Rachel Maddow has compiled the great thoughts of the religious people invited to Texas governor Rick Perry’s day of prayer on August 6 to which he has invited all his fellow state governors. (Via Pharyngula.)
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There is an outfit called ‘The International House of Prayer’? Who knew? Why isn’t IHOP suing for trademark infringement?
Oligarchies are most effective when they work in the background, out of the public eye, getting their way by having political leaders carry out their bidding. The oligarchy usually prefers to use establishment academics and the media and the bond rating agencies to speak on their behalf but they seem to have become worried that those subtle, behind-the-scenes ways seem to have failed when it comes to raising the debt ceiling, forcing them to come out more in the open.
Wall Street has pretty much openly told the Republican party leadership that the kabuki theater had gone on long enough and to raise the debt ceiling. In a highly unusual move, a broad segment of the oligarchy sent an open letter to Obama and every member of Congress (though I suspect that the real targets were the debt-ceiling holdouts) that the ceiling must be raised.
[Read more…]
The second weekend of the Sarah Palin fan biopic The Undefeated saw the film being expanded to 14 cities from the original 10 but reporting gross box office receipts of just $24,000, a decline of 63% from the first weekend.
To the calculators! With apologies to Tbogg, who has been mocking chronicling the film’s performance so far (see here and here and here), but the above results mean a weekend average of $1,714 per city or $571 per day or $143 per show (assuming four shows per day) or 18 people per showing (at $8 per ticket).
I think it is safe to say that if you want to see the film, you need not bother about buying tickets in advance, unless they are showing it in people’s living rooms.
This must really hurt, you betcha. After all, the distributors carefully chose cities that are supposed to be friendly to her, such as Grapevine, Texas.
Which raises the question: Where are all the real Merkins who see Palin as the nation’s savior? Surely she has more fans than this? Why aren’t they showing her some love in return for the joy she brings to their lives?
Even evangelical Christians agree with this assessment that the internet poses a real threat to religion’s survival. Listen to Josh McDowell of Cru, the organization formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ.
Atheists and skeptics now have equal access to our children as we have, which is why the number of Christian youth who believe in the fundamentals of Christianity is decreasing and sexual immorality is growing, apologist Josh McDowell said.
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“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.
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“Now here is the problem,” said McDowell, “going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”McDowell, who lives in southern California with his wife Dottie and four children, said atheists, agnostics and skeptics didn’t have access to kids earlier. “If they wrote books, not many people read it. If they gave a talk, not many people went. They would normally get to kids maybe in the last couple of years of the university.” But that has changed now.
Jesus and Mo pick up on McDowell’s comments.
Daniel Dennett once said that arguing with religious people is like playing tennis with someone who raises the net when you make your shot and lowers it for theirs. The internet is like a more impartial person who has taken over umpiring duties.
I do not tend to follow micro-politics (who’s up, whose down, what the latest rumor is about this or that, how the polls vary from day to day) carefully because doing so not only consumes all your time but it prevents you from seeing the more important big picture. I prefer to focus on macro-politics, politics on the large scale and longer time frames. However, there are times when macro-political theories impact micro-political events and the debt-ceiling debate is one such case.
I have been writing about how the US is run by an oligarchy that is fronted by the Democratic and Republican parties. The issues that the oligarchy is united on (ones that financially benefit themselves) are agreed upon by the two parties and usually take place so quietly and behind the scenes that we are not even aware of it (much of the legislation passed by Congress and the regulations implementing them by the committees is of this form) or when it cannot be avoided becoming public (as was the case of the massive bailouts of the financial sector in 2008) is done with a grand show of bipartisanship and rushed through as matters of supposedly extreme urgency that gives the rest of us no time to participate in the process at all, let alone mount a protest.
The debt ceiling debate is another case where the oligarchy has been forced to emerge from the shadows and try to more overtly influence events.
So who makes up the oligarchy and how does it make its wishes known? The oligarchy is not a hierarchy or secretive cabal that issues orders. Such a crude system cannot be effective for long. It is a loose alliance of the top people in the business, financial, and media sectors, all of whom all share the same goal of enriching themselves at the expense of the general public. This tends to create a uniformity in general thinking, though it can differ in details. These people tend to move around in the same circles as top government officials so a lot of the oligarchy’s wishes are communicated informally. The rapidly revolving door by which top government and business officials switch roles is another mechanism to ensure uniformity in thinking. The oligarchy’s lobbyists, who pretty much have taken up residence in the halls of government and contribute heavily to congressional and presidential campaigns, also exert constant pressure to ensure that politicians know what they should do.
The major media (which is also owned by the oligarchy) also contributes when it interviews business leaders and selected intellectuals and reports their opinions which can then reach a wider audience. A lot of so-called ‘think tanks’ (The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, etc.) are also created and funded by the oligarchy, along with prominent university academics who are sympathetic to oligarchic interests (see the great documentary Inside Job for examples of the latter). The chair of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Secretary can always be relied upon to be reliable spokespersons for the oligarchy since they almost always have close ties with them and often emerge from their ranks and go back to them when their terms of office are over.
This is how an informal consensus becomes created about what the ‘best’ course of action (i.e., what benefits the oligarchy) is for any given situation and those who are outside this consensus can then be dismissed as radicals and extremists and ‘shrill‘.
When it comes to the debt ceiling, I wrote the following back in November of last year:
Despite Republican rhetoric about opposing the rising national debt, the oligarchy needs the government spigots to be kept open and so I predict the Republican Party will agree to raise the debt ceiling, all the while hypocritically wailing and gnashing their teeth at what a bad thing it is. It will be interesting to see how well their supporters respond to such a blatant betrayal of what they were promised.
It has indeed been interesting to see how this is being played out in the current debt ceiling debate. I did not pay too much attention to the day-to-day drama of the talks between Obama and the Republicans or worry about the US defaulting on its debt because I felt that the oligarchy was united in wanting the debt ceiling raised and thus it would happen. This is because a default would trigger a lowering of the US’s debt rating which would require it to pay higher interest rates on the money the government borrows which in turn would raise interest rates all round. Since it is a fairly good rule of thumb that interest rates are inversely correlated with stock prices, and the oligarchy is devoted to keeping stock prices high, I felt it was a no brainer that they would push for passage of a debt ceiling increase to prevent a steep stock market decline.
It looks like that is what is mostly happening. The stock market has not panicked yet (in fact, it rose somewhat the last week) and the yield on US Treasury bonds (a key predictor of interest rates) has remained pretty much stable for the month of July.
However, it has also become clear that some vocal elements of the Republican party (such as the Tea Party caucus) are not as yet quite adept at picking up the subtle cues that tell them what they must do and who the real bosses of the country are, and are balking even when those cues are translated for them by their party leaders in more direct terms. They seem to be true believers of the idea that raising the debt ceiling is a horrendous evil and not merely a fairly routine procedure that was made into a marquee issue simply to win votes in the 2010 elections.
Given this high level of obtuseness on the part of the Tea Party, the oligarchy has to be more direct in conveying its message and it is interesting to observe it coming out in the open and start cracking the whip.
Next: How the oligarchy speaks
I read the book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (2006) by Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, some time ago and much of it consisted of him jetting around the globe meeting with heads of state and helping them solve their economic problems. He put out the hopeful message that global poverty could be eradicated and as an establishment liberal working within the system, he was high profile and you would find articles by him and about him all over the place. Then a couple of years ago, he seemed to suddenly disappear from the op-ed pages of the major newspapers.
I think I now know why. Yesterday an opinion piece written by him appeared in the Huffington Post and reveals that he has come to the conclusion that the political system is inherently corrupt, with both parties serving the oligarchy (though he does not use that term) and guilty of swindling the public.
Here’s a sample:
The Democrats of the White House and much of Congress have been less crude, but no less insidious, in their duplicity. Obama’s campaign promise to “change Washington” looks like pure bait and switch. There has been no change, but rather more of the same: the Wall-Street-owned Democratic Party as we have come to know it. The idea that the Republicans are for the billionaires and the Democrats are for the common man is quaint but outdated. It’s more accurate to say that the Republicans are for Big Oil while the Democrats are for Big Banks. That has been the case since the modern Democratic Party was re-created by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin.
Thus, at every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class. He refused to tax the banks and hedge funds properly on their outlandish profits; he refused to limit in a serious way the bankers’ mega-bonuses even when the bonuses were financed by taxpayer bailouts; and he even refused to stand up against extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich last December, though 60 percent of the electorate repeatedly and consistently demanded that the Bush tax cuts at the top should be ended. It’s not hard to understand why. Obama and Democratic Party politicians rely on Wall Street and the super-rich for campaign contributions the same way that the Republicans rely on oil and coal. In America today, only the rich have political power.
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Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather than the country’s needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle? The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and the middle class, and invests in America’s future not just in Obama’s speeches but in fact.
That kind of view quickly gets you booted out of the mainstream media and government circles. Sachs now joins a growing number of former establishment intellectuals who are increasingly being described as ‘shrill’ because they express views outside that narrow slice of so-called respectable opinion that requires you to pretend as if the two parties represent widely divergent interests. They have seen through the charade of politics in the US and talk about where power really lies and that is simply not allowed.
In reading about the horrific tragedy in Norway, I was trying to think of how, even to a diseased mind, it would make sense to mow down a large number of trapped unarmed young people. How could you possibly think it would bring credit to your cause (whatever it is)?
I know I may be engaged in the futile pursuit of trying to make sense of the actions of someone who has to be crazy, but such people do not seem to be crazy in the sense of having no idea what they are doing. This guy was clearly a coldly calculating person, planning the murders with great precision.
So what is it that causes their calculations to go so awry in the one particular area of gauging the likely reactions of ordinary people to their actions? Why can’t they see that it will cause people to recoil in disgust?
It’s easy!
A commenter named marius at the Calamities of Nature site where I saw this had a go at using the template and came up with the following:
The mind is like a quark. In both cases, when tunneling occurs, the physical reality of the void becomes apparent. It is only due to the field that surrounds us all that we can participate in consciousness. From this we know that the grand theory of unity exists. Amazingly, nature is the perfect analog to this phenomenon. The deep connection is the result of the earth. It is revealing that there is a fundamental link between us and the higher plane of existence and that consciousness is always found in the dark energy surrounding the stars.
Pretty good, no? Actually, a lot of so-called sophisticated theology that tries to meld science with god is like this so I suspect that many modern theologians are working off the same template.
What comedian Benny Hill taught us is that footage of almost any chase can be made funny by speeding it up and adding the tune Yakety Sax as the sound track. Here the theory is applied to a chase within a prison as captured by the closed circuit surveillance cameras. (Via Boing Boing.)
I just love the tune Yakety Sax. It never fails to cheer me up and put me in a good mood.
Via Pharyngula, I learn that Campus Crusade for Christ, the evangelical organization, has decided to change its name. The new one? Cru. Yes, really. Apparently college affiliates had been referring to themselves this way for a while.
I don’t know about this. Cru sounds more like the stage name a rapper would adopt, as in ‘DJ Cru’. Furthermore, the university where I work at has the acronym CWRU that is spoken as ‘crew’ which sounds the same as ‘cru’. So the members of the campus affiliate of this organization will become known as the ‘CWRU Cru crew’, which when vocalized will sound like you are doing bird imitations.
The reason for the change is that apparently the words ‘Campus’ and ‘Crusade’ had negative connotations. More interestingly, they found that even ‘Christ’ was off-putting because people “might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name”. They seem to think that having a name that gave no hint of being Christian would enable their members to sneak their religious message into conversations with people who were unaware that they were targets of a proselytization effort.
This is of course the kind of sneaky tactics religious people use. But despite that, I took it to be a very encouraging sign that the brand ‘Christ’ is seen by even evangelical Christians as being tarnished.