the biggest problem

What's the biggest problem this country faces going forward? The deficit? Not even.

How about gay gun abortion control? D'ya think?

Global climate change? You're getting closer, but that's a global problem, and there's an even bigger one peculiar to us.

The blood-sucking monster in the living room no one even wants to acknowledge the existence of is the simple fact that our economy cannot exist in its present form unless the country is at war or seriously preparing for it.

Eisenhower was the first and only president to understand the full implications of this, and issued an alarm after spending eight years doing nothing to stop it.

This has been the situation for 65 years, since 1948. It's so wrong on so many levels, including strategically, yet we refuse to acknowledge we've become a threat to the peace and safety of the world, and a danger to ourselves as a result.

It will take well over a generation to dismantle the war machine, and we don't seem to be in any big hurry to start. Who in Congress other than Barbara Lee is able to admit the depth of the problem?

That's the main reason prospects for this country don't look so good going forward. As long as we deny who we are, we'll be dealing with major, major difficulties just getting through life. 

gaybortion

It's not done yet. Not until the solemn ritual of the Grand Bargain is performed.

Once Grand Bargain comes, Obama & Boehner & McConnell will go bury the symbolic hatchet in the rose garden. 'Then, taking a real political risk by mixing metaphors, the three will take the bull by the tail and look him in the eye.

I don't have to tell you what comes next. An era peaceful cooperation will begin.

It sounds horrible.

Sure I was glad to see the Romneybot 2.0 break down by the roadside during the campaign, emitting strange beeps and buzzing weakly. The only thing that would have improved that scene would have been Obama dropping out, and then we'd have nobody for president.

Better to travel on alone than with a fool for a companion (Dhammapada)

Sure, when the issue is gun control, abortion, gay marriage, and any social veschsh that has no impact on the bottom line, the centrists check out OK. What the Obots and Obamaniacs seem to be missing is that that's part of the con.

God save us from the centrist democrats, who have never been right about anything ever that has anything to do with economics, not even one time. 

That's because they're bankrolled and run from Wall Street. Centrist Democrats are tools.

At least the Repus are robbers of the workers naturally. I'd rather deal with that than with some con man who talks to me sweetly as he picks my pocket.

These are radical times; the last thing we need is Aleksandr Kerensky going around "compromising" with everybody. Compromising with banks is a good way to go broke.

Compromise this, Obama. It's what you get for dealing with terrorists.

the eek conomy

A synopsis of Reuters's weekly economic analysis sums it up nicely:

* Brent crude oil futures lowest since August

* U.S. jobs figures disappoint markets

* Biggest weekly drop in Brent since June

* Oil prices "comfortable" - OPEC

Welcome to Stag Nation, where the oil companies' expectations of future gasoline consumption just tanked, thanks to our stillborn "recovery." 

Real recovery would include not only rising employment, but also a  recovery of morale and nerve. To get there, we're going to have to create some jobs in infrastructure maintenance and new construction. That would be the natural place to push, since our bridges, water mains, and sewer lines are crumbling. 

Instead, we get austerity in the form of the big C-quester, and now Obama proposing social security cuts. When everything the government does to "help" makes things worse, you have to wonder: would total laissez-faire be better than this?

But with the price of Brent crude descending rapidly toward $100, because gasoline consumption is either flatlining or falling, the bad news has silver linings: fewer greenhouse gases and lower gasoline prices.

bananavocadorange

Our lives have changed a lot recently, and by "recently" I mean in the last 10 thousand years.

Now, consider your gut. We may be using the drivethru window to pick up a pizza and large sodas all around, but just because we decided to come down from the trees doesn't mean our guts automatically evolved to accommodate our new lifestyles.

In evolutionary terms, our guts are still paleolithic and preagricultural. If we lived for the sake of our intestines, we'd     go back to swinging from branch to branch, foraging for nuts, seeds, and  fruits, occasionally going to ground for roots, berries, and grains.


That's one reason why the mainstay of my diet for the past few years has been these three fruits.

Oranges, bananas, and avocados are all teeming with essential nutrients. The 70 milligrams of vitamin C in a medium-size orange is its main attribute, and it contains 237 mg of potassium as well. Bananas have even more potassium, 422 mg, but the mighty avocado seems to be the king of fruits, containing 975 mg of potassium and significant amounts of niacin, pantothenic acid, vitamin A, and B vitamins in addition to four grams of protein.

Archie Bunker used to complain that "There's nothing in California but fruits and nuts." Good observation, but he never wondered why people there tend to look so healthy.

the un threat

Juan Cole asks why all the war talk in DC is always about Iran, but when the subject of N Korea comes up our establishment politicians say "Oh, they won't do anything."

www.juancole.com/2013/04/korea-threat-ab...

For the record, the Supremo Queso Grande of Iran has said when asked that Iran will not build a bomb because their religion forbids it, as it entails the potential destruction of innocent civilians.

Christianity should be so unambiguous, but Onward Christian Soldiers.

Then Cole produces this chart:

cover art

I've always liked everything about this cover art, but can't find the artiste's name.

Dumpster Juice was (is?) an LA garage band, metallers.

This cd appeared almost 20 years ago, in 1994. I forget why my daughter bought it for me. I lost it along the way, but it's still available used on Amazon.

that's what i like about the south, part 4

The North Carolina legislature is considering a measure that would authorize establishing a state religion.

Here it is:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

The thing is, there's no doubt but what the majority of North Carolinians would want that very thing.

And in this case they might get a surprise. Nowhere does it say in the proposed legislation or in the entire Huffpo article (though I might have missed it) the word "Christian."

But assuming that's what they want, there's two approaches the US could take here.

First, we have to answer the question whether states are able under the Constitution to establish state religions. The First Amendment says only that the US government may not. And actually, the Constitution says remarkably little about what the states may or may not do. There's Amendment X, and some stuff in Articles V and VI. Did I skip anything?

Also, there's the tradition of the states following the lead of the national government in all things, kind of like mini-feds. But that's just a tradition.

I have no doubt the US government could interpret the first amendment as applying to every state and make it stick. But do we want to do that?
Why don't we just let them be who they are? 

"Who they are" will remain undefined here, at least for now. And that's what I like about the south.

What about Bob?

Before our 10-year observances of Dick and Dubya's not-so-excellent adventure in Iraq fade completely, we need to recall the latter days of Baghdad Bob's career, and count up all the things he was right about.

We laughed at the time, because his ridiculous assertions about the invasion and outcome were grist for the comedy mill. However, hindsight is always 20/20, and a lot of the things Bob said that were laughed at here turned out to be...well, judge for yourself.  

(From the Atlantic:
www.theatlantic.com/international/archiv...)

"The crook Rumsfeld said yesterday that they are hunting mass destruction weapons in Baghdad and Tikrit, and yesterday I replied to that cheap lie. I assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place."

"The decisive battle is throughout Iraq. They do not know in what mud they are wading. We are in our country, among our kith and kin. ...Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege."

"The simple fact is this: they are foreigners inside a country which has rejected them. Therefore, these foreigners, wherever they go or travel, they will be rained down with bullets from everyone."

Bob's most famous and oft-quoted comment, "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds  on the gates of Baghdad," was so far off the truth few bothered to even ridicule it, but 10 years later military suicide is no laughing matter.

Maybe we should have listened a little closer to our old friend and buddy, Baghdad Bob. 

lizard brain

A recent poll found that four percent of American voters believe shape shifting humanoid lizards rule the world.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/04/02/poll-top-conspiracy-theories-revealed/

oligarchs among the journals

Via Atrios, Dean Baker reports from the intersection of politics and economics:

There are few areas where the corruption of the national media is more apparent than in its treatment of Social Security. Most of the elite media have made it clear in both their opinion and news pages that they want to see benefits cut. In keeping with this position they highlight the views of political figures who push cuts to the program, treating them as responsible, while those who oppose cuts are ignored or mocked.

This pattern of coverage was clearly on display last weekend. Both the New York Times and Washington Post decided to ignore the Senate's passage by voice vote of the Sanders Amendment. This was an amendment to the budget put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that puts the Senate on record as opposing the switch to the chained CPI as the basis for the annual Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA).

Switching the basis for the COLA to the chained CPI is one of the most beloved policies of the Washington elite. The idea is that it would reduce scheduled benefits for retirees by 0.3 percentage points annually.

That about says it all, except, like Atrios, I would replace the word "elite" with "oligarchy" wherever it appears.

Because this raises the question -- begs the question, really -- whose country is this anyway? Who rules here? 

The US today is not a democracy, but an oligarchy, which intends to accrue all wealth and power to itself. Yet we have the legal means to take our country back from them, because by law this is a democratic republic. So when will we?

ashley: the sliming

Ashley Judd, the movie star, has decided not to run for the Senate, at least not this year. Too bad. Her statement is at her web site (ashleyjudd.com), but she doesn't say much about the reasons why she dropped out.

I don't know what all was behind her decision. When she told a private dinner full of supporters that she'd been raped twice, and was tough enough because of that to handle Mitch McConneell, and word of that got out, do you think that had something to do with it?

The problem is she never said any such thing.

www.first-draft.com/2013/04/how-kentucky...

Judd told a group of supporters at a private dinner in Louisville, “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.” The actress’ apparent flippant comparison of a political campaign to sexual assault spread like ebola across the intenet, leading some to classify Judd as the Democratic version of Todd Akin.The problem is, it never happened.

I was at that dinner and never heard her say anything remotely like that. What’s more, such a statement would have been completely inconsistent with the way I’ve heard Ashley discuss her horrifying experiences as the youthful victim of sexual assault—how they defined her in adulthood; how they propelled her to champion women’s empowerment across the globe.

The lie was spread anonymously, of course.

This is typical; you have a dangerous opponent you need to take down. First, you scrutinize his or her personal history, looking for dirt you can use. If you don't find anything, you make shit up.

And yeah, I know Democrats do it too. But they're not nearly as good at it as the Repus, who get a lot of practice.

This is a real shame, considering that Judd's politics are as attractive and sexy compared to McConnell's as her face and body are, compared to his.
 

grupo fez

The Feztones, that hot new musical sensation that's sweeping the nation (of Morocco) is on tour in Mali this week, promoting their new Malian-themed CD, "Timbuktunes."

Their first album, "Warm and Fezzy," went palm wine in Morocco --  the equivalent of platinum.

the green lady

A while back I saw something in the news about a middle school where the administrators supposedly told the kids to call their Easter dance something else, because Easter is a Christian holiday and the school and religion are spoze to be the twain that never meet, & etc.

I have no idea if it was true or not, and it might have been from one of those stupid emails that get forwarded around u no the ones. Maybe some body got hoaxed by the Onion.

Whatever the case, what I find ironic in all this flapdoodle, plus in the fact that Easter is the ultimate Christian holy day, that it's the only holiday whose name remains an echo of paganism, and our pagan ancestors. In fact, Eostre was a beautiful Teutonic dawn goddess and great mother, the green lady, or in Latin, Primavera.

Furthermore, our method of determining the date of Easter is rooted in paganism, and as you'll recall, uses the full moon as a calendar marker. And since the moon waxes full on various dates, so then does the date of Easter which derives from it.

Eostre's totem animal is the fertile bunny, and her talisman the egg.

When Eostre was the ruler of springtime instead of Jesus there were 13 months, not 12. This is why, in Walter Scott's version of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood and his men sang "How many months be there in the year? There be 13 I say..." And it works out, too, because 13 months X 4 weeks = 52 weeks.

exercise & diet

We constantly hear about the importance of these things, so much so that we don't really absorb the message any more. But the fact remains, and I can personally confirm the truth of it, good diet and appropriate exercise will largely determine a person's quality of life.

This goes a lot farther than simply not smoking or not drinking to excess. Abstaining from what's harmful is one thing; proactively pursuing beneficial habits is another. They go together, like yin and yang.

My latest dietary reform is eliminating cheese, which I once believed essential to life, you know, as in "Give us this day our daily bread, and a little cheese to put on it if you don't mind." But my nutritionist-naturopathic doctor harangued an audience recently with sufficient passion to convince me I was in denial about this delicious but harmful substance, which is the main ingredient in pizza and found melted ubiquitously in processed food (e,g, Hot Pockets™).

Of course, with the cheese gone I eat more of the other stuff I was already eating, fresh produce, rice, eggs and bread, oats, etc. (OK, small confession here, Parmesan is still on the menu -- a litttle bit grated up and sprinkled on a salad is good , and it's the slimmest cheese.) I've lost a little weight, which I was ready to do, and am now at optimum poundage -- 128 -- on a little guy's slight frame, slender but developed.

That combined with the cardio workout-weight training have lifted my physical well-being another notch, and I'm wondering how far this feeling better stuff can go.

How about you, dear reader? How good do you think you could feel?

sold-out & jiggly

Like Chris Hedges, I can't identify the precise moment when TV news died. I know it began to die the first time a talking head news reader said "We'll be right back after these messages."

All news is now celebrity news. Barack Obama and John Boehner are celebrities who don't always get along, like Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks. War is like a football game, and reporting on Afghanistan concentrates on whether we should "pull out now" or "hang in there and get the the job done," which makes it sound a lot like sex.

Although it's hard to fix the exact moment TV news died, the excommunication of Phil Donahue in 2003, along with the exorcism of Bill Moyers at PBS, signaled there was a corpse in the room.

"The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television," Chris Hedges groans, "who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script." So Brian Williams reads only those stories he knows his bosses at the General Electric  corporation, one of the biggest war profiteers incidentally, would approve. Even more importantly, he omits those stories he knows they wouldn't want people to know about.

So if Bill Kristol and the rest of the superhuman crew at Fox News were totally wrong about the Iraq War, and if Tommy Friedman was totally full of shit about the triumph of corporate-driven global prosperity, why are people still buying that stuff? For the simple reason that when you turn on TV nooze, that's all there is -- some guy in a suit and his bottle-blonde-with-a-rack sidekick peddling "the ideology of the corporate state," as Hedges puts it.

It's just like going to Safeway; people go there and buy too much fat and too much sugar and too much salt because that's what's mostly available and always on sale. Then they go home and while eating their Tater-Tot™ casseroles and Sarah Lee™ pound cakes, are simultaneously fed bullshit by GE, Microsoft, Pfizer, and the Boeing Company.

I've got to the point now where I don't own a TV, don't want one, and write my own news, using sources like Chris Hedges, al-Jazeera, and my two eyes, one of which has a cataract that needs to come out, for which I have a doctor's appointment today.

Because you don't know the real happs if you can't see things clearly.

world-wide evolution

We're living through an era of immense and rapid social change. Consider that a time line like the one at left showing the acceptance of gay marriage is considerably steeper than this.

This has been going on for some time, but now it's picking up speed. Governments have to rush to catch up with changes that have already occurred in fact if not in law, revising old laws, throwing some out, writing some news ones, in order to reflect the changing nature of social relationships, drug policy, and any other social phenomenon you can name.

Some institutions lag behind. Mid-East governments struggle to suppress 20th-century political realities, and the Catholic Church refuses to accommodate modern social realities as it timidly approaches 1800 in its attitudes.

At this poiint, laggers lag at their own peril.

ruling-class prerogatives

The president of Mexico's brother-in-law, who happens to be governor of the city-state they call the Federal District, is in trouble for killing a prisoner.

The gov had Gabriel Hernandez, a rebel commander, pulled from his cell, shot, and set on fire. All of this, according to the NY Times account, while he was high on weed.

He then went to another prison, but they refused to hand over anyone for him to kill at that place. So he got pissed and went and got drunk.

Later that night he was arrested in a whorehouse. It's all in a day's work for a busy administrator.

These things happened 100 years ago today, and I found this item at the wonderful blog "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It." Enrique Zepeda, the brother-in-law of the cruel fascist dictator Victoriano Huerta (pictured) was acquitted in November of charges stemming from this incident due to temporary insanity. After all, he had been smoking those killer buds.

Also 100 years ago today marked the passing of May C. Brooks, the last surviving member of the Laura Keene Company, who were performing "My American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in D.C. the night Lincoln was shot. (From the same source.)

liberal reflex

Put me down as in favor of gay abortion. And anything having to do with marijuana.

I don't even need to know the particulars. I vote yes.

And I also vote not to nuke Iran or N Korea or anybody else, especially the gay baby whales.