Iowahawk explains how to feed the hungry American family in these hard times on $10 billion a day.
Seems like these days I hear a lot of whiney whiners whining about “out of control government spending” and “insane deficits” and such, trying to make hay out of a bunch of pointy-head boring finance hooey. Sure, $3.7 trillion of spending sounds like a big number. “Oh, boo-hoo, how are we going to get $3.7 trillion dollars? We’re broke, boo-hoo-hoo,” whine the whiners. What these skinflint crybabies fail to realize is that $3.7 trillion is for an entire year – which translates into only a measly $10 billion per day!
Mister, I call that a bargain. Especially since it pays for all of us – you and me, the whole American family. Like all families, we Americas have to pay for things – health, food, safety, uncle Dave America with his drinking problem. And when little Billy America wants that new quad runner they promised, do Mom and Dad America deny him? No, they get a second job at Circle K, because they know little Billy might have one of his episodes and burn down the house.
So let’s all sit down together as an American family with a calendar and make a yearly budget.
Democrat party strategist James Carville is upset, and is offering some characteristically unvarnished Carvellian advice to the Obama political team. (CNN:)
People often ask me what advice I would give the White House about various things. Today I was mulling over election results from New York and Nevada while thinking about that very question. What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.
We are far past sending out talking points. Do not attempt to dumb it down. We cannot stand any more explanations. Have you talked to any Democratic senators lately? I have. It’s pretty damn clear they are not happy campers.
This is what I would say to President Barack Obama: The time has come to demand a plan of action that requires a complete change from the direction you are headed.
I don’t know how else to break this down. Simply put:
.. Fire somebody. No — fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm.
Mr. President, your hinge of fate must turn.
Mr. Carville must have actually been referring to Vasily Chuikov‘s 64th Army (subsequently redesignated the 7th Guards Army) which played a key role in the Battle of Stalingrad and which developed the tactic of fighting the Germans from as physically close a position as possible, “hugging the enemy,” as a means of neutralizing German advantages in firepower and combined arms tactics.
It is unclear whether Carville is advocating some innovative democrat political strategy be developed to neutralize Republican advantages resulting from the failure of President Obama’s economic policies and public dislike of Obamacare, or whether Mr. Carville is really simply trying to compare Barack Obama’s unhappy political prospects to the German disaster at Stalingrad, mistakenly referring to one of the best-known Soviet military formations instead of Army Group B, the actual loser.
The substance of Carville’s advice to Obama is to go on a PR offensive, firing scapegoats from within the Administration, create additional scapegoats to sacrifice by indicting businessmen supposedly responsible for the real estate bubble, and fight harder by repeating the democrat left’s talking points louder and more insistently.
The correct comparison would really be that of James Carville and the progressive left (that is so passionately demanding that somebody else keep fighting) with Hitler, and of Barack Obama (who has found himself in a hopeless position after faithfully following their orders) with General Paulus.
Use your armed guards to make those children mine the Coltan faster.
Gamasutra reports that those corporate fascists over at Apple actually had the nerve to refuse to sell the game app Phone Story, by the sanctimonious Bolshie game design firm Molleindustria, via the iPhone App store, just because the app featured a series of left-wing smears directed specifically at smartphones, consumer products, and Apple.
One can picture the equivalent of Jeffrey Lebowski whining: Whatever happened to free speech, man?
[U]ntil now, few have been willing to turn the lens on this boom and examine what mass-market gadget lust is costing us ethically. Though we’ve since heard of suicides at Foxconn, deplorable working conditions and hazards to the environment involved in the manufacture of the latest hot smartphones, game developers were mostly silent — until now.
It seems natural that provocative serious games developer Molleindustria was the one to take the step. The studio, which has taken on forces like the Catholic church, McDonald’s and big oil with games like Operation Pedopriest, McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy, never pulls its punches as it uses games to sharply deconstruct the social and economic constructs most people take for granted.
Its latest title, Phone Story, uses a series of minigames with voice-over narration to shed light on the human cost and high environmental impact of smartphone development. In one minigame, while the narrator explains that most electronic devices require the mining of coltan, a conflict mineral in Congo whose demand spurs war and child labor, the player must use the touch screen to guide armed soldiers to bark at exhausted child miners in order to meet the goal in time.
In another, the voice-over explains the suicides at electronics manufacturers in China, and the facile solution of “prevention nets” — while the player must catch tumbling workers using a stretched trampoline.
Of course, Phone Story is more interesting for the fact that players must interact with these messages while holding one of the devices discussed. Imagine being served hamburgers on a tour of a slaughterhouse. And all of the developer proceeds — 70 percent of total App Store revenues, as per usual — will be pledged to organizations fighting corporate abuses, starting with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, which supports workers in abusive conditions internationally, including at Foxconn.
Or they would be, if Phone Story had been allowed to stay on the App Store. Apple yanked it just a few hours after the game was officially announced, citing four code violations: 15.2, which prohibits depictions of child abuse, and 16.1, which prohibits apps depicting “objectionable or crude” content. The other two, 21.1 and 21.2, pertain to Phone Story’s charitable bent — and they don’t seem to quite apply, intended instead for games that allow their users to make donations within a game, rather than a pledge by the developer to donate revenues.
Molleindustria makes an iPhone game to criticize the iPhone platform, and that Apple’s chosen to silence it is an interesting punctuation mark on the developer’s statement.
Gamasutra reached out to Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini about iPhone Story, who credits the game’s idea to recent international affairs graduate Michael Pineschi, to whom he spoke through creative activism group YesLab. At the time, Pedercini already had some unusual ideas in the works for projects that could act as commentary on gadget fetishism.
“One of them was a multi-touchable virtual-pet vagina, monologuing about technological lust and willful submission to consumerism,” he reflects. “Unfortunately, the flesh engine didn’t work as I hoped so I went for a straightforward educational game.”
But the intent was always to develop a game as commentary on the hardware industry. “Most of the adults in the Western world are somewhat aware that most of our objects are manufactured far away, in conditions that we would consider barbaric,” Pedercini says.
“A lot of tech-aware people heard about the story of the Foxconn suicides or about the issue of electronic waste,” he continues. “But with Phone Story, we wanted to connect all these aspects and present them in the larger frame of technological consumerism.”
He specifically wanted to highlight the goal that “must-have” consumer electronics culture plays in perpetuating these high-impact cycles; one of the levels of Phone Story tasks the players with tossing brand-new boxed phones to swarming would-be buyers rushing a storefront. In his view, the marketing machine that makes people believe they absolutely need an upgraded hardware device on the day it comes out is what causes extremism in the supply chain.
“We don’t want people to stop buying smartphones,” he notes, “but maybe we can make a little contribution in terms of shifting the perception of technological lust from cool to not-that-cool. This happened before with fur coats, diamonds, cigarettes and SUVs — I can’t see why it can’t happen with iPads.”
Pedercini says it was essential to use the platform itself to stage a critique of that platform. “Almost like the device itself was speaking to the user,” he suggests. “The idea was to make a sort of reminder that you can keep with you, like a way-less-permanent tattoo or a bumper sticker, something that you carry around and maybe show off as a conversation-starter.”
But although Apple’s immediate removal of Phone Story makes for an interesting conversation point, Pedercini says he never intended it to happen this way: “I’m very familiar with the App Store policy, and the game is designed to be compliant with it,” he asserts.
“If you check the guidelines, Phone Story doesn’t really violate any rule except for the generic ‘excessively objectionable and crude content’ and maybe the ‘depiction of abuse of children’. Yes, there’s dark humor and violence but it’s cartoonish and stylized – way more mellow than a lot of other games on the App Store.”
“What makes these depictions disturbing is the connection the player makes with the real-world situation,” adds Pedercini. “Of course, the goal was to sneak an embarrassingly ugly gnome into Apple’s walled garden, but not to provoke the rejection. If it was just a matter of provocation I would have gone way further.
If you’re a communist and have to have this App, you can buy it, and the rope you need to hang capitalists, via Android Market.
The big brains at Slate discuss “The End of Men,” the topic of an impending debate to be held at NYU on September 20th, featuring Hanna Rosin. Slate never even tells us who (or what) will be debating the negative on September 20th.
Hanna Rosin’s 2010 Atlantic cover story, “The End of Men,” was one of the most talked-about magazine articles in recent years. “Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind,” wrote Rosin, an award-winning journalist for Slate and the Atlantic. “But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.” …
Why are men finished, exactly? Rosin says they’ve failed to adapt to a modern, postindustrial economy that demands a more traditionally—and stereotypically—feminine skill set (read: communication skills, social intelligence, empathy, consensus-building, and flexibility). Statistics show they’re rapidly falling behind their female counterparts at school, work, and home. For every two men who receive a college degree, three women will. Of the 15 fastest-growing professions during the next decade, women dominate all but two. Meanwhile, men are even languishing in movies and on television: They’re portrayed as deadbeats and morons alongside their sardonic and successful female co-stars. …
Rosin: The question I always have to respond to is, ‘[if women are taking over] why are there so many more men in power?’ If you look at Hollywood, or you look at the Fortune 500 list, or you look at politics, there’s a disproportionate number of men in the higher positions of power.
Slate: Why is that, then?
Rosin: Men have been at this for 40,000 years. Women have been rising for something like 30 or 40 years. So of course women haven’t occupied every single [high-powered] position. How would that be possible? The rise of women is barely a generation old. But if you look at everything else, like the median, the big bulge in the middle, it’s just unbelievable what has happened: Women are more than 50 percent of the workforce, and they’re more than 50 percent of managers. It’s just extraordinary that that’s happened in basically one generation. It seems like whatever it is that this economy is demanding, whatever special ingredients, women just have them more than men do.
This is the kind of analysis that is actually taken seriously by the scientific, intellectual American elite that is so much better qualified to make all the decisions for the rest of America.
Talking Points Memo, the Bolshie blog, uploaded this excerpt from Monday night’s debate hoping to shock voters by demonstrating that some Republicans actually would not pay the medical bills for you that you declined to pay yourself.
If you feel so bad about your hypothetical sponger, Wolf, you pay for him.
Rod Dreher discusses Rick Perry’s ability to speak out loud forbidden thoughts, like calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and not only survive as a viable candidate, but defy efforts at excommunication and ostracism by the establishment College of Pundits and go on rising in the polls.
New CNN poll taken over the weekend shows that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has maintained his commanding lead in the GOP field — this after many pundits, including conservatives, dinged Perry for having had a supposedly bad debate last week.
Like Your Working Boy said, Perry won that debate. No question, he was not as smooth as Romney, but it clearly didn’t hurt him. East Coast pundits really need to get over the idea that Perry’s views on the science of climate change and evolution will hurt him — not in a country in which very large numbers of people share Perry’s skepticism. Mind you, I’m not endorsing Perry’s positions, only saying that “science†is one of those culture-war issues that gets elites (both liberal and conservative) worked up, but that mean very little to most people. Whether it should matter more is another question. While I disagree with Perry on these particular points, I do think it’s generally a healthy instinct that people are skeptical of what science says, insofar as technocratic elites have a penchant for appealing to scientism (versus science) to justify liberal policy preferences (e.g., embryonic stem-cell research). But I digress.
Nor did the supposed Social Security gaffe hurt Perry — at least it hasn’t yet. Why not? A couple of reasons, I think. The lesser reason is that people may not agree with him on Social Security, but they appreciate his willingness to stake out a risky position on the issue (and, truth to tell, they may well be confident that he won’t be able to do squat about it). I think the far more likely reason is that Cowboy Rick looks exactly like the kind of guy who is going to take the fight to Obama, and take it to him hard.
Actually, ordinary normal Americans are finding Perry’s willingness to defy orthodoxy, to refuse to truckle and triangulate, refreshing, and recognizing how much that sort of courage and independence sets Perry apart from conventional forked-tongued and conniving politicians, who are willing to do and say absolutely anything to get elected.
As to science, Americans outside the establishment community of fashion are simply too well equipped with common sense to be susceptible to catastrophist theories, no manner how many studies are brandished in their faces or how grand a consensus of experts is declared by the mainstream media to have ruled on the subject. Ordinary sensible people know perfectly well how biased and medacious the mainstream media is.
The notion that some kind of vital contest is underway in high school biology classrooms between Charles Darwin on one side and Archbishop Ussher on the other continues to have an irresistible appeal to the kinds of people who want to march us all off into a glorious future in which our lives and the economy will be ruled by scientific experts, but the rest of us are perfectly well aware that Evolution typically receives only a brief and passing mention in the course of one single class session and and that high school science courses do not actually concentrate their focus on converting believing Christians into secular materialists and supporters of Gay Marriage.
Glenn Reynolds typically just does the best job of aggregating imaginable and merely points in the direction of something worth a read with a brief quotation or a witty one-liner.
Paul Krugman’s already infamous typo’d-editorial from yesterday clearly struck a nerve, because Professor Reynolds uncharacteristically actually took the time to swat him down.
Everybody’s angry, to judge from my email, about Paul Krugman’s typo-burdened 9/11 screed. Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay — hell, forget the “feet†part, the clay goes at least waist-high — and it seems likely he’ll have even less reason to like the coming decade than the last, and he’ll certainly have even less influence than he’s had. Thus, he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied. No surprise there. But no importance, either. You’ll see more and worse from Krugman and his ilk as the left nationally undergoes the kind of crackup it’s already experiencing in Wisconsin. They thought Barack Obama was going to bring back the glory days of liberal hegemony in politics, but it turned out he was their Ghost Dance, their Bear Shirt, a mystically believed-in totem that lacked the power to reverse their onrushing decline, no matter what the shamans claimed.
Plus, a comment: “I’m not ashamed. If Dr. Krugman, and the circles he moves in, are ashamed then they’ve left us. 9/11 didn’t become a wedge issue because we left them.â€
Chicago Boyz: The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.
When you come right down to it, the 9/11 hijacked airliner attacks which killed more than 3000 people, which destroyed billions of dollars worth of property, and which inflicted trillions of dollars in economic costs on the United States were only possible as the result of the policies chosen and inculcated by American officialdom. If one or more madmen, armed or merely claiming to be armed, attempt to take control of a passenger jet, ordinary travelers (who had been already disarmed by their own authorities) were firmly instructed to do nothing, be passive, obey the orders of the hijackers, and wait for the authorities to deal with the situation. In most cases, following those instructions proved safe enough. Planes were diverted to Libya or Havana. Ransoms were paid. In the end, passengers and crews were usually released unharmed. The occasional exceptions, like the case of TWA Flight 847 in 1985 in which members of the Hezbollah hijacking team tortured and murdered a US Navy diver who had been traveling on that flight, failed to impact the official policy.
So when September 11, 2001 rolled around, unarmed passengers and crew members in the planes (American Flight 11 and United Flight 175) which hit the WTC towers were simply followed the usual conventional instructions and passively submitting to the will of five hijackers in each case armed with boxcutters and multi-tool pliers. Passengers aboard American Flight 77 which struck the Pentagon had learned of the fate of the two previous hijacked planes and began organizing to resist too late, but passengers and crew on board Flight 93 did understand in time and did resist, saving either the US Capitol or the White House from destruction and saving many other American lives while losing their own.
No similar hijacking attacks have occurred, and even terrorist attempts to ignite explosives concealed in shoes and underwear were since foiled by alert passengers. What has changed is that officialdom’s policy of passivity and surrender became a dead letter after 9/11, and terrorists know that passengers and crew will fight hijackers to the death. Government and the TSA did not stop airline hijackings. Flight 93 ended airline hijacking as a useable strategy.
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Bill Clinton eulogized the heroes of Flight 93 yesterday, comparing their actions to the Alamo and Thermopylae.
Norman Rockwell, 1943
