Mike's Blog Roundup
By Mike Finnigan Thursday Jun 11, 2009 7:00amHere's an example of what "Patriots" consider good clean fun...certainly nothing that could be considered "extreme" or dangerous wingnuttery
The Confluence: Did Hank Paulson use TARP as a "ruse" to rescue Citigroup?
The Reaction: David Brooks backs Sotomayor - but still espouses the racist double standard of the right
Multi Medium: Self-Promotion Fail
Consortiumblog: Tying Obama to Bush's budget mess. Republicans blame President Obama for an ocean of red ink, but a study shows most came from President Bush
Progressive Blog Digest: All roundup, all the time
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That "hunting Liberals" sticker:
IOKIYAR.
I wrote to the company and explained that as public affairs officer and marketing director, I order a lot of "stuff" and because I work on an Army post, I order a lot of patriotic give-away stuff.
I then explained that there are liberals in uniform (I was one and have several friends still in uniform who are liberals) and for them to sell items promoting the murder of liberals under the guise of "supporting the troops" was bogus and classless. I concluded by letting them know that they will never see any money coming from my office.
I wanted to call them what they truly are, but resisted the temptation.
"I wanted to call them what they truly are, but resisted the temptation."
What? Un-American fascist rednecks?
Sex Kills
...is up there with my product:
The "Jesus-lover Waterboarding Kit."
Get reliable intelligence AND baptize them at the same time!
/snark
Jesus worshippers seem more inclined to "stress positions". It is their symbol after all.
for the people who strong-armed the U.S. into launching wars against other countries just fell into place?
Another tome on peak oil, now from the DOE.
TomDispatch
By Michael T. Klare
here
The doo doo will be getting much, much deeper.
we're at bottom right now.
Read the article and grow some gravitas.
You can GROW gravitas?
sweeeet!
You can if you know how!
Nice!
Seriously though...we are in deeeeep dookey.
We have the converging dual catastrophes of climate change and peak oil headed our way.
Petroleum is central to everything we do in this modern world, we used (and mostly misused) oil to CREATE the modern world. Putting it in our cars and burning it was the dumbest thing we could have done.
As oil production declines the political pressure will be on to burn more coal. To produce petroleum substitutes from coal.
This precisely at the time that we have begun to recognize the folly of dumping these amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Climate change is accelerating because we have already burned half of the fossil fuel.
The fight will be to burn the last half and make the planet uninhabitable.
It can happen. Life itself over hundreds of millions of years took the carbon out of the atmosphere thus making the planet viable for us.
We are undoing that in two centuries.
and i think it was david harvey that discussed the history of failed empires, partly tying their demise to a revolution in energy. in that, as major sources of energy give way to another, the empire built on the former falls with the change. examples: british empire and coal, and soon to be the american empire and oil.
Thank you! I knew of David Harvey, but not nearly enough. I have found a number of links. I am listening to a conversation (here) this moment and he is hitting exactly the right notes with me.
Kevin Phillips in Bad Money takes on the decline of empires in a round about way.
Unfortunately today, we are facing conditions that have never happened.
It is not just the end of the American Empire and the rise of the Chinese.
They are going to have a very short run up, we are all facing the downward slope of oil production and the increasing ramp of carbon dioxide production.
We have used half of the fossil fuels, the easy clean half.
The remaining half will be difficult and even more dirty than the first half.
We are awash in solar energy, twenty thousand times the fossil use EACH DAY falls on the Earth.
We just don't know how to use it, yet. We might have, if we had listened to Jimmy Carter in 1977 we would be in a very different place today. My comment on him is here.
If we develop fusion and it has always been at least 25 years away each of the last fifty years, we could have global warming beyond belief.
I am not optimistic.
China has coal, they are burning it.
---
update
I have listened to the David Harvey interview in its entirety, what a joy he is. I will listen again, I wish I were half as smart as he.
The video is from 2/15/08 so the interview is sometime before. As he says, things can change rapidly. My own understanding of peak oil and undeniable relationship to the environment has been thrust upon me very quickly.
I hope to hear his thinking in this realm. The class struggle is going to ramp up in extremis when energy is so expensive that only the oligarchs can afford it.
At the end the interviewer asks what his personal advice would be to his students.
My advice would be, learn how to farm.
well, great! i am glad you enjoyed david harvey
if you have the inclination i would recommend:
1) the new imperialism
2) a brief history of neoliberalism
3) spaces of global capitalism
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
and, also, i would suggest immanuel wallerstein (if you haven't already read some of his writings on world system theory)
+++++++++++++++++++++
and i am currently reading kevin phillips' wealth and democracy and have bad money as my next-in-line. i am enjoying it more than i did american theocracy (which i found a tad dry)
+++++++++++++++
lastly, i completely agree: hubbert's peak (oil) is real, and needs to addressed as such
hey thanks for turning me on to this guy. i have an appreciation for the geography/social anthropology approach. i'm going to have to check out his book
The New Imperialism.
it is a thin book that packs one helluva punch!
i hope you enjoy it
i routinely think about what harvey is speaking of. this may or may NOT have some sensibilty but when i move out west i noticed less sense of community during the bush yrs. more gated/isolated communities and of course NO mom/pop businesses. i met many (r) who were competing against each other just in their social/economic lives. it's like capitalism has NO boundries. just a lot of collateral damage in order to be #1. it's almost like capitalism wants that to survive itself. there's a lot of deception used as it's strategy. thanks again. he also brought up mexico and moving people from their land. u.s is involved in that big time. moving people to mexico city for low paying factory jobs.
Thanks again.
I had read this in the Nation from Immanuel Wallerstein previously.
In his discussion the word 'energy' is not to be found and yet it is going to be of paramount importance.
Discussions of the time frames of forty years, twenty years even ten years will have no meaning without the calculus of energy.
Without energy, the world we know ceases to exist.
When energy is so expensive that only a few tenths of one percent can afford it, we will have an entirely new social system. The middle class will cease to exist.
What we will have will not be recognizable from today's viewpoint and this, in my estimation, could come to be very fast.
All recent editions of the report have predicted that China would eventually overtake the United States as number one energy consumer. What's notable is how quickly the 2009 edition expects that to happen. The 2006 report had China assuming the leadership position in a 2026-2030 timeframe; in 2007, it was 2021-2024; in 2008, it was 2016-2020. This year, the EIA is projecting that China will overtake the United States between 2010 and 2014.
i hadn't heard this latest trend. with CHINA providing universal healthCare consumerism will surely rise. there's a lot of pent up demand to consume/drive combustion vehicles. thanks for the read.
Yawn! That might have been clever maybe 30 years ago when they were advertising them in "Guns and Ammo" but jesus - can't these wingnuts come up with anything new? Oh, did you see what else they were selling at that website? A "vintage liberty" distowel set! How positively butch!
there's nothing new actually.
If I spot that sticker on a car in my town, I will call it in to the police as a threat.
I'm not fucking sitting still for that kind of shit anymore.
yesterday.
I saw one of these in SC at a truckstop.
I mentioned to the shopkeep that I was a liberal, and to go ahead and shoot me...he just stood there in amazement.
Like he never in a million years expected for a liberal to be in his shitty little shop, and then be called out by said liberal.
When you stand up to them, they're not at all as tough as they claim.
just earned you my hero-for-the-day award.
I love busting the bubbles of people like that asshole.
Do you think the same company that is marketing that sticker (and probably the one that is the "Terrorist Hunting License") make a
"Conservative Right-Wing Hunting License"? Not that its right or correct; its just "merchandizing"!
More stupidity we don't need!
The Confluence: Did Hank Paulson use TARP as a "ruse" to rescue Citigroup?
The 'change' in the tax law was itself an illegal abuse of authority by Paulson.
The 'section 382' giveaway, which amounted to hundreds of billions, was GIVEN to the banks…
ILLEGALLY.
Here is my last comment.
Where is the outrage?
Where are the competent journalists?
it's what you say. Tweet Tweet!
Just to be clear, W never, repeat NEVER, added the cost of the wars to the Budget. And, he, the fiscally responsible Republican, pi$$ed away the Budget surplus that the "tax and spend, anti-fiscal responsible, Democratic" President Bill Clinton created.
Way to go, W. Any one who pi$$es away that much money, is either a criminal or a very stupid person or both.
There was a guy on the bus this morning arguing with me that the size of government fell under boosh, and grew under Clinton.
He bragged he read the Wall Street Journal, but after I was done with him, he didn't look like he knew which way was up.
'extraordinary leeway granted to commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal'
double yikes...
triple yikes...
call me crazy, but this mcchrystal has some answering to do for torture under his watch, yet he is given unprecented power to shape the "war" in afghanistan. i predict the bith of thousands of new jihadists in response...
I mean lets face it look we're the masses are being herded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGcoQbCopuE
You Twit Face
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/11aborti...
..GOP; actually, in that poll of over a thousand, she got 4 votes.
4 votes! She's on a roll now!
palin is being used. she will probably benefit somehow maybe a book. palin does NOT have what it takes
for the big show.
I didn't hear ONE soldier clap or cheer.
HA!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/ec...
'President Obama's agenda ambitious as it may be, is responsible for ONLY a sliver of the deficits despite
what many republican critics are saying'.
this is a short read with a good graph. some may say why worry about the blame game well i feel it will/is being used to slow/obstruct Obama. the (r) are using deceptive
linguistics inorder to shift blame from BUSH to obama.
WHO: Swine flu pandemic has begun, 1st in 41 years
Runnnnnnnnnnnnnn for your lives!
"This is WHO finally catching up with the facts," said Michael Osterholm, a flu expert at the University of Minnesota who has advised the U.S. government on pandemic preparations.
bacon as possible to immunize ourselves.
ol Shep has done it again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/10/shep...
I'm off to read Howard Kurtz' latest white-wash attempts of right-wing hatred.
Sarah Palin has not intention of going face to face with the man she and her secessionist husband smear and spun lies about http://www.redstate.com/josh_painter/2009/06/...
Sarah's a typical right wing conservative. She prefers to throw grenades from afar. Sarah's toady had to get an under handed dig about Letterman going after Willow sexually.
Common white trash.
Redstate sees an opening to go after Letterman who, like an overwhelming majority of Americans, is no fan of their man George Bush. So if Redstate has to spin and lie about what Letterman said, so be it, they're conservatives afterall....spinning. lying and distorting is what they do best.
Obama mentioned several times today in his town hall meeting that in order to control costs, one thing the government can do is encourage people to lose weight and provide economic incentives to those who do.
I agree there is a problem with obesity in America, but like morality, obesity is something you cannot legislate.
In addition, the BMI index is very flawed. It tells me at 5'8" I'm supposed to weigh 135 to 145. Come on. The Brits did away with it because it was so flawed.
If what we get with our new healthcare system is a bunch of gestapo- like invasive tacticts into your life style, food, cigarettes, alcohol, then you can keep your change.
obesity is a major concern in healthCare. it complicates many human health issues specifically metabolic syndrome/diabetes,HTN,cardiac conditions and those are just a few. the cost for diabetic pt.s is on the rise. most people will appreciate the improved health they make in losing weight. the BMI index has flaws with certain body structure/composition. there's plenty of people where body fat can be determined with accepted margin of error. cigarettes effect everyone fron second hand smoke to human pathology various cancers and prolong healing process for a condition that would heal quicker/cost less. i believe in individuality but as far as healthCare the cost is shared/distributed to the (paying)pool. that's change i can believe in.
Patriots? More like nazi's.
Humor from the psychotic and criminally insane. I guess you gotta be one to find their evil funny.
God are these people freaking stupid.
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