Just Another Day at the Races

Tags

Campaign financing, Dana Milbank, evolution, fiction, Fox News, Glenn Beck, GOP, lifestyle, medicine, neuroscience, Nicaragua, nonconformity, OneNation Rally, Paul Krugman, the arts, US

Morning!

There is a new post over at Walking in the Shadows should you be interested. I’m keeping more of the religious stuff there rather than here, unless I think that the posting is of interest to all. This latest one, is I guess, but I posted it there anyway.

I’m back to using Foxfire Mozilla again, and finding it works fantastic. The issues I had with it and my blog are gone, as well as my reader issues. On top of that, it solved problems that were so bad on FB and Twitter, that they were getting virtually unusable for me. So hurrah!

Don’t know how much time you had to devote to the OneNation Rally this weekend. I had precious little, but I gleaned a few things: Fox gave it a lot of notice, figuring I assume that they could spin it in either direction. A big crowd = tons of progressives unhappy with Obama, or a small crowd = the progressive movement is puny.

So far, I can get no reliable numbers, but most seem to think that the crowd was smaller than the teabagger picnic. In any case, the pictures are dramatically different. Teabagger rally = old and white, while OneNation = all ages and diverse ethnicity.

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New definitions of “ugly American” are emerging as we find out how actual military doctors from the US of A, conducted human experiments on Nicaraguans during the 40’s. All that talk about Hitler mind you was going on at the time. I just can’t think of why so many folks in other countries hate us, can you?

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Head over to MotherJones in general and peruse. They have article after article on who gives the money, what groups give the money, what candidates are spending the most, where they get their money, who they defend on Congress and so forth. There are probably 8-10 articles in all. Worth your time to take a look.

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A really not-to-be-missed post by Paul Krugman on the insidious and blatant take-over of the GOP by a very few ultra-rich families, including our own favorite Foxy Noise. No pretence here, just power grabbing. And the ones who are being duped? The poor teabaggers of course.

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Sharron Angle is one of those alleged humans who just amaze you that they can walk upright. I mean the woman has the brain of a slug. Sad to say, Harry is so despised, that she still manages to hang on in the race. But really, just how much ineptitude can Nevadans tolerate before they bite the big ugly and vote for Reid? She’s caught on tape trying to talk fellow teabagger candidate Scott Ashijian to back out.  Nothing terribly wrong here, just amusing, as she touts O’Donnell and Scott from Alaska as people she thinks are “real.”

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There’s a new book about Beck, by Dana Milbank. It might well be worth the purchase. Milbank documents how Beck uses his favorite boy Hitler to attack everyone. This time it’s Gore and the UN. Oh, I’m gonna try to get this gem! Read more from Milbank here.

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Chris Guillebeau is a blogger and self-styled non-conformist. Read about his take on life and whatever in this 3quarksdaily interview. You can visit his blog here. He has visited 151 countries in his quest to visit them all. Lots of strategies to living your life your way.

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Why do we like art? No, not like. Why does our heart soar, our breathing change, our pupils enlarge, why do we lose track of time? All this when something hits us deeply? Why are we captivated by a story? A song? Why did we and do we spend time, energy and money on that which is fiction? We wouldn’t do it unless there was some evolutionary benefit you know.

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Related Articles

• Dana Milbank Says Glenn Beck Is Dangerous (newsbusters.org)
• Glenn Beck’s Hitler fetish (economist.com)

Laboring in the Vineyard One Sip at a Time

Tags

Democrats, economy, evolution, faith, FDR, gay rights, GOP, midterm elections, Obama, Paul Krugman, Politics, recession, Roman Catholicism, Technology

Happy Labor Day! I want to tell you I’m laboring too, over a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Yes I am. Some short ribs on a slow cook in the oven slathered with sauce and pasta salad and corn relish melding in the fridge. It’s a quiet, fairly overcast day.

Yesterday the Bronco did good. We got into town for a whirlwind trip of groceries and hair cuttings and a new vacuum cleaner. Still much to be done, and of course the next disaster is no doubt lurking around a corner waiting to pounce. But as of now, things have calmed.

We have taped the entire Star Wars saga and are going to watch them in order. A novel idea doncha think?

I’m twittering a lot these days. Which means I haven’t devoted the time I usually do to blogging and blogs. So much fun on twitter with the retweets. I get sometimes a half-dozen new followers a day, and come across some funny stuff. It’s also fun to think you are actually talking to people you watch on TV. Why Sarah speaks, and Keith and Rachel and Colbert and ME chime in with tastefully snotty replies. It’s a hoot.

I don’t know how Martha Stewart does it, juggling all the stuff she does. Nor other Type A personalities who are driven. I’m not so driven. But you knew that.

One of the reasons why in some regions of planet earth, humans moved forward into more sophisticated modes of community, was based on whether they had indigenous animals suitable for domesticating. This allowed greater movement of peoples and their belongings but also allowed drudge work of farming to be handled by animals, freeing up our minds and hands to other creative pursuits.

A number of evolutionarily interested folks are looking at the changes we were thus able to make in our new “community” way of life as driving forward our bigger brains. In essence, perhaps gene mutation is one factor, but new ways of living push us forward as well. A new book lays this out and is worth a look at. Read a short review of The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution.

A goodly number of folks would tell you that the Dems are about to suffer some mighty big losses come this November. Of course, if we become pessimistic and decide not to vote, then we will cause that to be true. That’s a self-fulfilling prophesy as they say. But Jim Kessler (who has some street cred here) has some ideas of why it need not be so. We need to find some optimism here, so do read.

One of many things that disgusts me about the average American voter is that they seem to have the attention span of a gnat. Everyone knows that you don’t recover from the ditch Bush and his evil band put us in, in a couple of years. Yet as much as Obama has cautioned that it will take years to recover, people are ready to throw him and Democrats out and usher in the party of NO simply because they are like two-year olds with no self-control. So the recession will drag on for more years than necessary. Remember FDR did not turn around the country in four years either, certainly not in two. Read Paul Krugman’s assessment.

There is a story at Killing the Buddha by Alane Mason. It’s about a gay friend, about death, dying, but most of all about faith and living. It is breathtakingly beautiful in its writing and in what it says. It is one of those pieces that make you gasp at the strange beauty of our humanity. It gives pause, it gives hope. You should just read it.

I still mourn Freddy Mercury, lead singer of Queen. He died of AIDS, back when everyone infected died of AIDS. He would have been 64. So many of our finest artists died in those early years. So many died, and were reviled and shrunk from as if breathing the same air they did was dangerous. We didn’t know better I guess, but still awful.

I remember being a lawyer and seeing deputies wear surgical gloves just to touch an inmate who was HIV positive. I recall a court clerk who scraped a pen used by an infected inmate into the garbage can with a piece of paper. I remember, and I am ashamed for those people and their ugly fears and callous behavior.

Grumpy Lion sends us over to Common Dreams to read a long essay by David Michael Green. I’m an American.  I live in a country – nay, an empire! – that insists on destroying itself. He echoes my thoughts, far more eloquently that I ever could. Read it and sigh. It is all too true I fear. And when you have finished reading, you will weep.

Have a good barbecue today folks and see ya tomorrow!