Ain't Nothin' New

I guess some of the shit we complain about now is the same shit we've been complaining about for what's getting to be a very long time.

Here's some Herblock stuff from 40 or 50 (or more) years ago.

Lance The Boil

When it seems like the world's all fucked up, one thing we have to stop and consider seriously is that maybe the world's just all fucked up.

Eventually, ya gotta get all that putrefaction out. If you don't drain the abscess, it just gets worse.

The UVa rape thing:

...At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.

"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party.

"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

The Bill Cosby rape thing:

If Shonda Rhimes had a show called How to Get Away With Rape, it would only need one episode, and it would be a short one.

The hot-shot lawyer main character would give her client this advice: be a respected figure in your own community and target victims with lower status than your own. If you follow those rules, people will be uncomfortable with the consequences of believing your victims. They will not want to do that work. In fact, they will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it.

Show over; roll credits.

On Tuesday, Janice Dickinson became the 15th woman to accuse Bill Cosby of raping, drugging, or sexually assaulting her, and the fifth to do so publicly. These women tell a similar story: that they met Cosby when they were young women. That he spent time with them under the guise of professional mentorship. And that he, at some point, drugged their drinks and assaulted them while they were incapacitated.

First:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

And then:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. . . . In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail" --Judith Herman, 1997, Trauma and Recovery (pg 7-8)

Today's Yeah But

Jim Webb seems like such a straight-shooter-no-nonsense kinda guy, it's a little difficult for me to buy in.  And since being honest is such a complete political liability, I just don't give him much of a chance - 'course, nobody tho't he could beat George (Macaca) Allen either.

But here he is anyway:



It starts out with pretty much the usual zero-content platitudes about "good leadership" and "solving problems", but the thing gets a lot more specific than most intro speeches I've heard.  

And so, here we go again - Hillary's the default Democrat again, and so I gotta look at alternatives again.  Yeah, but - the Repubs are still fingers-in-the-mouth-jumpin'-up-and-down-crazy, and they're likely gonna nominate somebody who lets 'em think they could pass for normal by making Ronnie Raygun look like Eugene Debs.

Full text and some discussion at Blue Virginia.

No more Clintons

No more Bushes

No more Rockefellers

No more Kennedys

No more legacies

No more dynasties

There Are No Nations

It's worth seeing just about anything Paddy Chayevsky wrote because of the speeches and/or soliloquies.

The clip is from Network (1976), and it's been a favorite for me for a very long time.

"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies.  The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business - the world is a business, Mr Beale.  It has been since man crawled out of the slime..."



I like to say I'm a Capitalist because god is a Capitalist, and that I believe strongly in Regulation because god believes strongly in Regulation.

I think Capitalism is the closest analogy to the way the biosphere has evolved to operate.  

As an organism, I have to take in enough calories to build up something of a surplus, so I'll have the energy necessary to make the effort it'll take to go out and get my next meal - income vs outflow; profit and loss etc.

But I also have onboard mechanisms that're there to regulate the functioning of my system.   Blood sugar (eg) is a good thing, but my pancreas is there to regulate it so I get the benefits without it reaching levels that're harmful to me. Bunches of other mechanisms of regulation are built into my system as well.  I have a hypothalamus to help regulate my body temperature; my brain stem does all kinds of nifty things like regulate my heart rate and my breathing and my eye-blinks etc etc etc.  Regulation is what works to keep me in healthy balance with myself and the world around me.

So, to be a little clearer, I don't have a problem with Capitalism.  I only have a problem with Capitalism when it's allowed to go crashing thru people's lives as it speeds toward the Logical Extreme (aka Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism) - which is where we get Feudalism and Slavery and Conquest and Authoritarian Rule and all of the really shitty ways of running things that America's supposed to be the exception to.

Always always always remember - a business is not a democracy.

A Sensible Position Statement

Finally - a Dem with enough starch in his britches to stand up and say it straight out and for real.  Never mind that he's on his way out and so he risks absolutely nothing if he actually tells the fucking truth for a change, but hey - I can give the guy one last Atta Boy:

"Every dollar that we spend on fossil fuel development and use is another dollar we spend digging the graves of our grandchildren. And I'm not going to be a part of it anymore. I'm through."  -- Sen Tom Harkin, D-IA

hat tip = Democratic Underground

And So It Begins

New Xmas music From Kristen Bell, backed by Straight No Chaser:

Here Comes The Sun

On day 3 of a weather cycle that seems determined to destroy the resilience of even the cheeriest among us - science, muthuhfuckuh:

The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. 

The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov) + (helioviewer.org). 

This animation has been rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is “up”. 

The audio is the ‘heartbeat’ of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev. Image data courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams.”Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake.

To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@storyful.com

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Give It A Try

Lamenting the dearth of good solid "librul" radio, Driftglass and BlueGal mentioned this on The Professional Left podcast today:

Netroots Radio

Friday Music (updated at 7:25 pm EST)

A quickie.

The Book Of Right On (cover) --Sarah Jarosz




And some Jackson Browne too:

Obama Hits Back

If only.