I don't think any of my reading today is going to produce a gem of greater brilliance than this, so I'm posting an early Quote of the Day:
"Only in our lifetime has running become associated with pain and injury; if you search history, folklore, and mythology, you'll find that prior to our generation, running was always associated with freedom, vitality, and enduring youth."
Christopher (Born to Run) McDougall
Crooks and Liars points out one area in which the GOP is a strong proponent of recycling--their economic rhetoric:
With Democrats proposing to set the top two income tax rates at 36% and 39.6% respectively, Republican leaders waged a ferocious battle on behalf of the wealthiest American taxpayers. Former House Majority Leader and current Tea Party moneyman Dick Armey warned, "This program will not give you deficit reduction." Ohio's John Kasich cautioned, "It's our bet that this is a job killer." And for his part, 2012 White House hopeful Newt Gingrich promised, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable."As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2010. At issue was President Bill Clinton's $496 billion program of stimulus and upper income tax increases. And what Republicans then decried as disaster ushered in the longest economic expansion in modern American history, a period which produced 23 million new jobs and a balanced budget.
Like a malfunctioning cuckoo clock that squawks "Tax cuts! Tax cuts!" in both good times and bad, the GOP is recycling their old inaccurate rhetoric. They were wrong then, they're wrong now, and we shouldn't let them forget it.
Streetwear design firm Eshe Brand has a series of "Religion Is Garbage" images (h/t: PZ Myers at Pharyngula) that many people will find offensive:
As a Pastafarian, I have to say that this yet-to-be-released image is especially bothersome:
Blasphemy!
A new campaign called Turn Off Fox (h/t: James Rucker at Crooks and Liars) to get public TVs turned away from Fox's GOPropaganda, and hopes to "reduce Fox's ability to poison our political conversations and divide our country:"
And we will send a powerful message: that this country will support media that informs us, sheds light on the problems we face, and inspires us to solve them together -- not deceptive propaganda that plays on fear and paranoia, spreads confusion and falsehoods, exploits our divisions, and pits us against each other.
Passing out their "Case Against Fox" flyer (PDF) to local businesses and having discussion about media issues may have an effect--give it a try!
Grantbridge Street reprinted this spectacular image from Superman-Batman #75:
Hitchens, Christopher. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso, 1995)
Tomorrow would have been Mother Teresa's 100th birthday, a fact that is widely evident in our religion-friendly society. Not only does Time magazine have a special commemorative issue in her honor, the USPS will issue a postage stamp featuring her. Amid the adulation, voices of dissent are nonetheless occasionally evident. With the 1995 publication of Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, iconoclastic writer Christopher Hitchens aimed a book-length broadside at the Catholic nun who had been all but free from critical examination.
From the first sentence, Missionary Position strives to justify its very existence, asking "Who will be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?" (p. xi, Foreword) The average person will wonder just what is objectionable about Mother Teresa, who has been all but sanctified in the corporate media for her charity work. In the not-quite-100 pages of Missionary Position, Hitchens borrows heavily from his three-part "Hell's Angel" video (parts one, two, and three) in laying out a case against MT not just for her counter-productive crusades against abortion and contraception, but for providing substandard medical care (especially when it comes to pain-relief medication), accepting vast financial donations that are hoarded instead of used for their intended purpose, and associating with an assortment of dictators (Haiti's notorious Duvalier family) cultists (John-Roger) and other crooks who were willing to offer indulgence-like donations to MT's operations. Here is a photo of her with a million-dollar donor:
In the book, this photo is captioned: "Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, the convicted Savings & Loan swindler from whom she received over a million dollars. In return, she sent a personal plea for Keating's clemency to the trial judge." More devastating than her letter was the reply from a District Attorney:
"Ask yourself what Jesus would do if he were given the fruits of a crime; what Jesus would do if he were in possession of money that had been stolen... [...] I submit that Jesus would promptly and unhesitatingly return the stolen property to its rightful owners. You should do the same. [...] If you contact me I will put you in direct contact with the rightful owners of the property now in your possession." (p. 70, Deputy DA Paul Turley)
Mother Teresa declined to either respond to the letter or to return the stolen money, but her money-hoarding appears to have been a consistent problem. Susan Shields (who was quoted by Hitchens) worked for Mother Teresa for nearly a decade, before becoming disillusioned enough to leave. She wrote in "Mother Teresa's House of Illusions" (Free Inquiry) that "there are many who generously have supported her work because they do not realize how her twisted premises strangle efforts to alleviate misery. Unaware that most of the donations sit unused in her bank accounts, they too are deceived into thinking they are helping the poor." Hitchens addresses this point several times in the text:
Without an audit, it is impossible to say with certainty what becomes of Mother Teresa's hoards of money, but it is possible to say what the true purpose and nature of the order is, and to what end the donations are accepted in the first place. (p. 47)Nobody has troubled to total the amount of prize money received from governments and quasi-government organizations by the Missionaries of Charity, and nobody has ever asked what became of the funds. It is safe to say, however, that if all the money had been used on one project it would have been possible, say, to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World. (p. 63)
Dr Robin Fox wrote in Lancet on 17 September 1994 that "Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Teresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement." (p. 39) Despite "immense quantities of money and material," Hitchens observes that Mother Teresa's Calcutta operation "is as he [Fox] described it because that is how Mother Teresa wishes it to be. The neglect of what is commonly understood as proper medicine or care is not a superficial contradiction. It is the essence of the endeavor, the same essence that is evident in a cheerful sign which has been filmed on the wall of Mother Teresa's morgue. It reads 'I am going to heaven today'." (p. 39) The preference for proselytization over palliative care was endemic under MT's rule. As noted by Susan Shields, this extended to surreptitious religious ceremonies:
"In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. [...] The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person's forehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not become known that Mother Teresa's sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems." (p. 48)
I was somewhat disappointed with the book's brevity; I wasn't expecting Missionary Position to provide equivalent argumentative rigor to Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger, but some of the arguments were lacking in depth. Even in its diminutive form, this book drove Bill (Catholic League) Donohue to near apoplexy. In "Hating Mother Teresa," Donohue asks, "Why does Hitchens hate Mother Teresa?" and suggests that "because he is a determined atheist, he cannot come to terms with Mother Teresa's spirituality and the millions who adore her. More than this, it is her Catholicism that drives him mad." Donohue makes much of MT's letter to Charles Keating's judge, but doesn't mention the DA's request that MT return the stolen money. (Also interesting is Donohue's excoriation of Hitchens for allegedly making "cheap ad hominem attacks" when his own critique was filled with such attacks against Hitchens--but ideologically-induced blindness seems to be one of Donohue's strengths.) Among many others, this complaint stands out:
An unrelenting secularist, [Hitchens] cannot comprehend how Mother Teresa can console the terminally ill by saying, "You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you."
That statement would only qualify as consolation if the dying person in question is Christian--a religion that comprises about 2% of Calcutta's population. I suspect that medical care--or at least adequate use of painkillers--would have been far more a consolation for this person, who responded that MT should "please tell him to stop kissing me." Hitchens continued, in a passage that Donohue is assuming his flock won't read:
There are many people in the direst need and pain who have had cause to wish, in their own extremity, that Mother Teresa was less free with her own metaphysical caresses and a little more attentive to actual suffering. (pp. 41-42)
Donohue is also annoyed that the Empire State Building wouldn't add a MT tribute to their lighting schedule. It's nice to see that not everyone complies when Catholic groups issue demands for special treatment for Mother Teresa--although they are free to do so within their own ranks. In 2003, Hitchens wrote in "Mommie Dearest" (Slate) that Mother Teresa's fast-tracked beatification was "the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality:"
Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
While not specifically addressing Mother Teresa, this paragraph by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism sums up my attitude toward both the Catholic Church in general and its more notorious apologists:
Whatever humanitarian work [the Church] performs, it's more than counterbalanced by the real and serious harm that Catholic teachings do: teaching medieval, misogynist notions of female inferiority; exacerbating poverty, overpopulation and AIDS by opposing contraception; opposing abortion even for raped children, or when the alternative is the near-certain death of the mother; battling tenaciously against civil rights for gay and lesbian couples; trying to dictate to parishioners how they should vote; trying to stifle life-saving stem-cell research; and last but certainly not least, the conspiracy of silence among the hierarchy to protect and shelter child rapists and abusers worldwide. There are plenty of secular groups that do just as much good for the needy without spreading these poisonous memes.
Keith Olbermann parodied the breathless bullshit of right-wing exposés with this take on their latest manufactured mendacity: Obama's "secret Islamic faith."
The most on-target satire in the video is the assertion that Obama "engineered the divorce of his own parents to prevent people from learning that his father was Muslim:"
To keep up appearances, Obama cleverly violated his Islamic faith whenever he could, fooling everyone by: never going to Mecca, breaking the fast of Ramadan, eating pork and drinking alcohol, having a Christian wedding, baptizing his children, worshipping at Christian churches--for decades.
Remember: one American in five believes claims like this when they come from talk radio, or Fox Noise, or the op-ed pages.
Today is National Trail Running Day; I've participated already (a little 8-mile jaunt through a park, a few detours onto some nice single-tracks through the woods, and along a utility road) and I'd like to suggest that others do the same.
Here are the NTRD's "8 Reasons to go Trail Running:"
1. Strengthens your leg muscles that road running does not.
2. Improves balance and agility from running on uneven surfaces.
3. Increases your mental toughness.
4. Biophillia - humans want to be close to nature. Trail Running increases your time in nature.
5. The primal thrill of using your body for what it was made to do, be a long distance, all-terrain vehicle.
6. Reduces injury because running on soft surfaces is better for you joints. Also, the differing steps do not put as much stress on certain parts of your body.
7. Less traffic and cleaner air.
8. Running in the shade is cooler, allowing you to run longer distances and get a better overall work out.
Don't wait--get out there!
TPM has a brief look at the "Plato Code" hypothesis. "Scholarly reaction has been cautious but far from dismissive," noting that "The debate, already lively on scholarly blogs, looks set to continue."
There will be an analysis in the next issue of TPM; I can't wait!
DailyMash has a great piece on "Outrage over plans to build library next to Sarah Palin" (h/t: EvanHurst at Truth Wins Out):
PLANS to build a state-of-the-art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.Campaigners have described the project as insensitive and a deliberate act of provocation by people with brains.
The issue is forming a dividing line in advance of November's mid-term congressional elections with candidates being forced to declare whether they have ever been to a library or spoken to someone who has books in their home.
Meanwhile President Obama has caused unease within his own Democratic party by endorsing the library and claiming that not everyone who reads books is responsible for calling Mrs Palin a fuckwit nutjob nightmare of a human being.
But Bill McKay, a leading member of the right-wing Teapot movement [...] added: "Our founding fathers intended for every building in this country to be a church containing one book, written by Jesus, that would be read out in a strange voice by an orange man in a shiny suit who would also tell you who you were allowed to kill.
"Building a library next to Mrs Palin is like Pearl Harbour. Or 9/11."
Alexander (Common Nonsense) Zaitchik's AlterNet piece on "Top 10 Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories" notes that "[s]cholars continue to debate the psychological and sociological origins of conspiracy theories, but there is no arguing that these theories have seen a revival on the extreme right in recent years:"
Here is a compilation of 10 of the most popular conspiracy theories currently circulating on the radical right and, increasingly, on points of the political spectrum much too close to the center for comfort.1. Chemtrails
2. Martial Law
3. FEMA Concentration Camps
4. Foreign Troops on U.S. Soil
5. 'Door-to-Door' Gun Confiscations
6. 9/11 as Government Plot
7. Population Control
8. HAARP
9. The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
10. The North American Union
The Rashomon Republicans are bringing the craziness, calling Park51 "Obama's mosque" and generally cranking up their alternate-reality rhetoric to 11 as they prepare for the midterm elections. In "The Bare Minimum for Public Discourse," Steve Benen takes aim at a recent Newsweek cover, captioned "A Mosque at Ground Zero?"
Of those five words, four are wrong -- it's not a mosque, and it's not "at" Ground Zero. American news consumers who only casually keep up on current events very likely walked by Newsweek at the check-out aisle and started to form an opinion, unaware that the only accurate word in the headline was "a."It's a reminder of one of the most painful aspects of our discourse: we're constantly having debates over issues that exist only in the imagination of deceptive conservative hacks, who happen to excel at propaganda. There are, for example, no "death panels." "Terror babies" don't exist. There's no such thing as a "death tax."
Benen points out of the "Ground Zero Mosque" that "it's not at Ground Zero, it's not a mosque, and even characterizing it as two blocks away is generous:"
The community won't be "in the shadow" of Ground Zero; it won't even be visible from Ground Zero. [...] Everything about this debate is largely a sham, cooked up by conservatives who hope to pit Americans against each other in advance of an election cycle.The bare minimum of a sensible, constructive public discourse is a base of reality to build upon. At this point, we're not even close.
Today's example of this problem is http://people-press.org/report/645/ the Pew study "Growing Numbers of Americans Say Obama Is a Muslim" (PDF) which notes, depressingly, that "nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009:"
The view that Obama is a Muslim is more widespread among his political opponents than among his backers. Roughly a third of conservative Republicans (34%) say Obama is a Muslim, as do 30% of those who disapprove of Obama's job performance. [...] The belief that Obama is a Muslim has increased most sharply among Republicans (up 14 points since 2009), especially conservative Republicans (up 16 points).
Brendan Nyhan examines this problem at HuffPo, adding a note that:
Time conducted a survey this week (August 16-17) which found similarly disturbing results. Using different question wording and response options, they found that 24% of Americans believe Obama is Muslim...
update:
In his piece "'The Other' in the White House," Will Bunch asks:
Just as happened several years ago with the bogus conflation of Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, we are seeing misinformation grow in a nation with the most pervasive if not the most sophisticated news media in the world. So how does this happen?
Perhaps his memory is short, because he answered that question in his previous post "America's war on 'the other':"
Let's face it: This country has long had its Know-Nothings and its Birchers and its McCarthyites, but it never had gizmos like Fox News or Sarah Palin's Twitter feed to fuel toxic ideas so far so fast. It's time we admit these seemingly disconnected battles over "anchor babies, mosques, and a black man in the Oval Office are all part of the same war against "the Other," and that we are in the fight of a lifetime.
Paul Rosenberg's piece "Blaming the victims for market failure" at OpenLeft takes a hard look at Newt's misrepresentation of unemployment insurance as "welfare," and how he misdirects culpability from systemic economic problems to those who have suffered the ill effects of the Great Recession:
Cold-hearted narcissists like Gingrich will never be capable of walking a mile in the shoes of the millions of Americans facing the reality of unemployment, or other forms of real economic hardship. Nor will simple-minded moral fantasists like Ginrich ever be convinced by arguments that point to complex causality. But many of those taken in by their fairy-tale economic fantasies could be wooed away to a more realistic point of view if they were made aware of how fundamentally flawed the "free market" mythology actually is...
Orthodox conservatives seem unable to understand that things such as speculative bubbles, lax lending standards, widespread bankruptcies, a foreclosure crisis, and high structural unemployment exist BECAUSE THE MARKET HAS FAILED. Keynesian stimulus, extended unemployment benefits, and welfare programs are necessary BECAUSE THE MARKET HAS FAILED. Pretending that liberals are expanding the federal government's efforts without justification is simply ludicrous: government must pick up the economic slack BECAUSE THE MARKET HAS FAILED. Claiming that the market is perfect and will solve our economic problems is a willful denial of reality in favor of theory--and MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM HAS FAILED, TOO.
In case you haven't heard, Right Wing News surveyed a bunch of conservative bloggers for their input on The 25 Worst Figures in American History. Here are the results:
23) Saul Alinsky
23) Bill Clinton
23) Hillary Clinton
19) Michael Moore
19) George Soros
19) Alger Hiss
19) Al Sharpton
13) Al Gore
13) Noam Chomsky
13) Richard Nixon
13) Jane Fonda
13) Harry Reid
13) Nancy Pelosi
11) John Wilkes Booth
11) Margaret Sanger
9) Aldrich Ames
9) Timothy McVeigh
7) Ted Kennedy
7) Lyndon Johnson
5) Benedict Arnold
5) Woodrow Wilson
4) The Rosenbergs
3) Franklin Delano Roosevelt
2) Barack Obama
1) Jimmy Carter
The idea of listing a traitor, an assassin, and a few mid-century [alleged] spies on a list largely populated by liberal politicians is ludicrous. That they included Tim McVeigh [but not other right-wing domestic terrorists such as Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph] and Richard Nixon as token conservatives is another (very slight) nod toward reality. David Weigel at Slate writes that "if this small list and small sample size reveal anything, it's...that these bloggers have a sort of cartoonish view of history." Jonathan Bernstein notes the Southern bias:
What strikes me as odd isn't the elected officials; it's the traitors: Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames, and Alger Hiss all show up on the list, although not Jefferson Davis.
Professor Bainbridge writes that the list is "pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history." Bainbridge recognizes the Civil War as "the worst act of collective treason in our history," and "gave it high priority" in his own far more sensible--although still biased--list (which even includes Confederate traitors Jefferson Davis and Bedford Forrest). There was also a partial rebuttal (or should that be a "refudiation"?) from National Review, where Jim Geraghty notes that "most of the modern political figures look ridiculous when we compare their actions to some of America's most really notorious figures:"
No Al Capone? No Machine Gun Kelly or the Lindbergh baby kidnappers?No Jefferson Davis or anyone else associated with the Confederacy beyond John Wilkes Booth? Speaking of presidential assassins, no Lee Harvey Oswald? (Oh, I know, I know, he was the fall guy for the big conspiracy.) Aaron Burr gets a pass for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel?
Isn't Johnny Walker Lindh or Robert Hanssen a more clear-cut case than Jane Fonda or either of the Clintons?
No Charles Manson? Come on. You're really telling me Al Sharpton and Michael Moore outrank somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate people? Race-baiting and rabble-rousing outrank cannibalism?
No Jim Jones (cult leader, not national security adviser) or David Koresh?
Not one villain from America's business world? No ruthless layoff king like "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap? No Ken Lay? Bernie Madoff couldn't reach the top 20?
Ed Brayton points out that the list "reveals much about the hyper-partisanship of those bloggers. While there are a few obvious bad guys on the list, much of it is made up of Democratic politicians and liberal thinkers with whom they disagree." Brayton goes on to decry the absence of "a single vote for those who ordered the Ludlow massacre or any of the other shocking examples of union-busting violence by corporations and the government," but that sounds like the raving of some pinko who has read too much Howard Zinn. (Speaking of Zinn, why isn't he on the list? He even has the taint of Hollywood liberalism due to that mention in Good Will Hunting. Wouldn't an academic with a celebrity affiliation be like a two-bagger for the Teabaggers?)
I'm not inclined to try putting together a more realistic list, but that doesn't mean I haven't thought about it. Benedict Arnold is a good choice, but he should be joined by Civil War traitors (Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee), mass murderer Henry Kissinger, media titans Rupert (Faux) Murdoch, Rev Sun Myung (Washington Times) Moon, along with some hyper-paranoid Cold-War-era anti-Communists (Robert Welch, Joe McCarthy, and J Edgar Hoover), and failed presidents (James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, W).
Thoughts?
With the brilliant piece "Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated," Slacktivist has provided my Satire of the Day. Or month. Maybe year. (Yes, it's that good.)
Go read it right now; you can thank me later.
...as to have a groupie like this (h/t: Edan Lepucki at The Millions):
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