sabadoGigante

"The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."

Miguel de Unamuno

comrade Benedict

Pope/contra-capitalism

""Benedict notes that economic "inequalities are on the increase" across the globe. He does not accept the trickle-down theory, which says that all boats will rise with the economic tide. Benedict condemns the "scandal of glaring inequalities" and sees a role for government in the redistribution of wealth.


Yes, you heard that right. The pope favors the redistribution of wealth. When was the last time you heard a liberal Democrat use those words?


The pope also disagrees with those who believe that the economy should be free of government regulation. An unregulated economy "shielded from 'influences' of a moral character has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way," he writes. This has "led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise."


Critics have complained that the Occupy Wall Street movement has no program. The people in the movement could do a lot worse than to study what the pope has said about the economy. Sadly, few Catholics know of the church's teaching on economic justice, which has been called the church's best-kept secret.


The pope does not have a magic plan to restore economic prosperity, but he does focus on the values that a political and economic system must support. The priority, he says, must be "access to steady employment for everyone." And that means not just here in the United States, but also in the developing world, where we must rescue "peoples, first and foremost, from hunger, deprivation, endemic diseases and illiteracy."""

job killah, cont.

Romney/YahooNews:

""... A venture capital firm run by Mitt Romney created nearly 150 jobs in Gaffney, S.C., in the late 1980s only to eliminate them four years later and earn millions of dollars in profits.

The Associated Press reviewed Bain Capital's little-known investments at The Holson Burnes Group. Bain doubled its $10 million investment into the clock and photo supply company. But workers in South Carolina and New Hampshire lost their jobs as the company consolidated and expanded its operations overseas.

By sheer coincidence, the economic fallout from Bain's decisions struck hardest in South Carolina and New Hampshire. They are among the first states with early primary elections that could affect Romney's run for the White House..""

sabadoGigante

Hitchens-Eulogies, Inc:  (Cockburn/Counterpunch):

"""Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away  about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient  Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’  books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?
Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity."""

Hitchens' vituperative essay on Mother Theresa was beyond what any of the decent Fabians would have scrawled. And while he was an amusing sort of Hume-lite at times, he ...rode with the pigs, from 2002 on.    Bienvenidos a Perdido, CH

bellum letale

"Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it."

Pope John Paul II

IraqNumbers/HuffPo

......""The American withdrawal was part of a 2008 deal negotiated between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, and an important campaign pledge for Obama. Yet the administration has long engaged in negotiations to keep a larger number of troops, despite the 2008 deal. Those negotiations failed as Iraqi lawmakers refused to grant the troops immunity.

What do 9 years of war in Iraq look like in figures? According to Associated Press numbers, 4,485 Americans have died as of November 30. 40,350 Americans were wounded, and at least 103,775 Iraqis have lost their lives. ""

Many would object to that estimated  body count of Iraqi civilians and military.

city of angels

 Ry Cooder/LA Stories

""I work for the Los Angeles City Directory, a book of names, addresses, and job descriptions. I am one of many. Our job is to go out and collect the facts and bring them back. Other people take our work and put it in the Book, but we do the important part. Los Angeles is a big city, and the City Directory is a big book.

"How would you like to be listed in the Directory?" I show people what it is. They're afraid you'll ask embarrassing questions like "Do you have a toilet?" and "Can I see it?" I tell them they can list whatever they want — the job, the husband's name, the wife's name — simple things that most people don't mind. Most people like to be noticed, they like being asked......"""

young old Ry and his pal Don VV.

 ++++++++++

Tangentially related:  high desert hipster Brian Goldie's gal:Dottie the hottie

Kirby/Zappa

critical Z-dan update/LA Times:

"...Yes it turns out that late Frank Zappa, the restless musical genius who may have been the most committed inconoclast in the history of rock, was a pal to the late Jack Kirby, the cosmic dreamer who is arguably the second most essential figure in the history of the American comic book. (You have to put Superman at first.)

I remember seeing a vintage 1968 issue of “Fantastic Four” that had an ad for “We’re Only in It for the Money,” the new album from the Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and it surprised me because it seemed like an unexpected crossover moment between counter-culture music and the Marvel universe. Both were popular on college campuses, of course, but seeing the gaudy little blurb (“Thrilling clean fun!” it promised) still made me smile and think about the sweet confusion of a young first-time Zappa listener trying to get his head around the album. If you don’t know it, it’s a masterpiece of cultural satire and heady music with Zappa’s smirking wit at every corner — the titles include, “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body,” “Hot Poop,” “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” and the mad-laughter finale “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny.” ..."

Relatedly:  Moebius!

warning...may be offensive to any/all descendants of the ancient psychotic Ibrahim )

Grosz-day

“To preach more than half an hour, a man should be an angel himself or have angels for hearers” (Whitefield)


Halle-f-in' loo-jah

party of the 1%

Dickinson/RollingStone:

""The Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points......""

As Dickinson suggests, historical fact rarely if ever interferes with teabug hype:  e.g,: Bush &  Co slashed the capital gains rate to 15%, significantly lower  than Reagan's  lowest cap. gains  rate of 20% (until '87 when it was increased to 28% or so), a point routinely overlooked by white-trash conservatives Ma and Pa Methcook when they got their anti-tax  hysteria and pro-NRA binge on..

Relatedly:  the Gerald Vick  Memorial Blog Link.

Net freedom

RebeccaMackinnon/HuffPo

"""In the past five months since I called on the world's Internet users to "take back the Net" at TedGlobal in Edinburgh, the issues I highlighted have grown more obvious and urgent. In October, the world mourned the death of Steve Jobs. Netizens in China, Cuba, and Iran made comments to the effect that they respected Jobs more than they respected their own leaders. This speaks to a phenomenon I highlighted in my talk: that global information technology companies have become what I call the new "sovereigns of cyberspace." New kinds of global constituencies are forming around certain brands of hardware, software, and virtual platforms created by multinational companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter. Members of these global constituencies can hold strong and even emotionally-charged loyalties towards technologies that they have integrated into their lives and even identities. These overlapping loyalties and constituencies will increasingly compete and clash with loyalties and identities tied to the physical nation-state.
No government -- not even Western ones claiming to champion Internet freedom -- is equipped to deal with the long-term consequences of this trend. But that doesn't mean that we should leave it to the world's multi-national technology companies to program and engineer the Internet in ways that best suit their commercial interests, or refashion global geopolitics to their own liking, just because so many governments are not getting it right. We the world's netizens must work to make sure that the Internet, the geopolitical system, and the international economy evolve in a way that serves everybody's rights and interests, not just those of the most powerful one percent.
The trends over the past five months have not been good. The sale and use of Western surveillance technology is rampant around the Middle East and North Africa and is aiding repressive governments. The social networking and mobile tools that helped fuel the Arab Spring have not enabled activists to stop a new round of state violence and repression in Egypt. Chinese Internet companies are bowing to government demands to ramp up censorship and surveillance of users. In Russia, digital repression is on the rise in the run-up to parliamentary and presidential elections.

the Moustach'd one (cont.)

 the  Nation--

"American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s lively history of the reception of Nietzsche’s ideas in the United States, from which I have drawn the preceding quotation about the moral life, wisely devotes its prologue to Emerson’s impact on the philosopher: “Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself. For Nietzsche, Emerson provided an image of the philosopher willing to go it alone without inherited faith, without institutional affiliation, without rock or refuge for his truth claims.” These themes, encompassing Nietzsche’s persona and ideas, figure prominently in American Nietzsche. The facts of the philosopher’s lonely nomadic life—his books largely ignored upon publication, his genius burdened by ceaseless physical pain and eventually insanity—were, for most readers, inseparable from the scandalous self-described “immoralist” with his emphatically modern “philosophy of the future,” as he called his thinking. And this fusion of life and work made him, especially in the eyes of Greenwich Village radicals in the twentieth century’s opening decades, a prophet and martyr embodying what Ratner-Rosenhagen calls a “cautionary tale about the perilous course of the intellectual in the democratic era.”

FZ

Frank Zappa, December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993.

Trey A. of Phish on FZ:

""...I'm making a new album, and the producer I'm working with told me that there is a whole generation of musicians coming up who can't play their instruments. Because of stuff like Pro Tools, they figure they can fix it all in the studio. Whereas with Frank, his musicians were pushed to the absolute brink of possibility on their instruments, at all times. Phish tried hard to do that too: to take our four little instruments and do as much as we could with them. I would not have envisioned those possibilities without him....
Zappa gave me the faith that anything in music was possible. He demystified the whole thing for musicians in my generation: "Look, these are just instruments. Find out what the range is, and start writing."""

Got that disco-emo boyz

mo' Zappa product:
I


II


III

sabadoGigante

Diwali-mas



gimme dat ol' time religion

"The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge." — Laplace

Mormon frauds, cont.

Daily Herald (Provo, UT):

""An 80-year-old man thought his life savings was being invested by his one-time LDS bishop, Kevin Palmer Thomas. But by the time the elderly man stopped turning over his money he had lost more than $300,000, a police affidavit states.


The affidavit alleges that Thomas, 51, used his leadership position in and knowledge of the LDS Church to earn the man's friendship. The man reportedly had saved more than $400,000 throughout the course of his life, and when he turned it over to Thomas, he believed it was secured with property and promissory notes. Thomas made token payments to the man in order to convince him that he was making a great return on his investment, the affidavit reveals. But then the payments reportedly stopped, and the man learned of his losses.


The affidavit also states that Thomas bilked the man out of an additional $15,000 when he convinced him to invest in a "hard money loan." Thomas reportedly spent the money on himself. In addition, Thomas is accused of forging checks worth more than $40,000.


As a result of the allegations, Thomas was arrested earlier this month on charges of communication fraud and exploitation of a vulnerable adult, both second-degree felonies, as well as forgery, a third-degree felony. The affidavit also describes him as a convicted felon who is currently awaiting sentencing on a different case. Court records reveal that in March Thomas pleaded guilty to theft and burglary of a vehicle. His sentencing had been scheduled for Nov. 9.


The affidavit states that Thomas could face more charges when prosecutors formally file the case and that he is a suspect in at least two other felony crimes.


The affidavit also notes that Thomas had been a successful mortgage broker for many years and that his criminal activity happened after the economic downturn in 2007 and 2008. Thomas's position in the LDS church is mentioned several times in the affidavit as well.""

Romneyocracy = one big Provo-ville.


More on LDS bunko:
I


II


III

Energy-ball

LA Times:

""When the oil price shocks hit the United States in the 1970s, many Democratic stalwarts supported the Nixon and Ford administrations in their attempts to enact comprehensive energy policies. They understood that energy is not a partisan issue but rather one that draws people together to ensure the future health and security of the nation. Democratic senators, congressmen, governors and President Carter supported myriad energy technologies, policies and projects, including nuclear power, conservation, renewable energy development, the Trans-Alaska pipeline and the lifting of oil and natural gas price controls.


While other Democratic voices sometimes argued that energy policy leaned too heavily toward conventional fuels and not enough toward conservation, fuel economy or efficiency standards, few party leaders opposed specific forms of energy or played to the galleries of anti-industry activists....""

....
To Frack or not to Frack.

~(foo-ball)

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
Hawthorne.

++++++++
(relatedly: Super-scribe Brian Goldie and his favorite Tommy Trojan)

"the roads to war..."

PC Roberts/Counterpunch

""In the November 22 presidential “debate,” the candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, revealed themselves as a collection of ignorant warmongers who support the police state. Gingrich and Cain said that Muslims “want to kill us all” and that “all of us will be in danger for the rest of out lives.”

Bachmann said that the American puppet state, Pakistan, is “more than an existential threat.” The moron Bachmann has no idea what is “more than an existential threat.”


However, it sounded heavy, like an intellectual thing to say for the candidate who previously declared the long-defunct Soviet Union to be today’s threat to the US.


Any sentient American who watched or read about the Republican presidential debate must wonder what there is to be thankful for as the national holiday approaches."""

  Miss Krenwinkle Miss Bachmann called Pakistan "more than an existential threat". The dizziness of freedom, man.

+++++++++++++++++

T-day

"Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for -- annually, not oftener -- if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments."


- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (U of C Press, 2010).
 

Mewt vs Nitt

Gingrich vs Romney

""NASHUA, N.H.—If Mitt Romney is weak broth, Newt Gingrich is a bouillon cube. Watching the two Republican presidential front-runners in New Hampshire over two days has been a study in contrasts. Romney is a known conservative ingredient suitable in a main dish. Gingrich is a powerful dose of partisan flavor to be used sparingly.


Gingrich is having his moment now because he offers punchy answers and ready solutions to seemingly insoluble problems. If he endures an examination of his personal baggage, his record on the issues, and his private-sector career, it will be in part because he is the “Republican Ideas Man.” But when you listen to those ideas—the scope of the change he is proposing, and the punch with which he delivers his pitch—you get the sense that that voters may not be interested in the Gingrich past because they’re too scared of the Gingrich future.


As Romney finished a four-day campaign swing through the state where he has dominated the polls, he touted his recent spending reduction plan and offered his carefully honed lines. President Obama “said if he was unable to get this economy turned around, he would be looking at a one-term proposition,” Romney said. “Well, I’m here to collect.”""

Many Mericans might consider a papist (Gingrich converted to the church of Aphrodite catholic church a few years ago) and a Mormonic to be completely at odds yet MR and NG have one thing in common: they're both members of  the Chickenhawk Hall of Shame.

+++++++++++

Speaking of Mormonics:  it's Dennis Dunderson, LDS-Log Cabin guy and the P-dale press club

OWS, etc.

Counterpunch/AC

""So chapter one of the Occupy movement draws to a close, and maybe the concerted onslaught by uniformed goons actually did the movement a favor – scant comfort to those battered to the ground – by leaving the Occupiers with a positive bank balance in ·terms of imagery at the moment of their enforced departures. Besides, this will allow trained teams of OWSers to hunt down all members of those drumming circles and dispose of them by any means necessary. This is not protected speech.""