More Re-posting

So summer's theoretically a time when life gets less hectic and you get to slow down a little bit, but this has definitely not panned out for me. Being so far behind, I've had precious little time to devote to my poor, neglected blog (although it should be getting better soon).

In the meantime, while you're contemplating getting up to 4,500 bucks for your inefficient car so you can upgrade to a slightly less inefficient car, remember that the Bush administration made it so that it's virtually free to buy giant, gas-wasting SUVs.

In 30 years when all the fossil fuels have been used up and we're living in a dystopic, Mad Max-esque charred hellscape, at least there will be some cool (albeit inert) old cars to look at...

Shocking News That Shouldn't Shock You At All

It turns out that when you give a shadowy company which remains shrouded in secrecy billions of dollars to enter a warzone and provide "security" and then place absolutely no oversights on what they're doing, they kill people indiscriminately and then kill the people who try to blow the whistle on them.

But then again, who could have seen this coming? I would have figured giving billions of dollars and carte blanche to kill whomever they please to a bunch of radical right-wing steroidal miscreants would have turned out great. Shame on you, Blackwater. You've given the word "mercenary" a bad name.

The Only Living Boy in Jonestown

On the night Obama was elected, the misses dragged me and some friends down to the orgiastic celebration going on at the temporary DFL headquarters in downtown St. Paul. And even though throughout the city people were quite literally dancing in the streets, I just couldn't get too hyped up about it all. I remember very distinctly running into a Professor in my department at the DFL party who was working on a project examining the Obama campaign and racial issues. That night she was carrying around a little digital recorder asking people to share their thoughts on Obama's election. My thoughts? I believe they went (verbatim): "I just wish it meant something."

And at the risk of congratulating myself too early, it seems the election hasn't meant much at all. Obama has already supported the "defense" of marriage act, refused to do anything about don't ask/don't tell, backpedalled on his plan to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, definitively said single-payer healthcare is off the table, and now Obama has adopted Bush's state secrets policy, meaning his administration can shut down any lawsuit it wants in the name of "national security."

But I guess we shouldn't be too surprised. After all, remember his campaign promises?

Why Poor People Are So Lazy (A Market Analysis)

Far be it form me to make the wild accusation that conservatives are sometimes hypocritical (like we all are, blah, blah, blah), but when discussing poverty, they take the cake. For you see, conservatives love to explain how the market solves everything -- from deciding who gets nice houses (rich people) to who gets nice cars (rich people) to who can afford to eat well (rich people) to who gets to go to the doctor and live through illnesses (rich people), the market is the force that solves all and explains everything.

Except when it comes to explaining what poor people do. For instance, they certainly don't sell drugs because they've had no educational opportunities and subsequently have no job prospects. No, they do it because they're bad people.

Or take welfare -- again, the reason poor people go on welfare is not because they've been shut out of our exclusive economic system, it's because they're lazy and don't want to work. Yet ironically, this is one of the few times market logic actually explains human behavior. Checkout the graph below:



The red line is what our government defines as the poverty line (which actually still leaves someone deeply in poverty because it's set way too low, but that's another post for another day) and the bars below represent how much someone would earn working full time at a minimum wage job (adjusted for inflation) throughout the past 70 years. Note that only once does one of those bars even come close to meeting the poverty line.

So you tell me, from a market logic standpoint, which makes more sense -- working your ass off 40 hours a week and not even earning enough to meet the poverty line, or collecting welfare and not even earning enough to meet the poverty line? Any good economist will tell you the better choice is to take the free inadequate money rather than the hard-earned inadequate money...

Understanding Palin's Quitter Speech

Apparently the key to understanding what Sarah Palin's ramblings were about as she quit the only job it appears she's ever had, it's because you heard them in the wrong context. The speech was actually a brilliant beat poem, it was just delivered poorly. William Shatner fixes the presentation:

Blog Stealing

I'm running very short on time today, so I'm merely stealing an interesting post from elsewhere. Johnathon Schwarz (via thismodernworld) reminds us that in the game of international politics, whoever lies first is most likely to be believed. A pretty handy lesson for all facets of life, I suppose...

Some Catching Up

I don't have time to write out a full blog post today, so I'm going to just throw some links at you.

It turns out that on pretty much every issue, Iowa seems to be the outlier. We're such iconoclastic people, us Iowegians. Though, I would also note, one way in which Iowa really stands out is in the legal recognition of same-sex marriage...

Norm Coleman, who is finally out of the Senate after switching parties and stealing a dead man's seat, feels the GOP needs to be able to compete on the "ethernet". Say what you will about Franken, but at least I'm pretty sure he understands what the internet is.

Not to be too radical, but I would go so far as to say I think racists are stupid. Here's a great example -- Pat Buchanan thinks America should be for people who butcher English as their first language.

And last, but oh-so-certainly not least, the Pentagon is furious with Fox News for suggesting the Taliban should murder captured soldier Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, going so far as to say Fox is aiding and giving comfort to the enemy. I believe the correct term is "poetic justice."

Saying Goodbye to Uncle Walter

I'm not of a generation that ever really saw Walter Cronkite do his thing, but given his reputation, it's hard not to know who the man was and what he did. And as tribute after tribute fades from the air, we've probably all by now memorized the speech he gave that President Johnson credits as finally swaying the public against the Vietnam war.

What you might now know is that Cronkite was just as much against the Iraq war. It's not surprising, but a still a little odd, that we so celebrate his integrity and fearless reporting yet ignore his more "inconvenient" arguments. You know, arguments such as the Iraq war was "illegal from the start" and a "terrible disaster" serving "no purpose" that has "probably made us less safe."

I don't think Uncle Walter has quite the same pull he used to, so I'm not under the delusion that public opinion would shift any more away from the war because he disagreed with it. But since all of the memorials are focusing on his willingness to take the tough stand and call it like he sees it, it would be nice to not scrub all of his opinions post 1976...

Exactly Two More Weeks of Bachelorhood

As of August 1st, the lease on my beloved li'l apartment will be up for the final time and I take the plunge and move in with the lady. Technically we already live together as we've had our house since early June, but I've still had my apartment the whole time and she's been in D.C. for the bulk of the summer, so we haven't really been living together. But she gets back the same day my lease is up and we move in for real, just like big kids.

And because we're hippies who have little, if any, faith in the institution of marriage, moving in together is pretty much the apex of our relationship. And actually, I argue that moving in together is a far bigger step than getting engaged anyway. Because if you get engaged and then decide things aren't working out, there would certainly be all sorts of emotional pain and whatnot. But if you move in together and then things don't work out, there's all the same emotional turmoil, but now it's combined with a whole mess of material consequences. And being a good Marxist I know that material conditions are far more influential than petty ideological ones.

So I'm trying to squeeze all of the enjoyment out of my last few days of bachelorhood as possible. Of course, I'm a pretty boring guy so instead of cavorting with shady characters or enjoying all sorts of depraved misogynistic pastimes like most guys in such a situation I instead enjoy the real pleasures of not having a partner at home -- showering sparingly, belching often and loudly, letting the dishes pile up into foul-smelling, precarious tributes to my laziness, etc. You know, the kind of things women seem to have some sort of weird problem with.

But honestly, I'm more than ready to settle down with the lady and enjoy the domestic life. Really the only thing I'll miss about my days here is the 5 minute walk it takes to get to my office, as opposed to the 20 minute commute I'll now have. Well, that and the aforementioned ability to live like a pig.

All in all, though, a pretty small sacrifice to make to get to come home to the love of your life everyday. Albeit a love that doesn't appreciate your ability to save water through bypassing showers, but no one's perfect...

The (Western) Human Cost of the War on Terror

The easiest way to get people to support a war is to hide the dead. Witness the first gulf war, which was so popular because there were "only" several hundred U.S. deaths (of course, there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, but who gives a shit about them?). This would also be the reason it was illegal for so long to photograph the caskets of U.S. service members. After all, if people were to actually see the fact that kids no older than 18 or 19 were dying for the constantly-shifting rationale of the war, it would be hard to swallow.

Well, to bring it all on home, the Daily Mail over in the UK has a fascinating article on the Western deaths in the war on terror. For example, here's a google maps image of where the U.S. soldiers and contractors who have died came from:



And this handy map links where they came from to where they died:



Just a nice sobering thought for your morning. Maybe you want to forward it on to your elected representatives who still won't end this pointless and illegal war...

In Case You Missed It...

The Talcott Parsons Project EP is here!

If you like hard-rocking, mystical-creature-centric shred-metal, then this is the album for you. If you don't like those things you are a loser and dead to me.

Either contact me for the whole shebang (artwork, jewel case, etc.) or download your free copy here.


Warning: This album may result in socks being rocked off and asses blown out

Basking in the Glow of Student Reviews

Teaching can be a maddening process. Of course, it can also be a very rewarding process, but it seems like the rewarding moments are sandwiched between multiple disappointing or frustrating moments.

I get where this comes from. I'm only a few years away from having been a college student myself, so I understand the blank-eyed stares and not wanting to talk in class, and I'm a guy who really enjoys talking. The only problem with this is when you get to the other side of things, it's hard to tell if the blank stares are just part of being a teacher or if the students are not understanding a thing you're saying. Or listening to a thing you're saying.

And it can start to wear on you. Class after class of slack-jawed, dead-eyed students quietly staring at you (ok, that may be a slight exaggeration) leaves you questioning not only how good a teacher you are, but your life trajectory in general.

Ah, but then come those rewarding moments, and there you are again, all wide-eyed and filled with optimism about the power of knowledge and educating future generations and blah, blah, blah (not to undermine how important I think education is, I just assume readers of this blog get that point by now). One such moment came today as I finally got the student reviews from the spring semester.

Once again, no one had anything negative to say (though maybe the people who hated me didn't show up that day or bother to fill out the form...), and there were a few pretty touching comments. Without falling too much into solipsistic ramblings, I'll just point out my favorite. One fella (well, I'm guessing it's a guy from the hand-writing) said something about me being a good professor (not technically a prof yet, but who am I to correct him?) and then wrote "please don't get burned out and become really boring like the rest of them."

Can't guarantee it, but enough rewarding moments like these and I should be ok...

It's So Bad in Iran It's Almost St. Paul!

The great thing about television news is that it doesn't need to make sense. 24 hours is a lot of time to fill with news, so no one seems to bother to see if what they're saying makes any sense at all as they desperately try to fill far too much airtime.

For example, they show scenes like this from Iran:



And then they talk about how repressive the Iranian government is that it would call out riot police simply because freedom-loving citizens were protesting the election of an abusive, reactionary government. Certainly this means the Iranian government is corrupt and beyond contempt -- after all, what kind of sick government abuses its own people when all they are asking for are democratic rights to speak out and be heard?

Of course, just under a year ago they were showing scenes like this from St. Paul:



But these were accompanied with stories about dangerous anarchist protestors intent on destruction and those poor police, who despite being heavily armored and carrying nearly a half-dozen weapons each, were afraid for their safety against these unarmed people and reacted like anyone would when faced with the menacing threat of hippies carrying poster board.

Just an interesting little example of how a simple change of location seems to make certain behaviors suddenly perfectly fine (like protesting an abusive government) while others oddly become suddenly deplorable (like beating and mass-arresting innocent protestors).

On Being a Minnesota Sports Fan

Baseball fans know that Tony LaRussa hit win number 2,500 as a manager last night, a feat only surpassed by two other people and unlikely to be touched again for a long time (the next closest active manager is Bobby Cox, and he's a couple hundred games away and heading to retirement soon).

LaRussa used his post-game conference to give a shout-out to some other managers he said would also be in his place if they had the chance to be a skipper on the clubs he has. One of those was longtime Twinkies skipper Tom Kelly, much to the surprise and amusement of the Sports Center crew, which is typically the reaction they have when reminded that people who don't reside in major media centers are capable of doings things well.

And it got me ruminating, as I often do, about what being a sports fan in Minnesota teaches you. As I've mentioned before, it definitely teaches you to have lowered expectations, which is good thing to learn in life. But this is a great example of the humility it teaches you. Tom Kelly never had the talent LaRussa had -- his big names were Jack Morris, Kent Hrbeck, Kirby Puckett, Gary Gaietti, Dan Gladden...all good players, but certainly not the superstar household names like MacGuire and Pujols.

And yet, with a fornt office rarely willing to spend money and a playing and living environment unlikely to tempt big-time free agents, TK managed to win two World Series Championships, which is no small feat in any market. Yet Larussa's mention of him as one of the best managers in the game is met surprised laughter.

But that fits well with the type of values we like in the Midwest, anyway -- you work hard and it doesn't matter if anyone rewards you for it wth praise and adulation. Or more cynically, it teaches you another great life lesson -- you can work really hard and accomplish great things, but usually no one really cares...

Sorry About The Nonexistent Blogging

Spent the past two weeks moving into, painting, and fixing a new house. It is never-ending, but I have proclaimed today a day off. Well, a day off from house work, which I conveniently get to spend doing school work. Blogging to resume normally next week...

Love in the Club, Showbiz Pizza Style

Again, although I hate to be the "lookie what I found on the internets!" guy...well, lookie what I found on the internets (or more specifically, look what Gutter the bus driver showed me on the internets):



There's a whole variety of hits and standards as performed by the Rock-afire Explosion band, so please do waste your entire morning giggling at childhood memories as filtered by some dude with an internet connection and a lot of time on his hands...

Welcome to Reality, Mr. Cheney

Well, Richard "Call me a Dick" Cheney has finally admitted there's absolutely no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Of course, what he fails to mention is that this was clear all along to anyone with a second-grade education or higher and that he intentionally lied about it to go back to a war he'd been itching to finish since he started it with Daddy Bush a decade earlier.

And, of course, despite the hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of people who have died because of this very intentional bald-face lie, he will never be punished in any way at all. Nice work if you can get it...

How To Talk You Way Out of Torture, in Just a Few Easy Steps!

Via Digby:

To help you keep track of all the morally duplicitous arguments for why it's ok that we're torturing people, here's a handy flow chart. To see it in a larger, more readable, format just click n the picture. Enjoy!

Continuing to Ignore Actual Terrorism

The funny thing about the government's incessant spying on leftist groups in the name of preventing terrorist attacks is that there is no known terrorist activity involving a left-wing group since the weather underground some thirty-odd years ago.

However, if you take a moment or two on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, you can see the dozens upon dozens of right-wing terrorist attacks this country has seen in the past 10 years. And let us not forget that the single biggest domestic terrorist attack, the Oklahoma City bombing, was carried out by a group of staunch right-wingers.

Well, once again the right wing has attacked and killed an abortion-services provider. And now all of the "mainstream" anti-choice groups are up in arms about how they're being unfairly persecuted just because they suggest you should kill abortion doctors and abortion doctors keep coincidentally getting killed.

It's funny how I've earned a FBI file for suggesting that we shouldn't kill people (and been quite ignored in my suggestions) and yet those who encourage violence which is then carried out are seen as fine, upstanding citizens. The kind of citizens who, in reaction to a man being brutally murdered in cold blood, react by saying "well, he didn't really deserve to live. Let's go get some beer and chicken wings!"

R.I.P. Northland Poster Collective

One of Mpls' great labor institutions, the Northland Poster Collective, is now going under. A sad reminder that while the companies who started this whole mess are getting billions in free money and will most likely continue on with little to no problems for their executives (cough, GM, cough), the people who have been fighting against this insanity are faltering left and right.