Something in the Air

Something in the Air

Climate Change affects the election

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 28th 2012

Once again, a rogue weather pattern has everyone transfixed this weekend. This time it’s “Frankenstorm”, the aptly named confluence of a hurricane, a nor’easter, an arctic blast, and a winter storm from the Pacific. They’re supposed to more-or-less merge over New England, and up to a million square miles of northeastern America and southeastern Canada are going to see some of the wildest weather seen since at least 1991 (“The Perfect Storm”) or 1938 (“The Labor Day Hurricane”) or, well, whenever. I’m hoping, for the sake of the hundred or so million people in the region, it turns out to be a bit of a fizzle. In part because I don’t want people to suffer, and partly because the region is a Democratic stronghold. Well, OK, Quebec and Ontario not so much, but they’re far enough to the northeast that it will probably turn into an unusually large snowstorm, something they can deal with.

It comes right after four debates over the past month in which the topic of climate change was never mentioned. That’s something that affects people far more than abortion, gay marriage, defense spending, taxes or even Obama’s college transcripts. For starters, it will cost them far more, and is more likely to kill or dispossess them than any of the items listed.

Back last March, a heat wave struck the same region now ducking the wrath of Frankenstorm and sent temperatures soaring 10, 15, even 20 degrees—not above normal, but above all-time records for the dates. Just imagine if a pattern like that set up in July! It not only can happen—it will.

Continue reading “Something in the Air”

Cultthink

Cultthink

When knowledge is an opinion, ignorance is king

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 22nd, 2012

 

No matter how this election turns out, the fact remains that the United States is a desperately sick society. You have nearly half the population apparently reduced to the status of religious cult members, and it’s only getting worse.

There’s even a tacit admission among the enablers of this cult that such a situation exists, in that they claim that everyone who doesn’t think like them is also a cult. It’s a false equivalency, of course. It’s possible for liberals, labor unionists and other groups to disagree with the Democrats and with each other without being dismissed and even excluded as heretics. In the great American cult, grown adults are expected to reject evolution and climatology, and pretend that the idea behind America was that authorities would tell the people what to do and how much they could make doing it, and not the other way around.

The greatest vulnerability in the American national character is the distaste for education. Day in and day out, it’s inculcated in movies, TV shows and the newspaper comics and nearly all other forms of entertainment that school is boring, tedious, an unwelcome intrusion in an otherwise idyllic existence.

It isn’t the entertainment industry that is to blame, and it isn’t the schools themselves, even though between zero-tolerance authoritarianism and the inflexible, grinding stupidity of “teaching to the test,” schools are rapidly going downhill.

Kids in America are taught to hate school, and this becomes, in far too many, contempt for education as they grow older.

There’s a British television show called “Skins” that I like to watch. The acting is good, and the writing is sometimes stellar. It’s probably no more representative of typical teen life than any other show about teens, but it has considerable depth and a sense of honesty about it missing from a lot of TV series. Now, with a few exceptions, these aren’t model kids. They drink, they do drugs, they have sex, they get into brawls, they fight with their parents. Where the show is strikingly different from American counterparts—and it’s a theme I see with other British and Canadian series—is that the kids don’t hate school, don’t consider it uncool to be intelligent. They want desperately to do well on their “A” Levels, school tests that sort of combine American SATs with Hogwarts’ Sorting Cap. The kids help one another academically, even the ones who aren’t so bright and face a life on the assembly line. If they are found ignorant, they are actually embarrassed.

Ignorance is considered a personal flaw.

It used to be the same way in America. Call someone ignorant, and they would be angry. And the more ignorant they actually were, the more angry they would get. If someone didn’t know the Earth revolved around the sun (and 30% of Americans don’t know that) if you asked him how he failed to learn it in school, he would glower and call you a know-it-all or worse.

It was perplexing, this mixture of embarrassment and pride. In the next breath, he might grin and say, “Science was never my strong suit; I was more into chugging parties and babes.” Well, that might explain why he doesn’t know the Earth goes around the sun. But it’s not really something anyone would want to brag about.

You can very nearly tell if someone is British or American by how they react to the song “We Don’t Need No Education” by Pink Floyd. A Brit will tell you the song condemned the system for its uniformity and forced conformity; an America is likely to tell you that the kids are rebelling against school, period.

In recent years this American character flew has taken an ominous and perhaps deadly turn. Not only is ignorance socially acceptable (provided you don’t CALL it ignorance), but now it’s just a matter of opinion. If you call someone ignorant for not knowing the Earth revolves around the sun, you are likely to just get a condescending smile and be dismissed as one of those Copernican crackpots.

Forty percent of Americans “don’t believe in” evolution. They regard it, at best, as “just a theory” and at worst as a kind of competing heretical religion. A majority now accept that the climate is changing, but it took a long series of horrific weather events over the past year to convince some of them. Until then, the scientific evidence was “just a theory.” You know. An opinion.

Evolution isn’t an opinion. It’s a theory, just as gravity is. But it’s pretty hard to get around the fact that gravity exists, so people accept it as “real,” although any scientist will tell you we know a hell of a lot more about evolution than we do about gravity. The evidence for evolution is so pervasive and wide-ranging that it simply cannot be dismissed as “just a theory.”

Nonetheless, it’s not evident on a daily basis, so it gets dismissed by the pridefully ignorant and regarded as an opinion by this cult, along with climate change, Republican economics, or the notion that the US is in imminent danger of falling to Sharia Law. (That last one is actually somewhat true; the laws religious fundamentalists want to impose come from the Old Testament rather than the Koran, but they are the same laws, written by the same people thousands of years ago.)

When reality is reduced to the level of opinion, there is no longer any such thing as ignorance. Any opinion constitutes knowledge. There is no baseline for reality, and it makes it possible for people to reject any argument, no matter how compelling.

It’s a social mindset that one associates with societies that are in extremis; on the verge of utter collapse, without hope, scared to death and looking for any way out. That the things that frighten Americans so much are largely imaginary (Iran is not a significant threat, Islam isn’t out to destroy the US, Obama isn’t a Moslem communist, and Darwin wasn’t a sociopath bent on killing Jesus) doesn’t make the fear any less real, or any less deadly.

Societies at that stage usually implode, often with utterly horrific results. Germany in the 1930s. France in the 1780s. China in the 1940s. And now, America.

I doubt the election will change that in any significant way. For sane people the choice in this election, as in most of recent vintage, is a choice between being hanged quickly or being hanged slowly. Obama might try to slow the process, but by doing so, exacerbate it. Nothing frightens and angers a cultist more than questioning the Truths the cult has vouchsafed him, and the only recourse sane people have is to question those Truths.

It’s a dangerous situation for the country to be in.

Ignorance, when it becomes king, rapidly becomes a terrifying tyranny, and blood flows freely.

Debate II

Debate II

The gloves come off, so do the Mittens

 © Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 16th 2012

 Well, at least Obama showed up for this debate. And he called out Romney on several of his lies.

The funniest moment came when both Obama and the moderator, Candy Crowley, were both trying to get Romney to explain how his tax plan works. You remember that? Cut taxes for everyone, increase spending, and, using players to be named later, balance the budget. Obama even parenthetically mentioned the “six studies” that supposedly supported Romney’s claim, a claim that has been roundly debunked. Nobody in the GOP or out of it can give a coherent explanation of how this Five-point plan of his would work. And Romney kept dancing away from anything that might look like a specific.

Romney was again doing his not-Romney, Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, making all kinds of moderate noises. He’s now in favor of the free contraception it seems. Oh, and doesn’t want to round up and deport undocumented aliens.

At one point during the immigration question, Romney falsely claimed that the Democrats had a super-majority in both Houses. It’s a favorite claim of the GOP in general, but it’s just not true. The Dems at the outset had 57 seats in the Senate. After ten months, they got a 58th, the result of Senator Al Franken finally being seated following a protracted fight by the sore loser. By then, both Senators Kennedy and Byrd were extremely ill, and Kennedy died just a few months later. There was never a “super majority”. The Senate requires 60 votes against the filibuster.

Continue reading “Debate II”

The Business of America

The Business of America

…is not business. It’s being a society.

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 20th, 2012

A favorite stance by Republicans and libertarians, especially this time of year when voter registrations are being trashed by Republican party operatives and the son of the Republican candidate owns the company that counts the votes in most of Ohio is that America should be run like a business. Just like they’re trying to do with the voting.

Why, by lying, cheating, and using economic force to get their way, they’re already trying to run America like a business, and this should be a clear and explicit warning to anyone who doesn’t want to end up as corporate chattel.

The notion, one that Mitt Romney explicitly stated during the second debate, is that if America is run like a business, by a businessman, it will be far more efficient. Efficiency’s a good thing, right?

The notion is one that rests very comfortably on bumper stickers and in Republican brains, but doesn’t bear any actual examination.

Running a country like a business is an absolutely horrible idea. It’s been tried before, you see. Holland tried it in the 15th century and eventually crashed, never to be a major power again. Italy tried it in the 1930s and 40s, with dismal results. The trains did NOT run on time. Indeed, they barely ran at all. Then Italy went to war for national glory, and all the trains got blown up. Spain has never quite recovered from the Franco years. China, while mouthing communist platitudes, is as business-oriented a country as you can find, and it is a huge-scale social and economic disaster waiting to happen. When that bubble bursts, hundreds of millions will die, and the rest of the world will be forced to see the conditions under which the Chinese lived as peons in a business state.

Continue reading “The Business of America”

Debate the First

Obama versus not-Romney

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
October 4th 2012

 

The first debate is fairly easy to sum up: notRomney painted Obama as ineffectual and wedded to policies that hurt the middle class. Obama painted notRomney as vague and more than a bit scary. In short, both were playing trope-versus-trope for all they were worth, and neither had anything substantive to say. Romney decided he was debating as notRomney, the Unrepublican.

It was fun watching notRomney kind of pretend that he wasn’t sure who this “Paul Ryan” was, or why people should be afraid of him. Three times he said that his plan was not a five trillion dollar tax cut without acknowledging that he had supported the Ryan plan—which would do exactly that—continuously over the past two years. It’s strange to see a Republican repudiate the notion that his plan would cause a large tax cut.

He doubled down on the false claim that Obamacare would cut Medicare by $716 billion. Obama refuted it the first time he claimed it, noting that it saved that amount, but without cutting any benefits for anyone. Continue reading “Debate the First”

What the Kittens Lost

Willard, that’s not a sauna; it’s a toilet bowl

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 23rd, 2012

….and I’m back.

I needed a break from writing essays, partly because after fifteen years I needed a good long break, and partly so I could sit down and write a novel. Well, the novel is written, and going through the copy edit and beta reader process now, and I’ll have more to say about that in future writings, but for now, let’s look at…surprise! The 2012 Presidential campaign!

 

Have you seen anything like this? I’ve been following US presidential campaigns since 1960. Granted, that first one was a bit vague; I knew a guy named Kennedy was running against a guy named Nixon for the American premiership or whatever, and I was hoping Nixon would win because his name rhymed with George Dixon, a football hero of mine. Scoff if you will, but I suspect that I made as informed a choice in 1960 as 30% of adult American voters do today. And the Alouettes lost the Grey Cup anyway.

Maybe in the end, Romney will lose because there are no sports heroes he can rhyme his name with. But he seems intent on losing the support of voters who CAN make informed decisions first.

I’ve never seen a campaign as chaotic as this one. For a guy who likes to fire people, Romney sure seems intent on keeping his campaign staff, no matter how inept and flat-out damaging they are. Continue reading “What the Kittens Lost”

Mormon Jackass

Mormon Jackass

by Zepp, frankly

I want a pasty little Mormon jackass
With a long phony rails and has a conscience that fails
A corny little Mormon jackass
A sight for pity from Salt Lake City
Baloney inside
and he can swallow his pride.

I want a smarmy little Mormon jackass
Adept at the deal and who knows how to steal
I want a sleazy little Mormon jackass
With glad-handing friends, who squeaks when he bends
I just want a fool
To be an establishment tool.

I want a sorry little Mormon jackass
Who don’t know shit about working and who is constantly jerking
I want a vicious little Mormon jackass
Who can run over winos in a super stretch limo
With a satisfied sigh
I just want that jackass to run
Once he’s on top we all twist in the wind.

I want a fucked up little Mormon jackass
A flipper, a flopper, he’s as bent as a copper
A crazy little Mormon jackass
A compulsive storer in church-designed drawers
He’ll be a complete whore
Willing to shaft both the rich and the poor.

I want a snotty little Mormon jackass
Who can lube corporate cogs while he airs out his dogs
A stuckup little Mormon jackass
For whatever flies, who weasels and lies
It would be quite a fright
To make this dumb jackass a national blight
To make this dumb jackass a national blight
To make this dumb jackass a national blight
To make this dumb jackass a national blight

 

with apologies to the late Frank Zappa and his fantastic “Jewish Princess”

-- 

Not dead, in jail or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Summer is Coming

Summer is coming
…and a host of other things, too

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
May 2nd 2012

Summer is coming.
For most folks, that’s usually good news. If you don’t live in the lower plains states or the American south, where summer renders the land uninhabitable, it’s a fun, relaxed time. Or at least it used to be.
Some folks remember the “Long Hot Summers” of the sixties and seventies; the tensions and civil strife, cities in flames, angry voices in the streets. Back then, thirty million Americans felt—with good cause—that they were subjugated by a system that hated them, cheated them, sneered at them and dismissed requests for fair treatment as disloyalty.
Now over three hundred million Americans find themselves in that position. And the simmering anger and desperation that led to Watts and Detroit is mounting.
America is still in a Depression. Yes, the market is way up (that’s actually part of the problem) and unemployment has dropped somewhat (the U6 shows it down from about 19% to 14.5%, still far too high in a country that has no real safety net) and economic activity is better than it was in 2008. But it’s like 1936, a year economists reckoned to be a year of recovery, even though the Great Depression would grind on for another seven or eight years. GDP was back to 1928 levels, and unemployment had dropped to 13.8, and people saw a light at the end of the tunnel. But then Congress imposed spending cuts and deficit reductions (what we now call “austerity measures”) and the economy plunged again.
Worse is the fact that whereas in the Depression, the wealth gap narrowed as the wealthy took the brunt of the economic losses (although not the hunger and privation visited upon the working poor), that gap now continues to widen: the incomes of the top 400 CEOs went up a staggering 15% last year, as everyone else’s income remained flat, not counting inflation. In other words, lost ground.
So for millions upon millions of Americans, the desperation and fear grows deeper and more painful, along with the realization that those in power have gone from indifferent to openly adversarial. FDR spoke of a “new deal”; the strutting and sneering fascists of his class today jibe that perhaps if workers were more worthy they would get more.
The fascist pseudo-justices on the Supreme Court tore down the one remaining wall of any significance between a free democracy and fascism with Citizens United, and the grotesque results of it were already apparent in the primary season this year.
The GOP field was a diverse collection of retreads, morons, crooks and bastards, yet with the exception of Jon Huntsman, who was quickly marginalized, they all spoke with one voice. There wasn’t an eyelash of difference in their opinions. They marched in perfect sync, uttering the grotesqueries of GOP class warfare.
They all washed out; the failed rural drama queen, the religious fruitcake, the pretentious fake intellectual, the dim yee-hah Confederate governor, the crazed teabagger queen. What was left was the vapid Mormon billionaire, a pampered scion who is puzzled that people don’t understand he has a right to build elevators for his cars or make immense profits by destroying jobs. Why he can even mistreat dogs. He sent his equally vapid wife out to get In Touch with The People in a thousand dollar T-shirt.
Mitt Romney makes Thurston Howell the III look like Will Rogers. He makes John Kerry, the last vapid plutocrat the Democrats tossed at us as a pretend candidate, look like Robin Williams. His wife is a cross between Lovey and Callista.
There are several thousand people who make up the upper crust, the fantastically overpriviledged collection of buffoons, heirs, hangers-on and sociopaths who make up the economic elite of the country and control over 75% of America’s vast wealth, and this was the best they could come up with as a man who could appeal to the people.
They aren’t even trying any more, but then, they know they don’t have to.
They’ll dump over two billion into this campaign over the next six months, shoving Romney down the country’s throat. Worse, they’ll have nearly total control of House, Senate and most local campaigns.
But the country already suspects they’ve lost control of the process that is used to select their government. The parade of losers all speaking with a single party line voice over the entire spring was evidence of that.
And that partyline voice is, at best, contemptuous of the 300 million plus Americans who aren’t part of the exalted rich, and at worst flat-out animus.
Have you been out of work for a year? You say you’re over 50, and nearly half the businesses in your town have closed? Well, you don’t deserve unemployment because it’s not the place of the people who benefited from your 30 years of hard work to look out for your welfare.
This is America. You get what you deserve.
And according to the super-rich and their puppets, you don’t deserve shit. You aren’t of any use to them unless you can buy something from them, be it shelter, clothing, education or health care. If you can’t pay, you don’t deserve to live.
The Ryan budget, with its merciless cuts meant to reduce the damage done by eliminating all taxes on the super-rich, lays it out for all to see. Really, it would be much cleaner if the budget just proposed building death camps for the tens of millions of Americans made superfluous—and therefore unproductive—under the new regime. If Americans aren’t willing to compete with people making pennies an hour in Asia for jobs, they don’t deserve to eat.
Americans tripled their productivity over the past 30 years, and lost ground on income. All that extra profit went to the people who are now using a tiny bit of that profit to try and convince you that you don’t deserve even the crumbs they throw you.
You could have been like them, but you weren’t a sociopath born to rich parents. So you deserve what you get—or don’t get.
Not all wealthy people are sociopaths, of course. In fact, most are not. Stephen King joined a chorus of multimillionaires demanding to know why his federal income tax wasn’t higher. The grotesque pig who is governor of New Jersey and the GOP’s heir-apparent for top fascist growled that if King didn’t like his tax rate, he should “write a check”. Christie couldn’t stand the idea that one of his class should debase himself by caring about that worthless American rabble.
The corruption goes beyond sociopathy into psychopathy. A leading Republican in the state of Arizona, who also happened to be a neo-Nazi (yes, with the swastikas and struts and beliefs that Jews and other lesser races should be exterminated) apparently shot and killed four people yesterday, including a toddler. He was just standing his ground, you know; that toddler had TEETH. He then shot himself, saving us all the trouble.
The Goebbels of this nasty little police state, Rupert Murdoch, was declared unfit by Parliament to be head of a major corporation devoted to controlling what the British people see and hear, and the American right are losing their minds over that. Apparently, stopping a sociopath from spying on private citizens, bribing and blackmailing celebrities and politicians, and trying to dismantle a free press is violating his right to free speech in fascistland.
The fake election is on, only now most people sense that it is a fraud, and that the GOP are no more running as a party devoted to freedom and democracy than Adolf Hitler was in 1933. If they take this election, America is finished in all but name. Oh, there will still be patriotism and Christianity, both in abundance, in greater amounts than we’ve ever seen before. There will be loyalty oaths to Grover Norquist and internal passports to weed out “the illegals”. There will be endless discussions on TV “news” about how anyone who doesn’t adhere to the party line is a communist (like everyone in Occupy) or a terrorist.
Speaking of Occupy, they had their biggest rallies yet yesterday, on May 1st. The GOP and the right wing propaganda machine tried to make it a communist celebration, of course, even going so far as to try to link the slogan for Obama’s campaign, “Forward” with a long-defunct communist magazine of that name from the thirties. And of course there were small, violent sprees by supposed Occupy members the night before the demonstrations, and it doesn’t take much in the way of brains to realize that such events would be staged, not by Occupy, but by the people seeking to vilify Occupy. Five bozos were arrested in a sting operation by the FBI to blow up a bridge, (yes, the day before the demonstrations!) and lazy or corrupt journalists and pseudo-journalists on the right were quick to at least mention Occupy, even though no actual link existed.
But the people are noticing all this, and one by one, the lights on the board reflecting the state of America’s culture are turning from green to red. This isn’t a good thing, but it’s inevitable when an aristocracy seeks to enslave an entire population, as is happening now in America.
This summer may prove to be a long, hot summer.

The Fifth Characteristic

The GOP goes for a clean sweep of Britt’s “Fourteen characteristics”

March 18th 2012

Back in 2003, Lawrence Britt wrote “The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism” (sometimes also titled “Identifiers: An Examination of Fascism”) That essay is posted below, and can be found here: http://fwd4.me/0wei.

The list seemed to fit the toxic right like a glove.

Mindless avid flag waving? Check.

Contempt for rights? Well, there’s tort reform, and hatred of “trial lawyers”. For starters. Endless sneers about “entitled minorities.”

Scapegoating? Can you say “Sharia law menace”? The Islamic threat? Liberals?

Worship the military? Check. I’ve even seen right wingers whining about how weak America will appear if they punish Robert Bale if he’s convicted of killing those sixteen Afghan civilians. Some right wingers think it’s an imposition that he even be tried.

Continue reading “The Fifth Characteristic”

Berth Control

It isn’t just contraception; it’s a power struggle

March 10th 2012

One of the more remarkable manifestations of the current campaign is the sudden foofooraw over contraception. That Santorum would make an issue of it is no big surprise; he’s been considered the religious nut all along. That the rest of the party would jump on the bandwagon as part of a larger casting of conducting “a war on women” is nothing short of amazing.

They have to be pretty confident that between the pressure to prevent poor people from voting, and the insane corporate corruption brought about by Citizens United, they are going to steal this election no matter what they say or do, because they sure aren’t bothering to appeal to voters.

Still, better to assume that the battle isn’t lost, and these fascistic maniacs haven’t already seized control of the country.

Continue reading “Berth Control”