Category Archives: reality

Primo Krugman.

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Today’s column by Paul Krugman in The New York Times is especially tasty. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I pulled a few quotes from it for the Palace’s long-neglected quote collection:

[I]n America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception — namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.

[I]f you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes.

[D]ebt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves.

Here are a couple more Krugman gems I found lying around in the library, collecting dust:

America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. [source]

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation. [source]

He isn’t always right: the good Mr. Krugman was way off base regarding the effect of global trade on American wages, for example. But he is almost always right. And when he dishes out cold, hard facts to make a case for Keynesian economics, the conservatives in his narrative always seem to end up mocking themselves.

[h/t SJ]

A field guide to conservatives, revised.

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Yesterday kos posted A guide to the conservative movement in one handy chart, which purports to characterize the various conservative factions.  I have taken the liberty of reproducing it here:

conservativetable

It’s amusing and mostly accurate, as far as it goes.  However there is one egregious oversight, which I have taken the liberty of amending:

conservativetable2

On the State of the Union.

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[Cross-posted at The Political Junkies for Progressive Democracy.]

I did not watch the U.S. president’s State of the Union address.  I had less than zero interest in the president’s State of the Union address.  Not because I believe a president’s words do not matter; in some contexts they certainly matter very much.  No, I declined to watch because after listening to this administration for 4+ years I have very little faith that anything the president says reflects his actual agenda, or gives us any meaningful hint of what his future actions will be.  Of course, talk is cheap for every successful politician: they are required to convincingly spew a lot of meaningless garbage in order to get elected, and then spew more meaningless garbage to appease various constituencies once they do.  That is why I have cultivated a habit of evaluating politicians not on what they say but rather what they do—an approach I heartily recommend, especially in light of the extraordinary rhetorical gifts of Barack Obama.  Besides, the state of the union can be assessed perfectly well by nearly anyone.  Let’s have a look, shall we?

Soaring income inequality continues unabated.  In a trend that began in the 1970s and is expected to continue, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46.5 percent of all income in 2011.  That is the highest proportion since 1917.  UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez recently revealed some telling numbers:  during the “economic recovery” over which Barack Obama has presided, the earnings of the top 1 percent rose by 11.2 percent, while earnings of the other 99 percent decreased by 0.4 percent.  As of last December, workers’ wages had fallen to their lowest-ever share of GDP.

Child poverty is higher than it has been in half a century.  At 23 percent, the U.S. has the second-highest rate of childhood poverty in the developed world.  Nearly half of all U.S. children — and 90 percent of black children — will be on food stamps at some point during childhood.

Corporate profits are at record highs.  In the third quarter of 2012 corporate earnings were up 18.6% from the previous year to $1.75 trillion, sending after-tax profits soaring to their greatest percentage of GDP in history.  In a joint report released last year (pdf) by U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice, the authors analyzed 280 corporations comprising most of the Fortune 500 companies that were consistently profitable over the previous three years.  These companies spent a combined total of $2 billion on federal lobbying over the same period, and received a total of $223 billion in tax breaks.  I’m no Warren Buffet, but 11,050 percent sure seems like a pretty good return on investment over three years.  Apparently the most profitable purchase a business can make is politicians, and President Obama is by far the best president for corporate profits since at least 1900.

Fossil fuels are flourishing.  U.S. crude oil production is at its highest level since 1997, while natural gas is now extracted at record volumes.  Indeed, the president has been an eager ally of oil and gas interests: early in his first term, he proposed an unprecedented expansion of oil and gas drilling up and down the Atlantic coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the northern coast of Alaska.  Those initiatives were shelved after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded and the world watched in horror as a giant geyser of oil gushed into the Gulf.  Yet the president has still presided over historic expansions of domestic oil and gas development on land, including federal land, and once again approved drilling in the pristine waters of Alaska.  Oil output is surging so fast that the U.S. is projected to soon overtake Saudi Arabia.  Meanwhile, there has been very little action taken on climate change:  2012 saw record-breaking heat in July as the U.S. experienced its worst drought in decades (pdf) and more than half of all U.S. counties were declared disaster areas.  Severe weather events pummeled the nation, including one that took a $50 billion bite out of the Big Apple and its environs.

The War on Terror is an unmitigated disaster.  The Arab world’s opinion of the U.S. under Barack Obama is now worse than it was under Bush/Cheney, and the same U.S. policies that fuel the terrorism they purportedly prevent are only expected to expand during Obama’s second term.

The rule of law has been eviscerated.  The most heinous of crimes committed by financial elites go unprosecuted; many are not even investigated, and those that are result in settlements that amount to a slap on the wrist.  The most recent example is a typically absurd one:  last December, the U.K.-based banking giant HSBC was issued a $1.9 billion fine — five weeks profit — by the Justice Department for what Matt Taibbi describes as “the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever.”  For many years the bank knowingly laundered money for fine folks like Al-Qaeda financiers, Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Russian gangsters and countries under sanction like Iran and North Korea.  By 2003 the feds were on to the bank’s felonious shenanigans and sent HSBC a cease and desist letter.  It was ignored.  They sent HSBC another cease-and-desist letter in 2010.  That was ignored, too.  In the end, the bank was fined only a tiny fraction of its ill-gotten gains.  Meanwhile, in 2009 a Pakistani man with a satellite television business was sentenced to more than five and a half years in prison for rebroadcasting Al Manar, a news channel run by Hezbollah, and selling it as part of a package to customers in Brooklyn.  One in a hundred U.S. adults are behind bars, and more than half are low-level drug offenders.  But there was never any question that the upstanding citizens at HSBC would ever spend even a single day in jail.

We have entered the territory of tyrants.  This president has seized the most lawless, radical, tyrannical power any leader can yield:  the right to assassinate U.S. citizens on his sole determination, far from any battlefield, anywhere in the world, without due process, oversight or accountability.  Even Dick Cheney never reached that far.  Dick Cheney.

I could go on, of course.  Domestic law enforcement’s increasing militarization and entwinement with powerful corporations and CIA.  Support for the most oppressive regimes in the Muslim world.  This administration’s unparalleled war on whistleblowers.  The abysmal state of U.S. health care.  Why, if I were cynical I might even say … wait.  I am cynical.

Of course I’m cynical, and I have at least two very good reasons to be:  first, our “public servants” do not actually serve the public.  Second, the public itself appears to be not only unaware of the actual state of the union, but by all accounts prefers it that way.  So I’ll just come right out and say it:  I think we have sufficient information to assign the state of the union a grade of F.

F

Abortion is a blessing.

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[CONTENT WARNING: extremely graphic discussion and imagery, NSFW.]

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that found unconstitutional certain restrictions by states on a woman’s right to an abortion.  Today, as in 1973, there is an all-out assault on that right, from exactly the same kinds of deluded individuals and Conservative Personality Disorder-inflicted factions that plague us all in so many other respects.  The Forced Birth Brigades have had 40 years to lie and whitewash history in their tireless efforts to assure that all female persons are relegated to the status of subhuman breeding sows, not fully independent human beings with all of the rights accorded thereto.  Think that’s a little harsh?  Think again:

In no other situation does anyone ever argue that it is right to make use of another living human’s body against their will.  None.  Hell, we do not even make use of dead human bodies against their previously expressed wishes: we don’t harvest the organs the dead no longer need in order to save other peoples’ lives.  We don’t strap people down and strip their bone marrow to save cancer patients.  We don’t forcibly take a kidney from anybody—not even prisoners on death row—and kidneys are desperately needed.  We don’t extract life-saving blood from anyone who does not volunteer to donate it.  To do any of these things would be abhorrent, even though people are dying every day because we don’t.  This human right to be free from such personal violence and coercion is so basic that everyone understands it, intuitively and viscerally.

Except in the case of pregnancy.  Only in this instance—pregnancy—is it somehow perfectly all right for some other entity to make use of another living human being’s body against her will.

In an honest, fact-based debate, this would foreclose any argument to the contrary — or, alternatively, reveal that “a woman is a subhuman breeding sow” is precisely the repulsive, religion-based proposition being defended.  But even an argument like this one, as instructive and compelling as it may be, does not pack the emotional punch of, say, the image of a fetus.

Pictures of embyos (gruesome or otherwise) feature prominently in anti-choice propaganda because they are emotionally powerful.  They work.  Even when the images are subsequently debunked as fraudulent or at best highly unrepresentative, anti-choicers are virtually guaranteed to keep using them anyway.  Yet abortion advocates do not fire back with gruesome pictures of women like Geraldine Santoro, who died as a result of a botched abortion attempt.  Her case generally and her picture specifically helped to galvanize the social forces that led to Roe and the moral progress that case recognized and codified.  Instead, on the pro-choice side, we hear lofty arguments about abstract ideas like “choice” and “rights.”  Yes, the Forced Birth Brigade’s arguments are ridiculous and fall apart under even the most cursory scrutiny, but ultimately their arguments do not matter in the slightest.  They are not in the business of making valid and compelling arguments.  They’re making converts to their cause — one fetal picture at a time.

In a recent conversation with Palace co-blogger (and Loyal Subject™) SJ, I proffered that one reason the forced birthers are so successful is the same reason conservatism is so successful:  because the left does not, as a rule, fight fire with fire.  They will not deign to use the right’s most successful tactics, and this means they are necessarily doomed to merely defending their ground for the most part, not extending it.  SJ recently sent me a link to a piece by Valerie Tarico entitled Abortion as a Blessing, Grace, or Gift – Changing the Conversation about Reproductive Rights and Moral Values, in which Tarico notes:

The other side talks about murdering teeny, weeny babies and then mind-melds images of ultrasounds and Gerber babies with faded photos of late term abortions. And we come back by talking about privacy?? Is that like the right to commit murder in the privacy of your own home or doctor’s office? Even apart from the dubious moral equivalence, let’s be real: In the age of Facebook and Twitter, is there a female under twenty-five in who gives a rat’s patooey about privacy, let alone thinks of it as a core value?

Tarico advocates a two-pronged strategy for rolling back the right’s gains in the abortion debate: (1) confront their arguments so that Americans will come to understand the moral emptiness at their core, and (2) express the pro-choice position in positive terms.  “In other words,” she says, “in combination, we must show why ours is the more moral, more spiritual position.” Tarico is a thoughtful and compassionate writer, and her post is a very good read.  But unfortunately it suffers from the usual defects to which liberals are haplessly prone.

Anti-abortion arguments have been repeatedly confronted and shown to be empty for decades, beginning long before Roe v. Wade.  More problematically, her suggestions for “changing the conversation” ignore the reality that these enemies of women are just that:  enemies of women.  Saving precious baybeez is nothing but a pretext for enforcing subhuman breeding sow status on female persons.  This is not an opinion, it is a demonstrable fact:

The NIH reports, “It is estimated that up to half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Among those women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is about 15–20%.” [citations at the link.]

So: untold billions of pregnancies end without any deliberate actions on the part of women.  Why, then, are anti-choicers not putting even the slightest amount of time and effort into saving and re-implanting even a single one of these billions upon billions of spontaneously aborted embryos?  Aren’t they precious special snowflakes, too?  Not according to the Forced Birth Brigades, apparently.  Further, nature’s answer to the special snowflake question — or, if you prefer, God’s answer — is also a loud and clear no:  dead human embryos are a dime a dozen, and that’s being generous.  Yet nobody, on the right or anywhere else, gives them a second thought.  This is de facto proof that all of this “personhood from conception” stuff is complete and utter bullshit.

All of their arguments have been likewise soundly refuted, shown to be utterly disingenuous if not laughably ridiculous.  And yet they persist in making them, because this is about something else entirely: only when a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant is there suddenly grave and profound concern for a blastocyst.  Uh-huh.

Confronting and soundly defeating the right’s arguments has gotten us exactly nowhere.  If we really want to “change the conversation” enough to have any impact, we will have to stop pretending that we are talking about baybeez and abortions.  We are talking about controlling, enslaving and subjugating women.  Period.  We will have to stop pretending that we are having a rational debate.  As if such things can be rationally defended, or should ever be subject to debate, at all.

Talrico’s second prong — expressing the pro-choice position in positive moral terms — holds more promise.  I agree that this can and should be done with more frequency (and that platitudes like the Clintonian “safe, legal and rare” do much to undermine the moral case for abortion on demand).  Ironically, the very reason the positive case is not made more often is that pro-abortion activists and writers are endlessly bogged down with Talrico’s first prong: confronting and refuting the right’s long-dead, shallow, bankrupt arguments, and all to no avail.  We are so busy defending our ground — and losing, by the way — that we have lost both the imperative and the ability to make the case for abortion, not just for “choice.”

Today in these United States, anyone exploring the matter of abortion is inundated with images of precious little fetuses, and (fortunately) not so much with tragic stories of dead, maimed, desperate and debased women and unwanted children.  We USians are far removed, however precariously, from the blood-soaked tableau of yesteryear (although thanks to the Catholic Church many places on the globe are not).  But in this fragile interim, we have also lost something:  a sense of urgent moral outrage at the inherent injustice of forced pregnancy.  There are now generations of women and men who have no knowledge of the nightmarish world that existed in the U.S. before Roe, and certainly no living memory of it.

And therein lies the problem.

Below is a fairly ubiquitous image found in anti-choice literature, originally published in 1971 by Dr. J.C. Willke, president and founder of International Right to Life, in his book Handbook on Abortion.  It depicts a ruptured tubal pregnancy, one which hopefully had not already killed the woman who hosted it.  Regardless, in no event could any such pregnancy result in a viable fetus.  Dr. Willke describes this picture in his book as a normal fetus at six weeks gestation.  Of course a fetus at six weeks is actually the size of a BB pellet, not the larger (and extremely deadly) potential little humanoid pictured here:

tubalpregnancyruptured

Aww! I totally want a pocket-sized dead fetus in a sac to carry around with me! Don’t you want one?

When I urge employing the right’s effective tactics in the abortion debate, I do not mean lying and exaggerating as they do.  There is no need to, because all of the salient facts are on the pro-choice side.  What I mean is this:  show me a picture of a fetus?  Okay.  I’ll show you a picture of Geraldine Santoro:

geraldinesantoro

Geraldine “Gerri” Santoro, June 8, 1964 (aged 28)

That is what the Forced Birth Brigades are advocating.  We ought to be reminded of this fact at every opportunity.

Require, as the state of Texas does, that women seeking abortions be told lies about a link to breast cancer?  Fine.  Providers can also tell them the truth: abortions actually exert a strong protective effect against endometrial cancer, as well as a protective effect against colon cancer — oh and FYI against breast cancer.

Require that a woman view a fetal ultrasound before aborting?  Fine.  Offer to show her a video of a difficult labor and delivery, and/or give her the actual statistics on the safety of abortion vs. childbirth: a woman carrying a baby to term is 14 times more likely to die than a woman who has a legal abortion.

As well meaning as Tarico undoubtedly is, her approach represents several steps backward from the kind of advocacy that made Roe v. Wade possible in the first place.  It was not polite, pleasant and respectful conversation that swayed the cultural zeitgeist in favor of legalized abortion.  It was growing horror at the undeniable consequences of illegal abortion.  It was devastated lives, dead and maimed women, unwanted children.

Now more than ever it is worthwhile to take a page from Anne Nicole Gaylor’s 1975 book Abortion is a Blessing (from which this post’s title was shamelessly stolen).  Gaylor eloquently recounts in unsparing detail why she became involved in abortion access; it offers raw, first-person testimony that makes Tarico’s piece seem painfully naive regarding exactly what is at stake here and how to confront it effectively.  You can read the whole thing online here.

Anti-choicers know perfectly well that outlawing abortions doesn’t stop them, it only makes the procedure far more damaging and deadly for women who are determined to terminate anyway.  It’s just a simple fact that women with unwanted pregnancies die and suffer horrific injuries where abortion is illegal.  Interestingly, although this fact seems quite jarring today, Christian clergy and religious congregations were in the vanguard of the movement to legalize abortion.  (What would Jeezus do?  Alleviate the needless suffering and death of thousands of women, apparently.  But only in the early 1970s.  Not so much now.)

Watch this video if you still have any doubts about whether women, their families and their societies are better off without access to safe, legal abortion on demand.  Scroll up and take a good look at that photograph of Geraldine Santoro.  Picture piles of her, stacked up, Holocaust-style.  And on this day, and every day, please consider what actions you can take to ensure that picture represents the past, and not the future, for all women.

abortionisablessing

Get the lead out.

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The other day I was perusing Alternet and just generally procrastinating and being unproductive, and I clicked a link that looked mildly interesting:  An Astonishing Argument for Why Violent Crime Rates Have Dropped.  As Loyal Readers™ well know, I do not generally write about crime per se, although I do write about the militarization of domestic law enforcement, the for-profit prison-industrial complex, the war on some people who use drugs, rape and domestic violence, prison and sentencing reform, domestic terrorism, and other issues primarily from the perspective of responses to crime and violence, institutional or otherwise.  Frankly, I do not know very much about criminology.  Like most people I would guess, I had this vague idea about interrelated and seemingly intractable causes of criminal violence:  poverty, neglect, abuse, failing schools, multi-generational patterns of substance abuse and domestic violence, genetic predisposition, childhood development, poor nutrition, poor maternal health care, poor mental health care, and probably a half-dozen other contributing factors I could rattle off.

I am also aware that despite the uptick in mass shootings, violent crime has dropped off dramatically in the last several decades, all across the country.  After peaking in the early 1990s, by 2010 violent crime rates had dropped like a stone: New York City, down 75 percent.  Washington, DC, down 58 percent.  Dallas, 70 percent.  Newark, 74 percent.  Los Angeles, 78 percent.  Although no one seemed to understand why this was happening, there was no shortage of theories — and no shortage of people vying for credit, either.

After taking office in 1994, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police chief William Bratton implemented the so-called “broken windows” approach to crime reduction:  in a nutshell, the theory was that tolerating petty crimes would lead to a cycle wherein criminality would only escalate.  I remember:  police began relentlessly cracking down on subway fare cheaters, harmless drunken loiterers, and heretofore unmolested joint smokers.  I also remember a proposed initiative to bust jaywalkers like they do in Los Angeles, but New Yorkers revolted.  This was a step too far.  We’re New Yorkers, goddammit: jaywalking is our fuckin’ way of life.

And lo and behold, over the next few years violent crime in the city did indeed plummet:

In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993, rape rates had dropped 17 percent, assault 27 percent, robbery 42 percent, and murder an astonishing 49 percent. Giuliani was on his way to becoming America’s Mayor and Bratton was on the cover of Time.

Wow, amirite?  At this time I was living in Hell’s Kitchen with my ex, and saw with my own eyes the transformation of my neighborhood from a dogforsaken war zone to a thriving community, humming with small restaurants and other mom-&-pop businesses in only a few years time.  Ninth Avenue had been pocked with boarded-up storefronts, pawn shops, porn shops, gang graffiti, and rundown bars where, upon entering, it was instantly made clear to Your Humble Monarch™ that “outsiders” were not welcome.  On my block I regularly encountered sex workers exhibiting visible signs of brutal violence and prolific drug use, even during daylight hours.  Within a few years they had not exactly disappeared, but could now be glimpsed only rarely, and only in the wee hours of the morning.  Taking their former places on the sidewalks were young adults and students pursuing careers in the arts, families with young children, and tourists venturing over from Times Square for a reasonably priced pre-theatre dinner.  (My ex complained bitterly about the disappearance of so many porn shops and peep shows on 42nd Street.   “What’s next?” he lamented, “Is Giuliani going to have us all wearing uniforms now?” He could be a funny motherfucker, I’ll give him that.)

But there is a glaring problem with attributing any of this crime reduction to the dynamic duo of Giuliani and Bratton:  violent crime in the city had already peaked in 1990, and showed four years of steady decline before Giuliani took office.  More damning than that, the same downward trend was happening everywhere — not just New York.

There were other proposed explanations, including the intuitively reasonable theory that violent crime tracks economic upturns and downturns.  But like the failed Giuliani/Bratton hypothesis, it turns out that violent crime trends do not, in fact, track economic data.  Ditto for other common theories, like the 1980s crack epidemic, increased incarceration rates, larger police forces, and a provocative idea popularized in 1999 by economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame):  Roe v. Wade.  Yep: “legalized abortion, they argued, led to fewer unwanted babies, which meant fewer maladjusted and violent young men two decades later.”

None of these proposed causes is persuasively correlated, much less conclusively causal.

Which brings me back to the Alternet article I mentioned approximately forty million words ago, An Astonishing Argument for Why Violent Crime Rates Have Dropped, which in turn ultimately led me to this Kevin Drum piece in Mother Jones (on which the Alternet article is based):

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

That’s right: lead.  As in, Pb(CH2CH3)4.  As in, childhood exposure to environmental lead from paint, and much more importantly, from leaded gasoline emissions.  It turns out that childhood lead exposure rates track violent crime rates* roughly 20-years down the road, nearly perfectly:

In a 2000 paper (PDF) [US Department of Housing and Urban Development consultant and researcher Rick Nevin] concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Continued research in the intervening years by Nevin and other has only further cemented these findings.  In states where lead emissions declined more quickly or slowly, violent crime twenty years later followed the same pattern.  The relationship holds for different times, and in different countries.  Drum asked Nevin whether in all of his research he had ever found a country that didn’t fit the theory: “No,” Nevin replied. “Not one.”  This year a published paper examined the correlation at the city level:

Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the ’50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. “When they overlay them with crime maps,” he told me, “they realize they match up.”

It has long been known that lead exposure in young children is linked with lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, learning disabilities and juvenile delinquency.  All of these consequences are profoundly tragic, destroying thousands of young lives before they even begin, not to mention costing society dearly.  Yet we have not managed to muster the political will — read: the money — to undertake environmental lead abatement on the scale needed to eradicate it.  Even if it were widely accepted that (a) lead exposure is by far the greatest cause of violent crime, and (b) the costs of cleaning it up would yield returns at levels Wall Street hedge funds would envy (a case Drum makes persuasively), it is still difficult to envision meaningful action in the foreseeable future.  As I remarked to my co-bloggers this morning, I disagree with this part of Drum’s conclusion:

There’s nothing partisan about this, nothing that should appeal more to one group than another. It’s just common sense.

The prison-industrial complex — specifically the lucrative boom in private, for-profit prisons — as well as the ongoing militarization of law enforcement and related infusions of cash (virtually limitless funding for anything remotely falling under the rubric of “Homeland Security”) for weapons and other “war on terror” technologies for domestic police forces, make for quite the formidable lobby.  They are typically Republican paymasters, but spineless Democrats have meekly acquiesced to all of these endeavors, lest they be perceived as Soft on Crime.  Worse, Blue Dog Democrats (like Barack Obama) enthusiastically embrace these authoritarian and conservative policies, and in any event are owned by the same constituencies Republicans are.

Drum notes other aspects of the intractability of the status quo and the intransigence of those defending it here:

Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the ’60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously.

More generally, we all have a deep stake in affirming the power of deliberate human action. When Reyes once presented her results to a conference of police chiefs, it was, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. “They want to think that what they do on a daily basis matters,” she says. “And it does.” But it may not matter as much as they think.

That’s all true: all of these factions present serious challenges to meaningful action in their own right.  But in a culture that puts profit and power above all else (including crime prevention), with a government that serves the interests of private capital above all else, it’s the money that erects a nearly insurmountable obstacle to “common sense.”

Drum’s piece is an outstanding example of investigative journalism and competent science reporting (now there’s something you just don’t see every day…). I urge you to read the whole thing: the implications are staggering.

Also, I had a terrifying thought: if we did invest in lead abatement and violent crime plummeted over the next two decades as expected, who, exactly, will fill all those empty prison cells?

__________
*Interestingly, lead exposure also tracks teen pregnancy rates.

Does the Universe Have A Purpose? A REAL Wellness Perspective On Meaning

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Introduction: REAL Wellness

The letters R-E-A-L constitute an acronym that hints at the meaning of the phrase REAL wellness. The letters signal the nature of each of four key elements in what I consider a quality of life-focused mindset and lifestyle. These four elements -  reason/exuberance/ athleticism and liberty, are the qualities that, more than any others, nourish the best physical and mental health from early life to old age.

Of course, no matter how well each is refined by environments and the individual’s efforts – even when enhanced by favorable genetics, the quality of life realized and enjoyed will be much affected, for better or worse, by daily servings of random chance. Fate does not rule, but it steers nearly everything along the way.There is no P in REAL wellness. A pity, that. If there were, the P would represent perspective.

To get the most joys out of life, perspective is vital. In the absence of the letter in the REAL acronym, the role of perspective can be addressed under the dimension of reason.

Meaning and Purpose

A few words on perspective are in order in the context of meaning and purpose in the universe and life. It seems to me that the universe is random and quite meaningless. It also seems that this is good news, since a view of no fixed purpose or meaning for every single person (or soul) imposed from above is liberating. The alternative, and the prevailing worldview, is that you are here as a slave to a god who demands unconditional love and devotion – but if you follow the rules of his minions on earth and win divine favor, you can float about, forever, in joyful delirium – after you’re dead.Meaninglessness in a random universe is good news. It allows a sensible person to create his own (positive) meanings for a pleasant enough life.

There are many factors that, over a lifetimes, have led me to a conviction that life is meaningless.

The History of Life

Consider what we know about the cosmos and the history of life on this planet (quite a lot) and elsewhere out in space (basically nothing). Science has meteorestablished that the simplest forms of life, let alone the newcomer genus to which we belong (homo sapiens), have dwelt on our 4.6 billion year-old rock for 00.0001% of cosmic history. Put another way, no life, microbial or higher life form, existed during 99.9999% of cosmic history. Furthermore, varied forces have cast unimaginable varieties of chaos, mayhem, destruction and obliteration on the earth since it’s formation. Among these forces, most decidedly unhelpful for our alleged purpose-driven lives, are such unpleasantries as volcanoes, rapid climate change, tsunamis, earthquakes and asteroids. Especially asteroids.

If some genius in the future manages to create a machine for time travel, he or she better be careful when setting the dials. Venture back in time too far and on arrival there will be hell to pay.

Most Life Forms Are No Longer in Business

Consider just one consequence of this mayhem over eons of pre-history: From the time life finally got going until today, no fewer than 99.9% of all species that ever lived have been wiped out by ecological devastation.

Doesn’t this make you a bit suspicious of those who claim to know that human life in general and you in particular have a very special meaning in some grand scheme of things?  Isn’t that a bit egoistic? How about lunatic crazy?

Dr. Tyson Address the Question of Purpose

Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked by the religion-based Templeton Foundation if the universe has a purpose. He said, I’m not sure. He explained:

An affirmative response could not be based on empirical foundations and that this way of thinking, common to most religions, has always failed badly. Any case ever put forward for purpose has failed as a way to understand, and thereby predict, the operations of the universe and our place within it.

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life’s neurological pinnacle? … Religious people are taught that the purpose of life is to serve God … If you’re one of the 100 billion bacteria living and working in a single centimeter of your lower intestine, you might instead say that the purpose of human life is to provide you with a dark, but idyllic, anaerobic habitat of fecal matter. So in the absence of human hubris, the universe looks more and more random.

Whether you prosper or suffer, succeed or fail, the universe is indifferent. If you pray, you’re talking to yourself. No harm in that. In fact, if it gives you a warm fuzzball or two, we might favor it. But, maybe it’s best not to get carried away – be aware that such imprecations have the same impact on natural forces and events as rain dances, tossing virgins off a cliff, slaying a bull on an altar and all such tried and untrue, pitiful forms of sucking up to an indifferent cosmos that does not give a flip. You and I, all of us, are in this alone – no angels, no devils, no benign or evil spirits, no gods, no trolls to look to or run from. We’re all by ourselves, left to our devices, which aren’t so impressive.So, look on the bright side – make the most of the improbable life you have. There’s not a lot of time available. Enjoy. Suck it up and go for the gold – or whatever you find shiny, comforting, desirable or beautiful.

Good wishes and be well.

Which assault rifle would Jesus own?

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The title of this post has been shamelessly stolen from a Jeremy Scahill tweet (although I very much doubt that this sentiment originated with him).  Nevertheless, it poses an interesting question — what would the infamous fictional character of Jeezus think of the recent shooting deaths?  I know exactly what you’re thinking:  maybe we should inquire with a Baptist seminary student dropout in order to find out?

As we noted yesterday, former Arkansas governor, Fox News host and Baptist seminary student dropout Mike Huckabee opined that the Connecticut shootings took place because “we’ve systematically removed God from our schools,” adding, “Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end, and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done.”  What a flaming doucheweasel, amirite?  No, not Mike Huckabee (yeah, okay, him too), but this god character.  In response to Huckabee’s weird assertions I mused:

Now so far, I remain unconvinced by this god theory of theirs.  For one thing, it doesn’t account for the 2007 mass shooting at New Life Church in Colorado Springs.  Or the 2008 killings at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville.  And that’s to say nothing of the military bases, restaurants and workplaces, where as far as I am aware gods are generally permitted unfettered access.  But more importantly, if some god demands American schoolchildren recite mandatory prayers to it in exchange for protecting them from violent massacres, then clearly that god is a sadistic, narcissistic @$$hole — and we should do everything in our power keep it as far away from kids as possible.

Obviously the governor has now taken my critique to heart, because he no longer believes the shootings were caused by a lack of mandatory prayers in public schools.*  Nope.  He has retooled his hypothesis and determined that the Newtown massacre was the result of “tax-funded abortion pills.”

Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders. Sometimes, we even say they’re normal. And to get to where we have to abandon bed rock moral truths, then we ask “well, where was God?” And I respond that, as I see it, we’ve escorted him out of our culture and marched him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without him reflects what it’s become.

Of course our culture is so god-soaked we’re all drowning in it, but no matter:  nothing can ever be Jeezus-y enough for the Mike Huckabees of the world.  Even if American schoolchildren were forced to grovel daily in unison to a malevolent Sky Daddy like good little fascists, there would be Mike Huckabee shrieking about the need for corporal punishment, sex segregation, and a thousand other biblical rules and regulations with no proven benefits (and in fact proven harms) in reality.  And speaking of reality, that magical land where Mike Huckabee dares not tread:

In reality, there are no “government-funded abortion pills.” The Obamacare contraception mandate, which is what Huckabee is likely referring to, does not provide coverage for any abortifacients — and will actually help reduce abortion rates.

Clearly there is not enough mockery in the world for the likes of Mike Huckabee.  But the Palace will continue to contribute whatever small amount of ridicule we can to this worthwhile endeavor.

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* Incidentally, there is a whole lot of praying in public schools: ask any kid unprepared for a test.

Happy Birthday Anne Nicol Gaylor.

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Anne Nicol Gaylor, a personal hero of mine, is celebrating her 86th birthday today (we referenced her brilliant essay “What’s Wrong With the Ten Commandments?” from her 1983 book Lead Us Not Into Penn Station in our post yesterday).  She co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 1976 with her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor, which is of course impressive enough.  I met her years ago at an FFRF convention in Orlando, and it was truly an honor for me to shake her hand and say “Thanks for this.”  But what I did not know until only a few years ago was that in 1976 she also founded Women’s Medical Fund, a Wisconsin non-profit that helps pay for abortions for women who cannot afford them.  For over 35 years she has been the sole volunteer, answering every desperate call personally to the tune of some 800 women and girls every year, and writing every single check — almost 20,000 to date.

Because the U.S. citizenry generally and our state governments in particular are overrun with misogynous doucheweasels of the odious Christianist persuasion, even where women have a legal right to abortion for all intents and purposes access is severely restricted if not outright eliminated.  Wisconsin is one of the worst states in this regard: 93 percent of Wisconsin counties presently have no abortion provider.  The state has enacted pretty much the complete suite of embarrassingly stupid and hateful laws, including biased counseling required by physicians and a mandatory 24 hour delay, mandated parental consent, prohibition of private insurance coverage for abortion, insidious TRAP laws, and of course draconian prohibitions on public funding.

In a fundraising appeal in 2009 Gaylor wrote, “Of the 632 women the fund has helped so far this year, 147 were teenagers.  Of these, nine were only 13 years old, and one, not yet a teen, was just 12!”  Some quotes:

Abortion is a blessing. [source]

How presumptuous of someone to think the world is interested in a half-dozen or eight or 10 of their kids. [source]

There were many groups working for women’s rights, but none of them dealt with the root cause of women’s oppression–religion. [source]

There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.  [source]

Nothing fails like prayer. [source]

The words ‘In God WE trust’ are not only unconstitutional, they aren’t even accurate. [source]

And here is a merry seasonal one:

For a fact, the Christians stole Christmas. We don’t mind sharing it with them, but we don’t like this pretense of theirs that it is the birthday of Jesus. It is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun–Dies Natalis Invicti Solis. Christmas is a relic of sun worship. [source]

As you might imagine, over the decades she has gotten some pushback from some of the aforementioned doucheweasels.  She was discussing her 1975 book, Abortion is a Blessing, on a Philadelphia talk show when an audience member rushed her from behind and put her in a chokehold.  (I am sure Jeezus himself would have done the same!)  More recently, after this article about her work appeared in The Wisconsin State Journal, a couple of CPD cases wrote bizarre essays condemning her.  Here is an except from a piece by a doucheweasel of the Catholic Deacon species, which I have taken the liberty to edit for accuracy:

What Anne Nicol Gaylor the Catholic Church is doing is Evil.  It should not be given the legally favored status of a “Charity” under the law. It is more akin to a War crime. After all, there is an undeclared War on the Womb Women and she it is helping to fund it by writing checks. So far, 18,986 checks billions of dollars and counting! The Bizarro World of Charities that Kill and Tax Deductions to those who fund Evil must be exposed. In John Paul’s the words of someone we never heard of “Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name.”  All righty, then:  The Catholic Church is a woman-hating scourge, one that cannot possibly be eradicated from the planet soon enough. 

Then there was this hateful @$$columnist from a paper in Milwaukee who describes himself as “generally a right-wing guy” (I know, right?! whodathunkit?) and describes Gaylor as “Sweet little old Granny Blood-Money.”  He is inexplicably “astonished” and “horrified” at Gaylor’s heroic work, whereas I am astonished and horrified that people who think like this are taken seriously enough to be given columns in newspapers:

One donor last year, a California woman who’d in the past given to the anti-religion group Gaylor used to lead, forked over $20,000, based presumably on Gaylor’s fund-raising pitch, which tells of helping girls pregnant at 12 or a girl raped by her father.

Both, of course, are horrible situations, almost as horrible as being not merely pregnant but chopped into little pieces and not at 12 but at a much, much more vulnerable age. After all, being killed by a choice-armed mother is much less tragic than being raped by monstrous father, yes?

No, actually. It’s not.

Yeah, actually. It is.  This hypocrite — who it goes without saying would never support society taking his blood or using his organs against his will — also said this:

Gaylor, the paper goes on to detail in inexorably unfolding horror, founded the fund whose sole purpose is to pay for abortions. Last year alone, it paid out $162,000 or so, three-fourths of it from individual donors and a quarter from foundations that apparently do not see some humans as, well, debris incubators.

FIFY, cupcake.

Per Palace custom, we will be celebrating the birthday of Anne Nicol Gaylor today in the Grand Entry Hall near the Palace’s Shrine to PZ Myers.  Baby-back ribs, Bloody Marys and gourmet, gluten-free, consecrated communion wafers will be served.

Mystery Series Part 6: Revealed.

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The “Mystery Series” part 6 is my last post in reply to a comment by Loyal Subject™ SJ, whose question basically boils down to this:  is there any merit to the “lesser-of-two-evils” argument in favor of voting for Democrats in the upcoming elections?  The reason my answer to SJ’s question is in the form of a six part opus (and not, say, a tweet) is that the case I am making here must necessarily be a particularly well-supported and valid one, because the course of action that follows from my argument is one that very few lefties are willing to entertain, much less adopt.  Hell, I don’t even want to entertain it.  Thus this insufferable verbosity of my response can be chalked up to a careful check of my facts and reasoning to be sure that I am indeed persuaded myself.

I am.

So here it is, the official “Mystery Series” title revealed in all of its hideous grotesquery:

Why I am not voting for Barack Obama, and neither should you.

To those who are nodding your head in agreement, you can stop reading here. Fergawdsake, go do something more enjoyable than reading my (apparently endless) blathering.  To those who are angrily shaking their heads, I humbly beseech you:  take a deep breath, exhale, clear your mind, and just hear me out.  If after doing so I have still not convinced you, at least I hope to have persuaded you that my argument is sound, my intentions are honorable, and that I have not undertaken this exercise lightly or in bad faith.

It had been my intention to consider and rebut potential criticisms and objections.  Actually, many of these cannot accurately be called “potential” at all:  I have already encountered and engaged them.  One can find them splayed all across the Internet (and piling up in my inbox).  Many are variations on a theme that goes something like this:

“But the Republicans are worse!”

Yes I know that.  But the Democrats are almost exactly as bad and getting worse with every passing decade, precisely because we keep voting for them no matter what they do.

“But Republicans are worse!  Less evil is still, you know, less evil!“

Yes I know that.  But you’re still voting for evil, and evil accumulates.  Also: the Democrats are almost exactly as bad and getting worse with every passing decade, precisely because we keep voting for them no matter what they do. 

“But Republicans are worse!  And if Romney wins we will soon live in a fascist theocratic state and then we will NEVER EVER get the right wing out of power!”

[Citation needed.]  Also: the Democrats are almost exactly as bad and getting worse with every passing decade, precisely because we keep voting for them no matter what they do. 

Repeat loop, ad infinitum.

Another “argument” I’ve seen when the specter of voting for someone other than Obama is raised is this one:  “You are [CHOOSE ONE:  an ideological zealot/irrational purist/egotistical @$$hole who just wants to feel smugly superior/unrealistic idiot] with no understanding of How Things Work in the Real World.”  To which I say:  even if it were true that I am an ideological zealot/irrational purist/egotistical @$$hole who just wants to feel smugly superior and/or an unrealistic idiot, that would not negate the relevant facts or the validity of my argument; in fact that is nothing more than an ad hominem fallacy and can be dismissed as such.  As for misunderstanding How Things Work in the Real World, I would very much welcome being enlightened.  With evidence.

Then there are the “criticisms” that no one can take seriously, like “you can’t trust Mitt Romney on Social Security.“  Oh no!  I can’t?  Let’s see:

October 3, 2012 presidential debate:

MR. LEHRER: Mr. President, do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position.

Or how about the very odd argument that a President Romney will take us to war with Iran, as if Obama’s position on Iran isn’t nearly identical, or we are all living in some alternate reality where none of this ever happened:

Obama has expanded drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. He has involved the US in aggressive cyber warfare and possibly other forms of military aggression against Iran. He has established and is now looking to expand what AP calls a “covert war in North Africa”. None of this has been debated, let alone voted on, in Congress. The one time Congress voted on a significant Obama foreign policy – the war in Libya – it voted against its authorization, and Obama blithely ignored that vote and proceeded with the war as though Congressional rejection never happened.

In sum, Obama uses military force whenever he wants, wherever he wants, and without anyone’s permission.

Another tack that critics take is to helpfully inform me that even though all of this awful and profoundly evil stuff is true about Barack Obama, there are still myriad ways that he is (marginally) better than Romney.  I do appreciate the effort, but I am actually well aware of those differences.  Some of them are important and meaningful.  But I am not making the argument that Obama is as bad as Romney on every issue.  Clearly, that is not the case.

I am making this argument:

Lesser-of-two-evilism and its corollary “voting for Democrats no matter what they do” is precisely the mechanism that guarantees the Democrats rightward trend continues on its trajectory, that we will only ever have two evil choices, and that exactly as they have done in the past, both of those choices will continue to become more evil over time.

It’s a tactical argument.  It’s about breaking this toxic cycle and getting ourselves a government that is not just a little less evil, but a lot less evil.  Maybe even good.

I have supported my argument as follows:

Over the past half century both parties have drifted very far rightward. (Part 1.)

Democrats cannot be pressured to change in any meaningful way if they are in no real danger of losing elections. (Part 2.)

A specific liberal constituency recently got Congress and the president to take immediate, meaningful action on its behalf — by defecting in significant numbers to the Republican Party.  The Democrats lost the House in 2010, but in the lame duck session, Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats suddenly discovered their ability to serve the interests of voters.  Not the voters whose support never wavered, mind you.  The voters who abandoned them.  Right-wing conservatives routinely use the same tactic successfully.  (Part 3.)

President Obama and many other conservative Democrats — especially in the party’s leadership — are not just dithering on liberal policies and reforms, they are actively working against them.  (Part 4.)

Objectively, Barack Obama is just not very liberal.  He is a True Believer in economic conservatism, a Wall Street-serving corporatist, a radical and lawless executive, and an unrepentant, murderous warmonger very much like his predecessor. (Part 5.)

As fortune would have it, I very recently came across a wonderful writer, Michael J. Smith.  He has posted online many chapters of his 2005 book, Stop Me Before I Vote Again, which I cannot recommend to you highly enough.  (He is also an excellent and prolific blogger.)  In chapter 2 of his book, Smith describes the forces that ensure the rightward trajectory of our political parties as analogous to a ratchet:  it only ever works in one direction.

The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties — Republicans and Democrats — play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation.

The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.

The Democrats’ role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don’t resist the rightward movement — they let it happen — but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.

Here’s how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes.

I’ll just quote Mr. Smith liberally (with his kind permission) and let him do the rest of my work for me here:

The system operates in one direction only; and it is crucial for Democratic voters to understand that their “lesser evil” votes are actively promoting this process, not retarding it.

…

Absent some countervailing pressure from what we’ll call, for short, the Left, it’s a foregone conclusion that the political system will evolve in a way that responds to the desires of the wealthy and powerful. Over time, the Democratic Party has assumed the role of ensuring that the countervailing pressure from the Left doesn’t happen. The party contains and neutralizes the Left, or what there is of it. Left voters are supposed to support the Democrat, come what may — and it’s amazing how many of us have internalized this supposed obligation — but they are not allowed to have any influence on the party’s policies.

…

[T]hat’s what Democrats do. They may run to the left, or even govern to the left, if they have to; but they govern to the right whenever they can, because they want to.  If you don’t hold their feet to the fire every minute, they’ll sell you down the river every time.

[A] big part of the problem is the way the Democratic Party soaks up the energies of people who might otherwise be part of the environmental movement, or the anti-war movement, or the anti-globalization movement, or a band of hardy urban guerrillas spray-painting the lenses of surveillance cameras. (I strongly approve of this kind of thing but I’m a little old for it myself.)

…

The Democratic Party is not only a necropolis where activists decay into bureaucrats; it’s also a toxic growth poisoning the soil where activism grows — the crabgrass or milfoil that crowds out all the other species and devours all the nutrients. It is not merely an alternative to activism; it is the enemy of activism, and thus the enemy of any politics worthy of the name — by which I mean politics that goes beyond an empty, meaningless rivalry between two white-collar street gangs for the spoils of office.

…

[V]ote for the Green anytime the Democrat isn’t up to snuff, even if the Republican is a wild-eyed berserker who wants to pave the world. It’ll take a few more losses like Gore’s in Florida in 2000 before the Democrats will get the message – if then — and you have to be willing to stay the course until they do get it.  Just remember that the only difference between a pave-the-world Republican and an “environmentalist” Democrat is – well, none, really; the Republican means what he says, but the Democrat means what the Republican says, too.

…

[T]he only thing that will make the Democrats change is the prospect of annihilation if they don’t. And the only way to raise that specter before their eyes is for their captive constituencies to desert them in droves. As long as they think you have nowhere else to go, they will take you for granted. And the only way to convince them you have somewhere else to go is… to go there.

…

Don’t worry so much about the next four years; they’re going to be a disaster no matter who gets into the White House. Face that fact squarely, keep a bag packed and your passport handy by way of preparation for the next President, and when you vote, think ahead a little more.

A few final thoughts:

Evil is cumulative.  Once seized, tyrannical powers are never willingly relinquished by governments.  And Barack Obama has put a bipartisan imprimatur on so many government evils:  targeting American citizens for assassination on the president’s word alone without due process or oversight, entrenching for-profit healthcare, engaging in counterproductive wars not sanctioned by Congress (as required by the Constitution), expanding warrantless spying on innocent citizens, militarizing the country’s largest police force in conjunction with the CIA, expanding the Bush abomination known as the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, eviscerating the rule of law by refusing to prosecute elite lawbreakers in the prior administration or on Wall Street, and, coming soon to a senior citizen near you, cutting Social Security benefits.  This president has done more to legitimize neoconservative policies and make them permanent features of our government than the neocons themselves ever could have.

There are — or ought to be — clear lines drawn, on both principle and practical grounds, that Democratic candidates cannot cross and expect the support of liberals.  We can of course differ on precisely where those lines should be drawn.  (illegal and counterproductive wars? presidential kill lists? for-profit health care? Social Security “reform”?)  But if there really are no lines that cannot be crossed, then it means exactly nothing to be a liberal.

Or, you know, fuck it.  We can all just keep voting for “less evil,” and continue to scratch our heads in bewilderment as to why our government is evil and corrupted.

I’m heading back to New York so that I can vote tomorrow.  For Jill Stein.

Palace service interruption.

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Over the past week or so, I’ve been doggedly working on a few half-assed rants that at this moment remain unfinished.  It’s not “writers block” exactly.  It’s more like I find myself wrestling with an issue — which is not at all unusual — but somehow in my efforts to write something approximating a clear and accurate picture (with good fact citations) inorder to infotain my Many Tens of Loyal Readers™, I would instead find myself lost, off in the mists and deep in the woods somewhere, and frustrated with the (my?) lack of clarity and inability to see how all of the pieces fit together.  Normally the more I read about and research an issue the clearer the picture becomes to me, even though paradoxically it also becomes much more nuanced and complex at the same time.  You know: more like actual reality.  (We’re not Fox News, here, people: idiots need not apply.  Well, except for positions in the Palace Kitchen, where idiocy is a job requirement.)

But lately this just isn’t the case; I get bogged down and frustrated.  (Sure, I’ve had some stressful shit going on recently.  Maybe that’s it.)  Anyway, I’ve saved these crappy draft posts and will look at them with fresh eyes this week, hoping that where I went awry will instantly jump out at me, and my obliging neurons will immediately serve up an easy and obvious fix.  Or, alternatively, I’ll realize what a hopeless mess they truly are and banish them to oblivion, for the good of all concerned.  Fortunately, while I have been wandering around in the weeds and muck the denizens of the internet have graciously provided some clarity of their own as to exactly, precisely what it is they desire when they click on a link to the Palace.  Here are the top searches this past week that led ‘netizens to our fabulous gates:

  • cake man raven red velvet cake recipe
  • muscle girl rape
  • flag of ecuador to color
  • prayers to god

Now as loyal readers well know, we truly aspire to be a full-service Palace.  That is, we endeavor to provide our guests with anything and everything their hearts desire — provided, of course, that it coincides exactly 100% with whatever it is we feel like doing.  But just as one cannot be all things to all people, one’s Palace cannot be, either.  We must draw some lines, determine some priorities, maintain some standards, and enforce some goddamn boundaries—all at our capricious whim.  To give you some idea of the shape such whims tend to take, witness our sincere efforts to meet the needs of our new Palace readers:

closeup slice

yum.

cake man raven red velvet cake recipe:  A perennial favorite search term that leads directly to Iris the Idiot’s Kitchen and an insufferably long-winded, bloviating post explaining in excruciating detail and with plenty of pictures how to make the best goddamn red velvet cake known to humankind thus far.  (Srsly.)

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muscle girl rape:   FUCK.  OFF.  NOW.

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flag of ecuador to color:  Here you go.  I just ran a picture of the bright and beautiful flag of Ecuador through a few filters, and hope that the result will suffice for all of your flag-of-ecuador coloring needs.  (It lost some of the fine detail in the process, but as you apparently prefer to work in the crayon medium, this is probably a good thing.)

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prayers to god:  Hmmm.  Okay, this is a tough one—it’s been a while.  Let’s see:

Dear Jeezus:  If you wanted us to worship you, how come you won’t even bother to do us the favor of existing?  Anxiously awaiting your response.  Thanks in advance.  Oh!  I almost forgot:  Amen.  Also:  Hallelujah!  And…um…peace be upon you.  P.S., Hey Jeezuz?  Why are so many followers of you and your dad such epic, ginourmous doucheweasels?  Also, what’s up with all the gay-hatin’?  I mean, you had two dads, and yet you supposedly turned out all right.
: |

Dear Vishnu:  Congratulations!  You are totally kicking Christ’s ass!  As it is a tenet of my faith that it is generally prudent to, you know, “go with a winner,” I am hereby praying to inform you that I am now your devoted follower… at least until some other god comes along and kicks your ass, obviously.  (I’d keep an eye on that Thor if I were you.  He is a badass.)

Dear Aphrodite:  I do apologize to your Goddessishness, but right now all I can think of are the lyrics to the Frank Sinatra song Fly Me to the Moon:

Fly me to the moon
and let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
on Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby kiss me

Fill my heart with song
and let me sing for ever more
You are all I long for
all I worship and adore
In other words, please be true
In other words, I love you

Welcome, new readers!  (Except for you muscle girl rape fans. You’re all probably a bunch of conservatives anyway. Go away and stay away. )