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)...."

Chair-person Arianna

at Davos...

""Davos 2011 is off to a great start. I've been surprised how little talk there's been in the cafes and bistros about Barack's State of the Union speech. I heard it aired here at 3 in the morning--I was...sort of busy at the time --but most people here are rarely asleep at 3 am (a Davos sleep challenge would be, well, a major challenge -- more on that in a bit). Plus, everyone who's anyone at Davos has an iPad, laptop, or mobile phone (and often all three), so it wouldn't be hard to watch a replay, like if we really cared. But it doesn't seem to be on peoples' radar screens, as like their favorite ski runs or investment seminars, or the party schedules were."

""At a reception hosted by Yale President Rick Levin, I ran into the Chamber of Commerce's CEO Tom Donohue and asked him what he thought of the speech. "It bored the crap out of me," he said. "What didn't you like?" I asked. "With gasoline prices headed to over $4 a gallon, and profits rolling in" he replied, "there was no reason to demonize US oil companies." And a big-time TV producer, who asked for anonymity to protect his chances of ever playing basketball with Obama, was focused on the president's makeup: "It was simply dreadful," he told me. "He looked so yellow, it was like he was jaundiced. It was so bad, John Boehner looked natural by comparison." But other than smatterings, not much post-speech chatter.""""""

Exit, golden gate

not for the squeamish.


(and..... not a recommendation)

""And remember that the term Rational was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every single detail and to do so with due diligence; and that Equanimity is the voluntary acceptance of the things which are assigned to you by the common nature; and that Magnanimity is the elevation of the intelligent part above the pleasurable or painful sensations of the flesh, and above that poor thing called fame, and death, and all such things. If, then, you maintain yourself in the possession of these names, without desiring to be called by these names by others, you will be another person and will enter on another life. For to continue to be such as you have hitherto been, and to be torn in pieces and defiled in such a life, is the character of a very stupid person and one overfond of life, and like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who though covered with wounds and gore, still plead to be kept to the following day, though they will be exposed in the same state to the same claws and bites. Therefore fix yourself in the possession of these few names: and if you are able to abide in them, abide as if you were removed to certain islands of the Happy. But if you shall perceive that you fall out of them and do not maintain your hold, go courageously into some nook where you shall maintain them, or even depart at once from life, not in passion, but with simplicity and freedom and modesty, after doing this one laudable thing at least in your life, to have gone out of it thus.""

(Marcus Aurelius)

sabado Gigante

...Asuras

Feast day of St. Thomas

Vo-lar-ay
From.... the Field guide to Flying Saints

Distinguishable features:

Wingspan: 1,89 m
Weight approximately: 105 kg
Range and distribution: Italy
Color: black and white tunic
Special features: an ox, a star or sun or with pagan philosophers at feet.

Suits-R-Us

The Most Business-Friendly President Ever? By MIKE WHITNEY

""On Tuesday, Barack Obama made the case for easing regulations in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The article, titled "Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System", was accompanied by a caricature of a scissor-wielding businessman slashing-away at red tape, a symbol that is revered among anti-regulation zealots. In the opening paragraph, the president praises free market capitalism ("the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known") and Wall Street ("vibrant entrepreneurialism is the key to our continued global leadership") while taking aim at the "burdensome" restrictions that prevent speculators from maximizing profits. Even by the administration's abysmal standards, the article is a new low, which is why the WSJ editors mockingly critiqued Obama's op-ed as "one of the greatest policy walkbacks in American history". Here's a clip from the text:

"Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs......Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.

This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It's a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades......""

WSJ? WTF?  WoW? WFT. WCW. WWF? WOC! WSD. WUF. WOE. WXW

Might I remind you Mr. Spade....

that you may haff the Fal-kon but vee certainly haff you. .... ...

""It's terse. It's polished. There's crime.

It's never been published - until now.

Fifty years after Dashiell Hammett's death, a national mystery magazine is about to publish a long-lost story by the father of the hard-boiled detective novel, and fans are giddy with excitement.

The story, "So I Shot Him," is one of about a dozen of the San Francisco writer's pieces that were never printed anywhere. Word is that, unlike many works authors choose not to publish, this 12-page thriller is high-quality and complete.

Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand Magazine, stumbled across the piece while poking through Hammett's papers at the University of Texas at Austin. He's featuring it in his Feb. 28 issue"....

Hammett/SFGate
Mo'NoirPhunn

My Old Phlame...
ah can't even rememburr her name

Google Ice Cream

The Schmidt-ster replaced by Page-ster. Communist--Pagan-network-News
HuffPo

"""Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be leaving the CEO's office and founder Larry Page will be stepping in. The question is whether this is a signal from the Internet Goliath that Schmidt's missteps and misstatements about online privacy are no longer company policy.

It's not likely Google will embrace the "Do Not Track Me" mechanism suggested recently by the FTC, nor abandon its business model of collecting as much data about us as possible to serve us up to the highest paying advertiser. Nonetheless, there could be subtle changes in the Page era that put our privacy back in the minds of Google engineers."""""

sabado Gigante

J.Cash/Hurt

Ask not what the Reptilians can do for you....

but what you can do for the Reptilians.

"""Is Barack Obama really a shape shifting reptilian humanoid from a far away galaxy bent on the enslavement of the human race? According to David Icke, who claims on his web site that most
world leaders come from a line of reptilians originating in the Alpha Draconis, Barack Obama is most likely a blood drinking shape shifter bent on progressing the New World Order. Icke's reptilian theory makes the claim that reptilians plan to control humanity and other civilizations through fear and negative emotion, a food source for the reptilian...."

Shapeshifters in the house, y'all

Charts-Co

Wrong Numbers/TheEconomist:

""""MEASURING things is hard. Counting mentions of them is easy. Google’s new search tool Ngram Viewer lets users find out how often a word occurs in the millions of books the firm has scanned. It also helps analyse the salience of abstract ideas—corruption, say—in different languages and places (see chart).


Lots of new numbers will be grist to the mills of those who compile international rankings. The hunger for crunchy comparisons of everything from venality to brainpower is huge and growing, not least among media such as this newspaper. It is tempting to try and pin ideas down by turning them into figures. Such measures can be handy. But they have serious flaws.

             ngram for..." copacetic" and "wallabies" 


The quality of economic statistics is often dubious in developing countries, for example. Figures are often only rough estimates and revised often and extensively. Inferences are risky. The latest version of the Penn World Tables, the best source for such numbers, has Equatorial Guinea’s GDP growing by 4% annually between 1975 and 1999. The 2002 version put the rate at minus 2.7%. The country may thus have been sub-Saharan Africa’s slowest-growing economy—or the second-fastest.


At least teachers have drilled generations of economics students in the limitations of GDP data, even if the public and politicians give them undue weight. But experts too can be fooled by “synthetic” indices combining several related measures into a single number which are often used to back broad claims. For instance, an index may rely on data on a few rather narrow items, such as the number of convictions for certain crimes, but claim to measure something broader, such as the quality of a country’s legal system.""""

Al-Speak

"""There is a scream emanating from Arizona that is reaching down the block, across the street, up the boulevard and into virtually every household in America.

We hear it in Granada Hills and Van Nuys as clearly as they hear it at the source - a Tucson plaza where Jared Loughner sprayed 9mm bullets into a crowd, killing six and injuring 13.

It is a scream of outrage, horror and grief that encircles images of the grinning 22-year-old madman who did the shooting, a congresswoman who fights for her life and a little girl who died.

They have become symbols of the moment in America that has inscribed itself into the journals that keep our history, the tale of an aberrant Don Quixote quest to right a wrong that was never wrong in the first place. They, and us, are the victims we scream for. ....""

When he's on (o tal vez sobrio, ese) Martinez out-scrawls a few dozen blogs worth of hacks (and most of the LA Times apparatchiks as well). Shades of Saroyan...

sabado gigante

Freedom/Hendrix

blame Nietzsche?

Loughner/Nietzsche....Feeney/Slate    

""The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men [such as Loughner] is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you'd prefer not to bother with anyway). He's funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.


If you're a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn't you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there's something in every book you're likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy."""


Mo' Nihilistic phunn with the Moustached One to be had here ...

and here...

und hier

Serious weapons

Quigley/Counterpunch

""Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious weapon?

The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a serious weapon - a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own them. The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons in private hands in the US.

The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of crimes. This man had not been found legally mentally defective or convicted so he was legally entitled to purchase an assault weapon. In Arizona he was legally entitled to carry the weapon in a concealed manner.

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Does the US really need tens of millions of assault weapons and hundreds of millions of other guns? We already put more of our people in prison than any country in the world and we spend more on our military than all the rest of the world together. How fearful must we be? ""

the Pale Criminal

your monthly Nietzsche update--

""Ye do not mean to slay, ye judges and sacrificers, until the animal hath bowed its head? Lo! the pale criminal hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt.




"Mine ego is something which is to be surpassed: mine ego is to me the great contempt of man": so speaketh it out of that eye.




When he judged himself--that was his supreme moment; let not the exalted one relapse again into his low estate!


There is no salvation for him who thus suffereth from himself, unless it be speedy death.


Your slaying, ye judges, shall be pity, and not revenge; and in that ye slay, see to it that ye yourselves justify life!


It is not enough that ye should reconcile with him whom ye slay. Let your sorrow be love to the Superman: thus will ye justify your own survival!


"Enemy" shall ye say but not "villain," "invalid" shall ye say but not "wretch," "fool" shall ye say but not "sinner."


And thou, red judge, if thou would say audibly all thou hast done in thought, then would every one cry: "Away with the nastiness and the virulent reptile!"


But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.


An idea made this pale man pale. Adequate was he for his deed when he did it, but the idea of it, he could not endure when it was done...."

Krugman on AZ shooting

ClimateOfHateNYT:

""""It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence."""

Su hasta la muerte

sabado Gigante.....

con los vientos

y musica de Nina RotaAmarcord

viernes con Morricone

...el oro
La mayoria de evangelicos, blancos y monos ingles no compreden la hermosura de.... La   Lucha

your monthly EFF update

""""Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.""  Article 19, UDHR.

Cont. fans might also take note of the various internet-control proposals currently being considered by the Demopublicrats, led by J-Edgar Waxman. With "liberal" snitches such as these in charge of communications policy who needs redneck teabaggers.
EFF.org

that ol' devil Distribution

The Inequality That Matters--
Tyler Cowen:

""The numbers are clear: Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top. The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues, namely income growth at the very top of the distribution and greater inequality throughout the distribution. The first trend is much more pronounced than the second, although the two are often confused.

When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1

These numbers have been challenged on the grounds that, since various tax reforms have kicked in, individuals now receive their incomes in different and harder to measure ways, namely through corporate forms, stock options and fringe benefits. Caution is in order, but the overall trend seems robust. Similar broad patterns are indicated by different sources, such as studies of executive compensation. Anecdotal observation suggests extreme and unprecedented returns earned by investment bankers, fired CEOs, J.K. Rowling and Tiger Woods.

At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973. But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.""

Another chapter from....Life in  Casino America.

Shysterocracy

on The-reign-of-Boehner-begins-today.....

with.........

EzraPoundSpeaking--


(warning: Pound's radio speeches--broadcast in Mussolini's Italy in 30s and 40s-- are not for the timid, tame or overly PC...)

""Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin’ round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin’, 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of ’em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.

ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won’t think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin’. And the shyster is pizin’. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin’ and cheatin’ FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.

That’s what non-shyster Europe is drivin’ at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N.Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of “human material” dumped into the making of the Stalin canal."""

in Xtian chester news....

RIO LINDA--

""First Baptist Church of Rio Linda senior pastor Tom Daniels was arrested December 9th. According to records at the Sacramento County Jail, he is facing one charge of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age, and another charge for engaging in multiple sexual assaults of a child.""

Daniels, it should be recalled, was a vocal supporter of Prop. 8. There appears to an inversely proportional relation with these cases:  the louder a religious moralist rants against same-sex marriages, the more likely it is he'll turn out to be ...a Chester. 

X-ball

"Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and and philosophy were taught.... Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught". Ambrose Bierce , decades before the arrival of..... the Lombardiocracy...

 ===============  ================

G.O.G.I. Day

G.O.

...G.I.:

JB's Gang

~(Ayn)

Rynd  Paul? Paul  Rand?  Rand Ayn [Chait/NewRepub]:   

""""Earlier this year I wrote about Ryan and his deep devotion to the philosophy of Rand, particularly her inverted Marxist economic-political worldview:


Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...

                                        

At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers."""""

Muzack

"a $4 trillion gift..."

Making the Rich Happy  ( Counterpunch/A.C.: )

""Nicely in time for the end-of-year job ratings, President Obama has crawled from the political graveyard, where only a month ago wreaths were being heaped around his sepulcher. The Commentariat now gravely applauds his recent victories in the US Congress: repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell inhibitions on gays in the military; Senate ratification of the new START treaty on nuclear weapons with the Russians; passage of a $4.3bn bill – previously blocked by Republicans - providing health benefits for emergency rescue workers in the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Something missing from my list? You noticed? Yes indeed: first and absolutely foremost, the successful deal with Republicans on taxes, better described as a $4 trillion gift to America’s rich people, by extending the Bush tax cuts. With the all-important tax surrender under their belts the Republicans don’t seem too upset in having allowing Obama’s his mini-swath of victories. There aren’t too many votes in insisting that 1500 nukes aren’t enough for Uncle Sam, particularly since Obama did his usual trick a year ago of surrendering before the battle began, pledging vast new outlays to the nuclear-industrial-complex. Would it have been that smart to deny benefits to 9/11 responders or say that gays in the military have to stay in the closet. Presumably they’ll fight all the more fiercely now they can stand Out and Proud. On things that really matter, once they reassemble after the break, the Republicans will probably stay awake, though with a President who surrenders with the alacrity of Obama, excessive vigilance probably isn’t necessary.

You give $4 trillion to the rich and they express their thanks in measured terms. Their hired opinion formers laud the spirit of admirable compromise enabling responsible members of Congress to come together in bipartisanship to keep the hogwallow open for business."".......

Mormowned

Little Moron?

***** ***** ***** *****
Mark Twain describes his meeting with Mormonic "Destroying Angel":

""Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a Mormon "Destroying Angel." "Destroying Angels," as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are set apart by the church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens. I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one's house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could you respect an Angel with a horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?

There were other blackguards present - comrades of this one. And there was one person that looked like a gentleman - Heber C. Kimball's son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps. A lot of slatternly women flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread, and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of the Angel - or some of them, at least. And of course they were; for if they had been hired "help" they would not have let an angel from above storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one hailed from.

This was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution," and it was not very prepossessing. We did not tarry long to observe it, but hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America - Great Salt Lake City.""

Holy Honey Bees,batman! The Destroying Angels still exist, brethhrrenn: check Googleland for the "Nauvoo Legion" (official name of Utah National Guard).

Merry Carjackmas

Aaron Clay Tanner has some unique if dangerous methods for coping with holiday depression and stress. On Dec 17 around 5 pm, after allegedly stabbing his mother numerous times, Tanner pushed her out of their car on the 14 Freeway at the interchange with the 5 Freeway. Tanner headed north on the 14 and exited at the Newhall Avenue off-ramp, and then immediately after leaving the off-ramp, smashed into another vehicle in the park-and-ride lot. Tanner's car was rendered inoperable, so he promptly carjacks a gal in her PT Cruiser, with her 4-year-old son inside.

A deputy spotted the PT Cruiser about four miles away, where Tanner had rear-ended another vehicle and then backed into a tree, disabling the stolen PT Cruiser. As the deputy approached, Tanner then leaps out of the smashed Cruiser and...circled around and steals the deputy’s patrol car. The deputy immediately alerted other cops and a nearby LASD helicopter.

So now Tanner's in the stolen cop car, driving wildly through Saugus, with deputies in pursuit. Then poor Mr. Tanner makes another mistake: moving at a high rate of speed he headed into a cul-de-sac, where he crashes the cop's car into a 4-foot block wall, breaks through the embankment and...then careens down a hill about 100 feet, rolling the car several times. Finally Tanner reaches the bottom of the hill, where the patrol vehicle bursts into flames. ...But the phunn's not over yet.

The cops run to bust Tanner and... Tanner reaches for a cop shotgun, and they wrestle with Tanner in the cop car, and he bites several cops as they attempt to handcuff him. Eventually they take him out with a Taser, and carry him off to the hospital in critical condition. Regardless, he'll be booked on charges of attempted murder, kidnapping, carjacking, attempted carjacking, auto theft, assault with a deadly weapon, evading arrest, and felony hit-and-run with injuries. And you think you got problems.

musique du jour

sabado Gigante

musick.

Economics of Sociopaths

"""""Brad DeLong asserts that the microfoundations of economics point not to a Hobbesian vision of the war of all against all, but rather to Adam Smith's propensities for peaceful cooperation, especially through exchange. "The foundation of microeconomics is not the Hobbesian 'this is good for me' but rather the Smithian 'this trade is good for us,' and on the uses and abuses of markets built on top of the 'this trade is good for us' principle." Bertram objects that this isn't true, and others in DeLong's comments section further object that modern economics simply does not rest on this Smithian vision. DeLong replies: "Seems to me the normal education of an economist includes an awful lot about ultimatum games and rule of law these days..."

I have to call this one against DeLong — rather to my surprise, since I usually get more out of his writing than Bertram's. The fact is that the foundations of standard microeconomic models envisage people as hedonistic sociopaths [ETA: see below], and theorists prevent mayhem from breaking out in their models by the simple expedient of ignoring the possibility. """

Noël*

Antidote for Lieberdems--
Remembering-

Celine:::

....   .........

"""""You don't do anything for free. You've got to pay. A story you make up, that isn't worth anything. The only story that counts is the one you pay for. When it's paid for, then you've got the right to transform it. Otherwise it's lousy. Me, I work . . . I have a contract, it's got to be filled. Only I'm sixty-six years old today, I'm seventy-five percent mutilated. At my age most men have retired. I owe six million to Gallimard . . . so I'm obliged to keep on going . . . I already have another novel in the works: always the same stuff . . . It's chicken feed. I know a few novels. But novels are a little like lace . . . an art that disappeared with the convents. Novels can't fight cars, movies, television, booze. A guy who's eaten well, who's escaped the big war, in the evenings gives a peck to the old lady and his day's finished. Done with."""""

"Noël" ---


late 14c., from M.E. nowel, from O.Fr. noel "the Christmas season," variant of nael, from L. natalis (dies) "birth (day)," in Eccles. L. in reference to the birthday of Christ, from natus, pp. of nasci "be born" (Old L. gnasci; see genus).    ...also   sp. nacimiento,  Navidad...from latin nasci,   gnasci "to be born,"

genus


(pl. genera), 1550s as a term of logic, "kind or class of things" (biological sense dates from c.1600), from L. genus (gen. generis) "race, stock, kind; family, birth, descent, origin," cognate with Gk. genos "race, kind," and gonos "birth, offspring, stock," from PIE base *gen-/*gon-/*gn- "produce, beget, be born" (cf. Skt. janati "begets, bears," janah "race," jatah "born;" Avestan zizanenti "they bear;" Gk. gignesthai "to become, happen;" L. gignere "to beget," gnasci "to be born," genius "procreative divinity, inborn tutelary spirit, innate quality," ingenium "inborn character," germen "shoot, bud, embryo, germ;" Lith. gentis "kinsmen;" Goth. kuni "race;" O.E. cennan "beget, create;" O.H.G. kind "child;" O.Ir. ro-genar "I was born;" Welsh geni "to be born;" Armenian chanim "I bear, I am born").

Not a speck of semitic in it.

Ahhnuld looks back

LA Times/Schwarzenegger

AS: "People are very receptive when I talk about these things because I’m a Hummer driver … not a tree hugger."

SchwarziSpeak: ~(Reason), 24-7.   

 

Ἀποκάλυψις

from THE FACE OF THE DEEP/Christine Rossetti Miss Rossetti's commentary on ...the Book of Revelation:

"""""4. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet
colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication :

5. And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.

The beast is scarlet, and the woman wears scarlet. He is full of names of blasphemy, and her names are of the same sort. He is scarlet as sin. She is both scarlet and particoloured, decked with such gauds as St. Paul warns us women against. As it seemed possible to study the sun-clothed exalted Woman (ch. xii.) as a figure of the all-glorious destiny awaiting the Virtuous Woman, so now I think this obscene woman may (on the surface) be studied as illustrating the particular foulness, degradation, loathsomeness, to which a perverse rebellious
woman because feminine not masculine is liable.

Holbrooke, unplugged

JoshFrank/Counterpunch

""""The disturbing symbiosis between Holbrooke and figures like überhawk Paul Wolfowitz is startling.

"In an unguarded moment just before the 2000 election, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington," reported Tim Shorrock following the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Shorrock continued: "Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was acutely aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in the next administration. Looking perhaps to assure the world of the continuity of U.S. foreign policy, he told his audience that Wolfowitz's 'recent activities illustrate something that's very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.' The example he chose to illustrate his point was East Timor, which was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with U.S. weapons – a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. 'Paul and I,' he said, 'have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.'"

Holbrooke worked vigorously to keep his bloody campaign silent, and it appears to have paid off. In chilling words, Holbrooke described the motivations behind his support of Indonesia's genocidal actions:

"The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer – which plays a moderate role within OPEC – and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. … We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia."

Richard Holbrooke may have died, but the influence he had on U.S. foreign policy continues to kill.""""

Sabado Gigante

Igor'sBoogie/FZ/MoI


Contingencies fans probably have heard of  the death of Beefheart.   Ave atque vale. Google "Don Van Vliet selling vacuum cleaners to Aldous Huxley" for mo,'  or not. Or peruse the Up Sifter   and Lester Bangs' trenchant rock scrawlings.

Ice Rose


official Cont. role model Lester Bangs on Beefheart:

Intolerance: a plea

Zizek:

""""The key moment of any theoretical (and ethical, and political, and - as Badiou demonstrated - even aesthetic) struggle is the rise of universality out of the particular life-world. The commonplace according to which we are all irreducibly grounded in a particular (contingent) life-world, so that all universality is irreducibly colored by (embedded in) a particular life-world, should be turned around: the authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes "for-itself," directly experienced as such (as universal). This universality-for-itself is not simply external to (or above) the particular context: it is inscribed into it, it perturbs and affects it from within, so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and its universal aspect. Did already Marx not point out how the true problem with Homer is not to explain the roots of his epics in the early Greek society, but to account for the fact that, although clearly rooted in their historical context, they were able to transcend their historical origin and speak to all epochs. Perhaps, the most elementary hermeneutic test of the greatness of a work of art is its ability to survive being torn out of its original context: in the case of a truly great work of art, each epoch reinvents/rediscovers its own figure of this work, like there is a romantic Shakespeare, a realist Shakespeare, etc. Take Wagner's Parsifal: a lot of historicist work was done recently trying to bring out the contextual "true meaning" of the Wagnerian figures and topics: the pale Hagen is really a masturbating Jew; Amfortas' wound is really syphillis... The idea is that Wagner is mobilizing historical codes known to everyone in his epoch: when a person stumbles, sings in cracking high tones, makes nervous gestures, etc., "everyone knew" this is a Jew, so Mime from Siegfried is a caricature of a Jew; the fear of syphillis as the illness in the groin one gets from having intercourse with an "impure" woman was an obsession in the second half of the 19th century, so it was "clear to everyone" that Amfortas really contracted syphillis from Kundry... """

Mitt, taxes and the Adversary

Mitt Rumney

""Death and taxes and the Divine Right of Kings, it is said, my friends, are life's only three certainties. But in the wake of President Obama's tax compromise with congressional Republicans, only death and the Divine Right retain the status of certainty: the future for taxation has been left up in the air. And Mr. Uncertainty is not a friend of investment, prosperity, or Kings and their subjects.

The deal has several key features. It reduces payroll taxes and extends unemployment benefits for the little people, and keeps the tax rates of brother Bush intact. So far, so good. But intermixed with the benefits are considerable costs of not inconsiderable consequence. Given the unambiguous message that the Elect sent to Washington in November, it is difficult to understand how our political leaders could have stooped to such a disappointing agreement. The new, more conservative, Nephite and christian Congress should reach a better and more pious solution.

The deal keeps current tax rates from rising to pre-Bush era levels for two years. But in 2013, unless Congress acts again, rates will increase dramatically, nearly equalling Clinton socialist-era levels--which is to say, Statist-Adversary levels.   Lest we forget friends, the government bureaucrats--the modern Statist-Adversaries--are nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the little people, which is to say--Lamanites."