If Boromir had seized the ring…

Tolkien talks about WWII and speculates what might have happened if Boromir had seized the ring and taken it to Minas Tirith:

“The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-Dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien hated allegories but it’s hard to not apply his scenario to just about any situation where a besieged group gets its hands on an unaccountable, powerful advantage.  Once you abandon your principles in order to gain the upper hand, there’s nothing to stop you or others from allowing treachery after treachery to happen without restraint.  Someone is bound to get hurt and it’s usually the little people who have no desire for power or unlimited wealth.  The powerful hold them in contempt and scorn them for failing to be as ruthless and selfish.

Before long, the hobbit gardener would be patronizingly praised for struggling to pull weeds without pay.

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The accusations of neoliberalism have flown fast and furiously at Bill Clinton since Wednesday night when he reminded us all about what our lives *used* to be like before the Democrats seized the ring stabbed him and his wife in the back. We’ve gotten little lectures from Atrios, Thereisnospoon and Matt Stoller.  Matt seems to be having a moment of cognitive dissonance.  He clearly doesn’t love Barack Obama anymore.  But he, like the others, have completely lost the plot over Bill Clinton.  One of our commenters tried to explain it to my silly lady brains about what the neoliberalism thing is all about.  Unfortunately, he used Chile and Pinochet as an example.

Yeah, THAT Pinochet.  You know, the guy who made torture into an art form and trained dogs to rape dissidents?

Can anyone out there see Bill Clinton even coming *close* to behaving like Pinochet or entertaining ideas of being a ruthlessly cruel, powermad dictator?

Anyway, while I understand that the University of Chicago is now the new Isengard and Milton Friedman is Saruman the White (and have forbidden the kid from going there, I don’t care how many recruiting letters they send her or how close it is to Ira Glass), I think the neoliberalism thing has been blown up to ridiculous proportions and misapplied to Bill Clinton.

Furthermore, I think it is the delusional neoliberalism boogieman that has in a way contributed to the advance of the true neoliberal president, Barack Obama.  Yep, in your paranoid frenzy to avoid electing a person who was associated with the hated neoliberal William Jefferson Pinochet, you have managed to elect and promote the guy who seems to be completely devoid of any principles whatsoever.

If you crazy neoliberalphobics didn’t exist, the right would have to invent you (and for all I know, the right has invented some of you).  You have done more to help them achieve their goals than Bill Clinton ever could and they’ve been trying for 20 years to shut him up.  In four short years, your unbridled enthusiasm to nurture Barack Obama and protect the country from Hillary Clinton has resulted in the worst performance by a Democratic president in my lifetime.

I’m not actually sure that Barack Obama *is* a Democrat, to be honest.  He’s got a D by his name on the ballot but I have read Democrat after Democrat in the past few days who say that they do not feel like Democrats anymore. Whatever the party is, they feel completely alienated from it.  It is making it easier for them to feel comfortable with their third party vote this fall.  This is a party where a small group has seized control and our input is no longer required.

This is not a plea for Hillary Clinton.  I never give up on sanity returning to the party but it’s pretty clear that as long as the “neoliberalism is evil!” Democrats are vulnerable to the corrupt and authoritarian party leadership poking them when its necessary to squelch the voices of dissent, sanity will not return to the party any time soon.  Hillary’s presidential aspirations are over and were over in 2008.  She’ll move on to something else and if it turns out that she is more powerful than ever and bedevils the young, overeducated, grad student suckup guys who let their paranoia get the best of them, I can hardly wait to see it.

For the past four years, I’ve heard nothing but ridicule from these same party loyalist “neoliberalism is evil!” people who thought the PUMAs were stupid, uneducated, ugly, menopausal, working class women. And while a lot of former PUMAs let their anger take them places where Clintonistas should never go, there were a lot more of them who kept their heads down over the past four years so they wouldn’t have scorn and mockery heaped upon them.  Four years later, it is the “neoliberalism is evil!” clique and Obama faithful that look delusional and out of touch, sticking with a dying party that has gone out of its way to shed what it thinks are its losers.  Good luck to them.  No matter what happens this fall, they have managed to fulfill the hopes and dreams of the right and I want no part of that.

In the meantime, the rest of us will have to put up with the “You have to vote for Obama or the bad guys will win!” crowd freaking out for the next 8 weeks.  I am not afraid of what is to come.  As long as friends stick together and work for a better way to live, we will weather the bad stuff.  The last thing I will ever do is voluntarily surrender my principles in order to satisfy the mob.

“Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. just so a Party-spokesman might have labeled departure from the misery of the Fuhrer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery …. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. (On Fairy-Stories)”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

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Take us out, Taylor:

Is this a Christian Nation?

Set aside a couple of hours and watch this documentary about a fight in a town in North Carolina over whether a Christian flag (let that sink in for a sec) can be flown over a public monument to American military veterans. Rarely will you ever hear the religious speak so candidly.

You know, I’ve been accused of being paranoid about a particularly malignant form of fundamentalist Christianity. I’m not referring to mainstream Christians, like UCC, mainstream Presbyterians and Methodists, who for the most part are pretty harmless. I’m talking about Christians who take the bible literally. These are the kinds of people who would slaughter you if God told them to do it. They’re the kind of people who would deny their children blood transfusions.

It’s time we stopped giving them so much status and respect and started to make them prove themselves. What is that saying about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof? Yeah, I’m thinking it’s time we started demanding that or subjecting the claimants to some well deserved ridicule.

When politicians start catering to religious fundamentalists for votes, the consequences to the culture can be quite serious. The Israelis are starting to understand what this means to women because the parties have been appealing to the ultra orthodox in recent years. Its been a disaster with little girls being spat upon for no covering up enough to professional female researchers being denied the right to address conferences or accept awards. Some of this behavior is being sanctioned by government officials on behalf of these ultra conservative Jews who traded their votes for enforcement of their particular brand of conservatism. And let’s not forget that in this country, Obama actively courted the evangelical vote in 2008. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they saw this as a green light to reinforce their socially conservative worldview to our detriment. How Obama approaches them this year will tell you a lot about what women and other disenfranchised groups can expect from the White House no matter who is elected.

Here’s the link. Prepare to be horrified, fascinated and scared shitless by these people.

Monday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!! It’s Monday again.

It sounds kind of funny to call this a slow news day with everything that is going on. Of course the earthquake in Chile is still big news. Troops in Chile are trying to prevent thirsty or starving people from “looting” grocery stores in order to survive. According to the BBC story, Chile’s president is appealing for international help to feed people, but God forbid they should get any of the food that is sitting around in Chilean grocery stores.

I guess the reason it feels like a slow news day to me is that, while there are lots of depressing and even dramatic events happening around the country and the world, the people who should be making changes happen in Washington, D.C. are doing nothing except make things worse.

Last Thursday, President Obama gave his trademark “sneaky middle finger” to Republicans at his fake “health care summit.”

Or was that just his way of letting all of us ordinary Americans know what he thinks of us?

Also on Thursday, Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act, extending some provisions that were set to expire. President Obama signed the bill into law on Saturday night when his cowardly act would be least likely to be noticed. From the ACLU website:

Year-Long Extension Contains No Privacy Or Civil Liberties Safeguards

The House today passed a one-year extension of three expiring Patriot Act provisions without making much-needed changes to the overly broad surveillance bill. The provisions of the Patriot Act which were extended – the John Doe roving wiretap provision, Section 215 or the “library records” provision and the never before used “lone wolf” provision – all lack proper privacy safeguards. The Senate passed the extension by voice vote late last night.

“Congress refuses to make reforming the Patriot Act a priority and continues to punt this crucial issue down the road,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Once again, we have missed an opportunity to put the proper civil liberties and privacy protections into this bill. Congress should respect the rule of law and should have taken this opportunity to better protect the privacy and freedom of innocent Americans. We shouldn’t have to live under these unconstitutional provisions for another year.”

And a more to the point piece at the ACLU Blog of Rights provides a list of some of the provisions that have been extended:

Both the House and Senate had bills that would have improved the Patriot Act. The Senate bill even had the support of the White House. But instead of passing the much-needed reforms, Congress:

•Reauthorized Section 206, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to wiretap a phone without having to provide the target’s name or even phone number. And unlike other law enforcement agencies, the FBI doesn’t even have to get permission to tap the specific phone before they tap it. The House bill would have required the government to name either the person or the place it wanted to tap.

•Reauthorized Section 6001, a.k.a. the “lone wolf” provision. Section 6001 authorizes the government to get secret surveillance orders against individuals who are not associated with any international terrorist group or foreign nation. This handy-dandy tool in the FBI’s arsenal isn’t so handy—according to the Justice Department, it’s never been used.

•Reauthorized Section 215, a.k.a. the “library provision”: Section 215 lowers the bar on the standard of proof needed to get a court order to access private info. Before Patriot, “specific and articulable facts” showing that the target of surveillance was the agent of a foreign power was required. After Patriot, Section 215 allows the FBI to only claim that the items or information sought is relevant to an investigation. That means the person being surveilled doesn’t necessarily have to be the target of the investigation or even be suspected of involvement in terrorism. (It’s called the Fourth Amendment, Congress. Read it sometime.)

In addition to the above expiring provisions that were reauthorized, sorely needed reform to the National Security Letter statute was also kicked to the curb. Under the original Patriot Act, the government can collect the records of innocent people whenever it deems them “relevant” to an investigation – without any oversight by an impartial court.

From Raw Story:

If the Patriot Act hadn’t been approved for another year, Sunday would have looked much different.

Sunday could have meant the government was no longer given permission to wiretap the phones of Americans and seize their records and property.

But since the bill was approved by Congressional Democrats earlier this week and signed into law by President Obama on Saturday, this Sunday is just another Sunday for Americans living with the Patriot Act.

From Alternet: Patriot Act 2010: As it Was Written, So it Shall Be Done

Back in 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama had this to say opposing The Patriot Act when it came up then for reauthorization: “We do not have to settle for a Patriot Act that sacrifices our liberties or our safety. We can have one that secures both.”
Throughout his entire presidential campaign, Obama often railed against the Act, criticizing it giving authorization for the Bush administration to secretly spy on U.S. citizens, illegally and unconstitutionally and with little or no judicial or congressional oversight.

He pledged that he would institute “robust” checks and balances if he got elected, explicitly promising to overturn its unconstitutional sneak-and-peek provisions toward citizens not even suspected of a crime. “Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional,” he said.

Guess what Obots? Obama lied and you fell for it.

Yesterday some TC’ers were watching and commenting on George Soros’ interview on CNN. Here’s a summary of Soros’ pontifications at the Wall Street Journal this morning:

Billionaire investor George Soros, who helped U.S. President Barack Obama raise money for his presidential campaign in 2008, said Sunday he wasn’t happy with Mr. Obama’s handling of the financial crisis.

Mr. Soros said the government should have taken over U.S. banks instead of bailing them out, a move he suggested would have been more popular with Americans.

“The solution that he found to the financial crisis, which was to effectively bail out the banks and allow them to earn their way out of the hole, was, in my opinion, not the right solution,” Mr. Soros said in an interview with CNN. “He should have compulsorily replaced the capital that was lost.”

But, Soros points out, it won’t stop him from making money as usual–it’s just us ordinary folks that are screwed. Ho-hum….

Ordinary folks like Richard Jones.

Chicago Sun-Times: Unemployment benefits for many expire today

Richard Jones of Brookfield spent four months in Louisiana helping communities rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Now, he needs a little help himself, but a lone U.S. senator is blocking the way.

Jones, 29, is among the 15,000 Illinoisans whose unemployment benefits expire today because of a filibuster by U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) Bunning is using Senate rules to block a vote to fund extended benefits for people nationwide who have exhausted the basic 26 weeks of coverage.

Even with an unemployment check, it has been hard to make ends meet, said Jones, a former trucking supervisor jobless since January 2009. “All my savings is gone,” he said. “If I hurt myself, I can’t even go to the doctor.”

Jones has a bachelor’s degree in urban planning, which he put to use working with a private contractor on post-Katrina rebuilding in 2005. Nowadays, he said, he has a hard time getting callbacks despite an incessant job hunt.

But who cares, right? As long as Goldman Sachs is happy, all’s right with the world.

Meanwhile, from Raw Story, Senator John Kyl (R-Arizona) defends Senator Bunning’s FU to desperate unemployed Americans.

“All Senator Bunning was saying quite correctly is it ought to be paid for,” Sen. Jon Kyl told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.

And, Raw Story reports, Senator Bunning (often rumored to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) responded to critics.

Republican Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) on Thursday night expressed his opposition to renewing unemployment benefits on the Senate floor with an unusually harsh message for its backers: “Tough shit.”

It’s a nightmare. But what is being done about it? Nothing much.

At Counterpunch, Clancy Sigal wonders why liberals seem to have lost the ability to fight back in anger.

Look at the mess. Evictions – I’m a child of Great Depression furniture-thrown-on-the-street – are skyrocketing. Mortgage holders are in a feeding frenzy on their hapless fellow citizens. Michelle Obama lectures us on obesity while one in eight Americans (and one in four children) are on federal food stamps. The human toll of long term, more-or-less permanent unemployment is yet to be counted as millions of Americans are pushed out of the middle class and become the “new poor” queueing up at food banks for the first time in their lives.

Those who do vent and get angry are put down as crackpots, which they sometimes are. But the so-called left seems to have joined the mainstream (and even the radical) media in under- or mis- or never-reporting what’s actually happening in the lives of so many of us. Like Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic party establishment we’ve forfeited real gut language in favor of policy abstractions, the “issues” syndrome, that so easily hide an open wound. Joe Stack, who rammed his Piper Cherokee into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring many, was one maladjusted injustice collector. But his online 3000-word suicide note, a long-repressed scream of protest, has the virtue of unminced words we are never likely to hear from anyone in Washington or a state capitol. “When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die.”

Finally, I enjoyed this piece on the recent Killer Whale attack, also at Counterpunch.

Call him, just for now, Spartacus. He was two years old when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to Oak Bay, near the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Haida. Day after day, in slave school they learned their tricks. Day after day, they did their act for the paying customers. And then, on February 20, 1991, in the tank operated by Sealand of the Pacific, the three struck back at their captors.

Okay, not Spartacus, but an orca whale – Tillikum, the one who drowned 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau last Wednesday in the Shamu tank, at SeaWorld, Orlando, after grabbing her by her ponytail. Tillikum was caught off Iceland. Nootka and Haida, both females, were seized in the Pacific. In fact, Nootka was the third orca by that name to be bought by Sealand. The first two died within a year of their capture. At that time, enslaved orcas had a life expectancy in captivity of anywhere from one to four years. These days they do a bit better. In wild waters, orcas live to be anywhere from 30 to 60.

Free the Killer Whales!

So what are you reading this morning?

Despite all the bad news, HAVE A MARVELOUS MONDAY!!!!!

Saturday Morning News and Views

Good Morning Conflucians!!!!

A giant 8.8 magnitude earthquake has hit Chile and triggered a tsunami

President Michelle Bachelet confirmed 47 deaths and said more were possible. Telephone and power lines were down, making damage assessments difficult in the early morning darkness.

“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings and forced staff to evacuate the regional hospital.

According to The New York Times,

The quake downed buildings and houses in Santiago and knocked out a major bridge connecting the northern and southern sections of the country.

It struck at 3:34 a.m. local time and was centered about 200 miles southwest of Santiago, at a depth of 22 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The epicenter was some 70 miles from Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, where more than 200,000 people live.

Phone lines were down in Concepcion as of 7:30 a.m. and no reports were coming out of that area. The quake in Chile was 1,000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused widespread damage in Haiti on Jan 12, killing at least 230,000, earthquake experts reported on CNN International.

The U.S. Geological Survey and eyewitnesses reported more than a dozen aftershocks, including two measuring magnitude 6.2 and 6.9.

Only hours earlier, there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Japan. A tsunami was predicted, but did not take place.

The late late night TC crowd was discussing this insane video of Trent Franks (R-Arizona) being asked about hate radio and Rush Limbaugh and then doing a quick pirouette to talking about abortion and “killing innocent babies.” He calls Obama “the abortion president” and he thinks African Americans were better off under slavery because (he claims) “half of all black babies are aborted.” Oh, and Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox because he cares so much about humanity.

Just who is voting for politicians like this? Thinking about the possible answers to that question gives me the creeps.

And speaking of forced servitude, why don’t they just set Tilikum the serial killer whale free?

Three years ago, Russ Rector, a Fort Lauderdale dolphin trainer turned marine mammal activist, said he wrote SeaWorld a letter warning it was pushing its show mammals too hard to wow audiences, thereby inviting attacks on trainers.

On Wednesday, a killer whale named Tilikum implicated in two previous fatalities attacked a trainer during a show at the Orlando theme park, dragging her around like a toy and drowning her in front of horrified visitors.

“I warned them this was going to happen,” Rector said. “Happy animals don’t kill their trainers.”

Another opinion:

Naomi Rose, a senior scientist for the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned at marine parks, said Tilikum’s reputation was well known and that SeaWorld specifically forbade trainers from entering the orca’s tank.

“He clearly has some sort of issue with people in the water with him,” she said of the orca.

Rose and many marine mammal activists believe the stress of life in a tank is acute for orcas, large animals that roam deep waters in close-knit pods.

“They’re moody,” she said. Rector, who has campaigned for years to free Lolita, a female orca that has spent nearly four decades in captivity at the Seaquarium in Miami, says it leaves them “demented.”

Lolita, Rose said, has not been linked to any serious attacks on trainers, but its old tank-mate, Hugo, died of a cranial bleeding in 1980 that activists blamed on the orca ramming its head against the sides of a small tank.

Can you blame a whale for getting mad when he is kept in a tiny container and forced to perform tricks for humans instead of being able to swim freely in the ocean? And get this, another trainer says Dawn Brancheau’s horrible death was all her own fault.

A former co-worker told the station that trainer Dawn Brancheau was to blame when her hair floated over the mouth of killer whale Tilikum. The massive creature responded by dragging her under Wednesday, and she drowned.

Thad Lacinak, a former head trainer at SeaWorld, said the trainers knew to stay away from the whale’s mouth. “The protocol was not to be around Tilikum’s mouth while you’re laying down,” he said.

Reporter Emily Turner explained that Lacinak said Brancheau “became too comfortable with the animal she loved so much.”

And can you believe there are still pictures and video on-line of Breacheau’s last moments? What is wrong with us? Set these beautiful, intelligent animals free!

Did you know that Matt Taibbi and an expat named Mark Ames ran an alternative newspaper in Russia for years? I didn’t. Yesterday I posted a link to an article by Ames on Ayn Rand’s obsession with a vicious serial killer who liked to dismember little girls.

From there, I was directed to Ames’ website and learned that this month’s Vanity Fair has an in-depth story on the “The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.” Ames is also the author of a book on workplace and school shootings in which he argues that Americans don’t want to face what is really going on in this rage killings–that bullying and alienation in schools and workplaces are driving both kids and adults to the point where they just can’t take it anymore. Sounds controversial yet interesting. I reserved it at my local library.

President Obama got up really early this morning so he could offer more “compromises” to Republicans in his weekly radio address.

“I am eager and willing to move forward with members of both parties on health care if the other side is serious about coming together to resolve our differences and get this done. But I also believe that we cannot lose the opportunity to meet this challenge,” Obama said.

“The tens of millions of men and women who cannot afford their health insurance cannot wait another generation for us to act. Small businesses cannot wait. Americans with pre-existing conditions cannot wait. State and federal budgets cannot sustain these rising costs.

The President didn’t mention that the bill he supports doesn’t do anything to help lower health care costs for ordinary Americans or prevent insurance companies from refusing to pay for care for people with preexisting conditions.

This article in New Scientist reports on research suggesting that ancient humans may have communicated in a written language much earlier than previously thought: The writing on the cave wall

Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a “creative explosion” around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.

Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity’s early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful – perhaps even the seeds of written communication.

I’ll wrap this up with a feel-good story from a few days ago about a 3-year-old girl who was saved from freezing to death by her dog Blue: Police Credit Dog With Saving Lost Girl’s Life

“She was able to stay warm with the dog. And it probably was one of things that saved her life. It was extremely cold out here,” Sgt. Jeff Newnum of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office told KPHO, a CBS news affiliate in Phoenix. “God watched over her last night.”

Victoria Bensch vanished while playing outside with the family’s Queensland Heeler around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. Search teams scoured the rocky terrain surrounding Victoria’s Cordes Lakes, Ariz., home, but as the night wore on, and temperatures dipped into the 30s, there was still no sign of her.

When the sun rose Friday morning, a rescue helicopter spotted movement below. It was Blue, hovering close to the missing girl, nearly half a mile from their home.

Even as medics approached, Blue kept Victoria, who was only wearing a T-shirt, pants and tennis shoes, safe.

“I think the dog was initially apprehensive of me. I was a little concerned he might bite me when I first walked up, but as I just walked right past the dog, the [animal] realized I was there to help,”

Awwww….

So what are you reading this morning?

HAVE A STUPENDOUS SATURDAY!!!!!!!