The Republican No-Everything campaign takes a turn into the absurd…

Via Mano Singham…

Sam Harris writes:

If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.?[8]

If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.

Most Americans, and perhaps most people in general, are uncomfortable with violence, we want to play nice. Sociopaths and criminals depend upon this fact, trusting that people will not react violently when faced with violence. Despite what we may feel, we cannot know how we will react until we are faced with the reality of a violent attack. We can train, we can mentally prepare ourselves, but knowing only comes after the fact.

Our society depends upon the small percentage of individuals who are capable of violence in the defense of those who are not: police officers and military personnel. Harris’ advice here is spot on, strive for nos. 1 and 2, but No. 3 is the nut. Just ask Ender Wiggin.

Last evening 13 of us gathered at the Phoenix Coffeehouse on Mayfield Road to engage in intelligent conversation as part of the longest-running Socrates Café on the planet. We invested 90 minutes of our time exploring the question:

Do politicians simply reflect the population?

From the beginning participants felt uncomfortable with the language of the question and we began to massage the text in order to dive deeper into the underlying questions. Politicians was the first word to succumb to our scrutiny, becoming elected officials in the process because of a sense that politicians was being used in this case as a pejorative. Statesmen was also offered as an alternative but not accepted, perhaps because the word carries an honorific sense.

Simply also caused us to consider if the word’s use carried a dismissive sense. That word was removed from the question. Finally we changed population to majority, feeling that population was too vague.

Along the way we discussed the difference between disempowered and disenfranchised; as well as what it means to protect a minority from the tyranny of the majority.

I was taken greatly by the insertion of the concept of courage among political officials, particularly as it pertains to voting for what a person’s sense of virtue tells them what is right as opposed to the politically expedient. At the end of the evening I came away with an sense that while I strongly disagree with the principles they espouse, the Tea Party members of Congress have to be given credit for standing by the positions they believe they were elected to defend when their own party leadership betrayed those principles.

So. What do you think?

Daniel McDermott writes:

And there will be other prisoners: hopeless, frustrated, sadomasochistic men with overgrown armpits and merciless eyes, and they too will assault me, like the policemen, not with phone books, but with tape-handled puncture knives and throbbing erections. And I will be put into isolation for my own safety, and I will be released one or two or five years later, and I will be the disgrace of my already disgraceful family, and I will become a janitor in Jersey City — because there is much to clean up in Jersey City — and I will live alone, in a basement apartment, beneath a home owned by a Vietnamese family who also own a sanitary-fowl takeout joint, and they will scream at each other every night in their squawking foreign tongue, and my apartment will be damp and brick, and in it I will masturbate to nothing in particular, and I will die young, forty-something, of liver failure due to alcoholic tendencies, and my death will be far from tragic, and I will go to hell and burn eternally, and the Devil will be there, and he will greet me, and he will be wearing braces.

I do sort of remember the gray years…

Jesse Jackson writes:

The tendency is to blame both sides, so the obstructionist strategy works. Congress has earned the lowest levels of public approval ever, but approval of the president has declined, as well. If your overriding goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president, as Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced, then obstruction of needed reforms makes a perverse sense, even if it virtually guarantees a stagnant economy, mass unemployment and declining wages.

If only…

From Fray:

Jesse Thorn: What do you mean when you say it sucks to be a straight guy? I myself am a straight guy. I feel like I’m pretty well set up.

Dan Savage: Well, can you vouch for that?

JT: I feel like I’m like rolling, you know, I’m great.

DS: What sucks to be a straight guy is that it’s hard to get laid if you’re straight — compared to women or gay guys — and the desire is certainly there, but the bar is set much higher for the straight boys. But also, heterosexual male identity — and in America I don’t want to get too pointy-headed about it, but it’s really this package of negatives. You know, to be a straight guy is not to be a woman and not to be a faggot and so it doesn’t really leave you much room to maneuver. If there’s anything about your interests or personality that can be remotely perceived as feminine or faggoty, you have to kill it or people won’t believe you’re straight or you’ll be tormented — you know, questions for the rest of your life. And it’s kind of sad to watch how hemmed-in straight guys are. And I didn’t realize that.

I always felt as a fag that I was kind of hemmed-in. And then when I came out and I was past it, I realized that I wasn’t hemmed-in at all. It was really the poor sad pathetic straight guys who are hemmed-in. I had sex with women when I was a teenager, and nobody looks at me and says “Oh, you had sex with girls, you must be straight.” But, you know, the poor straight guy who at college got drunk a couple of times or met the one guy that he was attracted to and did it, if it gets out, no one will believe he’s straight ever again and how sad for that poor straight guy.

Matt Taibbi writes:

On the other hand, nobody who actually understands anything about banking, or has spent more than ten minutes inside a Wall Street office, believes any of that crap. In the financial world, the fairy tales about the [1977 Community Reinvestment Act] causing the crash inspire a sort of chuckling bemusement, as though they were tribal bugaboos explaining bad rainfall or an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth, ghost stories and legends good for scaring the masses.

But nobody actually believes them.

Oh, but they do Matt, they really do, and the facts that we believe that are really true, but aren’t are the ones that will destroy us.

A friend was sitting at a sidewalk table this morning at the Lee Road Phoenix coffeehouse when a car pulled into a parking spot in front of him. The driver — taking a phone call, texting or perhaps having a driveway moment — sat in her car with the engine idling. After several minutes of spewing exhaust fumes into my friend’s face, a woman got out of her car and made to walk into Phoenix for her morning coffee.

My friend reports the following exchange:

Him: Excuse me mam, would you mind turning off your car while you’re parked?

Her: Oh, it’s alright, it’s a hybrid.

When I stopped laughing he suggested two analogs:

Him: Excuse me mam, would you mind not farting?

Her: Oh, it’s alright, I’m a vegetarian.

or…

Him: Excuse me mam, would you mind not smoking?

Her: Oh, it’s alright, they’re filters.

I’m sorry, some people are too stupid to be allowed to procreate.

If the voters do not understand what happens before and after they cast a ballot, the ballot is meaningless.

From my hometown newspaper:

Hess the only Republican winner
November 9, 2011
By Brad Bauer – The Marietta Times (bbauer@mariettatimes.com)

The only contested Republican to win a bid in the city of Marietta on Tuesday, Sherri Hess said it was her experience that carried her in the race for city auditor.

Hess defeated independent challenger Dana Singer with 2,185 votes (57.41 percent) to 1,621 (42.59 percent).

“When I was going out campaigning door-to-door, experience is what people kept telling me they wanted and that’s what they got,” Hess said after the election Tuesday.

Hess, 51, has worked in the city auditor’s office for the past 30 years and served as the office’s chief deputy since 1996. The auditor position was left vacant after former Auditor David Locke resigned earlier this year to pursue another career.

“I think that especially in these uncertain economic times and with so many changes coming (in leadership at city offices), that it is important to have someone in this office with an understanding of the current situation, as well as how we’ve dealt with issues in the past,” Hess said.

Previously…

0520: Auden on washing machines

[Update: 1 January 2012. Not only was the vital buried under the trivial, the beautiful was smeared with the pornographic, the gruesome and the threatening.]

Every Sunday morning since they began I have checked out a week’s worth of Post Secrets.

This morning, instead of the wonderful, sad, delightful and chilling handmade messages on real postcards, I was greeted by cold, sterile imitations produced by a cell phone app. The only change that could have made them even more so would have been if the text was all in Comics Sans.

Although the app has knocked out more secrets in two months than people have lovingly produced by hand and actually mailed in seven years, I think this will be the death of Post Secrets as the vital is buried under the trivial.

I’m sad.

Dear Jeffrey,

On Tuesday, November 8, you and I, and millions of Ohioans will make history.

The battle in America for fair wages, safe working conditions, and a secure retirement has endured for decades, but at no time in recent history have so many people come together at once to say, “Workers have rights.” Governor Kasich and the politicians in Columbus turned their backs on us when they passed Senate Bill 5, restricting critically important collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans.

This isn’t just unfair to workers – it jeopardizes the safety of our communities by making it illegal for firefighters, police officers, and paramedics to negotiate for enough men and women to do the job. Already, more than 1.3 million Ohioans have said “NO” to Governor Kasich and signed a petition to put Senate Bill 5 on the ballot as Issue 2, and on Tuesday, November 8 we will render our citizens’ veto on this deeply flawed bill.

I’ve been very lucky in my life to have served this country in several meaningful ways – as a Marine, as an astronaut, and as a United States Senator – but the daily contributions of the firefighters, police officers, teachers, nurses, and other public employees who keep our society running are just as significant. We cannot turn our backs on those who watch over us and our families every day.

We must cast a vote of “No Confidence” in this devastating and dangerous legislation. It is our duty as citizens to vote, and it is our duty as Ohioans to stand up for Ohio’s working families.

Join me in voting NO on Issue 2.

Yours faithfully,

Senator John Glenn

P.S. We’re all so busy that we can lose track of even the most important dates. Mark Tuesday, November 8 on your calendar and text OH to the number 225568 for a voting reminder and information on where, when, and how to vote. I’m counting on you.

Fritz Tucker writes:

On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization. No, this was not the meeting of any traditional influence on Wall Street. These were six of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street.

Via Ian Welsh…

The question now, of course, is who does Fritz Tucker work for and what’s in all this for him? Who will follow Fritz Tucker’s money?