I received another email today suggesting I set my listening preferences. Here’s the problem: ever since I opened my account some years ago, Sirius has slowly taken off the air most of the content I enjoyed. Swing Street is gone. It’s replacement, the All Frank Sinatra All The Time Channel, is horrible. Spa 73 is now an International Music channel which is, to me, almost completely unlistenable. The trance channel (now Area 33) only plays trance at night. OutQ has replaced one of the only two things I ever liked about it, Sunset Cruse, with one of the things I absolutely hate: Derick and Romaine.
I actually had the factory radio in my 2005 Honda Accord pulled out and a conversion kit installed so I could have Sirius, because XM didn’t have a gay channel, and I liked the fact that you had a dedicated swing channel over XM’s 40s channel. I discovered the trance channel and Spa 73. It seems now as if you are trying to make me stop listening. I have an iPod connection in the car now and I listen to the iPod Much more then Sirius. I do not intend to keep subscribing much longer if almost all I ever listen to now is the iPod.
So, my Sirius preferences are, Sunset Cruse, Swing Street, A Better Trance Channel, New Age, Better 60s and 70s channels, and A More Listenable Gay Channel. Signorile is really the only thing worth listening to on OutQ now. All the other content on Sirius I like when I opened my account is pretty much gone. Out of over a hundred channels you apparently have no room for anything I like to listen to. I will not be subscribing much longer at this rate.
TRIBUNE – Greeley County authorities are investigating what they call an alleged hate crime that occurred early Sunday morning.
Officers responded to reports of an intruder in a Tribune home. By the time they arrived, the intruder had left, but the teenager inside had been beaten, said Greeley County Sheriff Mark Rine.
Dustin Myers, 16, of Horace, was arrested Sunday. Rine said Myers perceived the teen in the home to be gay. Myers is charged with aggravated burglary, aggravated assault and carrying a concealed explosive.
Other news reports on the crime Here, and Here. Myers apparently broke into the home of the unnamed teenager and beat the crap out of him before the police arrived. He’d brought with him some sort of explosive device, and intended to kill the other teen. In the comments section over at Hutchinson news, people are rushing to the defense of Myers…
SHOCKING : 9/20/2008
Yes i know this is shocking to everyone…yes we do need all the prayers we can get…we do appriciate all them…Rutt is not the kind of kid that would ever do anything like this…he just doesnt have it in is heart to hurt anything…we are all just as shocked as everyone else but it would be nice if people would leave us alone about this and let us handle things
WE MISS YOU!!
Let it be said there also seems to be genuine worry about hate, but it’s being expressed in vague declarations that dance around the essential homophobic nature of the crime, along with a lot of calls for prayer. Maybe my friend in Kansas can shed some more light on this one.
Chutzpa: Conducting state business via your personal email account to get around state government email retention policies, then complaining that your privacy was violated when hackers uncover your little scheme.
Priceless: You support Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.
Barack Hussein Obama has taken the nation by storm. From obscurity, with zero executive experience, or much of any kind, he has vaulted into the position of Presidential frontrunner. It is stunning. On the surface, it appears attributable only to his eloquent oratory and his race. But an invisible factor may be a strong spiritual force behind him, causing some people to actually swoon in his presence.
I have been very concerned that he has publicly said that he does not believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. This makes both the Bible and Jesus a liar, and it means that Christ has died in vain. A person cannot be a true Christian who believes that there are other ways of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life with God. Only Jesus has paid the price for that.
Therefore, there is, indeed, another spirit involved. And this spirit has come into our national life like a flood. Last week at Obama’s acceptance speech, that spirit exalted itself in front of a Greek temple-like stage, and to a huge audience like in a Roman arena. Omama was portrayed as god-like. His voice thundered as a god’s voice.
At the end, Democratic sympathizer Pastor Joel Hunter gave the benediction and shockingly invited everyone to close the prayer to their own (false) gods. This was surely an abomination, but it was compatible with Obama’s expressed theology, and Hunter’s leftist leanings.
God was not pleased.
And God says, "When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him"(Isaiah 59:19).
Enter Governor Sarah Palin. With incredible timing, the very next day, Sarah Palin also appeared out of nowhere. Her shocking selection as John McCain’s running mate stunned the world and suddenly took all the wind out of Obama’s sails.
We quickly learned that Sarah is a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, attends church, and has been a ministry worker.
Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing. You can tell by how the dogs are already viciously attacking her. But they will not be successful. She knows the One she serves and will not be intimidated.
Back in the 1980s, I sensed that Israel’s little-known Benjamin Netanyahu was chosen by God for an important end-time role. I still believe that. I now have that same sense about Sarah Palin.
Today I did some checking and discovered that both her first and last names are biblical words, one in Hebrew the other in Greek:
Sarah. Wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. In Hebrew, Sarah means "noble woman" (Strong’s 8283).
Palin. In Greek, the word means "renewal." (Strong’s 3825).
A friend said he believes that Sarah Palin is a Deborah. Of Deborah, Smith’s Bible Dictionary says, "A prophetess who judged Israel…. She was not so much a judge as one gifted with prophetic command…. and by virtue of her inspiration ‘a mother in Israel.’"
Only God knows the future and how she may be used by Him, but may this noble woman serve to bring renewal in the land, and inspiration.
Jim
Unlike President Junior…it’s a safe bet that Palin actually sees herself this way.
This e-mail isn’t the only instance of Palin being seen this way. Sarah Posner, who has an interesting article about Palin’s time as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in Salon today, previously wrote about this phenomenon on TAPPED: "Many evangelicals are talking about Palin being like the biblical Queen Esther, who saved the Jews from the genocidal Haman, and believe that Palin has come, like Esther did, ‘for a time such as this.’ (The same narrative built around George W. Bush when he was running.)"
It seems the Post’s Karen DeYoung isn’t buying Randy Scheunemann’s line that McCain wasn’t confused just hardcore (from an online chat this morning) …
McCain seemed sort of foggy in the interview, much of which was about U.S. relations with Latin American baddies Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. Then interviewer asked about Zapatero and McCain seemed to be winging it, appearing to think that Zapatero was the leader of someplace in Latin America and reciting the same rote answer as for the others about not meeting with leaders who don’t support freedom and the U.S.
Meanwhile, Joe Klein thinks it’s not such a hot idea to put "a chill in the relationship with one of our NATO allies simply because McCain misheard a question."
Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder gave Randy Scheunemann another bite at the apple after it became clear that McCain said precisely the opposite in April of what Scheunemann says he intended to say yesterday. Saith Schuenemann …
In this week’s interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally. If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America’s adversaries. It’s called keeping youtr options open, unlike Senator Obama who has publically committed to meeting some of the world’s worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office.
So saying he might meet with Zapatero might amount to making "reckless promises to meet America’s adversaries"? It’s not easy being as deep in a hole as Randy is at the moment. But America’s adversaries? He might want to take a glance back at the NATO charter, which of course commits the United States to treating any attack on Spain as an attack on America. He’s really willing to create a diplomatic incident just to avoid admitting that McCain got confused about what he was being asked. On the other hand, I guess Randy’s nonchalance about binding NATO treating obligations puts his insistence on getting Georgia into NATO into a rather different light.
Ya Think? Read the Newsweek story for a taste of what government will be like under Dubya II…
In fairness to McCain, the reporter has a strong accent and sped through Zapatero’s name. After displaying a detailed grasp of his subject matter for three minutes, McCain suddenly goes Sarah Palin, giving generic talking points about being willing to meet with friends, then he goes off on what seems to be a tangent: "And by the way, President Calderon of Mexico is fighting a very, very tough fight against the drug cartels. I’m glad we are now working in cooperation with the Mexican government on the Merida plan, and I intend to move forward these relations and invite as many of them as I can of those leaders to the White House. "
That last bit about inviting as many Mexican leaders as possible to the White House seems to be the key. The guess here is that McCain didn’t catch the question, heard "Zapatero," mistook it for "Zapatista," and thought it was a question about Mexican politics. Hence the diversion to Calderon and the discussion of inviting Mexicans to the White House.
The reporter repeated the question and McCain, presumably realizing that Mexico was not the subject at hand, retreated to platitudes about standing up to those who would do us harm.
"Honestly, I have to look at the relations and the situations and the priorities, but I can assure you I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America," he said. "I know how to do both."
She tried again.
Again, I don’t [he seems on the verge of saying he doesn’t know who she’s talking about]—all I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not, and that’s judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region.
The hemisphere? Latin America? The entire region? She tries again: "But what about Europe? I’m talking about the president of Spain."
This is where McCain should have laughed and said, "Spain? How funny—I misheard you." Then, he should have spouted his Spain talking point. But he plodded on:
"I am willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for humans rights, democracy, and freedom. And I will stand up to those who do not."
(One would think that our NATO ally is with us on those principles and philosophy, but the Spanish did cut and run in Iraq, so you never know.)
All of this would be recoverable if the McCain campaign came out and said: "The reporter had an accent, he had a cellphone, it was simple case of miscommunication. Of course Senator McCain doesn’t think that Spain might wish the United States harm."
But here’s what Sheunemann told the Post:
"The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and ID’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview," he said in an e-mail.
So…John McCain isn’t sure whether Spain is an ally or an adversary?
Of course not. That kind of thing is something only the Reality Based Community obsesses about…
Breunthor:so, what does this mean for me personally? I suck with big picture scenarios
Have you heard about the Hadron collider that could tear a hole in reality and end the world? Like that, except in your 401k. That’s the way it’s been explained to me.
Gold went up from around $783 to $862 today. Maybe I should hold on to my gold after all. I was going to sell it to pay off some debt. Maybe right now is not the time…
The Down Jones Industrial Index is now lower then it was the week Bush took office…
But you know what? Even allowing that he may not have actually won either election fair and square, enough people voted for him that it was close enough to steal. If the economy is in a mess now, it’s because enough Americans decided that this spoiled rich man’s kid who failed at everything he ever put his hands to in his entire life, cheerfully knowing that either daddy or daddy’s rich friends would bail him out, was good enough for them. They didn’t want to elect a president. They wanted to elect someone who would put his thumbs in the eyes of all the people they hated. All the democrats. All the liberals. All the heathens and the dirty fucking hippies. All the uppity darkies, women, and faggots. They put a moral runt into the White House, as a way of pissing on all of them, and all the other undesirables who mistakenly thought that the American Dream belonged to them too. If they couldn’t have America all to themselves, then they might as well trash it.
Don’t think for a minute that when the misery of a broken economy reaches their own doorsteps that they’ll have second thoughts. No status or wealth or plenty could ever ease the pain of knowing that the people they despise are peacefully and contentedly living their lives as though what the gutter thinks of them doesn’t matter.
I’m pinching this from the Benz World Forum. It’s from a Mercedes owner who did the go to Germany and pick up your new Mercedes at the factory thing. I’ve wanted to do that ever since one of my uncles bought his that way back in the 1970s…
I picked up my USA spec C350 this on Sept. 8 and thoroughly enjoyed the factory tour of chassis fabrication and assembly sections of the MB plant in Sindelfingen (10 miles SW of Stuttgart). Following are some observations and facts given by the tour guide.
1. Delivery center is stunning. Modern, stylish, spotless, with auditorium, restaurant, mini-museum, accessory and gift shop, a waiting lounge with continuous free snacks and drinks, observation deck of delivery hall, and the delivery hall where you are introduced to your car.
2. The earliest departing english speaking tour is now 11:20 AM, not 9:45 AM as noted on the MB factory tour website. The regular tours are conducted in German. We opted for a German tour and it worked out OK as the intro movie uses translating audio headsets and our guide spoke also spoke english and would provide a separate "side-session" to answer our questions. I am also very familiar with auto factory assembly processes. The tour takes exactly two hours (they bus you around for two stops).
3. The Sindelfingen plant was proudly displaying large banners draped on the buildings noting their "1st in World" status awarded by the J.D. Powers folks for factory build quality. C, E, and S Class built in plant, but the C Class is the only line equipped with the all robotic sub-assembly; these yield the highest precision and speed of assembly. The new E Class will soon switchover to the new process, followed by the next S Class. The cars must be engineered from the onset to make best advantage of the robots, the current E and S pre-dated this epoch.
4. Tour does not cover engines, transmissions or major sub-assemblies like the dashboard. These just appeared just-in-time as needed in the assembly area.
5. Tour is of C Class chassis fabrication (hundreds of steel stampings placed into the robots’ loading trays’ by fork/skip-loader drivers. Robots weld stampings into three chassis units (forward, center, rear); several hundred pounds apiece, but robots can whip these around like they were paper. Robots use synthetic vision, laser measuring, and tactile sensors to maintain perfect fit/placement that automatically adjust for robotic tool wear and joint positioning error between calibration cycles. No people allowed around robots as they move too fast; sensors used to detect human incursion and stop robots for safety.
6. Leather upholstery and all steering wheels leather wraps are hand fitted and stitched. Very skilled job. Ditto the final shaping/sanding, staining, and sealing/polishing of wood trim pieces. Guide says this cannot be done by robots to MB quality standards; still need the human touch.
7. More robots weld 3 chassis pieces into one…getting tired of robots.
8. Side walls, roof, and aluminum/plastic front fender welded and bolted. Then off to robotic paint booth. Chassis done, sans doors, then robot installs entire finished dashboard assembly as a unit; functional checks come later.
9. Human assembly workers begin installing interior in painted unibody. Side airbags, console, steering wheel, etc. Assembly work reserved for senior, fully apprenticed workers; 90% German, the rest appear to be Turks who have worked their way up to the top skilled assembly jobs. They look very focused/careful and use portable combo barcode reader, tester, and laser probe to verify assembly tolerances.
10. Tour jumbs to body to engine/tranny, suspension merger with bodies. Brake rotors appear to be coated with some sort of grey powder coated protectorant/break-in layer. Vayring springs and shocks placed by workers as body and suspension are compressed together under load.
11. Tour jumps to glass enclosed area where C350 Avantgarde has cutaways allowing inspection of all component placements. Film and demo of seat technology and fabrication. Final questions then back on bus, finished.
12. Noticed some blue coverall clad workers and asked about them. They are interns who attend the onsite MB Institute. Very desirable job for high school grads who apply, take examinations, and are then interviewed. The attend classes and then spend part of each day being mentored by a journeyman or master level worker. It takes 1-2 years before they are fully trained and "on there own" in skilled positions. The are among the top blue collar in Germany (good pay and benefits for life).
13. Sindelfingen plant has 7,000 engineers and technicians who design, program, and maintain the plant and assembly systems. The maintenance of the robots requires lots of information technology types, networked communications, and cybernetic systems engineers; highly trained and skilled… big bucks too.
14. Sindelfingen plant has 8,000 fabrication and assembly workers to produce about 2,000 cars per day.
15. European Delivery destined vehicles are track tested to shake-out any problems before the customer’s the post-dellivery trip begins. Normally, this is left to the delivery dealerships to find and fix any flaws. My car was delivered in perfect condition and, as far as I can tell, everything functioned perfectly for the 575 miles I drove.
According to the VIN code, Traveler was made in Breman, not Sindelfingen. But the door sticker says Stuttgart, which would make Sindelfingen the factory. Either way…the car is the most solid thing I’ve ever owned. I’m surprised to learn the leather stitching on my steering wheel, and all the interior wood trim was hand done. That’s straying into über luxury car territory and it’s only a ‘C’ class.
I would love to take this tour someday. I doubt I’ll be buying another Mercedes for a long, long time though. Unless they actually start importing that really fuel efficient four cylinder Diesel into the U.S. I’d be strongly tempted to trade in if they did that.
This same user says another American they met there was worried that their Mercedes might not be legally registerable in the U.S. They’d bought a U.S. spec ‘C’ class but with the new "Blu-Tec" Diesel engine, expecting it to be EPA approved by the time they took delivery and it isn’t yet.
The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they’re lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don’t think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it’s probably good enough. People who prattle on about "the free market" are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the "rules" had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc… etc…, did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.
Dig it. For those of you still willing to prattle on while Rome burns that regulation is the antithesis of freedom and destructive of property rights and free markets, please bear in mind that the power to enforce a contract is a kind of government regulation. And yes, as a matter of fact, government has always distinguished between good contracts and bad contracts. Like for example, if you sign a contact with a hit man to kill someone and they just run off with your money instead…no, you can’t sue them for breach of contract. If you talk a four-year old into signing over all their income for the rest of their adult lives in exchange for a nice cookie, no, you can’t enforce that one either. Which probably does bother a lot of lenders.
If you listen to these jackasses yap, yap, yapping about how evil government regulation is, and you find yourself thinking that they’re not so much arguing for limited government as anarchy, you’re almost right. Their ideal government can be summed up in two words: Money talks.
As John McCain’s manufactured "lipstick on a pig" story was taking flight last week, Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, kicked off the hour by teeing up the story. In a note to viewers that telegraphed his disdain for the lipstick controversy, he announced that during the show, he’d share his own thoughts "about how, with a troubled economy, crumbling bridges, rail and roads, a failing educational system, a war that is now going on for five years, and an uncertain American economic future, we’re sitting here talking about lipstick."
Later, he complained the story was "an insult to the intelligence of our democracy."
Did you hear the media are mad? According to Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post, the press is angry at McCain for his patently untrue lipstick attack ("It’s false. It’s ridiculous"), and they’re seething over how Sarah Palin keeps telling her demonstrably false Bridge to Nowhere tale even after members of the media pointed out her stump-speech applause line was a lie. (A "whopper.")
During the past week, virtually every major news outlet has produced welcomed, hard-edged fact-checking pieces about how the Republican ticket goes far beyond bending the truth and just plain snaps it out on the campaign trail.
In the past, that kind of truth-telling would have embarrassed campaigns and likely caused a dramatic change in the rhetoric. But what do McCain and Palin do in response? They pretty much ignore the press and its critiques.
Writing on The New Republic‘s website, Eve Fairbanks spelled out the conundrum, capturing the dumbfounded realization that spread through the press corps. It’s like that scene in a movie when the superhero realizes his unique power (for the press, it’s collective indignation) has suddenly been rendered useless:
Reporters demolished the claim that the Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, and yet the McCain campaign insolently still uses it. Writers dismantled the McCain campaign’s untrue assertion that Barack Obama compared Sarah Palin to a pig yesterday, and yet the campaign put out an audacious ad featuring the ridiculous allegation, presumably on the assumption that Real Americans don’t care what the elite press says anyway.
Instead of recoiling, the Republican ticket seems to have adopted a post-press approach to campaigning in which the candidates simply don’t care what the press does or says about their honesty. More to the point, the candidates don’t think it will matter on Election Day.
They may be right. And that’s the media’s fault. They’ve reported their way right into the margins. Submerged in trivia and tactics for the past 18 months, the press, I think, has damaged its ability — its authority — to referee the campaign.
For the past 18 months? How about for the past several decades. They absolutely hated Bill Clinton, and it wasn’t anything to do with his policies, which actually left the nation with a budget surplus and a healthy employment outlook. It wasn’t that Clinton lied about anything. It wasn’t Clinton’s character flaws. If lies and poor character were problems for the news media they’d have been all over Bush during the 2000 primaries. But they fucking worshiped him. Oh no…it was the bubba factor. Picture beltway pudit David Broder huffing that Clinton "came in and trashed the place and it wasn’t his" and then review his nearly eight years of Bush worship you see all there is to see about the news media.
Proof? Let’s go back to the pissed-off Matthews for a perfect example. Raise your hand if, in the past six months, you’ve seen an entire episode of Hardball devoted to discussing our "troubled economy," the sad state of America’s transportation infrastructure, the failings of our educational system, the never-ending war in Iraq, or the "uncertain American economic future."
Matthews claimed those are the key issues that face our country and, by implication, are what are important to this campaign. Yet Matthews hosts a cable news program that pretty much refuses to discuss those issues.
Remember, Matthews is part of the same Beltway press crowd that told news consumers Hillary Clinton’s laugh was extremely important and needed to be analyzed for clues about her true character, that John Edwards’ haircuts raised serious doubts about the man’s candidacy, and that Barack Obama’s bowling score spelled trouble on the campaign trail.
And it wasn’t that long ago that the campaign press stressed how important it was that John Kerry windsurfed and that Al Gore spent time as a politician’s kid growing up in a Washington, D.C., hotel. These were issues of paramount concern for the media.
And now they’re shocked, shocked, to discover the republicans know they can lie through their teeth and nobody cares anymore what the press has to say about it. You fuckers sold out America to the rats, and now there isn’t anyone left to speak truth to power but the grass roots bloggers and web masters that you’ve been helping the rats vilify, because you were more worried about defending your jobs more then keeping the American dream alive.
You could have seen what these people are ages ago, if you’d just cared one whit to look. Gay and lesbian Americans have been seeing it for decades. Yes they lie. Yes they don’t care who knows it. The lies aren’t meant to fool anyone. They’re war cries meant to whip themselves up for the fight. They’re the bloody flag waving in the wind. They’re spit in the enemy’s face. And the enemy is all of us…every one of us who thinks that the promise of liberty and justice for all belongs to us too. For decades your gay and lesbian neighbors have known that they hate us. For decades we have seen how that hate trumps every other value they claim to hold. Now you know they hate you too. They hate everyone who isn’t in the gutter with them. Because anyone who rises their head above the gutter reminds them of everything they are not. They want to bring it all down, so they won’t have to know what brave and decent and moral humanity looks like. You didn’t want to see it. You didn’t care enough to do your godamned job and look it squarely in the eye and call it for what it is. You cared about your jobs more then you cared about your country. You sold America out to the rats. Rot in hell.
Jeff Frankels Weblog | Views on the Economy and the World: [F]or the last 40 years, rhetoric notwithstanding, Republican presidents have pursued policies… farther removed from the ideal of good… economics than have Democratic presidents. This is especially true… [of] the textbook version…. But… it applies even to the “conservative economics” version that puts priority simply on small government. The criteria underlying this generalization about Republican presidents are:
Growth in the size of the government, as measured by employment and spending.
Lack of fiscal discipline, as measured by budget deficits.
Lack of commitment to price stability, as measured by pressure on the Fed for easier monetary policy when politically advantageous.
Departures from free trade.
Use of government powers to protect and subsidize favored special interests (such as agriculture and the oil and gas sector, among others)….
Republican presidents have since 1971 indulged in these five departures from “conservatism” to a greater extent than Democratic presidents. The name I would give to this set of departures… is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but, rather, “illiberal”…
To which DeLong Adds:
Real conservatives take note: you will never have a party until you kill the Republican Party, and replace it with something new. You should start now, for all of our sakes.
Were there ever any "real" conservatives? Well…I guess Goldwater was one. But here’s the problem: Real or not, this is what conservative ideology gets you. Small government means no regulation of big corporations, of big money. When big corporations, and big money become more powerful then government, they will simply turn government to their own ends and that leads right back to "big government", just not big government in the people’s interest. So you end up with all the points Frankels makes above, even if you started from a sincere belief in "small government" ideology. When money becomes more powerful then the law, money inevitably becomes the law.
So. No fiscal discipline because big business doesn’t want discipline, it wants its profits and it wants them now. Fed monetary policy becomes whatever big business wants it to be at whatever moment in time it wants it to be that. Free trade is out because if big business hates anything more then regulation it’s competition. And…special interests? When you have government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, the common folk are the special interest group. And when big business takes over the nation’s news media, it gets kinda hard to find out just how deeply the corruption has taken root. All you see, is the spectacular meltdowns. Iraq. Katrina. The Dot-Com bust. The Housing bust. How big was that deficit again?
That’s what small government ideology gets you. When money becomes more powerful then the law, money becomes the law. Anyone who seriously thought (as I did once) that the way to keep government honest and the economy strong was to cut government down to the bone should be, after decades of republican dismantling of the New Deal, if they are honest, thoroughly disabused of that notion. A government that is smaller then money will never resist the corrupting power of big money. That is what we are seeing now. The moment, the instant the regulatory boundaries were taken away, corruption began running wild. Money does not self regulate.
Some of the people pushing the small government ideology didn’t reckon on that. But probably, most of them did. They talked up free markets, but they weren’t interested in freedom. They wanted the money. It’s easier to get when the law can be bought off. You keep a market free the same way you keep the streets safe to walk at night. It takes a rule of law, backed by impartial justice. There is no safety, let alone freedom, where the police work for the crooks, upholding laws that were written by crooks, for crooks.
And one more thing: morals. The people crafting the laws we all live by need to be people who understand that stealing is wrong. That lying is wrong. That cheating is wrong. Wrong because sooner or later the bills come due, and while Jesus may forgive you, reality is a hard assed motherfucker.
In China now, they’re undergoing an upheaval in the baby formula market. Children are dying after being fed baby formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t carelessness. It wasn’t neglect. It was greed. Melamine, a chemical used in plastics, contains a concentration of proteins which make it useful for hiding the fact that the milk in baby formula has been diluted. Profits are always higher, when there is less product in the product.
Via SLOG … Bad as the Bush gang have been for our economy and our standard of living, things could have been worse. Remember when they wanted to "privatize" social security? "Privatize", being another way of saying, "Let’s give the social security trust fund to Wall Street to play with…"
In a post about the economy, the Reality-Based Community makes a very important observation:
If George W. Bush’s/John McCain’s views on Social Security of a couple of years ago had been national policy, your retirement could have shared in this meltdown.
The upshot is a state of radical uncertainty: as Paul Krugman says today, "nobody knows what will happen next."… There is a very, very long list of things that could go horribly wrong from here on out. The liquidation of Lehman is one; the possible collapse of American International Group is another. Beyond that are countless hedge funds and other financial institutions which, collectively, present significant systemic risk.
But the biggest and most obvious risk of all is the one associated with Lehman’s own debt, which is now trading at less than 35 cents on the dollar. That’s a big loss for the institutions holding it—but it also means an unknowably huge loss for anybody who wrote credit protection on Lehman Brothers at any point over the past five years. Those sellers of credit protection are staring down the barrel of billions of dollars in claims, and they’re going to have to raise that money quick by selling anything they can get their hands on—and that might well include stocks.
Those would be the stocks that were supposed to make social security more…secure. See how deregulation works?
They’ve hated social security with a passion almost as lively as their hatred for FDR, the man who created it. All that money that went into the trust fund from worker’s paychecks to fund their retirement was money the kings of Wall Street figured rightfully belonged to them.
Of all the available nightmare story lines, the getting shot by a crazy old man you just happened to run into on the street who is clearly mistaking you for someone else is one of the fun-ist. Which is not to say I’ve ever had that one before, because I haven’t. But I just woke up from it and I’m here to tell you it gets your heart beating.
THE novel ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was based on a nightmare in which Robert Louis Stevenson saw a dapper Englishman change into a hideous monster. Mary Shelley’s ”Frankenstein” was also based on a nightmare, as may have been Bram Stoker’s ”Dracula.” New research suggests that such links between nightmares and creative vision may be more than accidental.
Nightmare sufferers, the new work indicates, may have a natural tendency to gravitate to the arts. Nightmares live with people all their adult lives, even though for most they are only dim memories from a long gone childhood. Nevertheless, nightmares evoke a fear so great that the memory of them can bring dread even years after they appeared.
Despite their power, nightmares are rare in adults. Researchers estimate their frequency at about one per year. Only one person in 500 has them as often as once a week. While nightmares are perhaps the most vivid of all experiences during sleep, researchers have found it difficult to give them systematic study. They are hard to capture: one sleep specialist says that during 3,000 nights of sleep studied in his laboratory, there was only one nightmare. Nevertheless, a group of sleep researchers has recently zeroed in on nightmares. Foremost among these researchers is Ernest Hartmann, a sleep researcher and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Dr. Hartmann has devoted much of the last several years to a series of studies on nightmares and the characteristics of those who have them often. Based on his findings, he proposes that some people have a genetic susceptibility that makes them more sensitive to experience in general, and leaves them with a lifelong proneness to nightmares.
If these people have a troubled childhood, Dr. Hartmann asserts, they appear to be vulnerable to schizophrenia as adults. But if their early environment is healthy, they are likely to go on to marshal that same sensitivity in the creative arts.
Most of my dreams are fairly benign…even the vivid ones. They’re usually just slice-of-life replays, with perhaps a few interesting curve balls thrown in. Like when I dream about taking a stroll through my old high school neighborhood, and I notice features in it from all the other places I’ve ever lived in all mixed together. I dream about doing housework. I dream about shopping for groceries. I dream about hanging out with old friends who I haven’t seen in years. If I don’t jot them down in my dream diary (I keep an ad-hoc one) they’re usually forgotten by mid-morning. But about five times a month or so I have a really gut slamming nightmare. When I was a kid they used to terrify me. Now, at least once I’m fully awake, they’re mostly just a bother. Dreams make sleeping worthwhile, otherwise I’d really like to have that time available to use for something. Death comes soon enough…I don’t need to spend a third of my life playing dead too. But nightmares make it troublesome.
In key research, Dr. Hartmann and Dr. Van Der Kolk studied 50 men and women who reported having at least one nightmare a week since childhood. Dr. Hartmann recruited his subjects through advertisements in Boston newspapers.
The most common nightmares involved being chased, or being threatened or hurt by an attacker. Unlike many ordinary dreams, nightmares were almost always in color and included other especially vivid sensations including pain, which is rarely experienced in ordinary dreams.
No, Yes and Yes. I didn’t really notice this before until I saw it refered to in the research, but yes…my nightmares are all in vivid color, as opposed to my usual dreams which are mostly in black and white. (Something else I’ve noticed about my normal dreams is that I can’t read in them. I am utterly unable to decipher a printed page when I happen across one in a dream. Sometimes, that’s very frustrating. I can draw. I can read gages and instruments. But not words. let alone sentences…though I can discern individual letters. I’ve actually tried in my dreams to read one letter at a time and try to make a word out of them and I can’t. It’s like the part of my brain that assembles letters into words just isn’t online when I’m dreaming.) And yes…in a nightmare I can feel pain. In the one I just had, the crazy old man shot me first in my right arm and I felt it like a hammer blow. When crap like that happens, I’m always a little surprised when I wake up to feel the pain completely gone.
But actually being chased by an attacker is rare in my nightmares. Over the years I’ve come to divide them into three categories. First is the simple, straightforward falling dream. These almost aren’t dreams, really, so much as having a sudden sensation of falling. They always happen just when I’m drifting off to sleep, and when they do they slam me back awake. It’s really irritating.
The second kind is the scary nightmare. These are the ones where you’re placidly dreaming along and then suddenly something happens that scares the steaming shit out of you and you slam awake with your heart pounding. Like the one I just had. Yes, sometimes it’s being chased by an attacker. But more often it’s something that just pops out at you. You reach into a cupboard for something and suddenly something inside the cupboard starts chewing on your arm. Or you step off a curb and instead of the road being solid its molten asphalt and you sink into it. Sometimes there doesn’t even have to be any scary imagery to go with the sudden fear. I’ve had scary nightmares where I’ve just walked into an empty room and suddenly become completely and abjectly terrified for no reason I could figure after I’d woken up.
The scary nightmare. Just…out of the blue a nice pleasant dream suddenly goes bad on you and you wake up with your heart racing. I hate it. But they stopped terrifying me long ago. At least, once I’m fully awake anyway. I can live with them so long as they’re only once a week or so. But there is a third type of nightmare that I would love to not ever have again, and that’s what I call the disturbing nightmare.
They don’t scare you, they don’t slam you awake with your heart pounding. These are the ones that really creep you out and you wake up feeling disturbed and that horrible disturbed feeling lasts for the whole day. I’ll tell you about a recent one.
I dreamed I was a kid again, and working at a fast food joint. I had the day’s cash in a box I was supposed to take to the bank. Along the way I skimmed some of it into my own pockets. I have no idea why I did that. Understand, I have really strong feelings about stealing. It comes from a longstanding family issue I won’t discuss here. But this is important, I have really strong feelings about stealing. I just won’t do it. I won’t even touch something that doesn’t belong to me without permission. Yet here I am in my dream doing just that. And then I get to the bank and for some odd reason instead of counting the money, in this dream the bank just weighs the money box. I get a receipt, and I take it back to the fast food joint I work at, and the boss says it wasn’t properly signed. For some reason, this prompts me into confessing that I stole money out of the box.
So now everyone there knows I’m a thief. The police are called in, I am arrested, and I’m sitting in the back of a police car feeling absolutely horrible. For some reason they don’t handcuff me, just put me in the back seat where I can sit and feel like a crook. I feel guilty, ashamed, miserable, I’m just wishing I could do it all over again and not steal that money. And then I wake up and it was all just a dream after all. But I still felt miserable. All fucking day. And…really creeped out.
But more significant, in Dr. Hartmann’s view, is the general personality of the nightmare sufferer. Such people, in his view, are markedly open and defenseless, not having developed the psychological protections most people have. They have what Dr. Hartmann calls ”thin boundaries.” They ”let things through.”
Most of the people in the study described themselves as unusually sensitive since childhood: easily hurt, particularly responsive to the feelings of others, unhappy as children even though there were no overt family problems. They also had a high incidence of relatives who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia, and four of the subjects themselves were said to be schizophrenic.
I’ve no history of that in either side of my family tree. Where my creative gene came from I don’t know, other then I am related on dad’s side to an important family of California artists. My maternal grandfather had the geek gene, and in his day and age radio was a new thing and he started one of the first radio shops in western Pennsylvania. I haven’t really developed any of it much, because of internal stresses related to my horrible love life. The stereotype is that an artist can’t really create unless they suffer. It’s a damn lie. If a suffering artist manages to create at all, it’s in spite of how they feel inside, not because of it. That internal stress, coupled with my inability during some stretches of my life to get any of it out of me creatively, may be what’s behind the frequency of my nightmares. Mostly, I just deal with them, the same way I deal with loneliness. I endure it.
So…in my dream just now…I was walking through a parking lot to my car…not the Mercedes, but for some odd reason a white convertible of some kind. I’m carrying a box with a paint gun in it. I notice two guys sitting suspiciously in a dark blue sedan watching me, and I worry for a moment that they’re going to try and rob me. Perhaps that was the first hint that the dream would go bad, because otherwise it’s fairly benign. I make it to my car, and put the box in the trunk. Then I notice that there is a sign where I’ve parked, that limits parking to just two hours.
I need more time, so I start walking around looking for another place to park my car. I see a sign that says parking is available at Arlington TV. Why a TV store would be renting parking spaces too I’ve no idea…dreams just get whimsical at times. So I go looking for Arlington TV. I can read signs in this dream, and see in color…in retrospect two more hints that the dream would eventually go bad on me. I can’t recall now though, whether the dream started out that way. I only vaguely remember being with some friends and we were walking around this shopping center by a park of some kind…and I started walking back to my car with this box with a paint gun I’d just bought in it.
So now I’m walking around looking for Arlington TV. I ask for directions and a friendly lady points me in the direction of a small strip shopping center. See the roof with the TV antenna on it, she asks. That’s the place. So I start walking over to it. I’m almost there when I see an old guy walking down the sidewalk toward me…and by old I don’t mean grandpa old, but middle age old. A thing I am myself now I guess, but I don’t see myself as being internally. In this dream I’m still in my mid-twenties or so. That’s kinda where my mental self-image has been for ages. The old guy on the sidewalk is wearing a dark brown hunting jacket and a cap, and work pants of some sort, and an old pair of leather shoes…not boots. His clothes aren’t ragged or torn or dirty or anything, but they look…rumpled. As though he’d been sleeping in them. His face is worn and tired and lined with creases…I can still see it clearly. He’s clean shaven but his beard is very heavy and you can see it as a dark shade around the chin. He looks a bit upset, but not terribly angry. Oh…and he has a .45 automatic in his left hand. He’s not pointing it at me, or at anything else in particular…he’s just walking along with it in his hand.
There’s a moment in dreams like this, where you just know you’re fucked. I try the old pretend you don’t see anything and walk on by trick and of course it doesn’t work. The old man looks at me with that vaguely put-off look on his face and asks me if I’ve seen Jeff. I don’t know any Jeff, and I say so and he raises the gun in my direction and asks again, more insistently where Jeff is. I get the sense that Jeff is somebody this guy has issues with. So I start running and he fires and I get hit in my right arm, just above the elbow. It feels like my arm got slammed with a hammer. So I start running and ducking and weaving through this empty parking lot with this old guy with a .45 right on my heels. He’s shouting that I know Jeff and I’d better tell him where he is. I take a turn and run into a grassy area beside the shopping center, that has lots of low scrub brush scattered all over it. As I run and dodge around the bushes I’m thinking that if he kills me here he could just walk aimlessly away, still looking for Jeff, and my body could just lay there for days or weeks or months and nobody would find it and when they did nobody would ever know what really happened to me or who killed me or why they did it…
…and then I wake up. Urrr! I don’t think I’ve ever had both scary and disturbing in one nightmare before. I can still see that guy’s face. Nothing really remarkable about it…just a middle age guy with a beaten down look, as though he lived a hard, low pay life that he’d shuffled through without the slightest sense of wonder or curiosity. You take one look at him and you just know his home has bare walls, no books or magazines, just a TV and an alarm clock and some basic furniture. He punches the clock every week day and watches TV at night. Maybe on the weekend he does the laundry, vaccums the carpet, washes his car and hits the neighborhood bar. I can still see his face.
I’m going to go through the entire day now with the sense that there is some dream me laying face down in a vacant lot in some distant dreamscape somewhere and my friends in that world are wondering what happened to me and my body won’t be found for months and when it is nobody will ever know what happened to me or why. Last we saw Bruce he was going back to his car with the paintgun he’d just bought. We never saw him again. We know he made it back to the car beause the paint gun was in it. But months went by before somebody finally came across his body. They found it in a vacant lot not very far away from where his car was parked. The cops say his wallet was still on him and they don’t think it was a robbery. Nobody can figure out what happened… I’m going to be creeped out by this one all fucking day…I just know it…
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