Strangely compelling image

 

Haven’t quite figured out why this image produces some weird responses in me.  Partly, it seems connected to a nightmarish perception of the present.  A bad wind steers Gulliver to the shores of Consumdingnag but it’s real.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

John Lofton, again

Nate Silver, the young polling whiz of FiveThirtyEight, just received an email from John Lofton.  Some months back, Lofton posted here and the two of us had a grand time (put his name in the search box on the right – not the upper one).

Here’s Nate on Lofton

Gerry Mulligan and Antonio Carlos Jobin at work

h/t Crooks and Liars

Dylan does Santa

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/media/videos/must-be-santa

Perlstein

You will not bump into much this week or next that is brighter than this discussion from Rick Perlstein…

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/perlstein-post-partisanship-millions

Sunday stuff

The Evolution of the God Gene?

No, this isn’t why I moved here to Portland

For this IDF Chief Rabbi, God’s version of the Nuremburg war crimes trials has those who hestitate to drop cluster bombs on innocents as the ungodly damned.

On the other hand, there are those who are not utterly insane.

Quite a few of them in England…Seven out of 10 Britons back The Independent on Sunday’s call for a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a landmark report by Oxfam this week exposes the real human cost of the war.

Auto purchase alert:  if you are down in Texas and see a blue/white 2 million dollar Veyron listed in the Auto Trader at a surprisingly low price, check for rust and rotting dove-scrotum leather upholstery…

Conservative purging of the impure continues apace.

The Weekly Standard crowd do one of those way-cool and way-logically-compelling Glenn Beck this-links-to-this charts…

Conservatives with intellectual integrity.  We don’t need a lot of fingers to count them up presently.  Bruce Bartlett is one.

I don’t mean to imply that Europeanization is unambiguously good; only that it’s not unambiguously bad, as virtually all conservatives believe. There are many ways I think we could learn from the Europeans and they from us. One way we can learn from them is how to have a tax system that raises considerably more revenue as a share of the economy than ours does without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

At a minimum, I think it’s safe to say that Hayek was wrong about the inevitability of totalitarianism arising from growth in the size of government. The collapse of communism is proof enough of that.

Saturday Nov 14

Israel pumps up the propaganda under Bibi…but it would, wouldn’t it?

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting. And who imagines that Bill Kristol or Don Rumsfeld or Cheney or the board at Northrup Grumman might care even in the slightest?

And providing healthcare for citizens is an outrageous misuse of citizen taxpayer dollars while, on the other hand, spending far more on the big killing machine is just jim-dandy. It’s all about principle, you see.

Instructional manual on how to surrender to terrorism in just a few easy steps (step 1 – become a modern conservative)…

Stephen Colbert claims Lou Dobbs audience.

Andrew Sullivan gets Bill Kristol right but could add that teaching people to hate serves the financial interests of the military/corporate complex very well indeed.

Elizabeth Warren on the economy

Friday stuff

Goldstone responds to Peres et al

If you happened to see Wolf Blitzer’s interview with the lawyer defending the accused shooter at Ft. Hood, you may have wondered how such a pompous and really rather stupid man got and maintains his media postion.   Here’s   Michael Tomasky on the interview.

The neoconservative camp, even moreso than the typical conservative, continues to pump up the idea that Russia is a big bad dangerous creature in need of aggressive military opposition.  During the Reagan era, these people were influential and that influence continued on under Bush 2 where, concentrating on this ‘issue’, they disregarded the threats that Richard Clarke and others advised would come from al qaeda.  They are still at it. Anti-communism was the ideological center of seventies conservatism and neoconservatism and it’s no easy thing to have your center disappear.  Of course, all of this makes rather more sense when one links together this militarist zest and the huge amounts of corporate money which arise from US militarism.

Thursday’s Notables

Goodbye, Lou

Months ago the president of CNN/U.S., Jonathan Klein, offered a choice to Lou Dobbs, the channel’s most outspoken anchor. Mr. Dobbs could vent his opinions on radio and anchor an objective newscast on television, or he could leave CNN.

Michael Tomasky on the bizarre Washington Times

Rupert Murdoch wants to rule the world

Gordon Brown has “the most enormous personal regard” for media magnate Rupert Murdoch, Downing Street said today amid reports that the prime minister telephoned him directly to complain about the Sun‘s criticism of his government’s handling of the war in Afghanistan.

The pair spoke on Tuesday at the height of a row over Brown’s misspelling of a dead soldier’s name in a handwritten letter of condolence to the victim’s grieving mother Jacqui Janes, published by the newspaper alongside her accusations of disrespect.

Rupert Murdoch insisted earlier this week that he regrets the way his papers have turned against Brown – but believes they are right to do so.

But it would be plum crazy to imagine that Murdoch might actually move to take down an American President

Rupert Murdoch‘s flagship American tabloid newspaper, the New YorkPost, has been accused of an extraordinary litany of racist and sexist behaviour by a former senior editor who is claiming discrimination in her sacking in September.

Sandra Guzman has filed a discrimination lawsuit in the New York courts against Murdoch’s media empire, News Corporation, the New York Postand its editor-in-chief Col Allan. She claims that behind the Post’s famously pointed and cheeky headlines lies a “hostile work environment where female employees and employees of colour have been subjected to pervasive and systematic discrimination and/or unlawful harassment based on their gender”…

She also claims the Obama cartoon was part of a concerted effort by the paper’s management to undermine America’s first black president. The lawsuit alleges that Charles Hurt, the Post’s Washington bureau chief, once told her that the goal was “to destroy Barack Obama. We don’t want him to succeed.”

Pleasing God through murdering people

The Jerusalem District Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday charged alleged Jewish terrorist Yaakov (Jack) Teitel with two murders, three attempted murders and other acts of violence.

“It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God,” said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. “I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”

The gears of corruption

The paranoid style of American politics in all its pathological glory

Speaking at a luncheon for a Midland County Republican Women’s group, Perry said that “this is an administration hell-bent toward taking American towards a socialist country. And we all don’t need to be afraid to say that because that’s what it is.”

Perry praised the tea party movement to the Republican activists in attendance, crediting the grassroots groups with discouraging some Democrats in Washington from pushing for a public option in the health care bill.

US at bottom of gender-gap stats across 31 nations

The hilarious Jon Stewart catch on Hannity’s propaganda trick this week represents just a tiny fraction of what  Murdoch’s propaganda network has been up to all along.

 

That’s it for now.  I’ll tack on more items if I have some time later.

Claude Levi-Strauss

A very important intellectual figure has just died.

One afternoon, chatting with one of my Sociology profs in her office, I was handed an idea which has proved to be a source of continuing illumination into all the ways in which we humans can be seen to imagine reality.

That idea, from the fertile mind of this amazing man, was that when we consider abstract notions, we begin by using or assuming a pair of binary opposites – good/evil, black/white, etc. We impose that conceptual framing or architecture over what we are trying to understand or make sense of. It may not be, indeed probably rarely ever is, an accurate reflection of the real world but using this simplistic conceptual framework allows us to begin thinking about whatever the abstract subject is.

One interesting aspect to consider here is how some people in certain circumstances seem to be unable to formulate a more nuanced or complicated conceptual mapping (shades of grey, to use the cliche) but stand firm in their insistence/certainty that the simplistic framing of binary or polar opposities represents the most valuable and fundamental truth of things, a ‘truth’ which is in danger of being lost if one allows nuance and complexity. These are the humans that scare me.