Month: November 2014

When Ross Douthat writes about race, he does so in a self-consciously “gingerly” manner, which means, for the most part, that he doesn’t have anything to say. It also means that he’s unwilling to point a finger in one direction unless he is simultaneously pointing a different finger in the other direction.

So, for one example, it’s not sufficient to point out that the Republican Party’s answer to black poverty is to impotently advocate for two-parent families, you must also allege that the Democrats have no idea how to raise wages in this country. If he means that the Democrats in Washington have no idea how to overcome persistent Republican obstruction and filibusters, he might have a bit of a point, but the Democrats just got the minimum wage raised in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Those are some “severely conservative” states, by the way.

The Republicans have blocked President Obama’s proposed hike in the federal minimum wage, and every other idea he’s put forth to improve America’s economic lot, but that doesn’t mean that the Democrats have stood still, nor does it mean that the left has no idea how to help people get out of poverty. The November/December issue of the Washington Monthly was almost entirely dedicated to these issues, and it was a collaborative effort with John Podesta, who happens to be a top guru to both President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This effort at moral equivalence on Douthat’s part is repugnant, but what’s even worse is the following:

(The left doesn’t know how to get wages rising again; the right doesn’t know how to shore up the two-parent family, etc.) Which has left both parties increasingly dependent on identity-politics appeals, with the left mobilizing along lines of race, ethnicity and gender and the right mobilizing around white-Christian-heartland cultural anxieties.

For a while the media has assumed that this kind of identity-based politics inevitably favors the left, because 21st-century America is getting less white every day.

But that’s too simplistic, in part because the definitions of “white” and “minority” are historically elastic. If a “white party” seems sufficiently clueless and reactionary, it will lose ground to a multicultural coalition. But as African-Americans know from bitter experience, “whiteness” has sustained itself by the inclusion of immigrants as well as by the exclusion and oppression of blacks. That history suggests that a “multicultural party” may always be at risk of being redefined as a grievance-based “party of minorities” that many minorities would prefer to leave behind.

What’s the equivalence here?

On the right, the idea is to mobilize “around white-Christian-heartland cultural anxieties.” Those types of anxieties will exist whether or not they are stoked, encouraged, pandered to, or not. But to deliberately set out to take political advantage of those anxieties is to, with clear foresight, intentionally increase people’s anxiety in order to make them more race-conscious, more resentful, more tribal, more selfish, more well-armed, and less prepared for the future.

On the left, the idea is allegedly to mobilize “along lines of race, ethnicity and gender.” But, there is really nothing foundational on the left to its appeal to one race or one gender other than a commitment to protecting the rights that minorities and woman have already won. The last really big civil rights bill passed in 1968, a year before this forty-five year old writer was born. Abortion rights were legalized in 1973, when I was in nursery school. And, yet, we are still forced to fight for the right to vote and for reproductive choice. We didn’t decide that the answer to black poverty was to lecture people about sexual abstinence.

So, when certain races, ethnicities, and women are under attack, we rally to their defense, but that is a reaction, not an agenda. Getting people health care was an agenda. Making college affordable is an agenda. Winning people a living wage is an agenda.

Try as you might, you won’t find the left trying to get anyone to hate white people or Christians or the “heartland.” We aren’t trying to make people afraid of these groups; we’re only trying to protect them from what these groups are trying to do them politically. A politician who wants health care for people in the inner city isn’t trying to rob Peter to pay Paul, but a politician who votes for a Personhood Amendment is trying to take away contraceptives from women. These are not equivalent things.

Which leads us to Douthat’s conclusion:

The key point here, though, is that whichever coalition is ascendant in this scenario, a politics divided primarily by identity is likely to be more poisonous than one in which both parties are offering more-color-blind appeals.

Unfortunately, identity is also the most primal, reliable form of political division. And Ferguson has provided a case study in exactly how powerfully it works.

Ah, yes. Ferguson.

One side thinks that it shouldn’t be legal to gun down teenagers in a hail of bullets unless your life is in imminent danger. The other side is like, whatever, the kid had it coming.

Which side is poisonous?

If the right would stop treating every social program as the societal equivalent of a car-jacking, would stop stripping voting rights from the underclass, would stop reflexively defending killer cops and vigilantes, and would stop treating the first black president and his family with relentless disrespect, we might have a less racially-tinged response from the left.

But the right has made a decision. Their decision is to mobilize “around white-Christian-heartland cultural anxieties.”

The left has not mobilized around “black-inner city cultural anxieties.” And it won’t.

That’s why the problem of race in this country is not perpetuated or exacerbated by the left. To the degree that the left is at fault on racial issues, its because they don’t do enough. But the main reason they don’t do enough is because the backlash is so strong. Look what happens the second anyone tries to get serious about prison reform for example.

Hell, we can’t even close Gitmo, let alone talk seriously about emptying our prisons of non-violent drug offenders.

So, let’s get real, Douthat. Progressives are working toward the color-blind society you profess to want. But we have no choice but to fight a constant rearguard action against the heartland anxieties that your party feeds like a dying furnace.

Whether or not Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee and whether or not she will run for the nomination at all are two very different questions. But arguing, as Charlie Cook does, that Clinton only has a 25%-30% chance of running at all is very bold and based on magical thinking.

There’s something vaguely gross about comparing Hillary to a new car smell, and it makes me uncomfortable. I’d like to ask a different question.

I think we political junkies operate with certain assumptions that we internalize after a while. We’ve had it in the back of our minds for years now that Clinton will run, will likely win the nomination, and should be heavily favored to win the presidency. We have good reasons for making these assumptions, but having internalized them long ago takes the novelty and excitement of having a female president out of the picture. Far from feeling like some path-breaking moment in American history, it seems more like a very boring and predictable outcome.

The midterms reiterated for us the importance of excitement and interest in the elections to driving Democratic turnout. Barack Obama was able to provide that in a way that Al Gore and John Kerry simply were not. Hillary seems like she is somewhere in between. She isn’t as charismatic as Obama or her husband, but she isn’t crushingly dull, either. Her fan base does include some very strong enthusiasts which we simply didn’t see with Gore and Kerry. She’s somewhat better at riling up the base.

And, when the time comes and the opportunity is finally at hand to make a women the most powerful political leader on the planet, there will be a real sense of novelty and possibility and potential for progress. I just don’t know how strong it will be. The public at large is not at all like political junkies, so they won’t be nearly so fatigued by the idea of Clinton becoming president as most of us are. Yet, this whole idea of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton-Bush is getting pretty old even for the politically disengaged.

A woman president is definitely a new car, in other words, but it seems in this case to be a car we’ve been test driving for years and years.

So, will a Clinton candidacy really bring the excitement we need and, if so, will it be an excitement that comes from a new base of voters?

I work with the best gang of maniacs ever:

I very much enjoy the Wal-Mart manager trying to get them to leave, and how the cops laugh it off.

Happy Sunday!

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia was almost bounced out of Congress, primarily because he and the Democratic Party were criminally overconfident about beating tomato can, Ed Gillespie. It was a humbling experience because Warner was seen as immensely popular in his home state, and just the kind of vice-presidential candidate who could put some Electoral College delegates firmly in the hands of Hillary Clinton, or any other Democratic nominee. Warner’s comeuppance didn’t last too long, however. Despite leaking that he had voted against Harry Reid to remain the leader of the Senate Democrats, he was just awarded a similar kind of leadership position to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said that Warner will be “taking on the role of policy development advisor at the Democratic Policy and Communications Center.”

Warner’s promotion came little fanfare compared with the Warren announcement, especially given the timing at 5 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but it demonstrates the breadth of opinion even within the smaller Senate Democratic caucus next Congress.

The split is particularly apparent on fiscal matters, as could be seen on the campaign trail in Virginia where Warner won an unexpectedly close re-election campaign against former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. Warner held campaign events touting fiscal responsibility, even telling a room full of Democrats that some of them might be better off voting for Republicans if they would support a debt and deficit deal that includes revenue increases.

Former Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, said in September that his former staffers heard from Warner with some regularity, and that the Virginian was an heir of sorts to his work on debt issues.

Reading crap like this makes drinking liquid Drano seem like an attractive alternative to perusing the political news.

What this party needs is not more debt cowbell.

The Hill doesn’t really go out on a limb when they endeavor to tell us the 13 most likely Republicans to win the party’s nomination and then become our next president.

Sometimes I think that the Democrats and Republicans are so dissimilar that they just behave differently and you can’t take lessons from the one and apply then to the other. But we can’t go back to 1988 to see what the Democrats did when faced with the end of the presidency of a transformative world historical figure. They had just endured two electoral drubbings far worse than what the GOP underwent in 2008 and 2012, but they were also coming off of a successful midterm election in 1986 in which they regained complete control of Congress. They opted to nominate a governor of a very liberal state, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. In other words, the party still wanted to impose its will rather than adapt. Remember that when you read this:

“Don’t count the Ohio twins [Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman] out for vice president,” one strategist said.

“Kasich is a little too flakey, he’s still Kasich the congressman to a lot of people, and generally speaking, the politics of Ohio are a little too left of center for a lot of Republicans,” said another. “But guys like him bring an awful lot to the debate.”

The so-called “Ohio twins” are completely discounted as presidential material, but they might make it on the ticket despite being too left-of-center for the party base.

Will the Republicans, just like the Democrats of the late-1980’s, require a third drubbing before they come to the conclusion that the party cannot compete in national elections unless it widens its geographical appeal?

My guess is that the answer is ‘yes,’ because, if anything, the Republicans are slower learners than the Democrats.

For The Hill, the top tier challengers are Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Chris Christie. These are rather insane choices, although not obviously worse than lunatics like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee.

Trying to cram another Bush down the Republicans’ throats, let alone the country’s, seems like a thankless and expensive and ultimately doomed enterprise.

Chris Christie has more skeletons than a Halloween Party and a volatile and abrasive personality that is just as scary.

Rand Paul is a serial plagiarist with more family ties to white supremacists than Reinhard Heydrich and “evolving” positions on foreign policy that would split the GOP in half, if not quarters.

Nominating any of these men would be a recipe for epic failure, although Jeb probably has the temperament to keep things from getting into Goldwater/McGovern/Mondale territory.

Nominating a lesser known, less damaged governor, hopefully with some moderate credentials and a non-southern base would be the obvious play, and the equivalent of what the Dems successfully did in 1992. Scott Walker lacks the personality and Mike Pence lacks the moderation. The obvious choice is Kasich, but maybe not until 2020.

Lucas Richert and Erika Dyck have reported on the renewed interest of the medicial community in psychedelics in the blog of the 2×2 Project.  This article is another one in the discussion about revising US drug laws with respect to those drugs whose use is currently criminalized and whose use as subject of research proscribed.  The history and political use of psychoactive drugs in the 1960s provides a cautionary tale about the hamhandedness of state power.
In the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency had a secret research program using psychoactive drugs on US soldiers as research subjects in the quest to discover a truth serum, a drug that would bypass the ability of the subject to lie.  Or at least that has been the public story since the public became aware of the program.  There is a sense that at least some of the Hippie political rebellion in the 1960s is blowback from this not-well-considered program.  Among those involved in this research as researcher or subject were Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (born in 1931 and later changing his name to Ram Dass), and Ken Kesey.

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World was published in 1931 and no doubt raised the issue of using pharmaceuticals for control of populations politically among those psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians associated with the militaries of various nations. Raised them to the extent that exploration of chemical weapons and the psychology of propaganda, both hot subjects in the 1930s had not already raised them.

Albert Hofmann was a chemist for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, which like most pharmaceutical companies in the 1930s was examining the chemical composition of traditional medicinal plants and figuring ways to improve their performance, reduce their risk and side effects, and also patent the result.  Hofman started research on two medicinal plants, Drimia maritima or sea squill and Ergot.  The purpose of this research was to synthesize a respiratory and cardiac stimulant that would not affect the uterus.  In the process he synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938.  He set it aside for five years and returned to research on it in 1943.  During this research he spilled some on his finger and experienced hallucinations and other effects that would later be given the term “trip”.  After reflecting on the experience, three days later he intentionally ingested a measured dose of 250 micrograms and went for a bicycle ride.

In the early 1950s, psychiatric researchers considered LSD as a psychomimetic model for exploring psychoses with the use of normal test subjects.  It was given to all sorts of test groups for all sorts of reasons: treatment for alcoholism, tracking mental degeneration if artists (right!); increasing artist and composer productivity or creativity,

A subculture of recreational use of LSD grew up within the psychiatric profession as a result of its use as a psychiatric model.

The CIA in it MKULTRA program was concerned about the brainwashing of soldiers in the Korean War and the rumored use of a “lie serum”.  MKULTRA conducted a program in which research subjects were given LSD without their informed consent.

By 1965, because the CIA had provided experiences of LSD to ordinary people (Ken Kesey was one), what was an elite recreational drug began to enter mainstream American culture, hyped by no less a publication than Look magazine and its Esalen-promoting editor George Leonard.  And in that year, the FDA decided that the drug was dangerous and persuaded Sandoz to stop production.  That moved production for the rapidly growing psychedelic culture to undercover labs that produced products of variable quality and after criminalization began mixing in amphetamines and even low doses of rat poison.  Bad trips, always somewhat of a problem in LSD research proliferated, which increased the calls for heavier criminalization.

In the meantime, research on LSD was completely halted.  Now it is beginning to resume within a medical paradigm.  The upside of this is that there will be well-recorded data and statistically valid trials to test various medical applications, safety, and effectiveness.  The downside is that Western culture has never had a tradition of managing psychoactive substances or a tradition of mystical uses of psychoactive substances.  The even further downside is that Western culture is a consumer culture with a “more is better” and “more more frequently is even better” mindset.  It is a culture that can barely stop for holidays.  As was seen in some cases in the 1960s and 1970s, that is poor environment for managing the use of psychoactive substances.  Or for respecting limits.

The criminalization of drugs in general and psychoactive substances in particular allowed the crushing of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s through diversion into a dream state of consumption of psychoactive drugs (creative for some but not allowing for sound politics), ordering police to become instruments of enforcement of conventional commercial values and political views with violence, and diversion of politics into consumption of symbols of change instead of the reality.  It was not orchestrated; it was a series of ad hoc responses by fearful elites.  And it created strange stories like that of the Manson family or of Altamont (the media’s favorite anti-Woodstock Generation stories at the time) as being totally linked to radical politics and the drug culture.

At Altamont, the organizers trusted the Hells Angels to provide security better than the Bay Area cops.  And they agreed to pay the Hells Angels in beer.  And one beer-drunk Hells Angel beat to death one of the concert-goers.  Because the primary duty of security was not to protect the concert-goers but to ensure that everyone inside the fence had paid.

The LSD sub-culture soon disappeared but first-time LSD use was a consistent percentage of the population until after 9/11.   Then it dropped.  As did first-time drug use in general.  Especially among youth.

So now the debate will be reopened. Hopefully this time there will be more attention paid to social environment and the framework within which use occurs.  And to how our culture can frame its expectations about the proper role of psychoactive drugs in individual life and society in something broader than an medical pop-a-pill model.

And maybe this time we will be more sensitive to how tolerance and then repression of drug use is driven by political anxieties in society.

On the night the non-indictment against Darren Wilson was announced there were demonstrations, looting and cars and buildings were set on fire in Ferguson, Missouri. No one disputes this. But except for one building, all of the fires occurred in or near the area of the protests on West Florissant Avenue.

The one building that burned to the ground far from where the police were firing tear gas into the crowds of protestors, and those taking advantage of the demonstrations to loot and burn, just happened to be the church that Michael Brown’s family were members and attended.

As chaos engulfed several Ferguson streets Monday, [Pastor] Lee tried unsuccessfully to chase away looters and put out fires along West Florissant Avenue. Then his phone rang.

The officer on the other end of the line told him that he needed to get to his church right away. By the time Lee arrived, the cinder-block structure had been gutted by flames. […]

Although other buildings were burned during the violence that consumed much of Ferguson on Monday, the flames at Flood Christian Church were different. The church building, purchased in March by the 31-year-old Lee, sits well outside the area where things were violent, far from the riots. The glass storefronts on each side remain unscathed.

Pastor Lee began speaking out in September demanding that Officer Wilson stand trial for the death of Michael Brown. Shortly thereafter he received a series of death threats.

“Seventy-one death threats. But I’ll never forget what one man said to me: ‘I’m going to come pick you up with all you other hateful n—– preachers and put you all in your church and burn you straight to hell.”

An arson unit of the ATF is investigating the fire because burning a church is a federal offense. Pastor Lee and other community members believe his church was targeted, possibly by white supremacists, because of his support for the Brown family. I have yet to see any reports of arson investigations by the Ferguson police or any other law enforcement or local fire department officials in St. Louis into what looks like a deliberate case of arson.

Alcohol Tobacco and Firearm investigators said somebody purposely set fire to Flood Christian Church on Monday night at 11:44 p.m.

Burning a church is a federal offense.

ATF agents said somebody forced open the front door and started the fire in the children’s area.

This Sunday the church will hold its services in a parking lot. Naturally, his insurance company is refusing to pay for damages. They informed Pastor Lee that his policy did not cover damages because it was located in “an area where riots and civil disobedience occurred.” The fact that the church is no where near the area where the other buildings were burned and that there were no demonstrations or protests in its vicinity apparently does not matter to the whoever denied the Flood Church’s claim.

Anyone wishing to donate funds to rebuild the Flood Christian Church can go to their Go Fund Me site here: Mike Brown Church The Flood

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the 2nd Empire VIctorian house.  The photo that I am using is seen directly below.  I will be using my usual acrylics on an 8 inch by 10 inch gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

I’ve moved on to some actual color.  Right now I’m painting in the various elements of the house.  Some of these colors were chosen simply for purposes of visual contrast.  I’ve got much more to do before the first layer is done but that will be the subject of next week’s cycle.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

If you are tired of your taxpayer dollars being used to pay Wal-Mart employees the money that the Waltons refuse to pay them, then you might be interested in the large Black Friday protests that are occurring at 1,600 Wal-Mart stores in 49 states throughout the nation right now.

“I have to depend on the government mostly,” says Fatmata Jabbie, a 21-year-old single mother of two who earns $8.40 an hour working at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia. She makes ends meet with food stamps, subsidized housing, and Medicaid. “Walmart should pay us $15 an hour and let us work full-time hours,” she says. “That would change our lives. That would change our whole path. I wouldn’t be dependent on government too much. I could buy clothes for my kids to wear.”

The nation’s largest employer, Walmart employs 1.4 million people, or 10 percent of all retail workers, and pulls in $16 billion in annual profits. Its largest stockholders—Christy, Jim, Alice, and S. Robson Walton—are the nation’s wealthiest family, collectively worth $145 billion. Yet the company is notorious for paying poverty wages and using part-time schedules to avoid offering workers benefits. Last year, a report commissioned by Congressional Democrats found that each Walmart store costs taxpayers between 900,000 and $1.75 million per year because so many employees are forced to turn to government aid.

This isn’t complicated. If you have a job at Wal-Mart and you still need Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing, then you aren’t just getting shafted by the Waltons. You’re also being paid your missing wages by the federal government. You’re not the deadbeat. The Waltons are the deadbeats.

ETA: It is AMAZING how a few botched tags can fuck up your post. Please pardon the missing content from earlier.

Friday is always a slow newsday, and in the wake of the holiday it’s doubly slow. “Leaner and meaner”? Really? How is insanity defined, and can that definition be expanded to include “sometimes caused by hearing the same old wives tale for the thousandth time”? I feel like we’ve re-trained the iraq army more times than Thomas Friedman has gained wisdom fro a magical negro New Delhi cab driver.

Meanwhile, now that it’s no longer a necessary distraction from the US election, ebola’s still killing the shit out of people in Sierra leone.

BREAKING: Looks like it’s not such a slow news day after all:

A man shot up a federal courthouse and a Mexican consulate — which he also seemingly tried to set ablaze — early Friday before being shot dead outside the Austin, Texas, police headquarters, that city’s police chief said.
The shooter fired “over 100 rounds” in a roughly 10-minute span, but he did not hit anyone even though the bullets ricocheted at a typically busy time in downtown Austin, when streets fill up with people after bars close for the night.

[…]

Authorities have not offered a motive, but the police chief said that the shooter’s “violent anti-government behavior” — as evidenced by attacking buildings that belong to Mexico’s government, the U.S. government and, in the police headquarters, the city government — may have come from ongoing and often vitriolic debates in society.

Be thankful you’re not Scott Stapp, who is undoubtedly being punished for this:

Perhaps Scott and Bill Cosby will move in together, and make a comeback together through a hilarious comedy/reality show.

A few weeks back, between biking 5 miles each direction to work, and running 2-3 days a week, I overdid it . My left hamstring has been one strip of throbbing gristle ever since. Last night I was introduced to the foam roller and my leg feels so good (you can make a super hard roller for cheap with a length of 3″ PVC pipe and spend a lot less).

For those of you in and around Philly, I’ll be at the Institute this evening for their First Friday Bluegrass jam session. If you’re in the area, drop by and say Howdy (ie, Phil Perspective). If you play the bluegrass music, bring an instrument. Starts around 10:00 pm.

OK, I think that’s about it for me. Time to get some fresh air. Add your own news, notes, what-have-you in comments.