U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan are developing a strategy that would tolerate some corruption in the country but target the most corrosive abuses by more tightly regulating U.S. contracting procedures, according to senior defense officials.
American officials here have not spoken publicly about countenancing potentially corrupt local power brokers. Such a stance would run somewhat against the grain of a counterinsurgency doctrine that preaches the importance of building competent governance.
But military officials have concluded that the Taliban insurgency is the most pressing threat to stability in Afghanistan and that a sweeping effort to drive out corruption would create chaos and a governance vacuum that the Taliban could exploit
So, yeah, not much to hang your hat on there. In the absence of anything substantive to give the American people, the right has gone home to their mothership: sowing discord, fear and hatred to distract people from the fact that, while Republicans are good at campaigning, they are walking cancer cells to the body politic if and when they actually win.
There's a joint in West Haven, Connecticut, called the Fire and Ice Hookah Lounge. By all reports (Click it! - G), it's a nifty little place; the theme is Middle Eastern, the hookah smoke is tasty, and the belly dancers are something to see indeed. Last Thursday, a fellow named Kevin Morris, also of West Haven, came ditty-bopping into Fire and Ice and staked his claim to first-ballot entry into the Dumbass Hall of Fame.
Mr. Morris, it seems, decided that any place with hookahs and belly dancers must be a festering nest of Muslims, and decided to give the patrons what-for. According to news reports, he barged through the door and started screaming racist and anti-Muslim epithets at everyone there. The crowd didn't really react until Morris tried to throttle the bartender...at which point, the patrons rose up righteous and basically beat the ever-loving Jesus out of him. Morris' mug shot looks like his face went through a wheat thresher, and as of now, he remains in police custody.
Hatred and stupidity, folks. When they ride in the same applecart, things can get truly dangerous. But sometimes, and only rarely, things can also get truly funny.
Thank you, Mr. Morris.
Indeed! That story was good for the soul and it should only happen more often. My sides, they hurt...
Nathan Poe formulated it on a Christian website: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." The NYTimes("A Niche of the Unreal in a World of Credulity") reports on the latest test of this hypothesis:
Since 2008, ChristWire.org has emerged as the leading Internet site for ultraconservative Christian news, commentary and weather reportage.
"Hurricane Earl Projected Path, Gay East Coast of America," ChristWire opined on Monday. One headline in late August proclaimed, "Warning! Black Music Infiltrates the Minds of Future Homemaking White Women."
[...]
Oh, by the way: ChristWire is all one big joke.
Not the readership — which hit a high of 27 million page views in August — but the content, the opinions and the fake authors who write the stuff… Neither of the two founders is a conservative Christian. They are just like-minded 28-year-olds who met on the Internet, have never seen each other in person, and until this week had never given their real identities to a reporter. Bryan Butvidas is a software developer who works out of his house in Southern California. Kirwin Watson is a former Pepperdine student who moved back home to Kansas, where he now works "on the patient-care staff" of a local hospital…
Neither Mr. Watson nor Mr. Butvidas is a crusading atheist. Mr. Watson calls himself "an observant Catholic," and Mr. Butvidas is a nondenominational Protestant who is "religious for the most part." Their target, they say, is not Christians but those who do not question what they hear on the news.
"There's just rampant idiocy in the media sometimes," Mr. Watson said. "People watch their favorite news channels, don't question it and will regurgitate it the next day at the office. That is no good at all."
"Our main culprit," he adds, "is Fox News."
Needless to say, Christwire is fighting back against this vile slur.
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It has always seemed odd to me that so many so-called conservatives who hate government, hate civil service workers, and hate anything government does to help people, are so eager to get in there and get a government paycheck themselves.
In the case of Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (Hypocritical Wingnut Party), the hypocrisy and the double standard are elevated to an art form, because her household is ALREADY supported by a federal pension:
Sharron Angle, the queen of Tea Party extremism, may be the worst hypocrite in a political party that never fails to take hypocrisy to new levels. Angle's political positions are well documented: she wants to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and practically the entire social safety net, except when it applies to her. Angle has no job of her own at the moment and is living off her husband Ted Angle's federal pension. Ted Angle worked for the Bureau of Land Management for 25 years and I'm sure his pension is well deserved, just like the 400,000 people in Nevada who deserve the Social Security benefits that they receive after paying into the program all their lives.
The idea that people are too dependent on the federal government to provide for them is the keystone of Sharron Angle's campaign, yet apparently she cannot support herself without the federal government. Of course like many other detestable Republicans, her hypocrisy does not end there. Prior to the Reid campaign illuminating Angle's own reliance on the federal government, Angle tried to attack Reid for the benefits he will collect through his retirement account that he enjoys as a Member of Congress.
Nevadans deserve this lunatic nimrod if they vote for her. The problem is that she's going to have influence that far outstrips her junior Senator status. And this is the price we pay for Harry Reid being so utterly useless.
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QOTD: "Now we know -- it takes 8 years of GOP control to totally fuck up our economy and only 18 months to blame Dems for it." Sam Seder
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Make the most of this life: it's all we get
I'm always amazed and saddened by people who give away the only life they have in hopes of an afterlife that doesn't exist. They remind me of the guy a few years ago who took the $3,000 he'd saved for college and bought Powerball tickets in hope of a $350 million windfall. I don't have to tell you what happened.
They're everywhere: accepting the injustice of low pay and bad treatment because a preacher says that's the price of admission to heaven, suffering decades in a sexual closet because homos burn for eternity, giving money they can't afford to a church that promises a post-death reward, suffering psychological wounds for life because betraying a priest's crimes will send them to hell ... the abominations of the carrot-and-stick religion are infinite.
Human ethics require neither bribes nor threats to do the right thing. That my life will end when my brain stops working instills in me no fear, because I bet not a single moment of my life on the afterlife scam. I live every moment to the fullest, because these moments are all I have. And that brings me true joy.
It's a hard sell for atheists, isn't it? We offer nothing but the prospect of personal oblivion, while our opponents promise paradise. If all we had to go on was belief, you'd have to be crazy to go with the atheists. But we do have something more than just a desire to believe: we have reason and evidence, and most importantly of all, an overriding interest in the truth. Why, we'll accept the most horrible, terrifying ideas if they are true: that we'll fall if we jump off a ten story building, that we can electrocute ourselves if we stick a silverware in an electric socket, and that someday we will inevitably stop and no longer exist.Read the whole thing.Reality matters. The only way to argue for an afterlife is to argue otherwise, that what is is unimportant compared to what you wish were true. I can't do that. In fact, I can't even offer anyone soothing words and the promise of consolation, because there are none. We stand naked before the universe, a product of its rules, and one of the facts of our existence is our eventual obliteration. Running away won't help. Believing in a magical savior won't save you. You face reality bravely, or you hide in fear - and that won't help you either.
The essential principle, though, the one that the religious cannot abide, is that you can face it honestly. And there's at least a little dignity in that.
More than a little dignity, PZ. Far more.
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Aftershocks are terrifying, but kudos to the government that power is back and water available. A series of aftershocks have rattled Christchurch, New Zealand, following a powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake. A curfew imposed overnight between Saturday and Sunday has been lifted, but parts of the city remained cordoned off, Radio New Zealand said. Police said the curfew was intended to protect people from falling debris, as the quake caused significant damage. The mayor of the city, Bob Parker, described the damage as immense, and a state of emergency has been declared. Gale force winds were forecast for Sunday, and authorities have warned that these may affect unstable buildings. New Zealand's Civil Defence estimated that more than 500 buildings had been damaged. Local officials say power has been largely restored and tankers will supply water."
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Because you never know how close a campaign is to the tipping point of succeeding until it gets there, every email, every letter, every call, every internet petition counts.
So take 30 seconds and sign this one.
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Liberals need to tell a better story
Want to know why it was possible to bring down the national community group ACORN with nothing more than a bogus tape, or why Fox News regularly spends weeks of 24/7 coverage elevating left-wing fringe figures like professor Ward Churchill of Colorado into national celebrities? It's because anecdotes are the raw material of bigotry. And it only takes one -- even one story manufactured out of whole cloth -- to conjure up a worldview poisoned against an entire religion, race or class. Think "Welfare Queen." Or "Wise Latina."
We do not see first and then define, as those who study public opinion tell us, we define first and then see. We look at the world and make sense of its "facts" through preconceived, and mostly ill-conceived, ideological lenses -- what Walter Lippmann called "the pictures in our heads."
An anonymous reader on Andrew Sullivan's site this morning -- a community college professor -- offers up what may be the antidote to the right wing's skillful deployment of Politics by Anecdote: a great story that captures the essence of why we are liberal.
The radical right is successful because it knows how to tell stories that illustrate the larger point they want to make -- the wastefulness of government or the corruption and laziness of those it says do not deserve our compassion but who make illegitimate claims for "Big Government" anyway that raise our taxes. Conversely, we liberals feel the need to explain things -- at length. Believe me, I know!
But the only way to fight a good story meant to provoke our outrage or stir our sense of moral injustice, is with an equally compelling anecdote that literally shows the other side of the story.
It's not enough, as liberals often do, to appeal to high ideals like fairness and justice or contestable emotions like empathy and compassion -- what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" -- without first sketching out for those angels their halos and wings.
The letter from the professor below resonated with me because I am proud to work for an organization that recently launched a program with our janatorial vendor and the SEIU to give this largely Spanish-speaking workforce six month's of intensive English language instruction. We did it in order to improve customer service. But when I had the privilege of attending the graduation ceremony of the first class to complete the course, it was both obvious and moving to hear from the proud graduates that we had also managed to open new doors.
Since then we've graduated two more classes, with two more on the way. We've also been recognized by a national Hispanic organization that promotes the career chances of America's Spanish-speaking workers.
Like the professor below, I've had a chance in my own small way to see the aspirations and determination of a class of people that Fox News and its right wing audience like to stigmitize as scapegoats in order to illustrate everything that they think is wrong with liberalism.
Ideas have consequence, but if we want to defeat a right wing that is tearing this country apart, we've got to beat them at their own game. And that means matching narrative against narrative, life story against life story.
Here is the letter:
I believe the assumption is that instructors are the product of a liberal-biased education and then we decide to join that liberal bastion and are just going with the established flow. For those of us in the junior college ranks, however, I think there is a more concrete reason for the lean left, rather than the abstract leftism offered in certain courses we took as students.When I hear friends and family offer specific illustrations of why they list in a more conservative direction, it often has to do with anecdotes revolving around the person they check out at the grocery store using food stamps to buy a jug of Carlo Rossi zinfandel or spending their welfare check on some other decidedly non-essential item. Or the stories they hear from mutual friends in law enforcement or social services who deal with the dregs of society on a daily basis. Who could possibly support any form of social safety net when a portion of that net will be devoted to such vermin?
Well, on an equally anecdotal and emotional level (not pillars of rational thought, granted, but clearly major inspirations for why and how most people choose a side) we here at a community college tend to see the better side of our fellow humans who are struggling on the low end of the economic ladder. We see them trying to better themselves, working hard in spite of their conditions to try and take a step up said ladder. Hell, some of them may even be spending public money on a pack of Winstons, but we don't see that. We see them in their best light, for the most part.
And that's what I want people to know about my job: I don't have empathy for poor people because I read Sinclair Lewis or Karl Marx; I have it because I work in an environment in which I see them at their best. Some of them are clearly not cut out for college, some of them are unpleasant to deal with, some of them probably do spend their meager checks on stupid things.
But they are also trying to change their lot. And they have much less margin for error in doing so. If I taught at an elementary school or high school, I may assume that the kids in my classes were on their way to the destinies that social research and my own perceptions had fated for them. If I taught at a university, I would never meet people who take an English class so they can legitimately compete for a promotion at the hotel chain in which they work, or pass the nursing program to get their AA degree. The world would be easier to categorize. But since I work in the gray area between, I know that it's not that easy, and that people defy your definitions for them all the time.
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