I don’t think I’ve ever met one of these face to face: an unapologetic libertarian fanatic who denies the existence of poverty, and claims that private charity would take care of it if it did exist. And at the same time, he’s stupid enough to voluntarily allow himself to be interviewed for the Daily Show! Oh, right, those two things are not contradictions.
The Daily Show
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The web has been resounding with a mighty echoing “WTF?” — David Brooks has written another column in the New York Times, and it’s weird, even for Brooks. He’s sneering at “Thought Leaders”, apparently this new generation of pundits who are beneath his contempt. At first I thought maybe it was entirely autobiographical, and that he was describing his own career, in which case he really needed to be put on suicide watch. And then I thought, nah, it’s David Brooks — I’m assuming a degree of self-awareness that simply isn’t there.
So I wrote my own impression of Brooks.
David Brooks. Paris. 1789.
David Brooks was awakened early by the shouting and rumbling of carts outside his apartment window — why, it was perhaps as early as 11 o’clock, a most uncivilized hour for a gentleman. It was one of the obligations of nobility, however, to be willing to address his duties at any hour, and by God, he could rise even before the sun had reached its zenith.
He rang the little silver bell by his bedside to summon his servants to come and dress him, rose, and slipped on his silk dressing gown. A pinch of snuff to invigorate the blood, and he was ready to investigate. He looked out his window, down upon the unwashed mobs of Paris.
The tumbrels were rolling. Yet another day when the ranks of the aristocracy would be purged of their dead weight, he thought, leaving only the deserving to lead the country. He recognized one of the men roped in the cart, despite the shabbiness of his velvet coat and the loss of his wig; that young cockerel! His great grandparents had been merchants, and even now he was rumored to dabble in trade. No loss there. Just another trumped up nobody who had dared to regard himself as a match for those privileged by righteous birth.
He was moved to write another missive for the King — the last had been well received and read aloud at court, and he was gaining quite the reputation as the clever wordsmith. His dismissal of the middle class as the “bohemian burgeoisie” had provoked mirthful titters from the right courtiers. An elegant letter explaining how the regime was right and natural and safe, and that the elimination of the arrogant young upstarts was only right and proper would strike just the right tone. He rang his bell again. Where were those lazy servants? He had work to do! These nouveau rapscallions needed to be named and chastised. How else will everyone know the right people to rebuke? And behead?
He rang the bell insistently. Hands on his hips, he stood facing the entry door: the instant that worthless layabout finally arrived, he was going to receive the fiercest verbal scourging, and be thrown out on the street with the rest of the rabble. You do not question the right of David Brooks to be treated with respect and dignity and the deepest humility. You do not delay him.
He waited.
There was a loud and ferocious pounding on the main doors downstairs. The servants will get it.
What is that crashing great racket?
Damn it. Charles Pierce has already done it so much better.
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
Well, you start out being a coddled little genius nurtured by the think tanks and vanity publications and fanzines of the American right. Then you make a career out of whatever pop sociology text you read 10 minutes ago. Then you write a couple of books about how the American genius for mindless consumerism is the future of the country. Then you get a column in the New York Times. Unfortunately, there comes a conservative president who fks up everything from hell to breakfast, and all of the intellectual arboretums in which you were raised fall into disrepute. Dutch Elm disease of the mind become epidemic. So you backpedal as fast as you can, running over several of your previous selves in the process until you finally end up one day writing a column in which you pretend that you haven’t spent your adult life pumping your speaking fees and grazing the buffet tables at various brainiac circle jerks.
I’m sorry. Were we talking about someone else?
Yeah, that’s David Brooks alright.
News from North Korea: Traitor Jang Song Thaek Executed. Read the whole thing — it’s a classic example of long-winded Communist pomposity, which ends, sadly, with the announcement of the immediate execution of the corrupt fellow who clapped half-heartedly at a conference.
Jang committed such an unpardonable thrice-cursed treason as overtly and covertly standing in the way of settling the issue of succession to the leadership with an axe to grind when a very important issue was under discussion to hold respected Kim Jong Un in high esteem as the only successor to Kim Jong Il in reflection of the unanimous desire and will of the entire party and army and all people.
When his cunning move proved futile and the decision that Kim Jong Un was elected vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party of Korea at the Third Conference of the WPK in reflection of the unanimous will of all party members, service personnel and people was proclaimed, making all participants break into enthusiastic cheers that shook the conference hall, he behaved so arrogantly and insolently as unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping, touching off towering resentment of our service personnel and people.
Jang confessed that he behaved so at that time as a knee-jerk reaction as he thought that if Kim Jong Un’s base and system for leading the army were consolidated, this would lay a stumbling block in the way of grabbing the power of the party and state.
I hope this North Korean denunciation doesn’t end the same way.
The state of Michigan has just passed a measure stripping abortion coverage from insurance plans: women will have to ask for additional coverage to get it. Why excluding this particular health issue is so important that it engages the legislature to specifically write it out is a mystery. It’s not as if they are going through a long list of potential surgical procedures, like say, appendectomies, and deciding for patients and doctors that they have to plan ahead for these things and purchase separate riders for them (hey, that might actually benefit me, since I don’t have an appendix; why should I have to financially prop up all you looters who still walk around with that risk factor in your abdomens?).
Unless…oh, right. Misogyny. Women’s lady parts are weird and unusual and not part of the Standard Human’s equipment, so we shouldn’t be expected to treat them as a mundane part of human health care. At least one person, Gretchen Whitmer, sees the problem of special exceptions.
In a charged hearing Wednesday, Michigan Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer told the story of her own rape and called the legislation “one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve ever seen in the Michigan Legislature,” according to the Detroit Free Press. The fact that women are required to plan in advance to have an abortion, Whitmer said, “tells women who are raped … that they should have thought ahead and bought special insurance for it.”
“The fact that rape insurance is even being discussed by this body is repulsive,” she added.
The people responsible for this abomination of a bill are, as you might expect, a so-called Right to Life group in Michigan. Once again, the fetus gets privileges that involving taking away rights from women.
Four Republican candidates for Lt. Governor of Texas gathered for a debate. They all agreed on the most pressing issue facing the American state today: whether Jesus made dinosaurs.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Sen. Dan Patrick, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said in the first televised debate of the campaign Thursday night that they favor teaching that there are flaws in the theory that humans evolved from lower life forms.
Late last month, state Board of Education members adopted new high school science books that include full coverage of evolution without the disclaimers sought by social conservatives and other critics of Charles Darwin’s theory.
While none of the lieutenant governor candidates mentioned the board’s decision, three — Patrick, Patterson and Staples — blasted teaching only evolution as a form of “political correctness.” They linked it to what they described as a broader moral decline.
“The breakup of the family in this country has started when we took God out of the classroom,” said Patrick, a radio talk show host.
“As a Christian, certainly creationism should be taught,” said Staples, a former state legislator.
Dewhurst, who is seeking a fourth term, agreed.
“It’s a fair discussion to expose students to both sides and let them make the decision with the advice and counsel of their parents,” he said.
Patterson said the country has gone too far in deleting religious instruction from government institutions such as schools. A 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banned teaching of creationism in science classes.
How do you bear it down there? If you think I’m cranky and rude living in Minnesota, think what I’d be like if I had landed a job in Texas!
Well, most likely dead of apoplexy and barbecue, but other than that.
Gregory Paul says that Nelson Mandela was an atheist. I’ve looked around a bit, and I can’t find any confirmation of that — I wouldn’t be surprised, but at best I find that he was a committed secularist who avoided coming out clearly about religion. Can anyone confirm? I don’t like it when dead people are immediately brought into the fold of a religion when they can’t deny it, so I’m not keen on atheists doing likewise.
Back in the last decade there was a cable talk show titled Faith Under Fire. Hosted by a right wing Christian, it featured theists and atheists in direct conflict over assorted matters. In one segment a theist challenged a leader of an atheist organization to name a single atheist who had become a great moral leader. To my annoyance the had-not-thought-about-that-one-before atheist was stumped.
A leading example, of course, is Andrei Sakharov. The wholly ungodly leftist physicist started out as the father of the Soviet H-bomb, but became so fed up with dictatorial communism – Khrushchev’s insistence on detonating a colossal 50 megaton thermonuclear device for no practical reason being a factor – that he became the leading dissident against the system, fighting for progressive democracy at considerable expense to himself.
And the other great moral atheist leader of the 20th century was Nelson Mandela. He too was an nontheist of the left (as most are, in the US 3/4s of the nonreligious are progressives, the rest Randian libertarians.)
Now that last bit is interesting. If you’ve been wondering how big the atheist rift is, and are a little tired of vague claims that those jerks are a minority, it at least pins a specific number on them: 25%. Which isn’t small.
The claim is a little overstated, though. They aren’t necessarily Randian libertarians. The basis of that 25% comes from the Pew poll of the “nones”, which found that about a quarter of them were politically conservative.
I looked through the whole thing; no sign that they actually assessed the details of political alignment closely enough to recognize libertarians. But yeah, 25% does sound like a reasonable estimate of the fraction of jerks infesting the atheist movement.
It’s all about kicking the freeloaders to the curb. O’Reilly only gives money to charities that hand the cash over directly to kids (what?), and Stossel demonstrates that panhandlers are all freeloaders because kind people would even give him money, a sure sign of moral bankruptcy.
The Colbert Report
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The good news is that John Stossel was so gleeful at getting $11 by sitting on a street corner, waving a cup, that he’s going to grow a beard to match his mustache, give up the journamalism he has been practicing, and squat on the street for his tax free income until he dies. It’s a big win for him: there’s more dignity in that than working for Fox News.
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Heh. So the Republicans are running scared: they don’t know how to talk to or about women. So they’re having training sessions to teach Republican candidates how to address (or perhaps, more importantly, how not to address) women..
"The National Republican Congressional Committee wants to make sure there are no Todd Akin-style gaffes next year, so it’s meeting with top aides of sitting Republicans to teach them what to say — or not to say — on the trail, especially when their boss is running against a woman," Politico reports.
One problem: for this to work, Republicans will have to learn how to talk like progressive, liberal Democrats. There might be a small conflict there.
Sometimes, it’s the little things that just add up and fill me with rage. Like this report on bank employees.
Almost a third of the country’s half-million bank tellers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, according to a report due out Wednesday.
Researchers say taxpayers are doling out nearly $900 million a year to supplement the wages of bank tellers, which amounts to a public subsidy for multibillion-dollar banks. The workers collect $105 million in food stamps, $250 million through the earned income tax credit and $534 million by way of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center.
We are all supplementing banks so that they can screw over their employees at the bottom, and throw more of their cash to the owners at the top. The plutocrats want it both ways: they want a complete absence of regulation so they can continue to plunder profits, and they want poor, desperate people to do their labor for a pittance, with government aid. You might argue that banks have faced all kinds of problems lately, so maybe they’re lean from top to bottom, but we know that’s not true.
Profits at the nation’s banks topped $141.3 billion last year, with the median chief executive pay hovering around $552,000, according to SNL Financial. In contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the median annual income of a bank teller at $24,100, or $11.59 an hour.
This cannot continue, and I’m getting too old to want to live through a revolution.
The report takes a little too much glee at poking at the JREF, but it does seem fair: Broward County is cracking down on tax exemptions for non-profits, including the JREF and churches. If they have undeveloped or unused property, property that isn’t being used for a charitable function, they are being told to pay taxes on it.
They lead with the example of the JREF, which has an unused million dollar building up for sale, and they seem to have ambushed Randi about it (I don’t think he’s much involved with the business of the JREF, so he was the wrong person to talk to). They owe about $23,000. At the end of the video, they finally mention that the JREF has paid up about $21,000.
What I find most promising though, is that they also mention going after churches — just on their unused property so far. But they make much of the fact that these exemptions are costing the people money, and that they are going to be much more thorough in auditing tax exempt institutions, which is a good thing.
One can only hope that they eventually get around to rethinking the charitable purpose of sitting around in pews getting hectored by a priest, and start yanking tax exemptions from churches wholesale.
