but stressed that the host and Fox News had reached a new deal for future, as-yet-unspecified projects.
Fox News and Beck both declined to comment beyond the statement.

* * *
related

Black Robe gang, cont.

"The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency."

 Thoreau
Scalia on kneepads for the Prosecution/LATimes

"Since the 1990s, the advent of DNA evidence has swept across the American criminal justice system and revealed that hundreds of convicted prisoners were innocent. Yet, throughout that time, the Supreme Court has shielded prosecutors from claims that they hid evidence that could have revealed the truth and has been reluctant to give prisoners a right to reopen old cases.

By a 5-4 vote Tuesday, the high court threw out a jury verdict won by John Thompson, the Louisiana man who had sued the New Orleans district attorney after he spent 14 years on death row for crimes he did not commit. In the past, the court has shielded individual prosecutors from being sued, even if they deliberately framed an innocent person. Last week's decision protects a district attorney's office from being sued for a series of errors that sent an innocent man to prison....."

HuffPo/Supreme-Miscalculation

""The Supreme Court's seminal decision in Brady v. Maryland recognized that prosecutors must tell the defense about any evidence that negates the guilt of the accused. If a prosecution witness has a motive to lie in order to curry favor from the state, the defense has a right to know. If evidence from the scene of the crime proves the defendant innocent, the defendant obviously has a right to know. A criminal trial is not a game. The prosecution's objective must be to do justice, even if that means the defendant gets acquitted.


The evidence at the trial of Thompson's civil lawsuit proved overwhelmingly that Connick was indifferent, if not hostile, to his obligation under the Brady ruling. Connick's office didn't provide any training to assistant DAs on the disclosure requirement. His assistants didn't know the basics of the rule. And in Thompson's case, they withheld from the defense team ten exculpatory reports and records - in addition to the exonerating blood evidence in the armed robbery - that undercut Thompson's murder conviction.""

Sheriff Reid

supporting social-security

""Sen. REID: Back off Social Security. It's in great shape for the next many decades. Let's worry about Social Security when it's a problem. Today, it's not a problem.""

Nice jab in the face of the embodiment of human shit on earth Cantor , that glib piece of Randian garbage in a Suit.   While hardly perfect as a politician, or person (Reid's afflicted with the LDS disorder) Sen. Reid has some inkling of what authentic democratic politics consists of, unlike many DINOs (like most d-Kos regulars). Maybe there's hope he can overcome his disorder.

Church tax (y sabado gigante)

Milwaukee???

"""Merton — St. John's United Church of Christ in Merton holds worship services on Sundays and during some months holds Bible study classes on Tuesdays.

Like other churches, St. John's is exempt from paying property taxes.

But every day of the week, including Sundays, a for-profit Jazzercise franchise runs fitness classes at the church. Classes are offered four times a day from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, according to the calendar posted online. Jazzercise holds fewer classes at the church Friday through Sunday.

Rental not uncommon
It's not uncommon for churches to rent out space. But when they rent to businesses that don't qualify for a property-tax exemption, that portion of the property used by the business is supposed to be subject to taxes, according to state laws.

In reality, how churches are actually used gets little attention from regulators, an investigation by the Journal Sentinel has found. Some properties are listed as churches but have little, if any, activity going on. Others, such as St. John's, raise different concerns. The lack of government oversight ultimately costs all the other property owners who do pay taxes. And the tax break gives Jazzercise a competitive advantage over other business owners who pay property taxes.

"That's definitely not fair," said John Gebhard, owner of Lake Country Racquet & Athletic Club in Hartland. "I pay some pretty big property tax checks. That kind of gets under your skin after a while. As a business owner you think 'Why am I paying this and everybody else isn't?' "........

Once First Church of the Blessed Beatnik holds regular jazzercize classes, or bar-be-ques open to the public (charging admission), or tax preparation classes hasn't it become a de facto business, thus losing the tax exempt status (itself dubious, even without the business)?? Contingencies says yes.

More phunn on Church/state



Slinky redfoot??

"the struggle for recognition"

from the Coeur d'Alene of the Mind

""In opposition to Liberalism and Contract theories, Hegel does not regard rights as originating from an a priori eternal human nature which have the same characteristics in all societies and all times. Human beings have rights as a result of a historical and social struggle, which he calls the struggle for recognition. This view of the nature of rights finds its complete exposition in The Phenomenology of Mind, but its origin lies in the Jena lectures.


If we take the right to property as an example, the difference between Hegel’s and Locke’s accounts becomes clear. The right to property in Hegel concerns Man as a Will, a Spirit, a Self-Conscious being. On the other hand, Man has property right in Locke because of his biological organic nature. Whereas Locke concentrated on the problem of possessing, enjoying, and distributing property, Hegel concentrated on the productive activity of the subject, which was prophetic to Marx. The subject in Locke confronts nature in a dominating, instrumental manner, taking from it what satisfies its biological needs, but in Hegel both subject and object, or man and nature constitute each other in a dialectical process. Hegel shows that human being makes the things of the outer world parts of his own world by way of labour, and thereby raising Man above his biological nature. ""

"Kill the Irishman"

via Easy Reader:

""The mafia wanted Danny Greene dead and they weren’t taking any chances.

He’d already been stabbed, shot at by a sniper, and run down by a drive-by shooter. He’d escaped several attempted car bombings, including one where he dismantled the explosive himself and then turned in the bomb’s caps over to a police acquaintance. When the policeman asked where the explosives were, Greene responded, “Those are going back to the son of a bitch who sent them to me.”

By some accounts, eight of the hit men who’d been sent to kill him died by the hand of Danny Greene.

By May of 1975, the mob had had enough. The Italian-run mafia decided to finish off this upstart thug who’d started as a longshoreman on the docks of Lake Erie and who now defiantly called himself “The Irishman” as he challenged La Cosa Nostra itself. They blew up his house.""

From... authentic US History 101: Organized crime, the Five Points gang and their enemies.....

sizzling like an isotope

SF Gate

"Minuscule amounts of radiation from Japan's damaged nuclear plant have reached Las Vegas, but scientists say it poses no health risk.

Ted Hartwell of the Desert Research Institute's Community Environmental Monitoring Program says extremely small amounts of the radioactive isotopes iodine-131 and xenon-133 had reached a Las Vegas monitoring station this week.

He says he's certain the isotopes came from Japan because they're not usually detected in Nevada, but the readings were far below levels that could pose any health risks.

Minuscule amounts of radiation from Japan have been reported elsewhere in the West, including California, Colorado, Hawaii and Washington."

Sounds negligible--that is, assuming you can trust the local bureaucrat in charge of radiation monitoring. Honey, be sure to pick up a Geiger Counter at the supermarket on yr way home....

sabado gigante

su medicina

Bad craziness 24-7

Darrow/Voltaire

""""About this time, an unfortunate lunatic named Damins made a weak attempt on the life of Louis XV. The orthodox in church and state said that plainly the act was inspired by the New Thought of that day. It was perfectly easy to trace the act of a crazy man to the writings of Voltaire, which the man had never read. True, when the man was captured, he had in his hand a copy of the New Testament. Voltaire was delighted when he got this news. "A testament? I told you so. All assassins have a Bible in their daggers, but have you ever heard of one who had a Cicero, a Plato, or a Virgil?"""""

slight retrofit of Marquis de Arouet: at least they nearly always have some form of a Bible--Old testament, New Testament or Koran. People of the Book

things are not what they seem....

jus' another Thaïs

Thaïs .





"My brethren in the Malebolge, we flounder in sewage and waste."

USS Swinestein

17. Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men.

18. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

19. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Romans 12:17-19 KJV

Saul didn't understand that; Paul did (allegedly) 

Sorties sunday

sabado gigante

Nuggetnomics  """"A bidder has paid $460,000 for a roughly 8-pound gold nugget found in Northern California's Gold Rush country.

Spectrum Numismatics came away with the nugget on Wednesday after a feverish two minutes of bidding at the Golden West Auction in Sacramento. The company was bidding on behalf of an anonymous buyer.

What may be the biggest California gold nugget in existence was found in the unincorporated town of Washington in Nevada County last March with a metal detector..."

Marx, Karl himself opposed the...jewelocracy (not to say royals of all sorts, whether christian, jew or mahometan). He had read his ....Diderot & Co.

the Shaleighleigh

For St. Padraig's day --

1 oz Lemon Lime soda
1.5 oz Amaretto
1.5 oz Bushmills Irish Whiskey
1 splash of Grenadine

Mix Amaretto and Bushmill's over ice, add Lemon-Lime soda and a dash of grenadine, shake, strain into glass. Makes a big shot that tastes like candy, begob, but hits like a Velvet Hammer.
¡Salud!

Oblation day

Homie CJC in the House--
from Caesar's Gallic Wars, VI/16.

""The nation of all the Gauls is extremely devoted to superstitious rites; and on that account they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices; because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods can not be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind ordained for national purposes. Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames. They consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offense, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent."""


also common to Eire, Pre-Palladius era aka St. Padraig

"An account mostly false..."

Thoughts on Bierce/CivilWar

HISTORY, n.
An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. A.B.

""One need only attempt to construct a narrative of a battle action to see what Bierce already knew. After-action reports, letters from the field, newspaper reports – accounts usually framed in the immediate aftermath of battles – were in themselves at best fragmentary, unreliable when it came to reporting events outside the direct observation of the writer, and open to question even when the author claimed to have witnessed what he reported. Distortions and rationalizations multiplied in the weeks after the battle, with a few participants demonstrating an unusual inventiveness in telling their stories. That process became even more evident in the decades after the war, when participants continued to clash with each other over who did what, what happened, and how it happened. They did so in autobiographies, interviews, articles, after-dinner speeches, and in the pages of several journals, notably Century Magazine, which between 1884 and 1887 published numerous pieces by various participants in what became known as the “Century War Series.” Many of the pieces were later published in the four-volume Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.""

You don't know jack about the....Chickamauga of the Mind, rube.


Ambrose Bierce

Tsunaminomix

Counterpunch/AC:

""""On the coastal stretch of our local county road in Humboldt county, northern California, perhaps the irksome signs installed a few years ago alerting drivers and hikers that they were in a zone exposed to the risk of tidal waves would at last be of some use, though what precise use is hard to say. If there really was a tsunami of destructive size racing towards the shore, by the time you saw the sign and looked out to sea, you would be engulfed long before swerving uphill at McNutt and inland towards CounterPunch’s southern HQ in Petrolia.


The whole tsunami signage is locally derided as either a boondoggle or one more extrusion of the eco-panic convulsing the genteel classes, stretching from the Mayan calendar Apocalypse to the menace of flies flying into one’s latte, a pressing concern of the county Health Department, and requiring my neighbor Joe Paff – a coffee roaster – to install costly anti-fly barriers on his milk steamer machines. Of far more use would be alerts on the coastal stretch for wandering cows...."

However nauseating the no-nuke freaks seem at times, they had a point: had a quake of that magnitude occurred off the coast of California, at least four nuclear reactors would be ..toast, and the Golden state would be Chernobyl-ized.

Everybody wants to be a cat

bad Joss with a capital J

avoiding meltdown--

"Japanese officials have begun pumping seawater into a second nuclear reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant 140 miles north of Tokyo to cool the reactor core in a last-ditch effort to stave off a core meltdown.

The action indicates that the reactor's normal backup cooling system has failed and is no longer able to supply fresh water to the core. Officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, have been struggling to keep six shut-down nuclear reactors cooled because seawater from the tsunami that followed Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake damaged the diesel generators that power the circulating pumps.

An explosion Saturday night at the No. 1 reactor destroyed the cooling system there and officials had little choice but to begin injecting seawater laced with boron directly into the reactor containment vessel. Seawater is highly corrosive, particularly when heated, and injecting it into the reactor means the company is, for all practical purposes, abandoning the reactor for all future uses."""

Fock.

sabado gigante

Sarangi-day. Yeah


"I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who."
— Rudyard Kipling

Mike Starr RIP

Obit/LATimes

""""Mike Starr, the former Alice in Chains bass player who went public with his drug problems on the reality TV show "Celebrity Rehab," was found dead in a Salt Lake City house Tuesday, nine years after the rock band's singer died of an overdose. Starr was 44.

"There is nothing to indicate that this was foul play by another individual," said a spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Department. An autopsy was planned.

Starr was fired from Alice in Chains shortly after the release of its breakthrough 1992 album "Dirt," which was packed with drug-related songs. In 1994, he was sentenced to 90 days in a Texas jail for stealing a piece of luggage at Houston Intercontinental Airport.

His former bandmates, with replacement bassist Mike Inez on board, enjoyed even greater success during the Seattle "grunge" movement. But singer Layne Staley's drug battles put the brakes on the band in 1996. Staley was found dead at age 34 in Seattle in 2002.""""

 We pay our debt sometime

wrong place...

right time, o close

Sobre dos ruedas

                              
Las-Bicicletas/LA Opinión

""Más que nunca los conductores de Los Ángeles tendrán que acostumbrarse a compartir el camino con los ciclistas, quienes ahora tendrán un sistema de 1,680 millas alrededor de la ciudad que los conectará con centros de trabajo, educativos y de entretenimiento, y con la red de transporte colectivo.


El gobierno angelino, que siempre había dado prioridad a los coches, aprobó esta semana un plan maestro que construirá cuatro veces más ciclovías que antes. El viraje ocurre cuando el precio del combustible es actualmente de más de 4 dólares por galón.


La ciudad tiene 378 millas de vías exclusivas para ciclistas en distintos segmentos que, sin embargo, no están conectados. El compromiso es construir 40 millas anuales (el promedio actual es de 8 a 12 millas) para cubrir esos huecos y enfocarse en vecindarios marginados. """

Y es esta mucha mejora para la salud tambien.

sabado gigante

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves 

Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder --

D A 

(from The Wasteland/ TS Eliot)

Phamily man

Carolyn Cassady/Guardian

""Idolised for his fast driving, hyperactive energy and voracious reading habits, Neal was the perfect Beat character, and his autobiographical writings were published posthumously as The First Third. "To sit still and write was agony for him," recalls Carolyn. "He said he'd think of a word and he'd think of 10 others." Instead, Neal dashed off free-flowing letters that influenced Kerouac's style.

The two married in 1948 and spent the next 20 years observing the Beats. Sort of. "I'm one of the last survivors and, of course, I wasn't a part of it really," says Carolyn. Certainly, there are no images of her in Angelheaded Hipsters, which takes its title from the opening lines of Howl: ". . . angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."

Watsonomics

Searle/WSJ

""""".... as in the original Chinese room, the symbols are meaningless to Watson, which understands nothing. The reason it lacks understanding is that, like me in the Chinese room, it has no way to get from symbols to meanings (or from syntax to semantics, in linguistic jargon). The bottom line can be put in the form of a four-word sentence: Symbols are not meanings.

Of course, Watson is much faster than me. But speed doesn't add understanding. This is a simple refutation of the idea that computer simulations of human cognition are the real thing.

If the computer cannot understand solely by manipulating symbols, then how does the brain do it? What is the difference between the brain and the digital computer? The answer is that the brain is a causal mechanism that causes consciousness, understanding and all the rest of it. It is an organ like any other, and like any other it operates on causal principles.

The problem with the digital computer is not that it is too much of a machine to have human understanding. On the contrary, it is not enough of a machine. Consciousness, the machine process that goes on in the brain, is fundamentally different from what a computer does, which is computation. Computation is an abstract formal process, like addition......""""

Moral-o-metrics

Horgan on Sam Harris's neuroscientific moralism/SciAm:

""Harris asserts in Moral Landscape that ignorance and humility are inversely proportional to each other; whereas religious know-nothings are often arrogant, scientists tend to be humble, because they know enough to know their limitations. "Arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity," Harris states. Yet he is anything but humble in his opus. He castigates not only religious believers but even nonbelieving scientists and philosophers who don't share his hostility toward religion.


Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. "The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?


I suspect Harris wants to rely on brain scans to measure "well-being" because he doesn't trust people to simply say what makes them happy. If a Muslim girl says that she likes wearing a veil, as many do, she doesn't know what's good for her, Harris might say. Maybe she doesn't, but magnetic resonance imaging won't help us resolve these sorts of issues.""

sabado Gigante

Milquetoast

JoeKlein/Time:

""Public employees unions are an interesting hybrid. Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed...of the public? Despite their questionable provenance, public unions can serve an important social justice role, guaranteeing that a great many underpaid workers--school bus drivers, janitors (outside of New York City), home health care workers--won't be too severely underpaid. That role will be kept intact in Wisconsin. In any given negotiation, I'm rooting for the union to win the highest base rates of pay possible...and for management to win the least restrictive work rules and guidelines governing how much truly creative public employees can be paid.""

Mr Bakunin's class

On Education:

"""""Now we see why the bourgeois socialists demand only a little education for the people, a soupcon more than they currently receive; whereas we socialist democrats demand, on the people's behalf, complete and integral education, an education as full as the power of intellect today permits, So that, henceforth, there may not be any class over the workers by virtue of superior education and therefore able to dominate and exploit them. The bourgeois socialists want to see the retention of the class system each class, they contend, fulfilling a specific social function; one specialising, say, in learning, and the other in manual labour. We, on the other hand, seek the final and the utter abolition of classes; we seek a unification of society and equality of social and economic provision for every individual on this earth. The bourgeois socialists, whilst retaining the historic bases of the society of today, would like to see them become less stark, less harsh and more prettified. Whereas we should like to see their destruction. From which it follows that there can be no truce or compromise, let alone any coalition between the bourgeois socialists and us socialist democrats."""""

No-day

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness."

Lunes con CAMUS, Albert

sabado Gigante

"Do not give anyone what they ask for, but what you understand they actually need; then put up with the ungratefulness later".(Unamuno)

“Cheap Publicity Stunts” for $1,000, Alex

Cosh/Macleans:

""""Every article about Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing device, should really lead off with the sentence “It’s the year 2011, for God’s sake.” In the wondrous science-fiction future we occupy, even human brains have instant broadband access to a staggeringly comprehensive library of general knowledge. But the horrible natural-language skills of a computer, even one with an essentially unlimited store of facts, still compromise its function to the point of near-parity in a trivia competition against unassisted humans. Surely this isn’t a triumph for artificial intelligence, or for IBM, so much as it is a self-administered black eye?

Jeopardy!, after all, doesn’t demand that much in the way of language interpretation. Watson has to, at most, interpret text questions of no more than 25 or 30 words—questions which, by design, have only a single answer. It handles puns and figures of speech impressively, for a computer. But it doesn’t do so in anything like the way humans do. IBM’s ads would have you believe the opposite, but it bears emphasizing that Watson is not “getting” the jokes and wordplay of the Jeopardy! writers. It’s using Bayesian math on the fly to pick out key nouns and phrases and pass them to a lookup table. If it sees “1564″ and “Pisa”, it’s going to say “Galileo”....."""""

green Carnivores

Monbiot/Guardian

""""If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don't compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.

It's the second half – the stuffing of animals with grain to boost meat and milk consumption, mostly in the rich world – which reduces the total food supply. Cut this portion out and you would create an increase in available food which could support 1.3 billion people. Fairlie argues we could afford to use a small amount of grain for feeding livestock, allowing animals to mop up grain surpluses in good years and slaughtering them in lean ones. This would allow us to consume a bit more than half the world's current volume of animal products, which means a good deal less than in the average western diet."""

A point lost on religious dogmatists--the pork industry, however unsavory does not produce nearly the environmental damage that cattle does. For that matter, shrimp beds don't either(or poultry, mutton, etc).

for a few shekels mo'

Wiseguys in Idaho

""To his Idaho neighbors, Jay Shaw was an outgoing, glad-handing greenhorn cattle rancher who liked to go hunting — at least until this week, when they learned he was actually accused Boston Mafia hit man Enrico M. Ponzo, on the lam for nearly 20 years.

“It was a shock to my system,” said one neighbor, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation from the friend who turned out to be a mobster. “He always told me he was from Jersey.”

Yesterday in federal court in Idaho, Ponzo, 42, pleaded not guilty to 1997 charges of racketeering, plotting to murder and attempting to murder. A federal official said he’ll eventually be extradited back to Massachusetts.

Pals said the man they nicknamed “The New Yorker” for his accent landed in Marsing, population 842, nine years ago, with girlfriend Cara Lyn Pace. She bought 12 acres of land, and they built a home, then had a son and a daughter.""

Fuggetaboutit, sodbusters

St. Valentine's Day...........

Massacre, that izz...

""On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, St. Valentine’s Day, five members of the North Side Gang, plus non-members Reinhardt H. Schwimmer and John May, were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage at 2122 North Clark Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side, possibly by members of Al Capone’s gang, possibly by gangsters hired from outside the city so they would not be recognized by their victims, or a combination of both.

Two of the shooters were dressed as crestview police officers, and the others were dressed in long trenchcoats, according to witnesses who saw the “police” leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage. When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, “Nobody shot me” despite having 14 bullet wounds. Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida. The St. Valentine’s Days Massacre resulted from a plan devised by a member or members of the Capone gang to eliminate the Polish-Irish Bugs Moran.""

Karpis claimed that Capone told him while they were both in Alcatraz (and Caponay decaying from syphillis) that Goetz had planned the massacre. Bugs Moran outlived Capone by ten years and died, nearly penniless, in the infirmary at Leavenworth.

sabado Gigante

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
Miguel de Unamuno

L-Wrong Hubbard , cont.

Scientology-expose-

""""L. Ron Hubbard may have faked his war record--
Scientologists revere the church's founder as a near-God, but Wright discovers that L. Ron Hubbard may have been all too fallible. Hubbard wrote Dianetics, the church's founding text, after claiming to have healed himself of his World War II injuries. But Hubbard's actual military records — all 900 pages of them — contradict the story. "Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard's being wounded in battle," reports Wright. The Church says that it hired veteran intelligence agent Fletcher Prouty back in the '80s to unearth documents proving Hubbard's claims. Prouty's evidence, according to an archivist interviewed by Wright, is a "forgery."""""

Scientology-slaves

More:

CoS 1.

CoS 2

L-Ron's definitely a front-runner on the Quack-o-meter but in reality was not the crypto-nazi his one-time pal RA Heinlein was (e.g. peruse some of Heinlein's commentary with WF Buckley and the "Nixon was soft" crowd, not to say his support for Reagan's "Star wars" hype).  Following  LRH's mysterious death the CoS arguably became far more secretive and sinister . 

EA Poe....in Beantown

"Poe, Poe, Poe -- and po' Baltimore. A forthcoming big-screen thriller starring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, called "The Raven," is set in Baltimore but has been filmed in Budapest and Belgrade. Now ABC is shooting a pilot called "Poe" featuring the poet, critic and fiction-writer -- and father of the detective story -- as a mid-19th-century P.I. cracking cases in Boston, where he was born.

Poe had such a contentious relationship with the scribes of his native city that it took until 2009 for Boston to designate "Poe Square" near the writer's birthplace. Even Beantown's mayor, Thomas Menino, had to acknowledge at the dedication that Poe said of Boston, "Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good."

A few years ago, Mark Redfield filmed the independent "Death of Poe" right here in Charm City. Will we ever see a new Poe film set in Baltimore and shot here? It's beginning to seem, "Nevermore." .....

Viva EAP

Mormowned, continued

Can-a-mormon-now-be-President? WaPo

"""""The general public seems to be getting more tolerant of Mormons. Eighteen months ago, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said said Romney's ratings rose after the 2008 election where Romney was viewed unfavorably by 44 percent of the general populace and favorably by 30 percent. By June 2009, those figures had dropped to 28 percent unfavorably vs 40 percent favorably.

If Romney thinks he's got more traction now, he has Fox News host Glenn Beck to thank. In one swoop, Beck managed to sweep away every last vestige of evangelical resistance to Romney when he included a long list of evangelicals, conservative Catholics and conservative Jews in his "Restoring Honor" rally last summer. People like Jerry Falwell Jr. said at the time that Beck's Mormonism is "irrelevant" to evangelicals like him.

Many evangelical insiders wondered why it took a Mormon convert to assemble 240 Christian leaders as a "Black Robe Regiment" for national revival. Beck's prominence pointed to a dearth of evangelical leadership willing to embark on similar bold and audacious moves. Beck was at least willing to step out and lead, for which evangelicals were grateful. """"

Reagan re-run

Hitchens/Slate

"""""It was extraordinary that, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan was dealing with a man who knew that the Soviet Union could not sustain the arms race and a man who was out of patience with the satraps of East Germany. To Gorbachev goes an enormous share of the credit. But if I run the thought experiment and ask myself whether Walter Mondale would have made a better interlocutor in 1987, I cannot make myself believe it. This does not involve un-saying any of the things about Reagan that his admirers would prefer us to forget. But it does acknowledge the distinction between a historic presidency and an average one. Reagan's friend Margaret Thatcher once said that the real test of her success was the way that she had changed the politics of the Labour Party. By that standard, the legacy of Reagan in permanently altering the political landscape is with us still.""""

sabado Gigante

smackdown--Hitler vs Stalin

Snyder/NYRblog

""""In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations. ....""""

Ayn Rand, looter

(via Alternet)
""""Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.


Her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor)...."