« August 2005 | Main | October 2005 »
September 30, 2005
Changing minds, one at a time
Rich Simon, a writer friend who teaches at a community college here in the East Bay, posted this story on his blog:
I had a student yesterday -- a Bush supporter, a member of the campus Christian prayer group, a Vietnamese immigrant and a good, smart kid -- pretty much have a meltdown. I had asked what the authors' purpose was in writing the book (Age of Propaganda, Pratkanis and Aronson, BTW). He answered: "because they don't like President Bush."A few in the class chuckled. I asked them when the book had been published. They flipped to the title page. It had been initially published in 1992.
Read the rest.
Posted by gans at 11:26 AM | TrackBack
Republican scumbags taste the fruits of their vileness
This post from The Daily Kos (by Hunter) is a thing of beauty. An excerpt:
Playing with fire, you say? Because the indictments ringing Tom DeLay finally reached up that one, final step from his ring of closest advisers to DeLay himself? Because the SEC has launched a formal investigation into the same behaviors by Bill Frist that put Martha Stewart recently in prison? Because one of the single most visible, highest profile Republican money men has been indicted for fraud, is being investigated for client shakedowns, and has his close business associates being investigated for a mob-connected murder?What utter cowardice. What pathetic anti-American pedantry. What laughable protestation. The crimes of campaign money laundering, of fraud, of conspiracy, the violation of the laws of the nation, to be answered with stern visions of potential gunfire if Democrats have the audacity to pursue it.
This is the world of the Republican Party, split open like a rotting pumpkin. Crime after crime after crime being investigated, all revolving around the Republican money machine. Every seed connected by the strands of money they share between them. Barely-laundered campaign money passed in the palm of every flabby handshake. Every player in boldface, underlined print in the Rolodex of every other.
And still, this same bottom-tier world of flag-waving supporters still obsessed over an extramarital sex act, but offended to the point of sad, blustering threats at the notion that crimes by gilded and worshipped Republicans are really still crimes.
Your party has set aflame the entire political landscape, and now, once burned, you warn sternly from the branches of a burnt-out tree about "playing with fire". You used the ashes of one of the great liberal cities of America, New York City, as war paint for your own sick, racist dreams. You shudder at a burning flag, yet are willing to snip-and-cut basic tenets of the Constitution as needed or convenient.
And now, you're outraged, not by any of the rest of it, not by anything that has come before, but because a few prominent Republican faces have -- shock of shocks -- been indicted in probes that have spanned years of investigation, and interrogation, and deposition. That, you say, represents the underpinnings of a civil war.
You poor, hollow, blood-painted clowns. Cheering the trials and failures of your country with the same pennants and giant foam hands that you wave at your favorite sports teams. Willing to accept the most outrageous of lies, if they are spoken from your favorite talking heads, and soothe your own notions of America for you, and only for you.
And as for the audacity of Democrats speaking up during this process... the redfaced, flatulent fury with which you declare Republicans off-limits to that which you so gleefully hurl yourself...
Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.
Posted by gans at 9:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 19, 2005
Wildcam: watering hole in Botswana
In his column in today's San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Carroll talks about National Geographic's new Wildcam - "a live video feed from a remote watering hole in Botswana. You can watch elephants, wildebeest, giraffes, baboons and ostriches coming down to feed, interacting in interesting ways, hanging out."
From the Wildcam site:
Embark on a quiet adventure and watch wildlife gather at Pete's Pond. Baby baboons scurry in the dust. Wildebeests push and shove to make room at the watering hole. Warthogs wallow in the mud. Catch these moments and more in these video clips.
Jon goes on: "The best viewing hours are in the middle of the night [Pacific] time, but as it gets into the summer months down there, there should be more action from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., so you can wake up to a wildebeest."
The whole column is worth reading. That's true of pretty much every Jon Carroll column. He's in the Chronicle Monday through Friday.
Update: More information about "Pete's Pond"
Posted by gans at 10:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The Big Lie and The War On Some Drugs
The U.S. drug czar's office is running ads implying that smoking marijuana can lead to insanity. But pushing dubious science is no way to persuade teenagers not to do drugs.
By Maia Szalavitz
Parents who read the New York Times or Newsweek this past summer could be forgiven for freaking out when they came across a full-page ad warning them about the effects of marijuana on their teenagers. If the kids were off somewhere sparking up a joint, the federally funded message seemed to say, they were at risk for severe mental illness. Were those parents hallucinating, or was Reefer Madness, long since debunked, suddenly a real problem to be reckoned with?The latest salvo in the never-ending war on drugs, the ads, which also ran in magazines like the Nation and the National Review, bore a stark warning. Under the headline "Marijuana and Your Teen's Mental Health," the bold-faced subhead announced: "Depression. Suicidal Thoughts. Schizophrenia."
"If you have outdated perceptions about marijuana, you might be putting your teen at risk," the text went on. It warned that "young people who use marijuana weekly have double the risk of depression later in life" and that "marijuana use in some teens has been linked to increased risk for schizophrenia." It followed with the sneering question, "Still think marijuana's no big deal?"
The rhetoric is alarming. But the research data used to support the ad campaign is hazy at best. Though carefully worded, the campaign blurs the key scientific distinction between correlation and causation. The ad uses some correlations between marijuana use and mental illness to imply that the drug can cause madness and depression. Yet these conclusions are unproven by current research. And several leading researchers are highly skeptical of them.
Posted by gans at 10:17 AM | TrackBack
September 10, 2005
"A God with whom I am not familiar"
A column by Tim Wise in the LA Weekly, forwarded to me by Bob Sarles:
A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar
This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, in the Brooks Brothers shirt:You don’t know me. But I know you.
I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal — and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word — moralistically scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck.
further...
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, while letting babies die in their mothers’ arms, and letting old people die in wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street? But no, it isn’t God who’s the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, or whatever your name is).God doesn’t feed you, and it isn’t God that kept me from turning around and beating your lily-white privileged ass today either. God has nothing to do with it. God doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl. God doesn’t help anyone win an Academy Award. God didn’t get you your last raise, or your SUV. And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.
and...
Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five, days? Without a margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them, I mean?Oh, and please, I know. I’m stereotyping you. Imagine that. I’ve assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel, Biff? Hurt your feelings? So sorry. But, hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren’t deadly. They won’t affect your life one bit, unlike the ones you carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me, supposing that no one could possibly disagree.
...and...
Well, Chuck, it’s a free country, and so you certainly have the right, I suppose, to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this — or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund — so be it. But let’s leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
Posted by gans at 2:32 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 9, 2005
Pat Robertson's "hurricane hustle"
The title of this post comes from the Huffington Post -- Max Blumenthal pointing to his column in the 9/19 issue of The Nation, a story headlined Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash:
Robertson has used the tax-exempt, nonprofit Operation Blessing as a front for his shadowy financial schemes, while exerting his influence within the GOP to cover his tracks. In 1994 he made an emotional plea on The 700 Club for cash donations to Operation Blessing to support airlifts of refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire (now Congo). Reporter Bill Sizemore of The Virginian Pilot later discovered that Operation Blessing's planes were transporting diamond-mining equipment for the African Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture initiated with the cooperation of Zaire's then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.After a lengthy investigation, Virginia's Office of Consumer Affairs determined that Robertson "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements and other implications." Yet when the office called for legal action against Robertson in 1999, Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley, a Republican, intervened with his own report, agreeing that Robertson had made deceptive appeals but overruling the recommendation for his prosecution.
Operation Blessing is on the Bush administration's list of Hurricane Katrina charities. Imagine my surprise.
Posted by gans at 3:59 PM | TrackBack
Bush doing what he was hired to do
Mark Morford's column in today's SF Chronicle is apposite. An excerpt:
...it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.
Posted by gans at 10:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 8, 2005
A real christian
I met a real Christian yesterday. Her name is Oral Lee Brown.
This is a woman who "adopted" a classroom full of first-graders in 1987 and aided them all the way through the Oakland schools and into college.
I was in her office to record her end of an interview with a Boston radio producer. While I was setting up, she was talking to someone on the phone about the effort by the Oakland Association of Realtors to find vacant homes and apartments for Katrina victims. "I don't want to see any more people in shelters," she told me. Her group is talking landlords into making vacant housing available at no charge to these people who are coming here from the disaster zone; they have other volunteers who will take the new arrivals shopping for food and clothing when they get here and make sure the have their needs met for as long as it takes. They're going to try to find jobs for as many as they can, too.
As the interview progressed and I sat there monitoring on headphones, I was moved nearly to tears by Mrs. Brown's story. She grew up in rural Mississippi, one of nine children; her father was a sharecropper who had some land of his own by the time she was born. She endured violence and raw hatred from the racists of that time and place, and she got out as soon as she could.
A chance encounter with a hungry child on the streets of East Oakland drew Mrs. Brown to a neighborhood school. She was unable to find the child she was looking for, but she wound up making a deal with the entire first-grade class that she would support them in every way she could and pay their way to college.
This page tells much of the story.
She tithes ten percent to the church, because she credits God with her own good fortune in life. She gives a lot of her money, as well as her time and social capital, to the kids - not just that first class, but several more groups of students. A new class will enter the program this month.
As I packed up my stuff, I told Mrs. Brown how moved I was by her story, and I told her how upset I've been by "Christians" like Pat Robertson. She agreed with me that he hardly seems to have understood the teachings of Jesus.
This is what Christianity is supposed to be about. It was a great charge to the spiritual batteries.
Posted by gans at 10:17 AM | TrackBack
September 4, 2005
"Like a dog watching television"
Great closing comments by Bob Schieffer on CBS's "Face the Nation" this morning:
SCHIEFFER: Finally, a personal thought. We have come through what may have been one of the worst weeks in America's history, a week in which government at every level failed the people it was created to serve. There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens. Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.
As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don't have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest.
By midweek a parade of Washington officials rushed before the cameras to urge patience. What good is patience to a mother who can't find food and water for a dehydrated child? Washington was coming out of an August vacation stupor and seemed unable to refocus on business or even think straight. Why else would Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert question aloud whether New Orleans should even be rebuilt? And when he was unable to get to Washington in time to vote on emergency aid funds, Hastert had an excuse only Washington could understand: He had to attend a fund-raiser back home.
Since 9/11, Washington has spent years and untold billions reorganizing the government to deal with crises brought on by possible terrorist attacks. If this is the result, we had better start over.
Posted by gans at 10:25 AM | TrackBack
September 3, 2005
Why New Orleans is vital
Amazingly informative piece on Stratfor by George Friedman, New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
and...
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Posted by gans at 2:31 PM | TrackBack
September 2, 2005
My patriotic act
I canceled a planned trip to Oregon this weekend. I was scheduled to play a private party west of Portland - a really nice tribal reunion that I played last year.
My decision was based in part on the cost of gasoline, but it's more than that. It just seems like a bad time to be consuming. There are some genuine intrruptions in the gasoline delivery system due to Hurricane Katrina, but if history is any indicator, there will also be plenty of opportunitstic profiteering. It seems to me extremely unlikely that anyone in a position of leadership in this country is going to call on the oil industry to make any sacrifices.
Seems to me the best way to deny windfall profits is to spend as little as possible on gasoline during the crisis.
I've heard from many friennds who feel the same way.
I'd rather send some money to the people who need it, stay home and do some creative work. My friends in Oregon understand and accepted my decision. There are other musicians coming to the party from much shorter distances, so I'm not leaving the tribe high and dry.
Posted by gans at 12:37 PM | TrackBack
Radio Memeworks' "artist of the month": David Gans
From Robert Tacker:
To celebrate David's fine new release, Solo Electric, Radio Memeworks has made David our September artist of the month. We have all of David's commercial releases, lots of live material both solo and with various friends and some Guilty Pleasures, and they will be in heavy rotation all month long.
If you have broadband/DSL or a better connection to the net, join us as we celebrate a fine American, a great guitar player, one of my favorite tunesmiths and the sharer of all that fine Dead related material these twenty years now.
Posted by gans at 9:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack