dowackado

ineffable beauty, unspeakable evil, etc

Author: timmuky

The last word on Romney’s “Even Jimmy Carter” kerfuffle

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From the always snarky and perceptive Who is IOZ?:

What I appreciate about Romney’s remark, even though this obviously isn’t what he intended it to mean, is that it makes so plain the basically quotidian nature of murder-by-Presidential-decree; it says that ordering hasty acts of war is the equivalent of updating your Outlook calendar or checking your voicemail in the morning, a mundane and repetitive task that everyone performs, just a part of the job, one part Easter Egg roll and one part press conference. Romney is standing in front of the great national Meineke and asking us to laugh at the incumbent mechanic for bragging about offering oil changes and tire rotations. Well, what else would he be doing?

The Obama administration acts disgracefully; GOP does them one better

By timmukyPosted on Posted in obama, politics, war, war on terrorNo Comments on The Obama administration acts disgracefully; GOP does them one better

One hoped there would be some negative consequences for overplaying the offing of Osama so shamelessly, but one is not holding one’s breath.

In a first for network television, NBC News has been granted unprecedented access to the most secret and secure part of the White House, the Situation Room. In a “Rock Center with Brian Williams” exclusive airing on Wednesday, May 2 at 9p/8c, President Obama and his national security and military teams, relive the pivotal moments of the raid targeting Osama bin Laden.

Well that generated at least this little bit of snark, directed at NBC: “I guess bowing to the president and hiring the secretary of state’s unqualified daughter as a special correspondent should be worth something, shouldn’t it?”

But, ah, well. McCain. Romney. Rove. Oy.

I don’t accept the premise that the killing, by twenty-some rippled, ever-so-manly assassins, of an unarmed, old man in front of his family, is “a nonpartisan, nationally unifying anniversary.” No matter what crimes he is accused of. But that puts me in the kook corner, and I’m OK with that.

As is so often the case, the behavior of both parties is cringe-worthy. Happily, as is rarely the case, this controversy CAN be summed up in a tweet, and Radley Balko said it best:

(A) Yes, Bush would have been selling a “He Killed Osama” campaign shirt by now. (B) “Not Quite as Crass as Bush” shouldn’t be your aim.

In which the author discovers his true identity: progressive purity troll

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A really good cartoon.  I reblogged it secondhand. It originally came from STFU Conservatives, a site whose self-description is as follows:

Basically, we like facts and truth, and we hate ignorance. If you believe in feminism, liberal ideals, civil rights, abortion, marijuana legalization, healthcare access, marriage equality, stopping slut-shaming and fatphobia, ending the wars, and revamping the tax codes

I like all of those things too! Some are more important to me than others: ending wars is a bigger deal than fatphobia, but that’s just me. But I wandered around the site, and if I may be so bold as to generalize, it seems to be all about saying bad things about Republicans and worshipful paeans to the president (Obama’s 11 Most Badass Moments, e.g.) Which is fine, but really? This cartoon? Do the STFU people feel the War on Drugs and War on Terror are essentially or exclusively REPUBLICAN things?

Also, there’s a lot here about the ACA. I followed a link to a TPM piece with the headline “How An ‘Obamacare’ Repeal Would Take Medicare And The Rest Of The Health Care System With It”.

I read on. Wasn’t really convinced. Another post on TPM says overturning ACA would lead to single payer. Who knows? I don’t. I kept at it until I got to the comments, which were not particularly enlightened. One comment made the fairly uncontroversial point that the ACA is a “Republican bill.” And was pounced upon in general. And then, one of my favorite comments of all time came up:

Blah de blah de blah blah blah. Same old progressive purity troll crap, different year. You are exactly the kind of idiot who gave Florida to George W. Bush by convincing people to vote for Nader.

That’s it. Criticize Obama and the Democrats and ultimately the partisans will take the conversation here. At least now I know what I am: a progressive purity troll.

Read this! Garry Wills, “Bullying the Nuns”

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The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.

The environmental impact of cow burps

By timmukyPosted on Posted in environment, farming, industrial agricultureTagged , , , No Comments on The environmental impact of cow burps

For all the strengths of these alternatives, however, they’re ultimately a poor substitute for industrial production. Although these smaller systems appear to be environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence suggests otherwise.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

This is not the first time the New York Times has given the prime real estate of its op-ed page over to James McWilliams, who has made a career out of tut-tutting the naivete of locavorism. It’s an easy target in some respects. But at least one of the claims he regularly trots out as fact — that raising livestock on pasture is worse for the environment than raising them in confinement — strikes me not only as counter-intuitive, but also flat-out wrong.

Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones, cites a recent study by researchers from Stanford and Purdue Universities:

The authors create a model in which the US government cancels ethanol mandates, which would basically destroy the corn ethanol market and cause the price of corn to drop. If farmers responded to low corn prices would give farmers incentive to let their cropland revert to native prairie and put beef cows on it to graze, they argue, their land would store significant amounts of carbon in soil—more than offsetting cow-related greenhouse gas emissions like methane—thus helping stabilize the climate. Their bottom line:

Results indicate that up to 10 million ha [24.7 million acres, more than a quarter of land currently devoted to corn] about of could be converted to pastureland, reducing agricultural land use emissions by nearly 10 teragrams carbon equivalent per year, a 36% decline in carbon emissions from agricultural land use.

I have written before about McWilliams and the opportunities awaiting ambitious academics willing to crank out faux-contrarian arguments that, regardless of intent (McWilliams is a vegan) have the effect of bolstering the status quo (in this case the industrial meat system). Tom Laskowy has coined a name for this sort of thing: the FUDosphere (FUD standing for Fear Uncertainty Doubt), “a network of Sith-lord scientists and unrepentant PR flacks who have no compunctions about tweaking their research methodologies … to generate results both favorable to industry and confusing to those trying to understand the truth.”

God, I’ve totally forgotten that I’ve written on this subject at least three times in the past. But it’s kind of important to me personally. I raise a small herd of cattle on pasture, using intensive management techniques. I’ve invested in Philpott and the Stanford/Purdue study being right. And I know scientific studies offer results that are often all over the map. Might I suggest a debate between McWilliams and Philpott on this very topic?

And now … Farmopolis

By timmukyPosted on Posted in farmingNo Comments on And now … Farmopolis

For better or worse, the dowackado tumblr is a pretty good representation of my jumbled mind.

But recently I’ve come to realize that mine is essentially not much different from tens of thousands of other tumblr blogs. Yes, bien sur, my taste is far superior to that of my (all-too-often teenaged) tumblr peers, but at bottom it’s yet another attempt at curating stuff that’s already on tumblr. It’s fun. I still enjoy it, but I’m living a real life too, goddammit.

So, the need arises for farmopolis, an account, in text and images, of my family’s adventures in moving from the urban bustle and the supercilious certainties of New York City to bucolic Central Kentucky.

So … maybe you would like to check it out?

Todd, Rahm and hydrogen bombs made out of dumb

By timmukyPosted on Posted in celebrity, music, overlooked musical geniiTagged No Comments on Todd, Rahm and hydrogen bombs made out of dumb

A new record from Todd Snider is always a cause for celebration, and Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables is currently streaming here. (Or was.) [Update 3/19–now on Spotify!]

But. BUT. Todd is friends with Rahm Emanuel? WTF?!! This little snippet pretty much blew my mind:

Yeah. He’s my friend. I love that guy. He first came to see me in Washington, D.C., and he was about to go to some big meeting. The next time I met him was in Chicago. I was telling him about this song I was making up about the military-industrial complex. I was telling him it’s a stoner fable. All the stoners in the world are convinced that the world is run by these people that Eisenhower warned us about. He said, “You’d be surprised how much power the banks have now by comparison.” He pointed out that there’s a song about “the military and the monetary” by Gil Scott Heron called “Work for Peace.” So it’s been tackled. He said, “What would Woody Guthrie do? He’d figure out a way to point out what the bankers are doing right now.”

Now if I were a marginally famous folksinger and the White House Chief of Staff came up to me after a show to tell me how awesome I was, I’d probably have a hard time bad-mouthing the dude, but … Rahm Emanuel. You know, the guy who made 18 million dollars in two and a half years as an “investment banker.” As per the Times, his rainmaking for Wasserstein Perella & Company involved “turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions.”

For this guy to talk about exposing “what the bankers are doing right now” and to imply he’s down with Woody Guthrie and Gil Scott Heron–that takes some pretty spectacular compartmentalization. Or balls. Or both. I want to say it started with Clinton and his sax, the first hipster president, but I think the real precursor is this guy.

It continues to this day of course….. Yeah, Obama’s day job involves making up lists of people to assassinate without charge or warning … but did you hear that Al Green thing he did????

***

And slightly off the topic, here is a quotable quote from the Salon piece. Here’s hoping “Hydrogen bomb made out of dumb” becomes part of everyone’s vocabulary:

I grew up conservative Christian and all that, and now when someone tells me they’re conservative politically and also a Christian, I think, Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a hydrogen bomb made out of dumb. Because those two ideas don’t gel. There’s one group that’s saying, Take everything you have and give it to the poor. And there’s another group that’s saying, Don’t tell me what to give to the poor. How can you join both groups? That’s like you’re joining Puppy Kickers Animal Rights of America. It just doesn’t gel, and that’s what I ran away from.

Whale: Favorite Band of All Time of the Day

By timmukyPosted on Posted in music, overlooked musical genii, pop, rocknrollTagged , No Comments on Whale: Favorite Band of All Time of the Day

Looking at that post below. Intense! Sorry! Sometimes you just want to recommend a Stephen Colbert video and you start typing and suddenly it’s like the world is going to shit.

Anyway, this week I have been stuck on Village Voice editor Maura Johnston’s terrific “remember the 90s (late)” playlist on Spotify. And I came upon these crazy Swedes. I don’t know a lot about them. Swedes. (Said that.) The 90s. By the look of it they did loads of drugs. There’s maybe a little Sleigh Bells thing there. The thrashy noise with the sweet girly voice floating over top. The singer Cia Berg was a television presenter of some sort. She had braces in one video, and not in another. They collaborated with Tricky on some things.

I think I might have seen the Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe video once, on MTV, and thought WOW! But then I forgot about them.

But … WOW! Or Holy shit! Or as Butthead says “this kinda like uh rocks”

This!

And this!

If you’re as taken with them as I was/am, you’ll want to investigate their slim but kickin’ catalog.

“Due process just means a process that you do.” Colbert’s reductio ad absurdum FTW

By timmukyPosted on Posted in civil liberties, obama, politics, rule of law, war, war on terrorNo Comments on “Due process just means a process that you do.” Colbert’s reductio ad absurdum FTW

There is not much to add to this priceless Colbert bit.

Except to point out that nobody really cares. It’s not exactly heartening to see what little impact Holder’s mind-bogglingly brazen (and incoherent) Northwestern speech had. I know. I know. Rush Limbaugh!

I’ll also concede that this is just making it official: the U.S. Government refuses to be bound by any authority beyond its own political calculations. It’s normalizing and codifying the fact that the War on Terror’s largest single consequence may now be that the Government no longer feels it needs to offer its citizens centuries-old rights and protections.

Today, it’s the Obama Administration; a few years earlier, it was Bush, doing it on the sly. The two are presidents from Central Casting. Bush was the blustery Cowboy, Obama the calm bipartisan bureaucrat–but the effect is the same. Regardless of what party is in office, the government realizes that the electorate no longer has any significant leverage. Democrats will support the leader of their party, no matter how conservative or, in this case, downright reactionary his policies are. So a living wage? Why? What are the people gonna do? Constitutional protections? Why? Who’s gonna squawk? The ACLU? Ha.Ha.

So this is where we are. Due process was once the hallmark of American government, (within obvious limitations–for blacks, for women, for Japanese and Germans in wartime, it didn’t apply. Naturally.) But it was there, at least for the people the government claimed to represent. But, like habeas corpus, it belongs to another time. Today, for the unfortunate soul accused of being a terrorist (which used to mean being al qaeda, but now has expanded to include [former allies] the Taliban and associated groups–and adolescent family members), your due process boils down to this:

The President and his underlings are your accuser, your judge, your jury and your executioner all wrapped up in one, acting in total secrecy and without your even knowing that he’s accused you and sentenced you to death, and you have no opportunity even to know about, let alone confront and address, his accusations; is that not enough due process for you?

You gotta hand it to Obama, though. This is great politics. Blowing people up in some dusty land halfway around the world is such a perfect piece of political theater and control. Poll numbers down? Time to get another scalp. The government need only trumpet the successes. Beautiful. (And grudgingly, passive-aggressively sorta kinda own up to the misses. Not that there’s a whole lot of follow-up on these things).

Obama’s defenders, remarkably, see nothing odd or contradictory or WRONG in the president’s more than enthusiastic adaptation of Bush policies he campaigned against. In fact, they cannot contain their glee.

President Obama’s foreign policy has been remarkably successful. Just ask 22 of the top 30 al Qaeda leaders. Oh, wait, you can’t. They’re dead—on Obama’s orders. He has approved 239 Predator drone attacks in just three years. George W. Bush approved 44 in eight years, the wuss.

So that’s the calculus of consummate insider Paul Begala. The more drone strikes, the better the foreign policy. And Republicans are wusses. Nyah! Nyah!

Will the Republicans, those brave representatives of the Constitution-obsessed Tea Party throngs, make Obama face any consequences for, in effect, vaporizing vaguely threatening foreigners (even those who are U.S. citizens) with a mere wave of his finger?

Hell nah! They can’t wait til it’s their turn….

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