Epistemic Ingemination

Regarding the debt ceiling foolishness:

Look. There is no unavoidable crisis here. The “debt ceiling” debate is a canard; it is a will o’ the wisp. A false flag operation.

It is a myth, manufactured. By — And Only By — The Republican Party.

All that we are seeing is the end game of a decade of thievery.

You — all of us — have just gone through the most monstrous (and the most successful) plundering of a public treasury in the history of the world. Ask yourself: where did that money go? It is a massive amount of money — $5 trillion dollars in ten years. That’s 41.6 billion dollars a month over the 120 months. Somebody received that money.

Did you see any of it? I think not.

It went to military contractors; big pharma; insurance companies; huge reinsurance firms; big oil; big banks; big investment banks. And the politicians who enabled the plunder: they have their share of the booty, too; rest assured.

It was such a excessive orgy of theft that it crashed the world economy. It was such an excessive orgy of theft that the Pentagon can’t account for over a trillion dollars that it spent. It was such an excessive orgy of theft that the State Department can’t account for over a billion dollars in *cash* money that it ferried to Iraq. It’s all just “gone.”

Where do you think that it went? Someone has your money, citizen. *Your* money. And it’s not you.

Now that the numbers are in, we are fretting about the horrific results of our lack of engagement with this treasonous behavior. I’m not seeing so much flag-waving at the moment from you, eh, Patriots? Feeling proud now?

Well, you know what? There’s an elephant in the room, and it is not a Republican.

If we do nothing, the Bush tax cuts automatically expire, and we are well on our way to a budget surplus within fifteen years. If we do nothing at all. That is a CBO-vetted fact.

Except. At this time, we need to pass a normal bit of housekeeping that is a standard part of governing: a debt ceiling increase. It’s wholly routine. It has been a routine vote many, many times in the past. All this does is allow the treasurer to borrow money to execute mandates that have already been allocated by Congress. The money is already spent. It has to be spent. By law. Since it has to be spent by law, we have to issue bonds to do it. Pretty simple stuff.

Or perhaps not so simple, in these extraordinarily dense times. Let’s ratchet back. Let me rephrase.

The Republican party stole your money and gave it to their friends. You are on the hook for it. Now the Republican party says that you need to pay it back by giving up your retirement and your healthcare — for which you have been paying all your life. SS and Medicare are not some “government handout” for which you’re being billed. They are insurance that you’ve been paying for, for all of your working life, and the benefits are rightfully due you. The Republicans have no problem with stealing that as well – so that their patrons can keep your money.

The Republican Party is trying to take these entitlements away from you, to try to make up the deficit that they assisted others in stealing. They are crying ‘foul’ on a false, rigged game that they themselves rigged, falsified and have now declared fouled.

…

I run into politically angry people all the time. Fox News Angry. Uninformed angry. I hear them in the grocery line; I hear them at the convenience store; in the bank. Sitting next to me drinking shots at the bar. Family emails. Customers at places I work. Cigarette smokers out in the parking lot.

I don’t usually do politics in social situations; it’s a recipe for heartache. But I have someting to say to such people.

To you flag-waving patriots; you “libertarians”; you “they’re all the same” folks; you “working man” folks; you “America first” compadres; you “American exceptionalism” people; you “free market capitalism” contingent; you “might makes right” folks, and especially you “no taxes” people:

You think that I am calling you stupid. I am not. I hang with you every day, and you are wonderful, intelligent, talented and thoughtful folks, one-on-one. But as a group you are an absolute horror.

I am not calling you stupid; I am calling you much worse: I am calling you a fool. You are an intelligent, thinking human being, and all you do is vote for the best advertised bucket of chicken that stokes your anger and divides your power. I use such a strong word because you don’t take the time to figure out who is on your side. You vote against your own interests again, and again, and again. You vote for the politician who makes you the most pissed-off at the other politician — and that is invariably the politician who is interested in nothing but acquiring your power and your wealth. They are certainly not interested in governing for your best interests.

People you elect make *public policy.* Public Policy affects your life. Whether you choose to believe this or not, it is a fact. Facts do not change whether you choose to believe them or not.

Guess what? The people you vote for don’t care about facts. And if you elect people who make up their own facts, you do not have public policy based upon factual information. Your country is dying, and your hallowed flag is becoming meaningless, because you did not do your job as a Citizen of the country that you so love.

Engage yourself in your own future, fool. Vote for people interested in public policy and facts first and foremost; vote for those who most represent your political interests. And if you can’t do something as simple as that, then don’t vote at all. Because you are killing the country that we BOTH love.

Are we all clear now?

A good review of a couple of Richard Feynman bios; a better review of Richard Feynman, from someone who worked closely with him. Over here.

…to take look at the quotations page.

Been updating it lately.

Our Discussion

Apropos of the Realist post a couple of days ago; an interview with Lenny Bruce. Starts on page one and you then have to jump to page three. This was 1960, and it has more concentrated insight than is possible these days. And it is as contemporaneous to our time as it can be.

The Realist interview with Lenny Bruce

This is neat. We now have an archive of every issue of Paul Krassner’s The Realist magazine.

THE REALIST ARCHIVE PROJECT

Elizabeth Gilbert (who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a really wonderful book my sweetie loaned to me) gave a TED talk earlier this year.

She gives a very comforting and illuminating review of the creative process, and how we approach it. If you have a spare twenty minutes, it’s a thought-opener for sure. Here ’tis:

Here is a separate link to it: http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.

Not to go all Youtube on you this week; I’ll back off.

But Stevie changing the Grammys (and the world) in ’75 is the real thing. Look at all of the White Peoples clapping, while they get the mirror held up to ‘em. In time. With the Colored Help. For perhaps the first time ever.

Introduced by Andy Williams, of all people.

Magnificent.

AISD is calling it the “North American Flu.” Very good. In some ways, we have a good school system here.

I’ve talked to a lot of folks who travel overseas; they’re plentiful in my biz. And almost to a person, the subject eventually comes up that our country has no idea what really goes on with the rest of the human beings in this world; we’re 300 million people trapped inside a mirror ball, and all we can see is a distorted reflection of ourselves. The subject has always interested me, but since I’ve never been outside of the mirror ball, I can’t really speak to it with any insight that isn’t hearsay.

But now, a writer named Joe Bageant has done a fine job of articulating his thoughts on the matter. He was invited to speak at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and a couple of other places, and his observations are very interesting. It’s worth your time to read the whole thing (and it’s pretty long) but here are some excerpts to illustrate the gist of his piece.

As psych students, most of you understand that there is no way you can escape being conditioned by your society, one way or another. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. So am I. When we go to the ATM machine and punch the buttons to make cash fall out, we are doing the same thing as the chickens that peck the colored buttons make corn drop from the feeder. You will not do a single thing today, tomorrow or the next day that you have not been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do — mostly along class lines.

…

Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of “appropriate behavior,” is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality.

Given the financialization of all aspects of our culture and lives, even our so-called leisure time, it is not an exaggeration to say that true democracy is dead and a corporate financial state has now arrived. If you can get your head around that, it’s not hard to see an ever merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. Or Japan for that matter. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information.

…

Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

The bad news is that we nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening. I know it doesn’t feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things, so it must be OK. This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in our case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture.

…

Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, first, second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a second world nation. We have no universal free health care (don’t kid yourself about the plan underway), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status, if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a “career.” High infant mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy, even by our own definition we are a second world nation.

But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy throwaway technology, that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright colored signs for Circuit City and The Gap (rest in peace), the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow and red wrapper on the burger inside its bright red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience. These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick conditioned illusion, the one I call The American Hologram, is indeed real. If it’s bright and shiny and new, it must be better. Right? It’s the complete opposite of tropical grunge.

There is much, much more, and I find it fascinating. I’ve traveled this country extensively; I’ve been to all lower forty eight states probably five times over, and seen much of the Canadian border provinces as well. But I’ve never been farther into Mexico than maybe three miles from the Rio Grande, and I’ve never been off of this continent at all, deep sea fishing notwithstanding.

Reading Mr. Bageant’s observations kind of makes me feel like the Neo character in The Matrix. There’s definitely studying to be done here.

Very Highly Recommended.

Wow, that post about my high school band director below has gotten some traffic. I guess that we all had at least one teacher that we clashed with on a visceral level. I initially noticed a bunch of Austin-local views, probably contemporaries who know who I was talking about. I’m seeing significant hits from Europe and Japan now. Amazing. And amusing.

So let’s give equal time to the ones that helped me through my checkered public school experience. This time, I’m naming names.

Donna Banik: my seventh grade English teacher at T.N. Porter Jr High. Earth goddess, poet, dewey-eyed idealist, and a fine educator. She fostered a lifelong interest in wordsmithery, a lifelong love of the English language. (And a lifelong weakness for beautiful, intelligent, long-haired brunettes.)

Bernard “Bernie” Owens: 11th grade history. An uncompromising patriot and an uncompromising political liberal whose love of this country and its history was infectious, and the infection remains to this day. We became good buddies, and ate lunch together occasionally. Also a man of ethics; he flunked me. Not because I didn’t know the material — I’d practically memorized the text book, he made it so interesting, and he knew it — but because I didn’t do any homework that final semester. A quality educator on many, many levels, not the least of which was in teaching me that there are rules in this world, and they apply to friends as well as strangers.

And, above all, LaFalco “Corkey” Robinson.

Old jazz beatnik, extraordinary music teacher, wise counselor, good friend, and a person who changed my life. I had the luck of walking into his band hall at the old Austin High after fleeing the marching regimen at Crockett High School. I told him that I didn’t want to march, that I wanted to learn music. The next thing that I knew, he’d arranged for me to play piano and string bass with the stage band, trumpet with the concert band, string bass with the orchestra, and had me in advanced music theory, too. We all ended up with the finest high school stage band in the country, and several of the people in that class have gone on to be very successful artists, working with the finest musicians on the planet. Me included, although my artistic palette ultimately ended up being synthesizers and audio consoles.

There are more, of course, but these three people made a huge difference in my life, and I give my profound thanks to all of them. I hope that, some day, they see this.

I Feel Better Now.

Seussville

I was recently enraged by a marching band contest.

Just a normal marching band contest; they weren’t glorifying Hitler or Ayn Rand or anything like that. Just some kids walking around in patterns on a football field to badly arranged music.

Which I thought was weird, because — well, my reaction was weird. I picked at it for a while, discovered a scar, rediscovered some long-unfinished business, and ultimately the following email exchange happened:

Hello, [name unimportant] -

For some reason, you popped into my thoughts today. Our paths crossed at Crockett in ’72. I was the first freshman admitted to your Varsity Band there, on the recommendation of [junior high band director]. I was also the first freshman kicked out of the Varsity Band there. Went on to a different high school, a teacher who taught music, and a satisfyingly successful career, both as a musician and as an audio engineer. Didn’t have to step 8-to-5 even once during that career.

I know that you’ve won an impressive number of awards in the meantime.

Are you pleased with your career as a “music” educator, Professor?

Cheerio,

r

The reply:

Randy -

I am satisfied with the many whom I have positively
impacted, and deeply regret that you are not among
them.

Best wishes for continued success.

And mine:

I’d definitely say that you positively impacted my life; it just was not a positive experience at the time. You taught me the dangers of getting into personality clashes with people who have absolute power; you taught me the folly of becoming an unwilling mechanism in someone else’s craft, and you illustrated the state of arts education in this country to me, early in my career.

All of these realizations have served me well, and I thank you. I mean that sincerely.

Best wishes,

Randy

Oddly, I genuinely meant that sincerely; that’s an absolutely true statement. But others were not so strong; I know of at least five talented people who gave up music entirely after being crushed under the heel of that “educator.” One of those, a brilliant and funny and easygoing brass player, drank himself to death by the age of thirty. Who can say “why?”, I know, but sometimes little things mean a lot, later on. He certainly didn’t have a lot of charity for his high school band director later in life.

That “teacher” went on to be the director of a music department at a world-class university, and was well known worldwide for her marching band. No doubt, she has a satisfying wall of awards and accolades in her home. But, sorry, she is culpable for the metaphorical trail of dead that she left behind, too.

This little exchange was not any kind of victory for me; it was a spur of the moment thing. I didn’t accomplish anything by making an elder well-decorated career education administrator feel bad about herself; I certainly don’t feel any sense of vindication. I am not necessarily proud of the exchange. But I am not unhappy that I instigated it; Sic semper evello mortem Tyrannus.

In the end, it just needed to be said. My son is that age now, and I am trying to navigate him through the industrial stamping-press that we call public education in this country. I am watching him as he gets mangled by the machinery, and it makes me angry. And I don’t have the answers that I should.

He’ll be strong enough, too. But no one should have to be.

Maybe, in the end, it’s like the Verve said: “It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence.”

Jon Stewart interviews Jim Cramer on the Daily Show. (They’ve been going back and forth for a few days.)

It’s, to me, one of the all-time best moments of television, ever. Easily Emmy material. Easily Pulitzer material.

These are entitled “Outakes” I, II, and III. I hope that they remain up as they are for a long, long time. It’s been said many times, but it’s well to ponder the fact that our best news source and our best journalism these days is coming from a comedy show on basic cable.

Extraordinary, powerful stuff. The Daily Show is a jewel.

The Rocky Mountain News prints its last issue today. Go and read the whole thing.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

April 16, 1963: Letter From a Birmingham Jail:

An excerpt:

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Tomorrow is a new day. A very long-in-coming new day.

The total accumulated cost of NASA since its inception 50 years ago is $416.7 billion. You’ve given away that much in the last 60 days, to people who refuse to tell you where it’s going.

Discuss.

Do you think that you have winter weather issues?

Check out what “Condition 1″ means in Antarctica…

A) When you build an entire economy based upon convincing people to buy things that people don’t really need, you run into issues when people stop buying things that they don’t really need.

B) What if most of your jobs involve servicing people buying things that they don’t really need? When people stop buying things that they don’t really need, most of those jobs are going to go away.

C) If people have been buying things that they don’t really need on credit, and then they lose their jobs servicing other people buying things that they don’t really need? That money is not going to get paid back any time soon, if at all.

D) Finally, if you’ve moved all of your manufacturing of things that people do need out of your country in the meantime? You’re going to be pretty screwed to the wall, and for a long time. Because when people buy the things that they do need, that profit leaves your country’s economy, and is unavailable to you for reinvestment.

Let’s close today’s post with an observation: One of the largest companies in the world, Google, was founded about 15 years ago. Starting from zero, it became one of the largest companies in the world in less than two decades through what avenue?

Advertising revenue. Think about it.

“Consumerism.” It makes a fine snack, but it’s an awful dinner.

Buckle up.

I hit the Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog daily — it is one of the finer, nuanced, thoughtful liberal weblogs. But today, Sunday, 11/30/08, it is so far-ranging and succinct and informative that I just have to say:

Forget this noise that you’re looking at. Go read http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/.

These are some of the ones that caused me to do what I did.

Jessica — The best rock piano solo ever starts at 2:29. Chuck Leavell. A minute and fifteen seconds that changed everything.

Green Eyed Lady — solo at 2:53. Ends at 3:45. Jerry Corbetta defines what rock organ needs to be. Everyone else scrambles to catch up.

Squonk — the whole song. Tony Banks actually played all of those keyboards. While holding down the bass line at the same time. I still want to be Tony Banks.

Streetwave — solo at 2:55. Monophonic synth at its most expressive, ever. I’ve never figured out whether it was played by David Foster, Larry Williams, or Steve Porcaro, but my guess is Steve. Just magnificent work, in any case.

Lucky Man — solo at 3:23. The one that started it all. Keith Emerson plays the first solo as ballsy as anything a guitar can do. I was immediately hooked; this piece quite literally changed my life. Less than a decade later I was geeking synclaviers and touring with rock stars. (Thank you, Rick.)

My friend Kristi just forwarded a link to Andrew Sullivan’s “The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama.” I read Sullivan regularly, but hadn’t seen this one yet.

It’s very good, and is a nice piece of welcome thoughtful conservatism at a time when our non-left political discourse has devolved into right-winger’s neanderthal grunting and feces-flinging.

This proud liberal is happy to report that there are still rational conservatives in this world, and I am happy to state my opinion that this world is a better place for it.

(And, BTW, I disagree with some of this, most notably his premise that Islamic Terrorism is the greatest threat to the West. While I agree 100% that Al Queda must be taken out, and I have supported police action in Afghanistan, I believe that the greatest threat to the world is religion-based fundamentalist thought of any kind. The “boomer culture war” is nowhere near over. But that post is for another day and time.)

Enjoy this nonetheless. It is a fine piece of work, and I hope that it might serve to illustrate some of the difference between conservatism and “right wing.”

10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won’t touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain’s plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama’s. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain’s knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran’s nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush’s first term and George W.’s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama’s fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.

3. Two words: President Palin.

2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today’s Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.

1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America’s reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.

Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.

This is just… stupefying. An example of everything that I’ve been writing about recently. The right wing of this country is truly, completely off their rocker. Behold a local Orlando TV station:

This is a really interesting time, a time for national reassessment. Atrios linked a Village Voice link to a post last night from a fellow in New England at the Wake Up America blog. His name is Roger W. Gardner. I know nothing about him, other than that he is a talented writer and has quite different political philosophies than I do.

It’s a beautiful description of an autumn New England day. But. Then it starts to devolve into a “don’t they know we’re on the eve of destruction” motif. Then Mr. Gardner pens a moment that really strikes me as telling:

Then I see another little sign, tacked up on a telephone pole. An innocuous little sign, weather beaten and torn at the edges — it’s been up there for quite a while now. “No room in this town for hate” it reads. And I shudder to myself. This is the sign that advertises our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses. This is what makes this beautiful little town of mine so friendly and pleasant and so blind to the steady encroachment of that other less friendly reality. We have no room here for hate.

That these words could be legitimately put forth by an obviously intelligent, articulate and concerned citizen of this country speaks volumes about our political discourse. And I think that it illustrates our “here and now” quite nicely. Here we have a citizen who espouses that it is a necessity, for the preservation of our society, to be able to hate.

I think that our right-wing has now constructed a complete information ecosystem for themselves in which they can be comfortable in their fear while they nourish themselves with a positive-feedback loop of their hatred for Otherness. As I wrote below: “You sat in your Barcalounger, and watched Fox News, and cursed liberals, and voted Republican, and ignored any real-world information that conflicted with the world-view narrative that you were being fed.”

This is what we are seeing at the moment; the fruits of this mindset. From “Obama Bucks” to the McCain campaign’s talking points, to sitting US Representatives calling for an investigative panel to find out who in Congress is “Pro-America” or not. They’ve been so isolated from different points of view, and for such a long time, that it has become impossible to entertain a competing idea without this whole worldview crashing down upon itself. There can be no longer be any preaching at all if it’s not preaching to the choir.

McCain can’t construct a clear argument to ask for your vote because his campaign can’t understand that there is an entire world outside of Fox News and the Free Republic hall of mirrors. They frantically argue ‘otherness,’ and ‘socialism,’ and ‘consorting with domestic terrrists,’ and ‘redistribution of wealth,’ and ‘cultural decay,’ and ‘Obama might be a Muslim,’ and being in ‘Real America.’ On and on and on — and it drives the right-wingers bat-shit rabid with political red-meat glee, internally reinforcing the idea that they are on some kind of valid message.

(My absolute favorite tagline of the moment is the whole “redistribution of wealth” meme. It is a fine illustration of how out of touch these folks really are. I’d wager that three quarters of the country thinks that some “redistribution of the wealth” is a pretty darned good idea right about now. Keep punching that one hard, guys.)

None of this stuff gains traction out here in the real world, because all of it is divisive nonsense. The overwhelming theme of America is (and has always been) diversity. E Pluribus Unum. “Out of many, One.” It is very telling (and quite beautiful) that the two most measured and sane voices of the moment, Barack Obama and Colin Powell, are each a genetically diverse, multicultural son of immigrants.

People out here in the Real America value religious diversity. They value cultural diversity. They eat Japanese cuisine and listen to Jamaican music and wear Indian clothing and study epic Middle-Eastern poetry in high school. Real Americans have their Kosher morning bagel with lox, drinking their coffee made through Turkish brewing techniques, while wearing their Mexican vaquero “cowboy” boots as they listen to “country” clawhammer banjo music that echos directly from the African banza. The Real Americans see the peaceful call of Christianity, and of the Jewish faith, and of Islam and Hinduism and Sufism, and of the Buddha and the Tao, and of the other “isms of Faith” — and they notice that each the other all counsel against hate, above all else.

The Real Americans value a marketplace in ideas. They believe that education is how you improve this world, and that the free flow of factual information is critical to the process of good and informed citizenship.

Our right-wingers are so far gone into their mirror ball of jingoistic tribalism that they’ve lost their bearings in the Real America. Hate? It clouds judgment. It wastes energy. It closes your mind to useful information. It is a strategic dead-end and a tactical catastrophe. It exposes your vulnerabilities and teaches your adversary about your motivations. And, incidentally, it reveals your fears and makes you controllable.

It’s how Bin Laden has been making you dance like a puppet. He has accomplished his goals beyond his fondest dreams.

That’s how we got here, to this state of our nation. The propaganda apparatus of the Republican party stoking the fires of fear and hatred, and innuendo and guilt-by-association, and all of the other teapot tempests, solely in service of gaining political power.

Here is a bit of news for the Roger W. Gardners of the world: If you reject fear, it is impossible to hate. As a result, you may have a chance to make rational decisions based upon facts. Your rallying cause is called “terrorism” for a reason, and you’ve bought into it hook, line, and sinker. It can’t exist without your participation. Terrorism without the “terror” becomes criminal behavior, and is approached much more successfully as a law enforcement issue.

The most impressive thing about Barack Obama is that all of these attacks are water off a duck’s back. No effect at all upon his eye-on-the-prize steadiness. The Real Americans see his calm response and his intelligent, measured ability to make sense of what really matters. It is clearly illustrated to them that the right-wing mindset is both false and divisive, and that it is detrimental to our nation.

That is true leadership. Obama is reminding our country that we love diversity, and moreover, he is teaching us, as a nation, how to deal with the right-wing mindset. It is a wonderful thing to behold.

Let McCain continue. Let the attack dogs have one good last run. Let them be so consumed by their fear and their hatred that they end up shattering their twisted worldview against a wall of reality. Let the right-wingers teach “Real Americans” more about themselves. It is their moment in the spotlight, and I hope that they feel the impetus to show us their whole toolkit.

I think that sports metaphors are pretty stupid — so let’s use one. My right-wing friends, you’re up to bat. Try to hit one out of the park against this pitcher.

Real Americans will be watching, and we’ll study, taking notes from Barack Obama, Ph.D., professor of constitutional law, as he illustrates to the World Classroom how to dismantle your insanity and evaporate your power.

Okay gang. If you get all of your information from the Faux News Network, you no doubt think that there is massive voter fraud taking place in this election. There may be. But not the kind they’re telling you, and not by ACORN. Here is some factual information for you.

• ACORN is a community organizer that primary does advocacy for poor and middle-income families. Some of that is voter registration work.
• ACORN sometimes pays people to register voters by the registration, and many organizations of this type do, across the political spectrum.
• Some of those hired people are dishonest and make up false registrations to get paid more.
• ACORN is required by law to turn in ALL of the registrations that it receives, even the ones that have “Bullwinkle J. Moose” as the registrant. If they didn’t, they would be guilty of election manipulation. They flag registrations that they think are suspect, but they still must turn in every one of them.

There is no “voter fraud” happening here. There may be an occasional fictional registration that manages to pass inspection by both ACORN and the county clerk’s office. But Bullwinkle J. Moose isn’t going to be showing up to vote on election day. No vote fraud exists. Registration fraud exists.

Seen?

Now, why is this bogus nonsense such a big deal? Because it allows Republican operatives a talking point as they attempt to purge real voters from the rolls, like they did in Florida in 2000, and in Ohio in 2004. This was the whole issue behind the firings of US attorneys that took Alberto Gonzales down. The White House wanted the ACORNs of the world prosecuted for “Voter Fraud.” No such crime existed, and the ACORNs of the world were not even guilty of the registration fraud; they were required by law to turn in every one that they received.

Even now, though, it continues. Purging legitimate voters in close battleground states has won the Republicans two national elections now. It is a proven tool in their toolkit — they’re not about to stop.

Make sure that your registration is valid before election day. If you’ve been purged, get it fixed before election day.

Monday is the last day to register for the presidential election in Texas. Take the time to make sure that you are registered – you may not be.

Check the validity of your registration anywhere in Texas here.

If you’ve moved within your county in Texas and just need to update your new address, this is the place.

This is really neat; via Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice blog. From The Chronicle Of Higher Education:

Who needs college credit when you have a makeshift diploma from a superstar professor?

David Wiley taught an online course at Utah State University last fall and let anyone fully participate, even if they weren’t enrolled. In the end, five people the registrar had never heard of joined discussions with the 15 or so regular students and got papers graded by Mr. Wiley, who considered the extra work a public service.

The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley, who at the time directed the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and is well known in the area of online learning.

That was plenty of recognition for Antonio Fini, a doctoral student at the University of Florence, in Italy. “I include it in my CV,” he says.

Open Teaching is the name Mr. Wiley and others use for their experimental knowledge giveaway. And it suggests how the Web could soon force colleges to re-examine their offerings in the age of digital delivery.

M.I.T. started this movement several years ago with their Open Courseware. Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins and several others subsequently followed suit to varying degree.

Donating time to actually grade papers for online students of this type is a whole new thing, and it seems to me to be pubic service of the highest caliber. Kudos to the Dave Wileys of this world.