wallpaper Poor, Delicate Flowers

wallpaper This Modern World. BTW, those cross-hairs on Palin's map? Turns out they were meant to represent "survey marks." Hoocoodanode? To which @tbogg commented, "Johnny Cash once surveyed a man in Reno just to watch him die." Another fine quote from the same account came down the pipe just a little while ago: "Compromise in DC: conservatives will tone down the rhetoric and liberals will agree to not be so whiny when they get shot"

wallpaper "Even More Tragic"

wallpaper In my previous post on the Arizona shootings, I quoted a comment I had received, but didn't really discuss how thoroughly it shocked and horrified me, leaving readers to find my problem for themselves. After considering this over the last day, I think that it is central to the issue of how mainstream the hateful, eliminationist rhetoric has become, and I want to revisit it. So here's the comment:

"It is a very tragic event. Even more tragic is to blame Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. I do not believe for one second that they endorse democrats being murdered. How stupid to think so. I do not like democratic ideas but I do not want one single democrat to ever be murdered!!!!"

Now think about that. Six people are dead. A congressional representative faces an uncertain future- the damage to her brain was much worse than I imagined a person might survive. The bullet traveled from the back to the front of her left lobe; this was not just a skull-grazing injury. One of the dead was a nine-year-old girl, pictured above, Christina Taylor Green, whose birthday was September 11, 2001. She had been featured in a book named "Faces of Hope," which contained portraits of 50 children, one from each state, born on that fateful day. She was interested in politics as a solution to human and social problems, and was taken to meet Giffords by a neighbor who thought she would enjoy the experience. Ironically, the levels of paranoia and fear whipped up by a certain side of the US political spectrum in the aftermath of her birth date have, without any real doubt, played some role- potentially small, possibly large, we simply don't know yet- in ending this child's life. And that of five others.

So, responding to my comment linking this paranoia, hateful rhetoric, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and my own anger and despair at yesterday's events, the commenter acknowledges that it was indeed a tragedy. Then proceeds to say, "Even more tragic is to blame Sarah Palin and the Tea Party." "Even MORE tragic?" Seriously?

MORE tragic that an absolute nobody blogger/facebooker/twitterer makes the exactly same connections as thousands of others who write and go public on the web? MORE tragic that Palin and the teabaggers are asked to take SOME degree of responsibility for an atmosphere of terror, blind rage and bloodlust? MORE tragic that within minutes of the news, Palin and others were pulling down images and comments that people have been warning for the last couple of years would lead to exactly this kind of massacre? Are you fucking serious?

These things are "even MORE tragic" than the simple fact of Christina Taylor Green's cold, dead body? Not to mention the 18 other injuries and deaths? MORE fucking tragic?

And this is exactly the point. I'm sure the commenter didn't even think about what she was saying. She was on autopilot. She has been conditioned by Palin, O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Boehner, Brewer, and on, and on and on, to believe that merely impugning the wonderfulness of "people like them" is more tragic, a greater crime, a worse humanitarian crisis, than hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from lack of health care, than millions of children who are mal- or undernourished every day, than tens of thousands of homeless veterans for whom it's well worth shelling out for showy car magnets, but not worth a nickel to actually get them shelter. I'm sure she is quite right that neither she nor her party's leaders "endorse" democrats or other undesirables being murdered outright. However, she has been well trained to understand that when, God forbid, such a thing happens, the appropriate response is to defend the righteous, stay calm, put it out of your mind, and walk cheerfully forward into the the world that is being re-shaped for the right people. The ones like them. The ones who believe the right things, in the right God. The ones who understand that democracy is all about being the ones ballsy and macho enough to kill and take power from anyone with the temerity to stand in the way of the blessed. The ones who understand that civility is for the weak. The ultra-rich and those who are happy to service them and their whims. The ones who understand that "thinking for oneself" is a trick of Satan. Because to react in any other way would even more tragic still.

wallpaper People Don't Watch Fox News Because They're Stupid

They're stupid because they watch Fox News. It's the causal order here that needs to be kept straight. From Steve Benen at Washington Monthly,

Researchers found that Americans who paid more attention to the news were more likely to know about current events. But Americans who relied on Fox News were "significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe":

* most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

* most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

* the economy is getting worse (26 points)

* most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

* the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

* their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

* the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

* when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

* and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

I read the earlier PIPA report, and found it awfully depressing. Just reading Benen's summary is about all I want to deal with this time around.

wallpaper Perfect!

For Zappadan Day thirteen, I was privileged to be in the target area for this commercial, shown by PGE to get consumers to find ways to cut their electricity use... I'm thinking 1986.

wallpaper "No One Could Have Anticipated..."

The go-to phrase for the new millennium.

• No one could have anticipated Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US
• No one could have anticipated New Orleans was so vulnerable to a major hurricane- though my first-term geo prof spent 10-15 minutes discussing said vulnerability... lecturing in Oregon, not the southeast... in 1981.
• No one could have anticipated attempting to privatize social security would drive down the ratings of the president trying to do so.
• No one could have anticipated deregulating banks, investment firms and insurance companies would lead to fraudulent lending, use of the loans as investments, and overconfident insurance of those investments, leading to an economic crisis.
  
• No one could have predicted that reneging on numerous campaign promises and continuing policies created by a deeply unpopular predecessor would tarnish the glow of a promising new president.
  
• No one could have anticipated...
  

Yada, yada, yada, I could continue this list for the better part of the day and still have examples left. But the one I wanted to get to was this:

• No one could have anticipated that not enforcing safety regulations, administering agencies tasked with enforcement with members of the regulated industries, and allowing lobbying for exemptions by the same industries, in a potentially phenomenally dangerous and destructive activity could lead to, well, phenomenal destruction.

Via NYT's Green Blog:

“The containment story thus contains two parallel threads,” the commission staff wrote in a summary passage in their 39-page reconstruction of the four-month effort to kill the Macondo well. “First, on April 20, the oil and gas industry was unprepared to respond to a deepwater blowout, and the federal government was similarly unprepared to provide meaningful supervision.

“Second, in a compressed time frame, BP was able to design, build and use new containment technologies, while the federal government was able to develop effective oversight capacity. Those impressive efforts, however, were made necessary by the failure to anticipate a subsea blowout in the first place,” the report concluded.

Headline, 2040: "No one could have anticipated the drastic sea-level rise and increasing severity of extreme weather events."

Yeah, no one could have anticipated. Shame, that.