It’s an easy choice. Leprosy is treatable. Rick Santorum isn’t. And the incidence of him in this country is a lot greater. Rick Santorum is one of the most singularly repugnant politicians in a group characterized by cavernous personal faults and flaws. Of an unlikable and impossible to admire bunch, Santorum takes the cake.
He’s a Catholic — the worst, someone straight from the church I knew as a very little boy, a mild-looking conservatively dressed sociopath with a pasted-on smile.
It’s virtually inconceivable to me that Republican voters are so nuts they’d actually vote for someone who holds beliefs pitting them against women over birth control and everyone else for having sex for lots of reasons outside procreation.
Santorum is emblematic of the beamish and out-of-touch orthodoxy, the unbending unbeliever-hostile unreason of the Catholic church in the US.
I got married in the Catholic church decades ago and while divorced for a good long time, in the eyes of it I am in that relationship forever.
Fortunately, we still live in the US.
Now for the second part of the story.
As a requirement for getting married in the church in the late Eighties partners had to take a course on marital relationships, administered by the parish in which they were to be joined. This was put in place to battle the merciless statistics on divorce.
Worked good, didn’t it?
Part of the course was on birth control. The church chose one of its local parishioners to teach this subject, feeling he was qualified in some way not apparent to anyone else.
The man counseled the class on the rhythm method, the monitoring of the woman’s temperature and her cycles of secretions. Really, that’s how it was phrased.
The fellow revealed he had five children, or maybe it was six, in the space of about four years and some change. The rhythm method was working very well for him.
It was hard to contain a natural superciliousness.
Of course, the idea wasn’t to teach birth control. It was to get you to have children, a lot of them, and as quickly as possible. Contraception, even the rhythm method, was not OK, to paraphrase and embellish slightly on the wisdom of Rick Santorum.
At one point a priest must have gotten the impression I wasn’t an ideal candidate for Roman Catholic marriage. So he asked me a question he presumably thought could be used to slow things down: “Are you on drugs, George?”
So I got married in the church after saying “No,” anyway. After that I never went to a single Mass. It was the end of having anything to do with the religion.
About a year after having been married a priest from the Allentown diocese showed up at the apartment door wishing to chat. He wanted to know why I had lapsed. I told him I wasn’t going to waste any time on him with an answer and I did it through the intercom security system apartments use to keep out the riffraff.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” the man asked. It apparently stunned him that someone married by the church could be so rude.
Like the Catholic clergy in Allentown, when I see Rick Santorum I see someone who’s idea of righteousness is getting in everyone else’s business in the name of their own warped code. They are worth only scorn. If you saw Santorum approaching on the sidewalk, you’d cross the street to get away.
People who support Rick Santorum seem from another planet entirely. Either that or they’re so desperate and rendered stupid by a hatred of Mitt Romney they cast their votes for a person worse than an Old Testament disease.
While I’m not watching any more episodes of National Geographic’s pitiful series, Doomsday Preppers, that doesn’t mean press releases for it go unseen. Published to to maximize the appearance of one of the show’s profiled preppers, it advertises a a fellow who has unsurprisingly built a business on survivalism.
Much of Doomsday Preppers is obviously devoted to the acquisition of survival gear and militaria.
For example, the appeal of the doomsday shovel must be its adaptability born in the tradition of the battlefield entrenching tool. It is not only for digging a hole but also for bashing those who would steal your dried corn, pemmican and preserves in the head.
A number of giant multi-nationals have finally figured out, or their CEOs have, that the mass downturn has soured a lot of the populace.
A decade of relentless outsourcing, squeezing out through automation and economic shrinking has done it.
People are figuring out corporate America really does hate them. It doesn’t like to pay even miserly American wages. It doesn’t like even minimal regulations preventing the fouling of the community.
So some have launched a massive p.r. effort in an attempt to convince those at the top of government that they’re not just offshore tax evaders.
Largest among the p.r. campaigns is that launched by General Electric.
The dancing people and elephants are gone — I’m glad to have had a very small hand in it — replaced by blue collar actors/workers in a bar telling the Joe Sixpacks they make the power, the electrical motors, so all can have Budweiser.
Hand in hand are regular news stories claiming manufacturing is coming back to the United States. Yes, very small increments here and there. However nothing to change the employment landscape in any major way.
Big manufacturers moved their production out of the country too quickly over the past decades and now see a competitive advantage in building up their footprints back home, top executives said on Monday.
The chase for lower-paid workers drove the migration, which resulted in employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector falling by 40 percent from its 1980 peak. But big companies including Boeing Co and General Electric Co are now finding that the benefit of lower wages can be offset by higher logistics and materials costs.
“We, lemming-like, over the last 15 years extended our supply chains a little too far globally in the name of low cost,” said Jim McNerney, chief executive of world No. 2 planemaker Boeing. “We lost control in some cases over quality and service when we did that, we underestimated in some cases the value of our workers back here.”
GE CEO Jeff Immelt said the largest U.S. conglomerate’s thinking evolved on the value of manufacturing inside the United States versus outside it.
“We’re basically moving our appliance manufacturing back from Mexico and China to basically Louisville (Kentucky),” he said …
Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE said at the event that it plans to hire some 5,000 military veterans over the next five years.
Manufacturers say they like to hire veterans because their experience in figuring out how to solve problems quickly is useful in high-speed modern factories.
It’s all crocodile tears. Jeff Immelt surely knows he’s detested by many who know his name as the CEO of the company the government paid tax bonuses to last year. More recently he was on 60 Minutes letting on that he thought Americans should cheer his company as his employees do when he visits.
Let’s do the math on the employment numbers attributed to GE.
GE will hire 5,000 veterans over five years. That’s 1,000/year.
Spread over a country the size of the United States at 311.5 million.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment/population ratio is 58 percent, which means 180.7 million people in the labor force this year.
Here’s the calculation:
1000 divided by 180 700 000 = 5.53403431 × 10-6
General Electric’s beneficent plan to bring manufacturing home to the US for veterans will contribute 5.53403431 times 10 to the MINUS SIXTH POWER to the work force.
When corporate p.r. arms and CEOs work these types of stories they must surely count on journalists and readers who won’t do any arithmetic.
The story also contains the usual received wisdom that Americans aren’t skilled enough for modern manufacturing jobs.
The wisdom expects you to actually believe the average Chinese worker has somehow been trained to be superior in the making of electric guitars, consumer electronics, or anything else formerly made in America.
I ask the rhetorical question, again: Do the line-dancing workers in my GE video look like they have or need any particularly special set of skills?
What special skills are on display here? Wiping glass screens with a squeegee soaked in hexane?
Wintek gained notoriety for making workers use n-hexane, a toxic compound, to clean iPhone touchscreens because it evaporated much faster than rubbing alcohol, enabling workers to increase their output. In 2010 interns told SACOM there were 500 students at the plant who worked 11 hours a day, seven days a week with a maximum salary of 500 yuan, less than $80 a month. According to the report, “Wintek pays the students’ salaries in accordance with law, but the lion’s share goes to the schools directly.??? Over the course of a year, 500 students could net a school more than a million U.S. dollars in income.
“Those jobs aren’t coming back.” — Steve Jobs, via the NY Times
I regularly run into people who rant against the government, vote Republican, who’s lives are utterly dependent upon various aspect of the social safety net.
The working class’ earning power has been so squeezed by corporate America it has fallen to the government to keep many from abject poverty.
Yet large numbers of the people dependent on government programs watch nothing but Fox News, detest the current President and argue vehemently to destroy all the things that make their lives survivable.
The New York Times has done a long story on them. It is a must read.
Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,??? said KI GULBRANSON, who counts on an earned-income tax credit and has signed up his children for free meals at school.
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
[Dean P. Lacy], a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.
And, here, the man who resent others who spend “his” money, doled out by entitlement check, in the same boat:
Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.
Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.
“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,???
Having played in a biker rock band for many years I’m intimately familiar with the tattoo parlor crowd. The logical mind is not one of its defining characteristics. You find no gentleness, expansive spirit or progressive value in tattoo parlors and this can hardly be news. Momentarily, I wondered why the Times even saw fit to interview someone who ran one. (The paper also uncovered a bigot — the resentment over “nice Nike shoes” being the giveaway. The reporter and editors certainly know it.)
However, scapegoating is a common characteristic of societies enduring hard times. And Paul Fussell noted in Class that the afflicted kick down at those of their own circumstance.
There’s a very thin line between disdain or contempt and outright hate between the divisions which make up our various middle-class tribes. And often there are no lines at all. Needle someone hard enough in a tribe different from yours and see it erupt.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or anywhere in the hinterlands. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. The presumed tormentor is usually someone within arms reach.
Here I often marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side.
The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided. It’s easy to laugh at material by people who couldn’t pass an introductory college economics course singing about Ron Paul’s love of “sound money” and returning to the gold standard.
However, one thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
A predatory economy has set into stone conditions in which Americans now always find themselves moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. How many people on food stamps vote for pols who want to destroy the food stamp program?
A lot more than you think, I imagine.
“There used to be room at the top,??? Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
Oklahoma is a place of idiotic whims. This week a Republican legislator moved to outlaw castor seed production. In talking to the local newspaper a bunch of stupid rationalizations bearing no relationship to truth were employed to explain legislation that would ban lowly castor plant agriculture.
The blog saw this one coming a couple months back and the original, “GOP selects for genetically stupid people,” is here.
From an Oklahoma newspaper, on the move to pass legislation in the state’s House making castor bean cultivation a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine:
Growing castor beans for commercial purposes would be illegal under a measure that won unanimous approval Wednesday by a House committee.
Castor beans, which are composed of 50 percent or more oil, are the among the most promising biofuel crops, but they also contain ricin, one of nature’s deadliest poisons, said House Floor Leader Dale DeWitt, author of the measure …
House Bill 2189 would make it unlawful to plant, nurture or otherwise commercially produce castor beans. Anyone violating the law could be found guilty of a misdemeanor and could face a fine of up to $500.
Nurseries still could raise the crop as an ornamental, flowering plant, DeWitt said.
“We have some folks that want to start production of the castor bean,??? he said. “The problem we have is they’re also very toxic.???
Wheat farmers who would plant castor beans would jeopardize future wheat crops, DeWitt said.
“Once you go out and harvest this, you can’t get a machine completely cleaned out, you can’t get trucks totally cleaned out,??? DeWitt said. “You do the best you can, but if you happen to get one of those beans in there, then you contaminate that load.???
Is there an epidemic of ricin poisonings in India? (Sound of crickets.)
The rest of the world doesn’t care what politicians in Oklahoma believe.
However, at DD blog I believe it’s important to point out such things, along with explanations when such people are lying to newspaper reporters.
And the Oklahoma politician is certainly being deceptive when he goes on about castor plant production as a source of biofuel.
It’s not a productive avenue, unless — of course — it could be heavily subsidized by the government. Castor oil into biofuel production in the world is negligible to non-existent.
However, it does make sense to have a castor oil business.
“[This plant] is a very useful raw material in many industries like soap, surface coatings, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, perfumes, greases and lubricants etc,” informs a page in the castor industry in India.
The page also shows the world’s biggest importers of India’s castor oil.
Europe is first. The United States is second.
I do not know why Oklahoma politicians compete with rocks for smarts.
It’s just the way things are.
However, it’s disappointing when the local newspaper lacks the editorial skill among its journalists to explain why they should be ignored and even disciplined when going on about castor plants.
In the past the United States did cultivate castor. Loads of castor seeds and castor mash were shipped on the roads of our land. And there were no incidences of contamination and sudden tragic death by accidental ricin consumption.
It is just not a problem. It only seems to be one when people get away with presenting nonsense passed off as fact.
Texas also once had a castor industry. Today, efforts continue to try and revive castor plant production there despite the US’s decade-long war against castor beans.
If the Okies outlaw castor plant agriculture, sharing a common border with a state that hasn’t — Texas, might be considered a provocation. In the future, what would happen if castor pomace or seeds from Texas found themselves being shipped into Oklahoma, or straying onto its highways?
Much amusement can be had thinking up scripts for a short comedic story, perhaps entitled “The Great Red River Castor Bean War.”
The National Institute of Health furnishes a report on a single case of poisoning by castor bean in Oman, where a patient used one to mistakenly treat a cough.
Apparently, some old methods of “traditional” medicine employ castor seeds. And the castor seed does not usually poison unless it is chewed, a factor pointed out by the journal article.
In various countries castor beans are the base of many traditional remedies. Our patient believed that they could treat his cough. Ingested castor beans are generally toxic only if ricin is released through mastication or maceration …
And from the abstract, the outcome is summarized:
Increasing the awareness of the population to the dangers of ricin would be a way to avoid the utilisation of castor seeds in traditional therapies. Here we are reporting a case of mild poisoning after ingestion of a single castor bean. The patient, who presented at Nizwa Hospital, Oman, fortunately recovered completely as the ingested dose was quite small.
Since no one else will link. My generation is way too full of goody-two shoes-es.
Many have fond memories of colorful sloe gin fizz misadventure.
Back when I still had hope I managed a swimming pool in the summer. During the season we had private parties for the staff. My best friend was the pool handyman and toward the end of the night he boasted he could drink just about anything.
I eyed a half full bottle of sloe gin on the table beside him. Betcha can’t do that, I said.
He accepted that challenge. Took about five minutes to wind up on the sidewalk outside.
I drove by the next day and the owner of the rental where we’d had the party was out trying to hose a baked-in stain off the cement.
The channel commissioned an online survey of 1,007 adults in the USA, and found that 61% of Americans believe the country will experience a major catastrophic event within the next 20 years, but only 15% feel they are fully prepared for it.
“I think between the survey and the show, people will get to examine their own beliefs, compare them to the survey, see how people in the show are spending their lives and learn to prepare themselves,” says Brad Dancer, senior vice president of research and digital media at the channel.
So it’s a public service to show lamentable crazy people, collateral damage of the fear-based economy.
Another bit:
Prepper Tim Ralston of Arizona views destruction of the electrical grid caused by an electromagnetic pulse weapon or solar flares as his worst-case scenario. To prepare, he regularly conducts a dry run to an underground bunker with his kids.
There’s never any shortage of hand-clapping and delight for taking an old cheap wind instrument, made to be played by hand, and rejiggering it into a software emulation that’s not quite as good but lots easier, for the iPhone. Even the cigar box guitar isn’t immune to being screwed up.
The top app orchestra in the list at YouTube is from Stanford University. And I stole a bit of it for Steve Jobs & Meat Blobs. The hopeless nerds in black body-stockings, not even particularly good as imitations of Dieter from Sprockets, were too priceless to pass up.
If you hang around until the end of the Stanford video you’ll find one of the iPhone mavens has made an ocarina for it. One that also tells you when other people around the world are playing their fake iPhone ocarinas, too.
Now if you wanted to be famous for dressing in black stockings while playing the ocarina, the New York Times would probably tell you to piss up a rope.
“If you have open ears and open minds, you see the value,” says one of the iPhone ocarina players.
“Somebody said it was revolutionary,” remarks another. Somebody said, surely.
iPhones nudge people into being creative, expressive.
Ultimately, these all fail for me because they lack any real physical resonant structure that along with a person, makes a wind, string or percussion instrument. You can beat a guitar and it will very much contribute to the music you make. iPhones? C’mon.
