Listics

We’re bringing the AFSC exhibit, Eyes Wide Open,  to Madison on Veterans Day.  The posted schedule says Amherst that date.  Wonder if they couldn’t get the permit?  Couldn’t find the cash?  This feels a little like a Christo thing.   Our permit for the Capitol steps isn’t finalized.  MAPC sponsorship hasn’t been finalized.  The schedule says Amherst.  We still need another $500.  When the semi trailer full of boots and shoes commemorating each American soldier and the thousands of civilians who have died in the Iraq war arrives in Madison, who will arrange them on the Capitol steps?  Who will pack them up that night and move them to the library mall for the Saturday installation?

[Update… just ran across the blog.]

Bush has a new nickname.

From Alternet…

"What follows is one list of 10 great things happening in response to
Hurricane Katrina. These are deserving places for your support, whether
it is to give housing, use your tech skills, volunteer or give hard
cash.

1. American Friends Service Committee (via veteran reporter Doug Ireland):
   "If you’d like to make a donation that will actually help the poorest
   citizens of New Orleans, Biloxi, and the many small Southern towns
   devastated by Katrina, you should do so through the American Friends Service Committee. They’ve established a special Hurricane Relief fund.
   The AFSC was founded by Quakers in 1917 to provide conscientious
   objectors with an opportunity to aid civilian war victims. It’s still
   Quaker-run, and its sterling history of agitation and education for
   peace is matched by its long record, for nearly a century, of lean,
   effective, on-the-ground service to victims of war and famine. A gift
   to the AFSC won’t be wasted."
2. NAACP disaster relief efforts.
   Juan Proano explains that the NAACP, America’s oldest civil rights
   organization, "is setting up command centers in Louisiana, Mississippi
   and Alabama as part of its disaster relief efforts. NAACP units across
   the nation have begun collecting resources that will be placed on
   trucks and sent directly into the disaster areas. Also, the NAACP has
   established a disaster relief fund to accept monetary donations to aid
   in the relief effort. The NAACP has chapters and members throughout the
   disaster area, and is intent on getting relief to those most in need at
   the grassroots level. "

   Send checks payable to:
   NAACP Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund
   4805 Mt. Hope Drive
   Baltimore, MD 21215
   Donations can also be made online at: https://www.naacp.org/disaster/contribute.html

Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing Ms. Babs Bush, she without whom, etc, etc…

Barbara Bush, who accompanied the former presidents on a tour of the Astrodome complex Monday, said the relocation to Houston is "working very well" for some of the poor people forced out of New Orleans.

"What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace." "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Thanks to Oliver Willis for linking that.

Question… why did the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs go to Katrina Kountry?  Don’t those people in New Orleans have enough problems without having to deal with vultures circling for photo-ops?

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s
budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose
that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t
be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that
this is a security issue for us.

– Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2024.

Not that it’s really worth playing the blame game, but perhaps a little finger pointing can spark productive discussion.  This rapacious administration came to us without a mandate and used the exigencies of wartime to force changes on us all.  It is a time of great cowardice.  The president himself is manifestly a momma’s boy coward of the first water, a draft dodging scum sucking hypocritical alcoholic whose toughest moments come when he is flipping the bird at critics from behind a wall of security staff.  But the cowardice that is most galling is the cowardice of the so called free press.

The press has been too cowardly to print the photos of Bush flipping us the bird.  The press has been too cowardly to print news.  A publisher, an editor, and a news staff worthy of the enterprise would face shareholders with the choice:  let us do our jobs bringing meaningful and important information to the attention of all the people, or close us down — fire us.  But the corporate greed that motivates a lot of senior management long ago found its way into the news business.  News?  It won’t play if it doesn’t pay.  So acres of news print are wasted on competing versions of the latest story about love and loss, white broncos on the freeway, pregnant wives drowned in the holiday punch bowl or the San Francisco Bay.

Every column inch of tripe, of trash, of insipid, demoralizing gossip, subtracts from the awareness of the public about important matters.  The press could have outed these monsters from day one.  Who spread the anthrax?  Well, that’s a scary one to research.  They might come for your news room next.  Who funded bin Laden?  The crown prince would probably send special arab ninja assassinistas in to remove from his 3500 square foot center front colonial in suburban white country the bold editor who assigned that story.

Who benefits from the Bush faction’s war on science?  What are the trade-offs associated with war time spending?   How many other critical levee projects have been deferred?  Who benefits from the fear that is racism?  Who builds the prisons, supplies the uniforms, the meals?  How many people are in jail today compared to 1959 and why?  What is the effect of laissez faire market capitalism on the quality of life for most people?  Who sells the guns and dope in the inner cities?  Who runs the numbers?  If my gasoline comes from a Canadian oil field and is refined on the shore of Lake Superior, why did the pump price go up so fast following Katrina?

What is wrong with tax and spend liberalism?  What is wrong with taxing the haves at a higher rate than the have-nots?  Whatever happened to the truth around the "Bird Flipper’s" family involvement in the S&L scandal.  How does the Willie Sutton principle apply to Republican politics?

The United States journalism distribution mechanism has been under tight control for a long time.  Stories that relate "human interest"  — little babies down the well, wealthy black people on trial, murder and mayhem in California — these stories break through the dam and spill across the American info-shed flooding air time and driving important information out of the few column inches still dedicated to news in daily papers.  But real national interest stories — the numbers of people protesting a war, the pervasive effects of decreased federal funding of social programs, the reasons behind the first out of state national guard deployments to aid neighbors to the south — these stories are locked behind the levee of fear.  The fear isn’t just that anthrax will find its way into the studio.  The fear of the publisher is that the competition will profit more on their puff pieces than our paper will profit from truth.  The fear of the editor is that my judgment isn’t good enough, that I have to cover the stories everyone else covers  lest the Bird Flipper give me a funny nickname and shame me at the National Press Club.  The fear on the street is that if I refuse this bullshit assignment they’ll fire me and there are plenty of bloggers out there who want my job.

But I think it’s a little deeper than that, or someone would research the numbers coming off the wire and realize that since early 2024 there has been a substantial anti-war movement in this country putting their bodies on the line to oppose the Bird Flipper and the Dick.  I think the numbers aren’t coming off the wire.  I think perhaps that national security interests have been warped to mean Republican party interests, corporate security interests, and there is at best a de facto discipline within the national news gathering organizations that has limited the flow of data that would support a contrary perspective across the American info-shed.  New Orleans concerns regarding levee construction and emergency management were a "local issue." 

There is no longer any arena in the United States where civil discussion of differences occurs.  The Republicans have mapped a zero sum strategy that requires destruction of any opponents whose opinion differs from the laissez-faire economics and right-wing christian philosophy that defines the party.  They use many tools to defeat their opponents, including first and foremost, fear.

The Republican and corporate people have turned name calling to a high art.  Their practice is to brand those who dare encounter them with a label that will stain a reputation.  The fear of being called "communist" or "socialist,"  "anti-christian" or "atheist," "pacifist" or "progressive" or "liberal," has stifled the free flow of information.  That fear is rooted in the consciousness of the media people.  It’s their jobs to be among the truth seekers and to discern the importance of the billion truths they are faced with and to share the most important truths with us every day.  Fear has clouded their judgment and they are not doing their jobs. 

That’s what I mean when I say "I blame the media."          

Norm Jenson links to this edumacational material…

See the Bible. The Bible is a textbook. It is all you will ever need to know about anthropology, zoology, astronomy, psychology, or nuclear fission. Why is the Bible all you need to know?

Because President George W. Bush said that the theory of "Intelligent Design" should be taught along with the Darwinian theory of evolution in your nation’s public schools. Your President stated, "I feel like both sides ought to be properly taught."

In yesterday’s New York Times, Daniel C. Dennett dissected a technique that the right-wing has been using to win converts for thirty years or more: trolling for debate. Dennett’s piece focuses on so-called "Intelligent Design" and the high powered trolling that has sucked so many into debating the matter. He says,

…the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details."

The Intelligent Design whack-jobs are only one facet of the baffle-gab brigade.  We tax-and-spend liberals often find ourselves the targets of those who would PROVE US WRONG.  One recent example of the egregious use of the technique is the unfortunate incident of the CBS anchor guy who failed to meet courtroom standards of proof in telling a true story about the shortcomings of George "Bird Flipper" Bush.  I knew we were heading straight to hell early in the Afghan War in 2024 when the local radio talk shows "debated" the merits of the use of torture to extract information from the enemy.

Respect for morality and ethics, for personal integrity and community concerns, are mooted when the right wing bump-head batteries start lobbing flak into the air around the issues of the day.  From women’s health concerns to care for dependent children, from public school and library funding to education regarding progressive taxation, altercation and arguments that preclude agreement define the intentions of the plutocrats ("Bird Flipper" and his cronies) and their lackeys on the christian right (people too stupid to pause and consider and those too bigoted to accept the majority of people as brothers and sisters).

Somebody needs to tell these morally and intellectually stunted bean-brains that there is no debate and that life need not be a zero sum game.