February 2011 archive
Feb 20 2011
Late Night Karaoke
Feb 20 2011
Howard Beale’s Nightmare
“We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness — you maniacs! In God’s name you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”
– Howard Beale from the movie Network
When the movie Network was released 35 years ago it was considered a satire. No one at the time could imagine how far the standards of television, and society in general, would decay.
Today it is considered prophesy.
While the character Howard Beale touched on the merging of fiction and reality, I doubt that creators of the movie could have dreamed where it would lead us today.
Feb 20 2011
The plutocrats could use a good knee-capping
Charles Blow of the New York Times has noticed that our decadent empire is in decline, and “It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country,” because among industrialized countries “we are among the worst of the worst.”
How dare you notice, sir? And since when is the NYT making such embarrassing revelations publicly? To paraphrase Colbert, Americans don’t want to know how vile and corrupt our plutocratic overlords are, and the media used to have the courtesy not to tell us.
It’s all about inequality
State of Working America has some interactive graphs showing average incomes of the top 10% (in red hues) and bottom 90% (in blue) of wage earners between 1917 and 2008. Moving the vertical bars in their graphs allows the user to select and summarize intervals of interest. Data were compiled by economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley.
From 1917 to 1970 the bottom 90% of wage earners took home 72% of income growth, whereas the top 10% earners took home 28%. The top 1% (light pink) took the smallest proportion of growth, whereas the next two largest income earners (rose and maroon)took the largest shares of the 28% cut.
Over the past forty years or so, income inequality has ballooned. Specifically, from 1970 to 2008, the top 10% wage earners took home all the growth in incomes. The top 1% took the majority of that growth. The bottom 90% got nothing. For the past 40 years, the vast majority and poorest Americans have gotten nothing. Bupkis. Goose eggs. Zilch. All the money has gone to the very top, the worst of the worst, for forty fucking years.
This trend of the uber-wealthy getting uber-wealthier while the rest of us “suck on it” is only accelerating. From 2000 to 2007 the top 1% took 75% of all income growth.
Feb 20 2011
test
Charles Blow of the New York Times has noticed that our decadent empire is in decline, and “It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country,” because among industrialized countries “we are among the worst of the worst.”
How dare you notice, sir? And since when is the NYT making such embarrassing revelations publicly? To paraphrase Colbert, Americans don’t want to know how vile and corrupt our plutocratic overlords are, and the media used to have the courtesy not to tell us.
Share of the wealth: Income growth
State of Working America has some interactive graphs showing average incomes of the top 10% (in red hues) and bottom 90% (in blue) of wage earners between 1917 and 2008. Moving the vertical bars in their graphs allows the user to select and summarize intervals of interest. Data were compiled by economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley.
From 1917 to 1970 the bottom 90% of wage earners took home 72% of income growth, whereas the top 10% earners took home 28%. The top 1% (light pink) took the smallest proportion of growth, whereas the next two largest income earners (rose and maroon)took the largest shares of the 28% cut.
Over the past forty years or so, income inequality has ballooned. Specifically, from 1970 to 2008, the top 10% wage earners took home all the growth in incomes. The top 1% took the majority of that growth. The bottom 90% got nothing. For the past 40 years, the vast majority and poorest Americans have gotten nothing. Bupkis. Goose eggs. Zilch. All the money has gone to the very top, the worst of the worst, for forty fucking years.
Exploding Health Care Costs:
The Housing Bubble Collapse:
The Bail-outs: Privatizing profits and socializing losses:
alphabet soups, GSEs
Our exploding national debt:
Feb 20 2011
Wingnut incoherence
They don’t call it “America’s Shittiest Website” for nothing.
Charles Krauthammer (who is a dead ringer for Wile E. Coyote, amirite?) shot himself in the foot the other day by criticizing CPAC, where Dick Cheney just awarded Don Rumsfeld the “Defender of the Constitution” award, as a conservative “weird fringe group…not Twilight Zone fringe. It’s more off shore, you know floating on a raft out there in the Gulf of Mexico.” He is still waiting for his slower-than-usual nerve conduction to signal the grave owie in his brain. There appears to be a concerted effort by some conservatives to distant themselves from Tea Baggers, lest they influence Presidential nominations.
Pardon me for wasting everyone’s time by remarking that conservatives are dummies, but since I’m on the subject, I can’t help noticing that the geniuses at Red State think that Planned Parenthood is engaged in teenage sex trafficking. Maybe they’re still star-bursting over the wild successes of Levi and Bristol.
Finally, I know John Cole has turned over a new leaf since the interminable Iraq war began, and I thank him for that, but am I wrong in getting the willies when I see this kind of nostalgia? Isn’t that a little too close for comfort?
Feb 20 2011
What’s for Dinner? v5.30: New Cooking Book
Hello, all! Tonight I am publishing the introduction to a new cooking book that I have in the works. It is not so much a cook book as it is a guide for people who have not cooked much before, or who want to improve their skills. It will also have information that even experienced cooks will find interesting. I do not want it to be a very big book, because I really think that the essentials of cooking well are not that complicated.
Besides, there are lots of good recipe books available, and I want this to be a little different. It is intended to more like a operator’s manual for the kitchen.
The introduction will be essentially all of the extended text box except for my signoff. I would appreciate any suggestions for improvement in the comments, and hope that the purpose of the book is clear from the introduction. Without further ado, here we go. By the way, I have not given the work a name yet.
Feb 19 2011
from firefly-dreaming19.2.11
Regular Daily Features:
- Saturday starts with Good Vibrations in Late Night Karaoke, mishima DJs
- Six Brilliant Articles! from Six Different Places!! at Six in the Morning!!!
Essays Featured Saturday, February 19th:
- Talk turns to The Splendor of Risotto in patric juillet‘s latest edition of Tales from the Larder.
- Saturday Open Thoughts are a little blurry from Alma. 🙁
- A new piece of Saturday Art! from mishima‘s talented hands.
- davidseth is in Solidarity with Wisconsin Union Workers. Are you?
- Firefly Memories 1.0 is where (normally)Alma takes a look back at some of the Brilliant essays of our first years posts, highlighting those which exemplify our firefly-dreaming spirit and mission. Alma has an eye problem so Dreamer is filling until she’s better.
Today:happy birthday papa - Dreamer takes a look at the Mindless Eating concept. (at 7pm)
join the conversation. come firefly-dreaming with me….
Feb 19 2011
Starry Starry Night
Looking through DOD photos of soldiers on guard in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, I kept asking myself…
What are they guarding, in the middle of nowhere?
What are they guarding?
Feb 19 2011
Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette
Our regular featured content-
- Six In The Morning by mishima
- On This Day In History by TheMomCat
- Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat
- Evening Edition by ek hornbeck
- Prime Time by ek hornbeck
And these articles-
- All Mobbed Up by ek hornbeck
- Health and Fitness News by TheMomCat (a weekly feature)
- Random Japan by mishima (a weekly feature)
Feb 19 2011
Did America Conspire to Cover Up a Genocide in the Congo?
Last week, Bernard Ntaganda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for “endangering state security” and “harboring ethnic divisionism.” The former charge is all too familiar to human rights activists and is little different from similar politically-motivated prosecutions across the globe. The crime of “divisionism,” however, codified as “sectarianism” under Rwandese law, is relatively unique. The closest parallels to these laws are probably most familiar to Americans as “hate speech” laws common to Europe, but prohibited by the First Amendment in the United States.
International human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have concluded that Mr. Ntaganda was almost certainly targeted for his opposition to the regime of President Paul Kagame. President Kagame is not well known in the United States, but he owes his prominence to the role he played in ending the 1994 Rwandan genocide as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF. The sanitized version of this story was distributed to American audiences briefly in the award winning film Hotel Rwanda. Unfortunately, the politcally correct version omits several important facts, omissions that help explain the current political climate in Rwanda and the slide toward authoritarianism on the part of Kagame and the rest of the political leadership.
Feb 19 2011
Injustice at Every Turn — Part VI: Public Accommodation
 Scarlet Letter |
Injustice at Every Turn (pdf) is a 122-page report of data gathered in 2008 by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality concerning quality of life issues for transgender people living in this country.
Transgender and gender non-conforming people experience grave abuses when accessing everyday goods and essential services, from retail stores and buses to police and court systems. From disrespect and refusal of service to harassment and violence, this mistreatment in so many settings contributes to severe social marginalization and safety risk.
Previous “turns” have covered the basic data about who transpeople living in America are in Who we are — by the numbers, Part I: Education, Part II: Employment, Part III: Health Care, Part IV: Family and Part V: Housing
Still to come are the analysis of the data on identification documents and police and incarceration.
Feb 19 2011
Solidarity With Wisconsin’s Union Workers
I haven’t forgotten. And I’m here to remind you about unions. And union members. Here’s Pete Seeger:
Yes, I know. I lament that union membership is now so small. And that union power is at an all time low. I regret that so few workers are organized in the US, and I am aggrieved by the constant libels unions endure: for example, that the auto industry needed to be bailed out because of its union workers, not because of an overpaid, greedy management as dumb as a sack of hammers. The dominant narrative is that the unions and not the capitalists have caused the problems in the economy. So the unions and not the bankers should make changes. And that the unions are unattractive. That they are fossils. What a joke. What utter nonsense.