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The Last Play I Will Write — The End Of A Habitable Planet?

Monica–not sure where you are in this great land of ours, but I’ve just signed a contract to do the play in NYC in November as part of an international festival of one-person shows. Tickets will be on sale in the next week or so (the festival opens the ticket window early and then books additional shows per demand). You can check my website at http://www.brooklynculturejammers.com. I will also travel if someone asks me nicely and can put me up.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On April 10, 2016 @ 6:43 am

History, Is It Being Taught Anymore?

Nirek: understood you don’t enjoy blaming the kids (nor do I). But there’s a gleeful edge about videos such as these, and such videos have become a staple of late night ‘comedy’. Frankly, I’d like to see such a video shot of NYC public school graduates of recent vintage for purposes of destroying the last vestige of accomplishment from the Bloomberg era. Mayor Mike is still coasting along on his reputation of saving the schools. No mayor has had more leeway on school policy (and more support from the business community) and his results are even worse than the status quo.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On November 13, 2014 @ 6:02 am

It’s fun to blame the kids here for inattentiveness. However, the State of Texas looked at their academic records, SAT scores, and other ephemera and said they qualified as high school graduates and as college freshmen. And Reality check–Because Texas buys huge quantities of textbooks in single purchases for the state, Texas enjoys de-facto control of school textbook content for all fifty states. If you are an educational publisher, you HAVE to make the approved list for Texas because the market is make-or-break for profitable publishing. So whatever these kids learned in Texas public schools is very close to identical to what kids learned in the other 49 states.
If it makes anybody feel better, I’ve been interacting with college students as part of the Brooklyn radio station gig I’m doing lately. Many of the ones I’ve dealt with are as dumb as the folks at Texas Tech, and these are the high-achievers. This is not a problem exclusive to Texas.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On November 12, 2014 @ 7:37 pm

Why Tuesday Went So Badly for Dems

Nirek:
Yup, the pipeline has the necessary 61 Senate votes because eight or nine Dems had ridden off the reservation. That, together with the whole GOP voting for it, will make it impossible for approval to be vetoed by Obama (assuming he WANTS to veto it–he’s waffled on it for several years).

The question is whether a GOP Senate can score a vote to make regulation of fracking a federal issue (and thus meaningless). One of the issues in the NYS election was whether Cuomo will use his second term to back fracking (his GOP opponent was an advocate, and Cuomo didn’t argue the point very forcefully).

» Posted By Misterbadexample On November 7, 2014 @ 4:54 am

Should Voting in the U.S. Be Mandatory?

Unfortunately, unlike most of the countries you mentioned, the US has two dominant parties, with third parties accorded virtually no chance of achieving high office. We also don’t have proportional representation–it doesn’t matter if, say, 35% of the electorate would support a progressive candidate to the left of the Democrat because our system is state-derived and winner-take-all. My votes for progressive candidates will not change the outcome of voting in my home district (where the Dems have locked down every election for over a generation). And with the Electoral college, it doesn’t matter what the percentages are–if a candidate doesn’t win the right combination of states, he or she will lose even after posting a voter landslide.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 17, 2014 @ 11:50 am

Great News on the Economy! (Made You Look!)

Funksands:
I’ve done a post or two on my blog regarding the gaming of the unemployment statistics. I profile the work of statistician John Williams here:
http://brooklynculturejammers.com/2013/02/14/dont-know-much-about-statistics-either/

But I’d like to refer you to Paul Craig Roberts, an economist and former Reagan treasury official who rode off the reservation about 15 years ago. His latest column calls the UI report into question on several levels. Particularly interesting–the boomers aren’t retiring. They’re taking whatever jobs they can find (part time, low-paying) to help supplement their income after their housing values crashed and their 401K’s stopped returning enough income to allow them to live.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/10/03/bad-news-jobs-front-paul-craig-roberts/

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 11, 2014 @ 6:23 am

Funksands, this is a really good summing up of where we are. People shouldn’t be giving each other high fives over the current unemployment rate when it really isn’t counting folks who’ve fallen out of their 26 weeks. I give props to the administration for what they have done, but unemployment hit a sort of Rubicon a couple of years ago with the labor participation rate. Our adult labor participation rate is where it was in 1978 and before, when it only took one wage-earner to support a middle-class family.

My fear is that the current unemployment situation, with cooked stats and a large and growing group of people who can’t find fulltime work, will become the new normal. And if middle-class wages don’t come back, neither will middle-class tax receipts for SS payments. The federal budget cannot be balanced with the taxes from people working as Wal-Mart clerks and waiters.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 7, 2014 @ 10:43 am

Boo! Visit The News Networks’ Haunted House!

Nicely done!

And unfortunately, Fox and its sensationalism seem to be setting the tone for all the MSM, at least on ISIS and Ebola.

There was an interesting workshop at S17, the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. It was called ‘occupy the media’, and was about the increasing irrelevance of the news networks. There were various news source organizations that want real reporting from people on the ground. the people organizing the workshop had even put together laminated press cards. If the networks aren’t up to their job, we have to be the media.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 6, 2014 @ 5:09 am

Open Carry is a Whites Only Law

There is no American above the age of fifty who has any reason to be surprised. One of Richard Pryor’s bits on his 1974 album THAT N****ER’S CRAZY was about being pulled over and cavity-searched while on a date. Another was relating to the police (white vs black). Things didn’t change much in the 40 years since the album was released.

And perhaps they never changed at all. Yes, we have a president who’s black, but fully as put upon by threats and disparagement as Jackie Robinson was when he went pro in the 1940’s. And now we have pictures of the way police behave with people of color. Rodney King’s beating went ‘viral’ on network news 22 years ago, but my guess is the LAPD still behave this way and get away with it. Can we at least start to work on common ground here? My lefty friends are appalled by the militarization of the cops–can that be folded into a larger demand for genuine policing instead of police behaving as an army of occupation?

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 26, 2014 @ 7:19 am

After the March, What’s Next for The Climate Movement?

I’ve become a pessimist of late about climate and the human relationship with it (as if people here couldn’t guess). I have a small circle of acquaintances who understand the issues and the importance, but most people don’t understand the sacrifice ahead should we decide as a society that this deserves our full attention. And will our efforts at this point even matter if the methane has begun to leak uncontrollably from the ocean floor? Dunno.

I think people should make the sacrifices anyway. We didn’t begin to understand the issues about methane and feedback loops until relatively recently. We might have missed something, and if we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, then do.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 28, 2014 @ 7:24 am

Ebola Outbreak in West Africa Approaching Epidemic Levels

well written, sums up the problem.
Does anybody besides me remember the Richard Preston account of Ebola back in the 1990’s called THE HOT ZONE? The bug from that time got progressively weaker with each human it jumped on, until it was unable to get past a healthy human immune system. That doesn’t mean it’s not a threat, but this is a virus we’ve had 20 years to figure out a countermeasure or a vaccine. It would be nice if the US still funded NIH and CDC adequately.

That said, I look at this from the context of global warming, which is already killing five million people a year (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa) due to droughts and deforestation. That number won’t go down anytime soon.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 5, 2014 @ 8:47 pm

Every Republican Senator Is Disgusting

Nirek–you missed my point (or maybe I didn’t make it clearly). For several months, people like Sanders and Al Franken and their friends at Move-on have been sending out e-mail and fundraising letters implying that changing citizens united is something that can be accomplished in the near term. My understanding is that It can’t. It would take veto-proof house and senate majorities, a Dem president (assuming the Dems really want this to change), and control of 3/4 of all the state houses to go through the process of changing this.

One of my many reasons for being less active with Occupy Wall Street is their assertion that the overturn of Citizens United was within reach. It isn’t. I consider it activist malpractice to promise people results when there’s no way one can deliver. And being disgusting has never been an impediment to the people who voted the GOP in before–why should it matter now?

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 16, 2014 @ 9:02 am

Nirek–Agree with you about the sh*ttiness of the GOP. And the fact that the GOP needs only a few million every cycle to buy an aggregate of 41 Senate seats means that fixing Citizens United probably won’t be accomplished in our lifetimes.

Keith Olbermann had it right in 2010. “unless this is undone, in ten years every politician will be a prostitute” (and that was the least of his statements). We’re halfway in to Olbermann’s decade, and things don’t look good. Democracy got broken in Citizens United. It’s not going to be gotten back anytime soon.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 15, 2014 @ 10:48 am

In Case You Didn’t Hear, We’re at War

The pictures of the ISIS beheading of journalists are absolutely horrifying, and support goes out to their families and loved ones. That doesn’t mean we (as in USA) should get involved or that we even know which side we should join.

AdLib is right–this video is fodder for the MSM beating the drum for more war. And that might work with Americans. But I’m not so sure the world gives us the benefit of the doubt this time. We’ve squandered our moral authority–It is almost ten years to the day that the pictures of what Americans were doing at Abu Ghraib were first circulated, and while we didn’t see any beheadings, that doesn’t mean we saw the whole treasure trove. Seymour Hersch said he had personally seen other photographs from the prison that were far more shocking. Does anybody on this planet trust us to do the right thing (in Iraq or anywhere else)?

I think anybody who does the reading on the history of our very checkered behavior in that part of the world would probably come to the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do that will be perceived as humanitarian or altruistic. And the talking points are coming close to 1984–we are at war with Eastasia, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Every once in awhile I want to get in the Wayback Machine and see how things in Iran and Iraq would’ve turned out if we’d decided against supporting the Ba’athists in Iraq and overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran. It’s a history we should at least acknowledge when blowback happens.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 8, 2014 @ 3:59 pm

The Bubbling Cauldrons in Ferguson and NYC

KT, totally agree with you that protest marches don’t bring change. I think that’s always been true, though. What protest marches do is they make the people sitting at home realize that others share their feelings and they aren’t alone. I was the only person in my office who thought George Bush was a war criminal–it was nice to go to a protest in DC and find that 100,000+ people agreed with me.
The problem is, most ‘Muricans think the protest is the end-point. My boomer friends marched on Washington to end the Vietnam war, and were astonished when their huge turnout made no difference. What’s important is what happens AFTER a protest march. The people organizing the event have to plan for the next step. Al Sharpton had a captive audience at the Eric Garner march, and I didn’t hear much except the usual rhetoric. the ‘leaders’ such as they exist, and the politicians don’t understand the anger coming out of people over police misconduct. At some point, somebody’s going to start shutting down bridges and tunnels with demonstrators.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On October 1, 2014 @ 8:16 am

Interesting. I used to belong to a really lefty Methodist Church and ‘Lift Every Voice And Sing’ was held up as an anthem of the old AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church. We sang it frequently. I thought it came earlier than 1900.Thanks for the info.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 30, 2014 @ 8:26 am

Promise and Problems

the phrase ‘thug’ as used in MSM is almost never applied to anyone but young men of color. Based on behavior alone, George Zimmerman should have been so labeled–and would have been had his father not been shown some police deference for his judicial standing. And the Central Park 5 were ‘thugs’ until they weren’t–sent away for a rape committed by another, vilified by the better part of society.

We’re back to the Scottsboro boys law-enforcement wise. And our current crop of Robocops are far more ready to unholster and let loose with ‘justice’ in shell casings.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On September 3, 2014 @ 1:24 pm

Ferguson: Why Does a Mostly Black City Have Mostly White Government & Police?

Murph–I don’t think changing the racial balance of elected officials in Ferguson (by itself) will fix the problems that surround the way the city is policed. There have been three questionable NYPD killings of African Americans in NYC in the last 18 months or so (Kimany Gray, Ramarley Graham and Eric Garner), and the first two garnered almost no coverage or attention. This in a city with far better minority representation in politics. I have a bucket full of protest buttons over such killings (dating back to the 1980’s), and nobody seems to be able to break the pattern at the NYPD.

Ferguson is also troubled by the same problems as Camden or Detroit–high unemployment and deindustrialization. Changing the faces on the city council won’t be enough to reverse corporate trends that are moving decent wage jobs abroad.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 20, 2014 @ 7:17 am

The Police States of America

Adlib–Great article. A small note (and I might be wrong). the militarization of the civilian police departments started before 9/11. The helmeted armored cops in SS-black uniforms were a feature of the Seattle WTO protests. It was about the same time that the FBI started lumping non violent protesters and violent protesters together in terms of response tactics.

I think we’ve gone too far down this road already. Some of the reporting Michael Ruppert did before his death was about the military aid to police departments and how it was linked to networking of all law enforcement computers and other communications systems. In effect, everything one police department is doing can be analyzed by anyone on the network with the appropriate rights. There’s a whole segment on law enforcement in the documentary Apocalypse, Man. Worth ten minutes of your time (it’s Segment 2 on Youtube). Ruppert had been in the LAPD and had continued inside sources inside the law enforcement community.
We’re in for bad times.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 14, 2014 @ 11:15 am

Why Preventing Genocide Isn’t the Same as Re-Invading Iraq

Adlib–I think you’re right to call out politicians for their hypocrisy on intervention in Iraq. But I also think that people are naturally gun-shy about getting into another ‘crusade’ in the Persian Gulf. And every time I read about ISIS, there’s a list of questions.

And by no coincidence, Wikileaks published a series of cables between Syria and the US on the subject of ISIS (apparently, there’s another mole at the NSA–these are dated Feb 2010). Syria was warning the US of an upstart terrorist group called ISIS and the threat it posed to both the US and Syria, and offered intelligence on them to the CIA in Damascus. Link is here: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10DAMASCUS159_a.html#efmBraBr6BsHB6RB6UCDN
I think humanitarian intervention is a wonderful thing. but I don’t wanna get lied to again.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 12, 2014 @ 3:34 pm

Video from Canada On Fukushima

Thanks for the comments. I understand the folks who are skeptical (and I include myself in their ranks). The starfish population crash is happening, and it doesn’t seem to have any parallel in historic memory along the West coast. Could it be ocean acidification or warming temperatures? Sure. But someone would be able to replicate these in a controlled environment. And putting rescued starfish into a controlled environment would (at least in theory) ameliorate the problems. And starfish aren’t the only species showing sudden decline.
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Meanwhile, this is a video response to Dana Durnford’s original broadcast. Again, these aren’t scientists–these are locals who have some sense of what they would ‘normally’ see in the tidal waters off Vancouver’s coast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=20HYCDKKKmg&app=desktop

I don’t know what the answer is. But the problem of massive amounts of radiation (including actual fuel particles) going into the oceans is real. And nobody wants to talk about it.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 20, 2014 @ 11:37 am

Greenchica, thank you very much for your comments. On the Youtube site I linked to, a local resident put up a ‘response’ video confirming what was in the original. The ‘starfish melt’discussion has been ongoing among Fukushima activists–the phenomenon may have begun several years ago, but nobody noticed it much before March of 2011 when Fukushima went critical. Part of my reason in posting this was to see if others had stories to tell.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 13, 2014 @ 12:07 pm

Thanks for comments, Kesman. I’ve seen the Kos article, and it has been circulated by a number of folks including Guy McPherson, who I referenced in the post about near-term extinction. There was a similar article last year–an experienced yachtsman sailing from Melbourne to Osaka saw virtually no sea life in the 8,116 KM trip. Ivan MacFadyen did see evidence of factory fishing, and encountered plenty of debris (some possibly from the tsunami), but the lack of sea birds indicated that there was no food in the water. his words: “the ocean is broken”. http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/

I posted here to see what people’s reactions were. One of the complaints of many who’ve been following the aftermath of Fukushima is the lack of official interest in issues such as the die-off of fish and sea birds. I probably need to do follow-up on this as well.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 12, 2014 @ 6:44 pm

More News On Methane–Are We Really F*cked?

Nirek, I have no desire to see fracking continue. But absent fracking, the only other source of NG is the methane hydrates–conventional NG extraction is falling off a cliff. My fear is that the elites are looking at extracting methane from the Arctic as some sort of salvation from our energy plight, instead of recognizing that our addiction to fossil fuels will end life on this planet.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On August 3, 2014 @ 7:54 pm

Putin’s Ukrainian Gambit is Really Starting to Hurt the Russian Economy

The financial analysis you provide is spot on, but I think there’s more to this discussion than what Putin is up to. My understanding is that the dissolution of the USSR and the independence of its satellite countries was negotiated under some understandings that have since been violated. Specifically, the then-Soviet leadership was assured that NATO would not expand eastward. In fact, the opposite has happened.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html

And Ukraine membership in NATO is the Rubicon. As a NATO member, Ukraine could be used to base military forces on a vulnerable point on Russia’s eastern border. The West has engaged in a no-holds-barred attempt to lure Ukraine into the EU fold. And the World Bank’s $10 B in ‘aid’ to Ukraine would be a loan that would require the kinds of austerity measures that have lead to riots in Greece and Spain.

The financial world is extremely fragile at the moment, what with the possibility of war and oil embargo in the Arab world and the ongoing meltdown of Japan’s financial position post-Fukushima. Putin cannot be the leader of Russia who lets go of Ukraine.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 30, 2014 @ 5:53 am

The NYPD’s Bull Connor Moment

Miles Long, you are preaching to the converted. I have a bucket-full of protest buttons going back to Eleanor Bumpurs, and including luminaries like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. At the same time, I get really angry after events like this when the usual lefties and other activists show up and we get an outraged march or three and then nothing really happens. The ‘reforms’ are weak tea and nobody pays attention when the ‘independent’ CCRB rubber stamps such events as ‘justified’.

I think the reason Kimani Gray and Ramarley Graham’s cases got so little in the way of attention was/is the fact that the activist community of NYC is so burned out at getting zero traction in such events that many people have given up. There’s also a dearth of leadership–working class people in NY are fighting so many fights right now that it takes something really egregious to get them out in the streets. Here’s hoping that some good can come out of this–that NYPD gets the kind of scrutiny from the Feds that Mississippi got after the Freedom Riders.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 23, 2014 @ 10:32 am

Russia’s Shooting Down of Malaysia Flight 17 – The New Lusitania?

England was NOT our ally when the Lusitania was sunk. The Lusitania was sunk in May of 1915: The US didn’t enter the war until April 1917. Wilson ran in ’16 on a peace platform.

The US was ostensibly trying to stay neutral prior to the declaration of war. But the idea that the Lusitania was a civilian ship was put to rest in 2008, when divers looking at the wreckage found a cache of millions of rounds of rifle ammunition. As for Churchill, he is quoted in this link as welcoming the attack on an American or other neutral civilian ship in the hope that its sinking would mobilize public opinion on the war. There’s more about it here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1098904/Secret-Lusitania-Arms-challenges-Allied-claims-solely-passenger-ship.html

Not a big fan of the Daily Mail, but this particular article is pretty straightforward. And all of the passengers of the Lusitania could have traveled on other liners which were not targeted.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 23, 2014 @ 2:26 pm

Ad Lib–Interesting that you use the Lusitania as your frame. AFAIK the Lusitania was in fact carrying millions of rounds of ammunition to Britain, along with other war materiel. It might have even mounted a deck gun (carefully hidden). The Germans had offered the US safe passage of its ships as long as they were marked as American (I think they wanted some sort of flag painted on the hull, visible to a submarine), and they would allow boarding to check for contraband. The US rejected this. It was clear that Churchill (at the time the supreme Civilian commander of the Royal Navy) hoped that an incident like the attack on the Lusitania would come to pass.

The other conundrum–the Lusitania was struck by a torpedo, which in most cases was not sufficient to sink a ship of the period. It was a secondary explosion that destroyed the ship and lead to the huge loss of life. There’s some suspicion that the torpedo set off the contraband, and THAT is what sunk the Lusitania. In effect, the Brits were using civilians onboard as human shields.

I’m posting this because there are numerous questions about the chain of events. The Russians have great concerns about Ukraine, because if the US is able to enroll a free Ukraine in NATO, they will have weapons right on their border.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 23, 2014 @ 8:05 am

Should Pot Be Legal or Not?

This is one of the issues tailor-made for Jury Nullification. If every person busted for pot demanded a jury trial and won, the system would self-destruct.

I am not a user, but many of my friends are. They will not get busted because they are not persons of color or young. imho the drug war has always been about mass incarceration of the poor. Legalize it or start busting people in proportion to use. Don’t use pot as a means of criminalizing minorities.

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 19, 2014 @ 9:34 am

Siberian Blowouts, Climate Collapse and Feedback Loops

The pro-nuke folks (especially the smart ones) scare me. On my link above, there’s a Youtube where Ruppert talks about Fukushima in detail. Guy McPherson has also touched on nuclear as being a threat to existence, again because of the cooling issue.
Beyond all the dangers, the fuel is in short supply. Jeremy Rifkin has talked about ‘peak uranium’. Why are we building plants when we’re short on fuel to run them?

» Posted By Misterbadexample On July 18, 2014 @ 8:38 am

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