USA - USA - USA

We're number - 2.  OK OK - not too shabby.

But wait; these rankings are a little fudged, cuz if this was a tournament (and make no mistake here - it is a tournament), we'd be listed as 3rd place.  Again tho', not bad from the standpoint of total energy produced.  This is a big-assed joint that needs and produces big-ass bunches of energy, but in terms of the percentage of the total energy produced, we're #111.

So - fuck; again!?!

There are 17 countries in the world getting more than 90% of their energy from renewable sources.

Somebody please explain to me how it seems Burundi knows a little somethin' that we just can't quite figure out.

What is it about Tajikistan?  Kyrgyzstan?  And the Congo for fuck sake!?!  You're telling me they have their shit together enough to meet 100% of their energy needs without fossil fuels and we're just standin' around with our thumbs up our butts?

Yeah, yeah - OK.  Factor out all the cars and you get a different thing altogether - or do ya?  One more thing to chew on here: a British company owns the world's Land Speed Record for an Electric Car - as reported in Auto Week.

The Drayson Racing Technologies Lola B12/69 EV electric race car hit a top speed of 204.2 mph at a racetrack at RAF Elvington in Yorkshire, England, smashing the previous record of 175 mph set by Battery Box General Electric in 1974. Fittingly, Lord Paul Drayson was behind the wheel.

The Brits.  Makers of some of the shittiest cars on the planet for 70 years.  That's who owns the single most important world record for going fast in a car right now.  Once upon a time, if you wanted to go fast in a car, you just called Richard and Kyle Petty down in Carolina, or the Unsers, or just about anybody in the US with a shade tree in their backyard and a little extra time this summer.

But we choose to be Number One Hundred-and-Eleven.  We are so fucked.

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Per Wikipedia:

Grimshaw's primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he created landscapes of accurate colour, lighting, vivid detail and realism. He painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type of weather; city and suburban street scenes and moonlit views of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Glasgow also figured largely in his art. His careful painting and skill in lighting effects meant that he captured both the appearance and the mood of a scene in minute detail. His "paintings of dampened gas-lit streets and misty waterfronts conveyed an eerie warmth as well as alienation in the urban scene."[5]

(hat tip = The Bone Orchard)

Told Ya

The Fundies and "conservatives" are just too fun.

Today's Pix

The KrugMan Speaks

...also, Today's Best Blog Line is the one hi-lited below:

Three Unsayable Words

Brad DeLong finds Allan Meltzer inveighing against quantitative easing, and notes that Meltzer’s story (in which it’s all Obama’s fault) is completely at odds with data on both investment and interest rates.

But there’s a larger story here. Some readers may recall that four long years ago Meltzer warned, in the direst of tones, that we faced a looming danger of inflation from expansionary Fed policy. Those of us who had studied Japanese experience, and more broadly thought through the implications of the liquidity trap, shot back that this was foolish — even if the Fed greatly expanded its balance sheet, the funds would just sit there, for example accumulating as excess bank reserves.

So here we are, with inflation low and falling despite a huge Fed expansion, and with Meltzer himself pointing out that the bulk of that expansion just sat there, largely in the form of excess reserves. In a better world, Meltzer would say the three unsayable words — “I was wrong” — and maybe even admit that the other side of the argument had something to it.

But no; his predictions didn’t go completely wrong because his analysis was wrong, it was all the Affordable Care Act, or something. And like so many people who originally raged against easy money because it would cause inflation, the failure of inflation to take off has simply led them to invent new reasons to take the same hard-money position.

And I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to think of a single prominent conservative economist who has responded to the complete failure of his predictions by changing his views. This has long since stopped being merely an analytical issue; it has become a moral issue, a test of character. And almost everyone on that side of the debate has failed.

Dr K just keeps pluggin' away - and may Zeus bless him for that. I don't get a lot of what Krugman has to say, but I think it's important to find people who seem to be looking for the same kind of Uppercase-T-for-Truth that I'm looking for. And if it doesn't quite fit my political leanings, then I have to change my thinking, not just keep scratchin' around for "facts' that seem to bolster my preconceptions.

Krugman strikes me as the kinda guy who will never say anything as stoopid as, " It isn't that (insert name of bullshit ideology here) failed us; we failed (bullshit ideology)."

Find that truth and stop working so hard to maintain your self-image as some kind of oracle. What Would Krugman Do?

A Coupla Cents Worth

This one's making the rounds, and of course, in the end, the Repubs are actually cheering a woman for doing what an awful lot of 'em think is justification for taking a pot shot at her next time they see her on the street.

This has been put together with the fact that while Ol' 3-Things Rick was busy sucking up to 'the base' by trying to slut-shame Ms Davis, one of his prison wardens was carrying out Texas execution #500.  But being Irony-Challenged is just kinda who they are and how they roll.



That's plenty to gripe my ass right there, but what really gets me is that whenever I hear this strain of argument - the one about giving everybody a fair chance blah blah blah - some things just naturally pop into my brain: first, how come the fetus gets a fair shot to have "every possible advantage" (which will have to include spending huge amounts of tax dollars to enforce criminalization of abortion) but its 8-year-old sister deserves nothing but cutbacks in the SNAP benefits that make it barely possible for her to get whatever third-rate education she has to struggle for in a semi-shitty school that became kinda shitty because of Wingnut Austerity & Privatization, and so they can't afford to do any better?

Second - when these 'conservatives' are waxing idiotic about 'the unborn', why is every fetus automatically destined to become Bill Gates or Albert Schweitzer or Wendy Davis, while apparently none of 'em could possibly have grown into the next Klaus Barbie or Richard Speck?

It's like when somebody decides they can "channel a past life"; everybody's a great warrior, or a noble, or a high priestess, or some heroic figure; and nobody's ever some regular schmuck who sucked at his job and tried to fuck his sister-in-law when he was drunk, and then wandered off into the woods and got eaten by a wolverine.

The point here, Governor Derringer-dick, is that Wendy Davis is the only one in any room at any time under any circumstance who has the brains, and all the information necessary, and the fucking right to make healthcare decisions for Wendy Davis.

You don't like abortions?  Don't get one.  Seriously.  Butt out and find something useful to do with your time and my money.

Nice Little Joint Ya Got There, America

...be a shame sump'n bad should happen to it.

And as long as we're casting ourselves in the role of oppressed victim, let's not forget about the delicate sensibilities of Macho Jesus:

And shit, while we're at it, we should put together another cringe-worthy campaign slogan (and don't forget the graphic) that encourages our fellow Goddies and Cristianists to do the Blow Job Mime - I just can't wait to see what the Libruls can do with Photo Shop on this one.

Today's Rude Pundit

RIpped entirely from The Rude Pundit's blog:

6/21/2013

In Brief: On the Continuing Need to Shove a Can of PBR Up the Elitist Ass of David Brooks:
Every once in a while, New York Times columnist David Brooks strays into the Rude Pundit's 'hood and writes about the world of the university. The Rude Pundit, see, is a real and actual perfesser, not someone who playacts as one, as Brooks did in his recent stint teaching a course in "Humility" at Yale. (Here's a hint: if you own a $4 million dollar house because your $1.6 million house wasn't cutting it, you don't have the right to teach a brain-damaged dalmatian about humility.)

Today, in his column (if by "column," you mean, "the smug pronouncements of a dilettante intellectual fraud"), Brooks mournsthe decline of "the humanities" at colleges. And who does he blame for the fall-off in humanities majors? Fuckin' professors, man, and their fuckin' politics. See, "the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise." Is that what we've done? That wasn't just existential nausea at reading Brooks?

Please, person who doesn't teach in the humanities, do go on and tell those of us who do what we're doing wrong: "The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, 'the dark vast forest.'" Yes, indeed, it was always about idyllic afternoons, laid out on the manicured grasses of the quad, quoting Eliot and Schopenhauer just enough to soak the panties of sighing coeds. "The humanist’s job was to cultivate this ground — imposing intellectual order upon it, educating the emotions with art in order to refine it, offering inspiring exemplars to get it properly oriented." Until those pesky sexual harassment lawsuits put an end to all that cultivating by professors.

But we haven't gotten to the meat of the matter: "Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender." That's right. Oh, for the days when white male professors could teach the white male canon and the universality of their whiteness.

Fuck, David Brooks is the Paula Deen of the Times op-ed page.

Here, Davy Boy, let this professor, one who doesn't teach privileged little shits how noble other privileged little shits are, give you a lesson: The "decline" of the humanities, from 14% of majors in the 1960s to 7% now, has happened not because the big, bad, evil cultural anarchists came in and demanded their pound of canonical flesh. No, see, what has happened to the humanities happened on multiple levels. Conservative fucks like you attacked them as invalid because we decided that things like race, gender, and class mattered because the university opened up to more people of different races, genders, and classes (and, you dunce, class was a huge category of study in the 1930s until red-hunting administrators got a few Marxist scalps and that approach to the humanities was squashed until the 1970s). Add to that the corporatization of the university: schools seek big-ass grants and donations, and those generally come from big-ass companies who want to fund things like business, science, and technology, not the history department. Add to that the destruction of secondary education by "reform" minded people, generally conservative fucks like you, which makes the humanities into another bubble to be filled on a yearly standardized test. Add to that the establishment of Education as a major area of college study, one that has exploded in the last couple of decades and has taken many humanities majors with it.

But, no, really, go ahead and blame those vile feminists and Marxists and multiculturalists and others. It's so much easier than actually solving the fucking problem.

The Honorable Ms Duckworth

Tammy Duckworth does more for us in a 4 minute reaming of a Small Business Phony than Joe (the deadbeat) Walsh managed to do in his full term.

Today's Pix