Author: hugh

Religulous Sarah Palin

Buds walk on water
Buds walk on water

I’m listening to Terry Gross interview Bill Maher and Larry Charles (director of Borat) about the movie Religulous. While I haven’t seen it yet, I think I’ve heard enough to talk about it. Maher picks off low-lying fruit by singling out fundamentalist elements of religion but it needs to be done as it is the shrill element of religiousity that makes religion dangerous. People need their stories for moralism and philosophy but when the stories seriously cloud rational judgments about history, current events, and science, and are accepted as truth, they really do belong in a psych ward.

Later in the show, Terry interviews Steven Waldman, co-founder of Beliefnet — probably the closest thing to an objective platform for faith. The main topic of both interviews turned out to be Sarah Palin. There are Youtube videos and statements that raise all kinds of questions that have not yet been asked of Ms. Palin. Like Matt Taibbi, who has a long rant on Palin published at Rolling Stone and Alternet, I think the Palin phenomenon says really disturbing things about the American psyche in general. Here’s Taibbi’s windup:

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

The Palin nomination really boggles my mind. I don’t think I’ll be watching her debate Joe Biden on Thursday. It’s getting too painful to watch this trainwreck.

Recommended: TPM gathers highlights of several economist views on the Wall Street bailout.

Firehose Check

I know it’s not my job but I thought I’d check on the firehoses in my work building. In case there’s a fire, you want to be able to put that shit out without a lot of bipartisan posturing.

Firehose 1 – slightly experimented with. Broken alarm box.

Firehose 2 – overzealous cinch knotting. otherwise ok.

Firehose 3 – used once at 1998 christmas party. still workable.

Firehose 4 – now that, my friends, is a fireshose we can believe in.

Firehose 5 – firehose has some identity issues, nothing some water in the veins won’t fix.

Firehose 6 – one tall firehose toyed with by a local fireman.

This concludes my firehose check.

Playing the Markets with Fraction Man

Fraction Man Aims for the Fences

Like Duncan, I’m not an economist or a financial analyst but it is useful for people like us to think about these things in metaphors and he made a ton of sense today:

The entire financial system is practically collapsing and they’re [CNBC business pundits] lamenting the possibility of more regulation. I don’t think the sports/referee metaphor is perfect, but it’s probably good enough. People who prattle on about “the free market” are usually too stupid to have a clue how complicated and pervasive the “rules” had to be to to get a well-functioning modern market system: sophisticated concepts of contracts and enforcement, property rights, legal entities, proper accounting, bankruptcy, limited liability, etc… etc…, did not descend from the heavens but were, in fact, created.

Earlier, he likens what’s going on to a building fire:

It might have been the right thing to run down to the river with buckets to collect water to throw on the burning building, but it would have been much better to have better fire codes and a functioning fire department.

You can also infer the situations involving Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA here.

Finally, the sports metaphor linked to at TPM in the first quote goes like this:

…the markets operate like team sports — like say, a football game. Team sports don’t operate well without referees, and that’s exactly what’s happened under the Republicans.

They can blame Clinton all they want — the fact is, the Republicans under leadership of such brain trusts as Phil Gramm have methodically removed the referees from the games, and look what’s happened. One of the primary reasons investors shy away from putting money into third world countries is an ABSENCE OF REGULATION.

Honestly, the free-market whiners who bemoan regulation sound like the corporate welfare socialist pigs they are and I’m here to stuff some punk rock in their ears.

A Supposedly Good Book I’ll Finish Someday

Walk this way

I’m pretty sad David Foster Wallace is dead. I first became aware of his writing when “Shipping Out” was published in Harper’s in the mid 90s (later the lead essay in “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”). Besides giving me reason to never go on a cruise ship, he helped me be comfortable with the fact that I would never be comfortable with people who vacation on cruise ships. I never finished Infinite Jest not because I thought it sucked. I’ll give it another go-round one of these days.

Update: Presumably for a short time, Harper’s has PDF downloads of everything Wallace published with them in memoriam.

I watched Kansas City Confidential earlier tonight, another noir classic (viewable for free here). Ski masks were much scarier back in the day:

Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef rock as the bad guys. Most of the action is in Mexico. For another south of the border noir movie that doubles as light comedy see Fred MacMurray in Borderline.