Musings from Southern New Mexico

Month: January 2012 (Page 2 of 3)

Some … uh … game ?

I don’t watch much football, but I did catch the latter part of the Denver-New England game. It was painful. I found myself feeling sorry for Tebow. He may be a religious loon, but probably no worse than a number of professional athletes. The fact that he is also a reasonably good-looking clean-cut white kid made him the toast of the religious right. It is they, and not he, that I hope can stew on this for a while (from USA Today):

With the Broncos passing game so inept (Tebow completed nine of 26 passes for 136 yards, with a 52.7 efficiency rating) that they were calling option runs in the second half despite trailing by four touchdowns at the intermission, Brady put on a clinic.

Ouch.

Tipping Their Hand

I saw this at Crooks & Liars:

In April, Congressional Republicans extracted $600 million in cuts from the IRS in return for a spending deal with President Obama, reductions which at the time were forecast to cost the Treasury $4 billion in lost revenue.

From whom would the money collected through improved enforcement come? Not wage slaves. Republicans (and, to a lesser extent, Democrats) know on which side their bread is buttered. This is just an overt case of “trickle down” theory working exactly as planned. That is to say, it is working as planned, but not as marketed. The people who sell these bills of goods are not now and never have been under the delusion that what they are saying is true.

Back from Internetless Hell

I do a lot of programming at work. It turns out that my employer’s policy does not allow me to put “unapproved software” on my computer. I write software. You can see where this might make life difficult. The solution proposed was that I get a second development computer off the main network, and use my laptop for correspondence and regular network activities. As a bonus, they upgraded the security on my laptop.

So I went to Phoenix on business. At the hotel, I found that the security upgrades rendered the laptop incapable of connecting to hotel internet. So I was not only unable to do work email, but I was also unable to goof off on the internet. On the up side, I had a ready-made excuse for being behind on my correspondence. As well, I was able to get in some reading and some running. On the down side, I have been unable to post anything blog wise. What only occurs to me now is that I never had the urge to turn on the TV.

Santorumentum!

Last night Willard “Mitt” Romney narrowly avoided being drowned in the Santorum fever that issued forth from over 30,000 Iowans.
The Rascal parking was doubtless backed up for blocks. This grand coup was accomplished at the bargain price of a mere $3,960,000 in Romney and Romney-friendly advertising in the month of December for a total of 30,015 votes. Extrapolating to he national election, Willard needs to spend about $8.8 billion to get as many votes as Obama got in 2008.

The Enemy Within

A common theme among authoritarians is that of “the enemy within.” This idea has been used to great effect for as long as recorded history. In the last millennium, we have seen this idea spread from the witches and heretics of the medieval church to the counterrevolutionaries of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

We like to think of these paranoiac visions as belonging to foreigners. If you’ve read this far, though, you probably imagine a few scenarios I might recall from recent American history. Foremost among them will certainly be the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. Since then, few reasonable people would entertain the idea that dissent was tantamount to treason. Yet that is where we find ourselves now. From the patently absurd claim that the war in Vietnam was lost due to anti-war protesters to the controversy of not wearing a silly flag pin on the lapel, we are presented with old fashioned propaganda modernized only in the media used.

I find one seemingly obvious facet of the meme interesting. Anytime the meme is brought up, the proposed solution is a concentration of power in the hands of the already powerful.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Desertscope

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑