Some people say it's foolish to worry about soulless creatures overtaking the earth and devouring our brains.
I say they've already won.
Blog Credo
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
I just finished Alden Bell's novel The Reapers Are The Angels. It was quite good.
The tagline was that it was Harper Lee mixed with Cormac McCarthy and George Romero and that's fairly accurate. The writing always verged on purple, but never felt quite too overblown. It was a spare novel at 225 quick pages, which might have accounted for the writing not getting to be too much.
The basic story is of a 16 or so year old girl named Temple who grows up after the zombie apocalypse. She leaves a sanctuary in the first chapter and commences to find a group of survivors. She kills one who tries to rape her and the dead man's brother tracks her across the wasteland.
For one thing, it reinforces a rule I discovered about zombie lit: The stories are either well written and compelling OR they paint a realistic picture of the undead world. There were too many functioning gas stations and power grids in the novel for me. What was missing was that sense of large areas of wasteland where mankind had slipped below the technological threshold of electrical power and combustion engines.
Aside from that, it was very, very good. I would be shocked if the film rights were still out there. It reads and plays very much like a movie, but very much better written.
Still, a very good book if you like Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O'Connor but with more zombies.
Another term has come to a close. The exams are graded. The comments are written. The meetings are adjourned.
It gets dark at 4:30, so it's not all fun and games, but I actually began work on the my honey-do list today fixing the insulation under the sun room. Nasty, dirty work that. Next it's on to re-painting the water damage from last winter (now that the roof is fixed) and reading The Reapers Are The Angels.
Frankly, presents are overrated. Just having the gift of time is wonderful enough.
The Gingrich bloom is withering, apparently, as the GOP establishment throws down on him. His poll numbers are slipping. He's still the putative front runner, but honestly at this point what does it matter?
The pundits are already looking around at Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman to see if they could be the next Not Mitt. Ron Paul? He spent the debate very sanely explaining why we should not invade Iran. Plus, he wants to bring back the gold standard. The neo-cons and the Big Money boys will squash him like a bug.
The only reason I'm a Democrat is because the GOP is a mental illness. Seriously, you have two huge advantages as a party. First, you really do represent the needs and issues of the 99%. Second, you are creators and protectors of Medicare and Social Security.
Within a 24 hour day, you manage to undermine both.
Somewhere back in our family trees, I'm related to these guys.
That video never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Thing One was about the same age as that kid when I first saw it, and their name is Hawes for crying out loud.
Today we finally end the Iraq war. In the course of an almost nine year war, 4487 American service members died and 32,226 were wounded. The collateral damage to the lives of literally countless others will take decades to fully comprehend. The financial cost of the war is about $1,000,000,000,000. When you start to count that high, who really knows. Three quarters of a billion were directly poured into Iraq, at the very least. How many Iraqis died? No one really knows. How messed up is that?
What was accomplished? Iraq got rid of a dictator. Even money says that they will have one again in the near future, although the Arab Spring suggests that maybe they won't or that it won't last long. But unlike Egypt or Tunisia, Iraq has been traumatized by almost a decade of relentless violence and before that 15 years of devastating sanctions. The country of Iraq is fundamentally messed up, and we did a lot of it. As the Moustache of Understanding put it, we "took some little country and threw it up against a wall just to show we could". And we broke the hell out of it and killed a lot of people - theirs and ours - to do it.
USA! USA! USA!
Pardon the expression, but you can't unshit the bed. Obama did as well as he could to get us out of there, and if he's re-elected I trust he will draw us out of the other, longer quagmire in Afghanistan. It's worth remembering that no single event more contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union than their long misadventure in Afghanistan. Remember, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."
As we look at our weak economy, think of what a trillion dollars would have bought here. Think of the schools and public spaces refurbished. Think of the smooth highways and fast rail. Think of the public wi-fi and gleaming new power grid. Think of wind farms and solar farms.
Think of that little boy crying in that video.
Vietnam happened because people in Washington just let us drift into a situation without giving it the proper sort of thought. Kennedy and Johnson thought too much about the domestic politics of looking soft on Communism. Iraq happened because people in Washington directly took us unto a situation without giving it the proper sort of thought. Ask Eric Shinseki, who did give it the proper sort of thought and got fired for it.
If it hadn't been for Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson would be ranked amongst our greatest president. Tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese would be alive today. But the Bush Team had the lessons of Vietnam to call upon, but they insisted on their ability to "create their own reality".
It is difficult to mark a more egregious act of folly in my lifetime.
I hope - and I know this sounds vindictive and I don't care - I hope that Bush and the rest of his cronies are visited in their dreams by the relentless ghosts of the people whose lives they destroyed. I hope they age prematurely under the crushing burden of knowing they sent so many people to early graves, that their decisions were ultimately no different than if they had loaded the gun, put it against someone's head and pulled the trigger themselves.
They are stupid and evil people, and if we lived in a just world, they would be in prison for their crimes.
But at least we're closer to a day when videos like the one above won't be so common.
Peace on earth, goodwill towards those with whom God is pleased. And that can't possibly include Bush, Cheney and the rest of the war criminals who ran our country for eight years.
Charlie Pierce takes on one of the most pernicious tactics of the modern GOP: Voter suppression. Voter suppression is done under the guise of preventing voting fraud, which - as far as anyone has been able to determine despite massive amount of study - DOES NOT OCCUR on anything like scale. Someone somewhere probably voted twice, but no one has pointed to a trend or a movement.
So to solve a problem that doesn't exist, the GOP has reinstituted poll taxes. Just read the thing.
There is something in the human brain that craves structure. It's why we look at the billowing clouds of the towers on 9/11 and see Satan's face or Jesus's face on a waffle. It's why we create stories like the Kennedy assassination conspiracies or Area 51.
We need story to make sense of a patternless world.
And Romney's story increasingly is a sucky one. He's the rich kid who expects things to be given to him. He gets petulant when challenged, even by Fox News. He's Pete Du Pont or Steve Forbes with better hair and a killer jawline.
And while the "establishment" can overlook this, voters can't.
When I talk to young teachers, I tell them that there is no substitute in the classroom for authenticity. You have to create a classroom persona that is authentic to you. You are a performer, but it has to be a genuine performance.
Politics is the same way. And Romney's persona is stuck to him. His efforts to change that only make him look inauthentic.
Nobody bets $10,000. You either bet $10 or you bet $10,000,000 in that situation. Either of those and what you're really saying is, "Put your money where your mouth is." But $10,000 from a guy who spends that much on his hair suggests that he really wanted to make a bet for that amount. Now of course he's a Mormon and doesn't gamble, so his defense was that he made up a number that sounded large. But $10,000 is an amount that a rich person thinks a middle class person thinks is a big number. It manages to show him as both a rich, privileged prig and a patronizing prick.
Maybe it's just because I don't want to start writing class comments, but I found the threads over at Balloon Juice really interesting this morning.
One was a question of how far off base Gingrich was in saying that the Palestinians are a "made up people". There was a fair amount of lefty caterwauling about imperialism and so on, but a few commentators were making some important points.
Basically, my feeling is that if we use the words the way social scientists define them, there is no Palestinian "ethnicity". Palestinians are ethnically Arab. You are born Arab, it's ascribed to you, not chosen. A group of Arabs with long historical ties to the former Roman province of Palestine have taken the national identity of Palestinians. In that sense, Gingrich is right. Palestinians are a made up group. But all national groups are "made up". All national groups create for themselves a narrative of their national existence, usually tied to place and ethnicity. There is a great deal of debate, for instance, as to whether there is a single American nationality, or simply American citizenship.
And it's citizenship that the Palestinians are trying to get. Citizenship - or membership in a state - is what is being denied them.
The second thread was about whether or not the filibustering of executive branch appointees could be ruled unconstitutional. "Advice and consent" does not describe what the Senate is doing now. They are explicitly refusing to have a vote on whether or not to confirm Cordray to the CFPB in order to extort changes in established law.
I guess I can see some, small merit in preserving the filibuster for lifetime judicial appointments, especially at the Supreme and Circuit court level. But filibustering executive appointments seems a rampant abuse of the system and should be challenged in courts.
Right now, I'm basking in the glow of my team, the Falcons, making a dramatic comeback against a team they should not have been trailing. The "Any Given Sunday" phenomenon works really well.
Certainly in the NBA or the majors, no team is expected to win everyday. No problem, get'em tomorrow. There are 162 games in a major league season. Unless your Boston or Atlanta *sigh* any one game doesn't matter. But with only 16 games, every NFL game is potentially huge. Denver is riding a QB who throws like a cricket bowler because he has a great defense Jesus loves him. But every game of the Tebow era was one play from disaster. The Patriots won be a touchdown against the hapless Redskins. New Orleans and Houston barely survived their games. OK, the Packers are beating the snot out of the Raiders, but for the most part, it really is any given Sunday out there.
Two things to watch for (not that I'll be watching).
First, will Romney got all Pawlenty on us, or will he go as hard after Gingrich as his surrogate have started doing?
Second, Gingrich is, frankly, playing the attacks brilliantly. He's laying down Reagan's Eleventh Commandment and trying to be the bigger man. Given that his main problem is impetuousness and meanness, what better way to say, "Hey, I'm a new Newt, bathed in the blood of the lamb." If he maintains his cool while Romney loses his, game over.
