One of my students, a young man wrestling with society, politics, spirituality and science, told me I had to see this.

The punch line was what grabbed him: “The Tea Party is the American Taliban.”

Except it isn’t.

The Tea Party is many things, starting with bought and paid for by the our American Oligarchy known as the One Percent, but it is not, in any stretch of the imagination, the American Taliban in the same way that President Barack Hussein Obama is not a socialist. When it comes to name calling, the Taliban has become this century’s equivalent of the fascist, the Nazi, Adolf Hitler, and calling names is for children, not adults.

I don’t like the Tea Party but I believe in being one of the adults in the room. Members of the Tea Party are plenty bad enough without resorting to hyperbole.

The Republican convention in Florida was so bad, that the faithful are rolling out this tired, witless attemp at political humor in the hope of distracting voters from the all the flat out lies, ineptitude and bumbling that was one again inconvenienced by Mother Nature Gawd.

HERE IS THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION SCHEDULE!
HOPE YOU CAN SIGN UP AND GET THERE!

2012 Democratic Convention Schedule – Charlotte, NC

4:00 PM – Opening Flag Burning Ceremony – sponsored by CNN
4:05 PM – Singing of “God Damn America” led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright
4:10 PM – Pledge of Allegiance to Obama – led by Whoopie Goldberg
4:15 PM – Tribute to George Soros for his help in creating and financing the Democratic Platform – Nancy Pelosi
4:30 PM – Reading of the Democratic Platform – Nancy Pelosi XXXX Canceled. Will be passed without reading.
4:30 PM – Tribute to the Occupy Wall Street movement for all that they have accomplished to unify the country, improve employment, and boost the economy. – Harry Reid
4:45 PM – Jobs seminar “How to have a successful career without having a job.” – Al Sharpton / Jesse Jackson
5:00 PM – Travel Seminar; “Great Vacations I’ve Taken on the Taxpayer’s Dime” – Michelle Obama.
5:30 PM – “Family Values” Seminar – Eliot Spitzer (via Satellite)
5:35 PM – Real Estate Bargains Seminar – Tony Rezko
6:00 PM – Home Mortgage Seminar – Barney Frank
6:10 PM – Pledge of Allegiance to Obama – led by George Clooney
6:15 PM – Airing of Grievances by the Clintons
6:30 pm – Kinder, Gentler Bombing Techniques – Bill Ayers
6:45 PM – Paying Your Fair Share – Timothy Geitner
7:00 PM – Free Gov. Blagovich rally
7:15 PM – Tribute Film to Brave Freedom Fighters incarcerated at GITMO – Michael Moore
7:30 PM – Dramatized film re-enactment of Obama’s single handed capture of Osama Bin Laden – Michael Moore
7:45 PM – Personal Finance Seminar – Charlie Rangle
7:50 PM – Commitment to US border security – Atty Gen Holder
8:10 PM – Pledge of Allegiance to Obama – led by David Letterman
8:15 PM – Media Seminar “Bias in Media – How we can make it work for you” – sponsored by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times
9:00 PM – Denunciation of Bitter Gun Owners and Bible readers – Dem Natl Cmte Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
9:15 PM – Energy Plan Symposium / Tire Gauge Demonstration / Profiting with Green Investments – Al Gore
10:00 PM – Ceremonial Waving of White Flag for IRAQ , & Afghanistan
10:10 PM – Pledge of Allegiance to Obama – led by Barbra Streisand
10:15 PM – Obama Accepts Oscar, Tony and Latin Grammy Awards
10:20 PM – Obama accepts Congressional Medal of Honor for Bin Laden capture
10:25 PM – Obama accepts Greenpeace Hero Medal for instant cleanup of Gulf oil spill, and blocking of Keystone Pipeline
10:30 PM – Official Nomination of Obama by Bill Maher and Chris “He sends a thrill up my leg” Matthews
10:45 PM – *** Break for installation of additional teleprompters ***
11:00 PM – Obama Accepts Nomination as Lord and Savior
11:45 PM – Feeding of the Delegates with 5 Loaves and 2 Fish – Obama Presiding
12:00 AM – Celestial Choirs Sing (Food stamps distributed to all delegates as they leave.)
1:00 AM – Convention Hall cleared and cleaned
3:00 AM – Biden Delivers Acceptance Speech

In reply I’ve sent them links to: GIVE’EM HELL CHARLIE… IN CASE YOU MISSED THE ROMNEY BIOPIC… WHAT WAS SHE, MR. RYAN…? and THE LARGER TRUTH: THEY WANT TO FUCK US…

Via Mano Singham…

Mano Singham writes:

Hence I was startled by this short interview that NPR’s Ari Shapiro had with a woman who attended an American Legion convention. Bobbie Lucier said of the Obamas,

I just – I don’t like him. Can’t stand to look at him. I don’t like his wife. She’s far from the first lady. It’s about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.

There is something clearly different about the Obamas, especially Michelle, that disgusts this woman and makes her feel that they are different, and far worse, from those who came before. But I can’t quite put my finger on it. I wonder what it could be?

Too bad Shapiro did not ask her because it would seem like an obvious follow-up question. Or maybe he did ask and did not want to report her answer.

Mano is, of course, most likely correct, NPR would be in big trouble is it were to allow a sentance like, “I can’t stand having no damn nigger bitch as First Lady,” on the air.

In this simple chart we get a real-world, capitalist, military industrial, Republican AND Democratic illustration of why our government, awash in billions of lobbyist/one percent dollars, cannot, will not, let go of the we-must-go-to-war-with-Iran drumbeat.

There is more money to be made scaring the bejeesus out of everyone in sight so that they’re willing to say the hell with butter, we need more guns.

I peg the beginning of this on Ronald Reagan, but I could be wrong. If you examine the Great Communicator’s first term in office, marked by a recession, President Reagan redirected federal dollars to his handlers in the mostly California based military industry. The capitalist problem with such build-ups is that, in the absence of war, they hit a ceiling; you can only justify so many tanks, ships and bombers.

The death merchants needed wars or their bottom lines would go to shit.

Even in a hot war where the enemy is basically outclassed, such as the initial phases of our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the big ticket items — the multi-million dollar tanks and planes, as well as the multi-billion dollar ships, don’t get used up. Even at a million dollars a pop, you can only use up so many smart bombs before you run out of targets.

We’re going through a lot of those Predator-fired Hellfire missiles, but they’re peanuts at $60,000 or so. That’s hardly enough to cover a middle-level managers annual performance bonus.

So what’s an arms manufacturer to do?

You take a thousands of years old hatred between Persians (Iran) and Semites (Arabs and Israelis) in the Middle East and push the Iran-Will-Destroy-Us-All meme until the weapon systems fly off the shelves.

That is why in 2010 American arms sales accounted for only (yeah, I know, only?) 44 percent of all arms sales to developing nations, those sales exploded to a whopping 79 percent of sales in 2011. In real dollars, that’s a leap from $21.4 billion in 2010 to $66.3 billion, in increase of 210 feckin’ percent and most of that increase, according to the Congressional Research Service, came from sales to Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

And we wonder why people hate us.

Saint Basil wrote:

Who is a man of greed? Someone who does not rest content with what is sufficient. Who is a cheater? Someone who takes away what belongs to others. And are you not a man of greed? are you not a cheater? taking those things which you received for the sake of stewardship, and making them your very own? Now, someone who takes a man who is clothed and renders him naked would be termed a robber; but when someone fails to clothe the naked, while he is able to do this, is such a man deserving of any other appellation? The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.

From Cranston, Rhode Island, Herald:

To the Editor:

I am white. I am male. I am also 68 and a Vietnam Era veteran. And I am angry.

And I know many people my age who are also angry. They see gays and lesbians demanding the right to get married. They see a black man in the White House with a strange sounding name, changing our health care system and suggesting that we as a nation might have something to do with the sorry state of affairs in the world.

To my fellow seniors who are upset and alarmed at this, I have a message: Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Enough of your whining! The world is changing, and it’s about time you got off your mental easy chair and did the same! Your stubborn resistance to change is maddening!

Upset about gay lifestyle? I am married more than 40 years … to a woman … and I do not in any way feel threatened by gays and lesbians who wish to be wed. Here’s some advice – one senior to another – try minding your own business.

When I see you no longer eating pork or working on Sunday, then I’ll take your Bible-based opposition to gay marriage seriously.

And while you are at it, stop complaining about this so-called “socialist” president as you sit in your easy chairs collecting both Medicare and Social Security. And don’t swallow the hogwash about a Republican saving Medicare and a Democrat “robbing” it. Please, don’t make seniors look senile by swallowing that lie. ( I’ll deal with that lie in my next letter.)

You constantly lament how things have gotten worse. Yes, they have.

Ours was a noble generation that fought for Medicare, for equal rights for women and blacks, clean air and water and decent wages for all. Now too many of us fight for tax breaks for the wealthiest few and more power and money for corporations. How noble is that?

We admired and respected broadcasters like Walter Cronkite and Paul Harvey. Men of integrity. Now we are taken in by any right-wing blowhard with a microphone, the biggest being a four-times married, self-admitted drug abuser. Another so insane, even Fox News dropped him.

And, yes, there is a black man in the White House. It’s a sign of the changing face of America. I fully understand for many this is an uncomfortable sign; your old world is gone. For most, what you feel is not bigotry; it’s fear. Deep down fear.

Please! It’s 2012. Stop fearing change! Embrace it! Welcome it as we did so many years ago because change is here and will continue with or without our help.

Charlie Lawrence
Johnston

I think I first heard the rule: your first answer is almost always correct, from GMM1 Giles when I was in Gunner’s Mate “A” School at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois.

I’ve repeated the rule, without question, dozens of times to my students over the years.

I was wrong.

From Mano Singham:

A book given to people taking the GRE exam advises them that “Exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer. Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.”

This advice represents a widespread belief that our instincts, our intuitive senses, are the most reliable guides to decisions. It is based on the assumption that instincts are based on prior knowledge and experiences and that our brains integrate all these things to enable us to make quick judgments that tend to be sound. This is the idea heavily promoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink.

But is it true?

I was interested in this study (published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, Vol. 88, No. 5, 725–735 by Justin Kruger, Derrick Wirtz, and Dale T. Miller) titled “Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy” (subscription required but you can see a fairly detailed discussion of the paper here) that examined the answers given by 1561 students in response to a multiple choice test. By looking at the erasures and comparing them with the final answer, they found that 51% changed their answers from wrong to right, 25% from right to wrong, and 23% from wrong to wrong. In other words, when people changed their minds, they were twice as likely to go from wrong to right as from right to wrong.

The finding underscore another rule: It is not that which we don’t know that can hurt us, it is that which we think we know that just isn’t so that will bite us on the ass.

Your gay friends are not obsessed with the idea of being hated by a few Christian friends, they are rightfully mindful of a group of ignorant, fearful religious bigots who want to do them real harm and until you realize that the problem is not the religious right, but you, the religious light who enable the ignorant bigots, your gay friends will continue to be rightfully concerned.

0803: Paul Ryan was for Ayn Rand before he was against her

Matt Taibbi laments:

So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?

Just a lame pair of speeches, overall. They made me miss George Bush. At least the Bush/Cheney/Rove era offered a clear ideological choice – and some pretty passionate, ingeniously-delivered political theater, comparatively. Where’s the blood and guts, the bomb-‘em-till-they’re-crispy war calls? Where are the screw-the-poor tirades, the “you can pry it from my cold dead hand” guns-and-liberty crescendos? This stuff is pretty weak beer compared to those days.

School is in full swing and I’m getting back to preparing food ahead so that when I come home in the evening (I finish my last student at 1840 and get home around 1930) I don’t have to think about what to eat and end up buying food I haven’t prepared for myself.

Fortunately, my Geauga Family Farm shares have not yet reached this point:

This weekend the lineup is:

Friday: Quinoa and Grilled-Peppers Salad.

Saturday: Peanutty Thai Chicken.

Sunday: Dried Apricot Chicken and Wild Rice Soup.

I’ll also be preparing chicken in teriyaki marinade to grill and go in the freezer and making a batch of white-bean and tuna salad for lunches.

Listening to Eastwood, a man whose film career I admire, tragically reminds me of another great actor’s performane more than a decade ago when Michael Moore interviewed Charleton Heston for Bowling For Columbine. That interview was painful to watch and I found myself wishing that Moore had left it on the cutting room floor. I feel the same way about Eastwood’s speech.

Matt Taibbi concludes:

Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what’s missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney’s diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.

Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.

Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.

That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.

Mitt Romney isn’t blue or red. He’s an archipelago man. That’s a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they’re from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

[Raymond] Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories: “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines or write checks.”

This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit from setting aside time to do one and only one thing. Just follow Chandler’s regimen:

“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

The rest comes of itself. That’s the seeming effortlessness that comes from playing offense. Chandler was incorporating several of the techniques we discussed earlier. The Nothing Alternative is a bright-line rule: a clear, unmistakable boundary, like the no-drinking vow… Chandler’s particular rule – If I can’t write, I will do nothing – is also an example of an implementation plan, that specific if-x-then-y strategy that has been shown to reduce the demands on will power. p. 254-5

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

I just can’t get enough of Matt Taibbi’s Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.

After Milken and his junk bond scheme crashed in the late Eighties, Romney and other takeover artists moved on to Wall Street’s next get-rich-quick scheme: the tech-Internet stock bubble. By 1997 and 1998, there were nearly $400 billion in leveraged buyouts a year, as easy money once again gave these financial piracy firms the ammunition they needed to raid companies like KB Toys. Firms like Bain even have a colorful pirate name for the pools of takeover money they raise in advance from pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. “They call it dry powder,” says Slavkin Corzo, the union adviser.

The four truths inter-are. p. 11

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Matt Taibbi writes:

I ask [Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO] what Bain’s justification was for the giant dividend recapitalization in the KB Toys acquisition. The question throws her, as though she’s surprised anyone would ask for a reason a company like Bain would loot a firm like KB Toys. “It wasn’t like, ‘Yay, we did a good job, we get a dividend,'” she says with a laugh. “It was like, ‘We can do this, so we will.’?”