The results of a new parenting study are reporting that, “If American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go f%$#ing ape sh%$.
Word.
Click on the link, and read the rest.
Category: Good Writing
If I Were Glenn Greenwald, I’d Watch My Back Around Pierre Omidyar
A while back Mark Ames wrote of the ties between the founder of First Media, who now employs Glenn Greenwald, and the CIA and State Department’s clandestine activities to destabilize the Ukraine.
Now, Paul Carr follows up with an analysis of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar’s pattern of regular visits to the Obama White House:
Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different…
I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?”
Scahill’s question is a good one — and it’s also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar.
After all, according to records made available under Obama’s 2009 transparency commitment, Omidyar has visited the Obama White House at least half a dozen times since 2009. During the same period, his wife, Pamela Omidyar, who heads Omidyar Network, has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at least four times, while Omidyar Network’s managing partner, Matthew Bannick, has visited a further three. In all, senior Omidyar Network officials made at least 13 visits to the White House between 2009-2013. (In fact the logs indicate that, on several occasions, Omidyar visited the White House more than once in the same day. To avoid unfairly inflating the numbers, I’ve removed same-day duplicates from all the totals cited in this article.)
To put the numbers in perspective, Omidyar’s six visits compare to four visits during the same period by NBCUniversal chief Stephen Burke, two by Fox News boss Roger Ailes, two by MSNBC’s Phil Griffin, one by New York Times owner Arthur O Sulzberger, and one each by Dow Jones’ Robert Thompson, Gannett/USA Today’s Gracia Martore and Omidyar’s fellow tech billionaire turned media owner, Jeff Bezos.
In fact Pando could only find three media titans who had earned more White House visitor loyalty points than Omidyar: CNN’s Jeffrey Zucker (7), former Post owner Donald Graham (9) and queen of all media, Arianna Huffington (11). According to records, neither The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown or Barry Diller were invited at all — nor, by the way, was Rupert Murdoch.
Even compared to other major tech leaders, Omidyar is a special case. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman visited the White House twice during the same period, as did Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Omidyar also beat out Marissa Mayer (5), Eric Schmidt (5), John Doerr (4), Dick Costolo (3), Evan Williams (3), Jack Dorsey (2), Larry Ellison (1) and poor old Reed Hastings who wasn’t invited at all, until this week. According to records, other people not important enough to make it through the door include Pando investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
………
Serbia, Georgia and Burma are, of course, all places where USAID-backed pro-US color revolutions were successful. And now we have Omidyar Network investing in USAID’s newest overseas programs, “advancing U.S. national security interests” in USAID’s words.
Carr reveals Omidyar’s extensive and ongoing ties to the US state security apparatus’ involvement in the intelligence operations, Scahill says that Omidyar is aggressively involved with the day to day operations of First Media‘s magazine, The Intercept, “Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else.”
This is not proof that Omidyar is somehow in cahoots with the CIA or the Obama administration, but it does mean that neither Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, nor Matt Taibbi should trust him any further than they could throw him.
As James Reisen of the New York Times observed, the Obama administration, is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have Encountered In At Least a Generation.”
That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)
Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles:
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. [As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.
Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.
Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.
Krugman makes a point that needs to be made. Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.
So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, “mindful human beings,” to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.
And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net:
In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.
A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”
And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.
There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.
But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.
………
On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.
“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.
Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.
Ouch.
The Cowardice and Hypocrisy of Some Haredim in One Sentence
That sentence was, 50 Thousand Haredim March So Only Other Jews Die in War.
It was written by Yori Yanover who used to work for the Jewish Press, a New York based publication that caters to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) community.
They canned him, and deleted the page, though it is still available in the Google cache.
This is similar to what goes on with the dole money allotted to Haredim so that they don’t have to work.
They are using Torah to derive personal benefit, and this is forbidden in normative Judaism, as it is said in Pirkei Avot 4:6, “Do not make the Torah into a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, and don’t use it as a spade with which to dig into them.”
Basically it means two things:
- The study of Torah is not about self-aggrandizement or puffing up one’s own ego.
- The study of Torah is not about deriving personal financial benefit. (Which also implies that draft dodging is out as well)
Those Haredim who are protesting are batting 0 for 2 on this.
H/t Mitch Gilbert (the first link) who has republished the article.
You can also find a copy at Failed Messiah.
H/t to my brother, aka “The Bear Who Swims,” for cluing me into this story.
This Takedown is Worthy of Matt Taibbi
On The Baffler Alex Pareene systematically demolishes New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin’s dealings, and double dealings with, the finance industry:
The New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.
How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative—and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCormicks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.
Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.
………
In 2010, DealBook expanded again, adding staff (including some well-respected reporters from competing papers), videos, and a page in the paper four days a week. A Times press release captured the excitement, and the intended audience, of the venture:DealBook caters to a high-level audience of C-Suite executives and decision-makers and will continue its focus on key beats—M&A, private equity, hedge funds, regulation, law—delivering more scoops, insights and breaking news throughout the day and across platforms.
The use of the common PR term “caters to” in the context of an ostensibly journalistic venture was apt. The release went on to thank the people who made the expansion possible:
Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s and Tata Consultancy Services are charter advertisers for the relaunch of DealBook.
So Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance.
And then there is this delicious bit:
One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.
This is really a thing of beauty.
Read the whole thing.
I am adding Alex Pareene to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”
Well, I Guess That It’s Better than Being Hit By a Bus (Or Not)
Charlie Pierce listened to Sarah Palin’s closing speech at CPAC:
By now, and by god, it should have settled permanently in the consciousness of the nation what a huge and untoward gamble with the country John McCain and his campaign took in 2008 when they elevated Sarah Palin from her rightful place on the tundra to the political celebrity she currently enjoys. McCain should pay a heavy price for unleashing this ignorant, two-wheeled bilewagon on the country’s politics. If you think she’s a legitimate political leader, you’re an idiot and a sucker and I feel sorry for you.
Yesterday she gave a wildly received speech to ring down the curtain at CPAC. The applause, as far as I know, may still be going on. It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere.
………
A friend bailed on the speech, making the very plausible case that Palin is simply another political celebrity freakshow, like Donald Trump. I can see the point there but, with Palin, and watching the hysterical reception her puerile screed received, there is something more serious going on. She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense. She respects no standards but her own. She is in perpetual tantrum, railing against her betters, which is practically everyone, and volunteering for the job of avatar to the country’s reckless vandal of a political Id. It was the address of a malignant child delivered to an audience of malignant children. If you applauded, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.
Actually, no.
Last year, my car got totaled by a tour bus while CPAC was going on, and it’s clear that Mr. Pierce had a WAY worse time this year at CPAC than I did last year getting hit by a bus.
Sarah Palin riffed on Green Eggs and Ham.
Read the whole thing, and shudder.
The Intercept, Pierre Omidyar, and His Connections to CIA Operations in the Ukraine
There has a bit of a pissing contest between Mark Ames and Glenn Greenwald over the connections between the First Media news organization, and its subsidiary The Intercept magazine which employs Greenwald.
Part of this is that Greenwald and Ames have been involved in a long running pissing contest, which explains why Ames original article mentioned Greenwald prominently, even though his remit is surveillance, and not covert organic operations or the destabilization of disfavored governments by our state security apparatus.
Still, it raises some very valid points, and Greenwald’s response addressed none of the underlying facts.
It’s basically, Greenwald telling Ames that he’s ugly and that his mom dresses him funny, and that the publisher doesn’t matter.
This is not true generally, nor which is not true in this case, as Omidyar has a long history of intimate involvement with his media ventures, with The Intercept writer Jeremy Scahill saying that he is intimately involved with their messaging:
Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. This guy has a vision.
With those two remarks, Scahill obliterates Greenwald’s claims of independence from his boss, publisher and sole quarter-of-a-billion-dollar backer.
There is no universe, current or imagined, in which Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen or any other venture capitalist would be allowed within a billion miles of Pando’s internal messaging system. And there is no planet within that universe on which Thiel, Andreessen or any of our dozen or so venture backers would be given any privileged line to our reporters (if they have something to say they can send us a letter to the editor, like everyone else). I would hope all of the other “billionaire-backed” media organizations Greenwald cites in his post would say the same.
(emphasis original)
So this is not one of the Glennster’s greatest moments.
Of more significance is the fact that Marcy Wheeler (aka Emptywheel) who is covering the developments in the Ukraine for The Intercept, asked sometime before this article came out about information on intelligence ops masquerading as “civil society. Quoting from Ames’ article:
Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:
“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”
These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.
And now Wheeler is saying that there is no “there” there. This is the bit I find most interesting:
B) The Kyiv Post reported that in 2012 (the year after New Citizen received this grant, and therefore presumably the year it got spent), Omidyar Network funded 36% of New Citizen’s budget, Pact, a non-profit funded in part by USAID funded 54% of it, and other funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy.
USAID is, of course, a US Government agency, and while it is nominally independent, it is largely directed by the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy, thought technically a non governmental not-for-profit is funded entirely by a line item in the budget of ……… wait for it ……… USAID.
Or as the best-named-blog ever, Cats not War, observes:
Now, I say Wheeler knows more than she lets on because she apparently understands enough to link to the excellent Moon of Alabama blog, dedicated to chronicling the less visible manifestations of imperial power, when comparing the Ukrainian and Syrian cases. And be reminded that Ames dug this information up about Omidyar at Wheeler’s curiosity–viewing the Ukrainian fray, she clearly knew dirty tricks by their effects and felt compelled to ask about them in public. When Ames revealed that one such meddler was her boss, she employed a new skepticism about the existence of imperial meddling in Ukraine, writing, ‘I don’t see any evidence that [Omidyar’s] donations were explicitly intended to pay for regime change… unless you presume transparency and better governance equates to regime change.’ Soon down the text, Wheeler belittles Ames’ suggestions about Omidyar’s business operations by cueing ‘Hollywood villain music’ and asking what is wrong about Pact, Omidyar-funded NGO, promoting ‘women in leadership,’ a goal Pact offers up on its about page (clearly the only place to go when seeking to understand an institution’s true workings). The insinuation of conspiracism mimics Greenwald’s own, when he reduces Ames charges to the ‘laughable hyperbole that Omidyar is now the mastermind who has secretly engineered the Ukrainian uprising.’ To Greenwald I’d like to ask, But what if, like, the suggestion is not that Omidyar did anything alone, but that he belongs to a larger oligarchical-state network whose global investments make up that thing called imperialism? And to Wheeler I’d like to ask, But what if, like, an NGO doesn’t outright come out with goals of regime change because they are manifestations of soft imperialism, crucial supplements to the harder stuff that use a language of liberal abstractions to work towards goals more nefarious?
Which brings us to my explanation of imperialism. There are two primary parts of which to keep track. The first is its role in capitalism–an odd concept to propose because imperialism is capitalism insofar as capitalism could not persist without it. Here, we are talking about capital and, more specifically, finance. The second is its expansion, which happens through hard imperialism (military operations of varying types–bombings, drones, invasions, covert ops, and so on) and soft imperialism (NGOs and PsyOps), because sometimes the mid-sized and small states fail to cooperate. When describing these activities, I will move from country to country with examples, fully aware that imperial tactics are employed differently in accordance with the needs of given contexts, but hoping still to establish that imperialism has a reliable repertoire, that it is global in scale, and that there can be no doubt about its purpose where it is to be found.
Read the entire Cats, Not War post. I cannot do if full justice.
Gee, You Think?
In the Armed Forced Journal, Army lieutenant colonel Daniel L. Davis calls for the forced retirement of most of the US general officer corps:
The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.
………
Events have granted us a short window of time in which we might address the problem. America is drawing down after two intense wars, while the potential threats of the future are not quite upon us. Seven decades ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall surveyed an officer corps similarly ill-suited for the tasks to come. He forced into retirement scores of generals, clearing the way for the ones who would help win World War II.
Today’s times, like Marshall’s, call for a reformation of the general officer corps.
………
After each of these failures, one might expect the Army and program leaders to have suffered censure. Instead, the opposite seems generally to have been the case. The leaders of failed programs and other efforts received prestigious medals, promotion to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort.
………
Shrink the general officer corps. In 1945, about 2,000 general and flag officers led a total of about 12 million citizens in uniform. Today, we have about 900 generals and admirals and 1.4 million troops, and the ratio of leader-to-led has accelerated upward in the two decades since the end of the Cold War. In an age of unprecedented communications technology and with the education and training opportunities for today’s soldiers, this is indefensible. Many general officer billets are redundant and should be eliminated; others can effectively be filled by colonels or even lieutenant colonels.
I highly remommend this as a read, though I would argue that the “Up or Out” officer promotion and retention policies have also contributed to these problems.
It makes the consequences to challenging the Pentagon’s group think to be the end of a career.
I Called for Amputating the Financial Sector Years Ago
See here.
JD Alt at New Economic Perspectives has just called for the same thing:
All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%. Write them off. Let them have their gated communities, their mega-yachts, their island retreats and off-shore bank accounts. What do we need them for?
For one thing, we DON’T need their money. Even if we could get it—which we can’t because they steadfastly refuse to use it for anything other than casino gambling in their private and secretive financial networks. We wonder why we have a “jobless recovery”? Does it have anything to do with the fact that such a large percentage of our “capital” has, for all practical purposes, been removed from the economy?
Even when the 1% decides to invest some of their Dollars to manufacture or build something, they rarely decide to manufacture or build anything we really need—only things we really don’t need. Like strip-mines in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, or pipe-lines across Nebraska’s freshwater aquifers, or rocket-planes for space-tourism. Thanks, but we really don’t need—or want—any of it. We’d much rather have fresh wild salmon (rather than the artificially colored hatchery-stuff) than more copper and gold, fresh water instead of tar-sands oil, and the good-old week-at-the-beach is just fine for a vacation.
He then gives the example of the huge transformers that are essential to our electrical grid.
We do not, and can not, make them in the United States, because the casino finance class doesn’t care, because they can always get them from Korea, with a a 2 year lead time.
If that’s a problem, they can always move to their summer house on a Greek island.
Here is how he poresents it going:
This little tale is made even more interesting by the fact that these very-large transformers—usually situated inside a compound protected by chain-link fencing—are easily destroyed with a few rounds of fire from a semi-automatic assault rifle. Thankfully, semi-automatic assault rifles are difficult to come by in the U.S., otherwise there might be cause for concern. The seventeen transformers recently shot to death in California (we can’t explain how this actually happened, since the NRA is only marginally active on the West Coast) are a cautionary tale: If this were repeated on just a little bit larger scale, the Department of Homeland Security has determined, our entire electric grid could be down for months—or even longer. (Come on South Korea, hurry it up…. We’re waiting!)
So my example is this: Why doesn’t President Obama propose that since the 1% have no interest in doing it, the U.S. sovereign government build a plant to manufacture very-large transformers, hire engineers to train unemployed people to do the labor, pay those unemployed trainees for making the effort to learn how to make a giant-sized transformer, then hire those newly trained workers to run the manufacturing process? We could build a backup supply of these critical electric grid components so that in the (increasingly likely) event some crazy, anti-government sociopath seizes the opportunity to turn out America’s lights, we could turn them back on in fairly short order.
It’s an interesting mental exercise, and I am not sure how serious this proposal is,it has a Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal snarky feel to it.
Still, breaking the lock of the “Washington Consensus” of so-called free trade and the continuing financialization of our economy is a non trivial task.
That’s why my calls for amputation involve a zero tolerance criminal prosecution policy.
I am So Stealing This for My Blog
Surfing the net, I came across that a bon mot that former Nixon strategist turned not-Republican Kevin Phillips created for John Kerry following his disastrous run for President in 2004, “a Haircut in search of a brain.”
I love it!
I am using it!
Quote of the Day
The Shrill One speaks:
To the extent that people have negative feelings about the one percent, the emotion involved isn’t envy — it’s anger, which isn’t at all the same thing. Envy is when you have negative feelings about rich because of what they have; anger is when you have negative feelings about the rich because of what they do.
I differ slightly, I don’t think that this is just anger, I think that it is well justified outrage.
Quote of the Day on the Ukraine
Courtesy of Ian Welsh:
I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions. Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action. You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame. (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this. But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)
He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine’s government has been 5 billion dollars.
By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California’s population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.
So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.
And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.
And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.
Tweet of the Millennium So Far………
Say what you will about George W Bush, but he wouldn’t have stood for Russian aggression in Ukraine. He’d have invaded New Zealand by now.
— Donal O’Keeffe (@Donal_OKeeffe) March 1, 2014
Brilliant!!!
I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier
John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.
Notice that they are both smiling.
They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”
It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.
Just watch.
Best Comment Ever on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable Merger, With Taiwanese News Video
Telco Maven, and fellow medieval recreation afficianado, Harold Feld, gives us the best comment ever on the merger:
OH MY GOD!! YOU COMCAST PEOPLE HAVE NO LIMITS! YOU’RE LIKE SOME GIANT, COAX-TENTACLED CTHULHU-BEAST THAT KEEPS PROMISING TO DEVOUR US ALL BETWEEN 8 A.M. AND NOON BUT DOESN’T ACTUALLY GET AROUND TO DEVOURING US UNTIL AFTER 3 P.M. BECAUSE YOU GOT ‘STUCK IN TRAFFIC’ AND A PREVIOUS DEVOURING RAN LONGER THAN EXPECTED . . . .
Not only that, he raises one of the famous (infamous?) Taiwanese CGI news animations.
Mr. Feld, you are a f%$#ing genius.
Best Resignation Letter Ever
Matt Taibbi writes a goodbye letter to Rolling Stone that should make his former bosses proud:
Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras.
I’ll have plenty of time to talk about the new job elsewhere. But in this space, I just want to talk about Rolling Stone, and express my thanks. Today is a very bittersweet day for me. As excited as I am about the new opportunity, I’m sad to be leaving this company.
More than 15 years ago, Rolling Stone sent a reporter, Brian Preston, to do a story on the eXile, the biweekly English-language newspaper I was editing in Moscow at the time with Mark Ames. We abused the polite Canadian Preston terribly – I think we thought we were being hospitable – and he promptly went home and wrote a story about us that was painful, funny and somewhat embarrassingly accurate. Looking back at that story now, in fact, I’m surprised that Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana gave me a call years later, after I’d returned to the States.
I remember when Will called, because it was such an important moment in my life. I was on the American side of Niagara Falls, walking with friends, when my cell phone rang. Night had just fallen and when Will invited me to write a few things in advance of the 2004 presidential election, I nearly walked into the river just above the Falls.
At the time, I was having a hard time re-acclimating to life in America and was a mess personally. I was broke and having anxiety attacks. I specifically remember buying three cans of corned beef hash with the last dollars of available credit on my last credit card somewhere during that period. Anyway I botched several early assignments for the magazine, but Will was patient and eventually brought me on to write on a regular basis.
It was my first real job and it changed my life. Had Rolling Stone not given me a chance that year, God knows where I’d be – one of the ideas I was considering most seriously at the time was going to Ukraine to enroll in medical school, of all things.
………
No journalist has ever been luckier than me. Thank you, Rolling Stone.
Read the whole thing.
It’s funny and gracious, and everyone at Rolling Stone should be proud of what he said.
I’d Never Looked at the Christo-Fascists this Way Before
Considering that I have tended to call them Fascists, I’m rather surprised that I’ve never noticed that bullying is THE core value of the Talibaptist crowd:
The anti-bullying campaign was supposed to be one of those causes that everyone, regardless of ideology or political party, was able to get behind. As Emily Bazelon discovered in her seminal book on bullying in schools, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, even in schools where it seems fairly obvious that authorities were being negligent toward victims of bullying, the schools insisted that they were opposed to bullying. No one is for bullying, right?
Well, that’s what we’d like to believe. But it seems that, as with many things, bullying is becoming a partisan issue. Anti-bullying efforts seem liberal in tone and emphasis, which means that they will inevitably attract negative attention from the knee-jerk “anything to piss off the liberals” crowd. But let’s be honest: Part of the reason conservatives frequently support bullying—or at least resist efforts to end it—is because bullying works. Bullies are good at exerting exactly the kind of social control that the right, especially the Christian right, wants to exert. So here’s a list of incidences where conservatives just straight-up supported bullying in the face of efforts to curb it.
Seriously.
Every “freedom” that they insist upon violates the old adage, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.”
They want the right to discriminate, and to act on their hatred and their bigotry.
You have the right to be a bigot and a hater, but you cannot inflict your bigotry and hatred on the rest of society.
Charlie Pierce Gets It
Pierce notes that when you look at those who wish to criminalize abortion (and birth control), “There Is No Common Ground On Abortion.”
They want to punish women for their own sexuality. They want to remove their autonomy, and they (Catholic Church excepted) don’t give a damn about children once they are born into poverty.
These people who are afraid by women, and the power that women possess, and want to minimize it, and there can be no compromise.
The idea of “Common Ground” is that it provides a way for Democrats to weasel out of this.
Guess what, the only people who feel inspired to vote for members of the weasel family are other weasels, like skunks.
Go read the rest
95 Years Ago Today
The Great Molasses Flood of Boston:
On January 15, 1919—an unusually warm winter day in Boston—patrolman Frank McManus picked up a call box on Commercial Street, contacted his precinct station and began his daily report. Moments later he heard a sound like machine guns and an awful grating. He turned to see a five-story-high metal tank split open, releasing a massive wall of dark amber fluid. Temporarily stunned, McManus turned back to the call box. “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately,” he yelled, “there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”
More than 7.5 million liters of molasses surged through Boston’s North End at around 55 kilometers per hour in a wave about 7.5 meters high and 50 meters wide at its peak. All that thick syrup ripped apart the cylindrical tank that once held it, throwing slivers of steel and large rivets in all directions. The deluge crushed freight cars, tore Engine 31 firehouse from its foundation and, when it reached an elevated railway on Atlantic Avenue, nearly lifted a train right off the tracks. A chest-deep river of molasses stretched from the base of the tank about 90 meters into the streets. From there, it thinned out into a coating one half to one meter deep. People, horses and dogs caught in the mess struggled to escape, only sinking further.
Ultimately, the disaster killed 21 people and injured another 150. About half the victims were crushed by the wave or by debris or drowned in the molasses the day of the incident. The other half died from injuries and infections in the following weeks. A long ensuing legal battle revealed several possible reasons for the flood. The storage tank had been filled to near capacity on July 13 and the molasses had likely fermented, producing carbon dioxide that raised the pressure inside the cylinder. The courts also faulted the United States Industrial Alcohol Co., which owned the tank, for ignoring numerous signs of the structure’s instability over the years, such as frequent leaks.
The rest is even better, because they start to discuss things like Reynolds Numbers.
I got some serious geek on reading this.
God Bless The Onion
This is prize:
My Fellow Americans, Look At Me: Do I Look Like A Corrupt, Vengeful Bully?
Commentary • Opinion • ISSUE 50•01 • Jan 9, 2014
By Chris Christie, New Jersey Governor
I must admit, the past two days have been the most humbling of my entire career. I was shocked and disgusted to learn of the deplorable conduct of a member of my staff, who, without my knowledge, orchestrated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, deliberately causing major traffic congestion in order to exact political vengeance against a local mayor who didn’t endorse me for reelection. Though I promptly fired the aide in question and repeatedly stressed that I had no prior knowledge of her actions, many have continued to accuse me of being complicit in this incident. And to those who do, I can only ask that you simply look at me, right now, and just ask yourself one question: Do I look like a corrupt, vengeful, openly antagonistic bully to you?
………
Read the reat.