The Scum Also Rises

THE ABSURD TIMES

Just as we orbit around the Sun, the Sun orbits around the core of the Milky Way. Relative to the center of the galaxy, we're moving at an average speed of 143 miles per second—even at that breakneck speed though, it still takes 225 to 250 million terrestrial years to complete one trip around. (Just to keep things in perspective.)

THE SCUM ALSO RISES

BY

CZAR DONIC

The title is a combination of a tribute to both bald Gonza and Hemmingway to whome Gertrude Stein once said "Earnest, You're always wearing a wig on your chest."  He was so poor in Paris that he sat of park benches waiting for stray pigeons stupid enough to get close him, grabbed them, wrung their necks, and too them home to feed his family.  One assumes the parts given to his family, at least, were cooked.  But we are trying to write about the train of recent events over the last week or so and not go insane without the aid of alcohol.

So first we got hit with the idea of bribery to get kids into "prestige" schools like UMC and Yale (a strange combination).  Yale is more famous for a learning ground for suit-wearing preps who study how to become government agents and overthrow foreign governments, any foreign government.  Clean cut and pure and skull and crossbones.  Yeah, true Amerikans.

Which reminds us to look up tuition history.  At one time in Chicago, under Dick Daley, Junior College tuition was free (one-half by the state and half by the city), just as long as you took PE.  (In Champaign Urbana it was just half).  That explains why I could play semi-pro baseball (once shutout a AAA minor league baseball team in Eau Claire Wisconsin belonging to the Cubs).  That way, I could forget about the stupid baseball scholarship and free room and board at an all-jock dormitory that would have been Hell.  Stupidity strutted down the halls with a badge of honor.  Now, of course, the legislators found out that people actually learn some things in higher education, so they kept raising the tuition until only the mindless children of the wealthy could afford to go.

Next?  We have to cover international stuff and also have a few snippets from Daffy Don here and there.

Turkey: Erdogan made some remark about rising eggplant prices causing his political defeats and therefore he will buy his weapons from Russia. 

France: An inspiration to all of us to wear yellow anywhere.  France had the same choice as we did in the last election, either an insane fascist or a well-dressed austerity junkie.  They chose the latter.  We choose the former.  Oh,hey, civil war in Libya, but Looney John Bolton still wants to use the Libya model for North Korea.  That's why fat and jolly guy from Kansas is now secretary of State.  I assume the President or Supreme Leader of North Korea still sends love letters to Trump. 

Boeing is angry, which makes absolutely no difference to me as I will not get on an airplane and haven't since 9/11, not for fear of terrorists, but the driving to and from the airport and trying to get through the checkout line, all of which makes it much easier and more efficient to drive.  "Take you shoes off, bend over, let's search you anal cavity, you have more than 2 ounces of liquid with you, and batteries?"  It's damn nuts!  And we still have idiots saying "Better safe than sorry."  Why is that a choice?  Or rather why isn't that a choice?  Let's have an airline that doesn't give a damn, says fly at your own risks, and bombs welcome?  Before that, it was still strange.  People would get on planes and hijack them to Cuba as it was a safer place for them.  It was so strange that once Marlon Brando was arrested for saying, joking, but not letting on, "Is the plane to Cuba?"

Trumps Tax Returns – you almost only have to mention them to get a laugh.  It is about as funny as a headline I saw: THE LEFT CAN'T MEME!  Yes, it's funny until you find out it is supposedly a serious article about politics.  So, tax returns – aren't we the only country that subjects its people to that ritual to the extent that anyone who can afford it has to hire a tax attorney or a CPA?  If you can't, you probably don't have to file.  Now 10 years of Tax returns made public?  Give it up, folks, give it up.

Have you heard that windmills cause cancer?  Trump says so.  Also, the United States is like a cheap motel: NO VACANCIES if you try to cross the border with a coyote?  Don Quixote! 

Where are you when we need you.  Attack those windmills before we all get cancer and the giants come.  Wehat giants?  Where did that come from?"   Who cares, it's there now.

Let's heard it for the Jewish Republicans for Trump!  Democrats are anti-Semitic.  We know that because they use tropes.  Yeah, whatch out for the wild tropes coming from the evil Democrats.  Better safe than sorry.  No more holocausts!  If the Democrats had their way, they'd put windmills in your back yard, giving you cancer and reducing your home's value by 75%.  The reason he knows this is because he lowered the value of everything he owns when it was time to file taxes, and then killed the windmills as soon as the filing was over and he applied for a bank loan.  How does one go bankrupt running a casino?

Hey, we need a head of the Federal Reserve.  Remember that strange black guy who used to run Godfathers Pizza and said 9,9,9 was his tax solution?  He will by Daffy Don's nominee for head of the Fed.  Why the hell not?  He can fight it out in the alley with John Bolton.

The secret is out from England and it makes the whole Brexit nightmare seem insignificant:  Details emerged that Margaret Thatcher used to spank Christopher Hitchens.  We have that detail from none other that Salmon Rushdie who, I assume, is no longer under a Fatwah for his death from writing SATANIC VERSES.  I don't know – he may be getting into deep mud here in exposing Maggie as a sexual predator – much worse than Pizza gate from the twisted mind of Steve Bannon.

I'm tired and you just have to take the rest as if I covered it.   Just remember, and Anarchist is someone who thinks all institutions should justify their existence.  

Fwd: Czar Donic sent you a video: "Tom Paxton - What Did You Learn In School Today? (by EarpJohn)"

Just in case you think school helps:

Our schools haven't changed much. Tom Paxton - What Did You Learn In School Today? (by EarpJohn) by EJ - Tom Paxton #5 - Ramblin' Boy (1964) Rediscover more full albums: ... Help center • Report spam ©2016 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066

Thoughts and Invective -- Maudlin Edition

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

FUCK IT

Bobby McGee

A while ago, Kris Kristopherson wrote the line "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  Nice.  That line, along with a Janis Joplin recording of the song, left him with enough money never to have to work again in his life.

Some have even written about it at great length, analyzing its meaning, and so on.  That's not our purpose here.

Thomas Mann's last masterpiece, Dr. Faustus, has a similar line, sort of.  Now I've only read translations of the book.  While I am comfortable reading Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, (Heine and Hesse for sure), and so on in the German, Thomas Mann is a bit of a different case.  Now I can enjoy reading Milton's prose, even though some of his sentences run on for 50 or so words.  Somehow, he uses semi-colons and the like so that the meaning is clear. I can even agree with most of his points once I allow for his first premise that there is a god.  Dut I draw the line at a couple of pages, especially in German where they usually save the verb for the end.  No, I'll read a translation thank you.

But by a little tweaking, mainly elimination one adjective, Thomas Mann wrote "Freedom's just another word for subjectivity."  You can actually sing it to the same tune, and it makes more sense.  

Israel

The face of Nitwit Yahoo is quite ugly.  It also reminds one of the worst things Israel has done.  Unfortunately, it also leads to reinforcement of the anti-Jewish sentiments around the world.  No wonder the Hassidic sect carry signs saying ZIONISM IN NOT JUDAISM.  Perhaps in the days of Daniel Deronda there was something in it, back in the days of Queen Victoria, but today the movement is simply repugnant. 

Sexism

After women use the bath room, is it too much to ask that they put the seat back up?  It seems like such a little thing to do.  In other words, the whole thing is getting too tiresome.

Racism

One thing I noticed most about that 73 year old fart that drew his gun instead of his taser is that he looks like Dick Cheney.   It is a haunting resemblance, especially with his glasses on.

I heard a black comedian say "You lost your right to discuss race during the O.J. trial."  I wondered about that as I was on the defense side all the time and I think I'm "white".  I guess several factors entered into this.  Marsha Clark revealed herself as a real bitch, worse than the Lilith of the old Frasier and Cheers series.   Barry Sheck was great fun to watch.  You had to be pulling for the guy when he tried to ask a simple question, objection, sustained, then tried again.  Five times and finally the answer was allowed.  Imagine the effect on a juror.  What horrible information was being suppressed?   And even with this team of Prima Donna attorneys, OJ maintained control of the defense as a football coach would his team.  That's why Scheck was elevated to second chair, despite being the lowest paid one there.   Clark objected to the term "hysterical" as "sexist" as Freud had used it as a "wandering uterus."  Sheck's team found that she was the first person to use the herm in the trial, months ago.

One of the best things about it for me happened a year or so later when Clark came out with her account of the trial.  She called Sheck "easily the most obnoxious person at the trial."

FUBAR MEDIA

[Fucked up beyond all repair=FUBAR]

A pretty mild-mannered 60+ year old post office employee has been crusading against money in government.  Anyone here know that corporations can give as much as they want to buy off congress and that they do.  So, this guy decides on an act of "civil disobedience," sends a video and makes several phone calls to a newspaper in advance, then flies to what amounts to a mo-ped with a rotor blade on top like a helicopter (called a gyrocopter), and land on the Capitol Lawn with a letter for each congressman and senator.  He thought it would bring attention to campaign reform.

The media turns it into a madhouse of the need for more counter-terrorism measures.  Now why would that be?  There is more money in it, that's why.  This is what our democratic system has come to. 

Lest any other country thing we are racist here in the U.S.A, remember we elected a Black President.  Things are so much better now.

IRAQ

They say they have killed al-Duhry.  He was the second in command to Saddam and there was a 10 million dollar bounty on him.  Of course, for over a decade, they have claimed he was dead.  Of this much you can be certain: he was not with Daesh.  Perhaps he advised them, but his goal was to re-establish the Ba'ath party.

Libya

Hundreds are fleeing to reach Italy.  In the past, these people found gainful, peaceful employment when Gaddafi, but we took care of that to make the world a better place.  Sort of how we improved life for Iraq, made things so much better for Palestinians, and are trying to do in Syria.  It didn't quite go our way in Syria, so we created a "model" in Yemen.

Government

Perhaps competence is over-rated.

Education

Teachers and administrators are being locked up for helping their students "cheat".  The problem is that G.W.'s plan to leave no child behind consists in nothing but standardized tests.

Now, I liked standardized tests.  I never scored lower that the 97% percentile on any of them and on one I got a perfect score once I explained why one of the questions in logic was incorrect.  They worked in my favor because they were completely anonymous and the machine scoring them did not know how misanthropic and anti-social I was.  In short, there was no room for teacher bias.

However, these tests do not measure the ability to think but rather the ability to memorize [unless, of course, you study them and the psychology of the test designers as I did].  School in this country is designed to indoctrinate, not to encourage critical thinking.  Why if you have people going around able to think for themselves, who would vote for the idiots and greedy bastards that are running?  Who would sign up and get slaughtered in our many, many wars of imperialistic aggression?  No, best to make them learn how to do long division and remember dates.

SUMMARY

I am really a nice guy, loved by people all around the world.  All of the above may offend some people, but then they are simply morons, or idiots, or rich.  So, have a nice time!

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EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

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THE ABSURD TIMES

ILLUSTRATION: From www.whatnowtoons.com by Keith Tucker

A nice illustration of Cheney, rhymes with "meany". If anything, barring an independent prosecutor, a panel of Judges should be convened to investigate the war crimes of the Bush Administration. Why is Obama so chicken?

Sotomayor, the nominee for the Supreme Court, has provoked the most idiotic reactions from the right wing. They used to be better than they are now. One objection is that she pronounces her name with the accent on the last syllable. She should either pronounce it on the syllable before that or withdraw her nomination. Another that she said "I would hope that a hispanic [whatever] woman would have greater insight than a white male." Well, I should hope so too. Unfortunately, a black, Justice Thomas, has shown no insight whatsoever, so it is no guarantee of anything. Scalia is certainly not a WASP, but his decisions are certainly pro-WASP and anti-constitutional.

Here is a nice article on education here. It is a bit frightening, but nothing we didn't really know. I remember once saying "I'm postponing my education until I complete my degree." It seems even more true today.

Tom Dispatch posted 2009-05-28 10:19:24 Tomgram: William Astore, Educating Ourselves to Oblivion Can there be any doubt that education matters not just in how we view the world, but in what kind of world we create -- or simply accept? And can there be any doubt that, despite a massive educational infrastructure (admittedly now fraying badly), Americans remain remarkably poorly informed about the world? Last year, Rick Shenkman, the editor of the History News Network website, published a book (now out in paperback), Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter, excerpted at this site. Stupid enough (or ill-informed) was the answer. Since Barack Obama's election, many readers wrote Shenkman asking him if he still believes that "the voters are uninformed. Didn't Obama's election mean they were pretty smart?" In a recent post, he answered regretfully in the negative and here's just a little of what he had to say: "The highlights of the 2008 election included controversies over Obama's bowling score, his middle name Hussein, and Hillary's crying. These were not exactly issues of much weight at a time when the financial collapse of the country was happening before our eyes. And yet they drew extended media commentary… The media was to blame for the deplorable low quality of much of the campaign. But I am firmly convinced that you get the campaign you deserve… "Take the question of Obama's religion. Millions of voters paid so little attention to the news that they were easily bamboozled into believing that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim. On the eve of the election, confusion reigned. Polls indicated that 7 percent of the voters in the key battleground states of Florida and Ohio and 23 percent in Texas believed that Obama was a Muslim. In addition, and worse, more than 40 percent in Florida and Ohio reported that they did not know what his religion was. The arithmetic is horrifying: 7 percent + 40 percent = a near majority guilty of gross ignorance. "Americans did not come by their confusion by accident. A deliberate campaign was launched by Republicans to convince people that Obama's faith was in question. But what are we to make of voters who could be so easily bamboozled..." It's sobering to consider just how many Americans can't sort out propaganda (or simply fiction) from fact in the media madness that passes for our "information age." It's no less sobering to consider a corollary possibility: that we get the society we deserve; that, in fact, our youth in college today are being prepared, as TomDispatch regular William Astore (who has taught at both the Air Force Academy and the Pennsylvania College of Technology) suggests, to enter a world in desperate shape, but not to challenge it. Tom Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls The Tyranny of Being Practical By William Astore Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don't perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents. Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today's so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today's collapsing job market. Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life -- 20 years' service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level -- I'm convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It's simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.) And here's one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job -- if it's merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods -- you've effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it. Three Myths of Higher Ed Three myths serve to restrict our education to the narrowly utilitarian and practical. The first, particularly pervasive among conservative-minded critics, is that our system of higher education is way too liberal, as well as thoroughly dominated by anti-free-market radicals and refugee Marxists from the 1960s who, like so many Ward Churchills, are indoctrinating our youth in how to hate America. Nonsense. Today's college students are being indoctrinated in the idea that they need to earn "degrees that work" (the official motto of the technically-oriented college where I teach). They're being taught to measure their self-worth by their post-college paycheck. They're being urged to be lifelong learners, not because learning is transformative or even enjoyable, but because to "keep current" is to "stay competitive in the global marketplace." (Never mind that keeping current is hardly a guarantee that your job won't be outsourced to the lowest bidder.) And here's a second, more pervasive myth from the world of technology: technical skills are the key to success as well as life itself, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide are doomed to lives of misery. From this it necessarily follows that computers are a panacea, that putting the right technology into the classroom and into the hands of students and faculty solves all problems. The keys to success, in other words, are interactive SMART boards, not smart teachers interacting with curious students. Instead, canned lessons are offered with PowerPoint efficiency, and students respond robotically, trying to copy everything on the slides, or clamoring for all presentations to be posted on the local server. One "bonus" from this approach is that colleges can more easily measure (or "assess," as they like to say) how many networked classrooms they have, how many on-line classes they teach, even how much money their professors bring in for their institutions. With these and similar metrics in hand, parents and students can be recruited or retained with authoritative-looking data: job placement rates, average starting salaries of graduates, even alumni satisfaction rates (usually best measured when the football team is winning). A third pervasive myth -- one that's found its way from the military and business worlds into higher education -- is: If it's not quantifiable, it's not important. With this mindset, the old-fashioned idea that education is about molding character, forming a moral and ethical identity, or even becoming a more self-aware person, heads down the drain. After all, how could you quantify such elusive traits as assessable goals, or showcase such non-measurements in the glossy marketing brochures, glowing press releases, and gushing DVDs that compete to entice prospective students and their anxiety-ridden parents to hand over ever larger sums of money to ensure a lucrative future? Three Realities of Higher Ed What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system's technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls -- thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see, regard and disregard, value and dismiss. Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing market, enjoyed its own growth bubble, characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don't know much about history? Go ahead and authorize waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don't know much about geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires," and allow them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war. Perhaps I'm biased because I teach history, but here's a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so. We don't have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history -- not when they never learned them to begin with. Donning New Sunglasses One attitude pervading higher education today is: students are customers who need to be kept happy by service-oriented professors and administrators. That's a big reason why, at my college at least, the hottest topics debated by the Student Council are not government wars, torture, or bail-outs but a lack of parking and the quality of cafeteria food. It's a large claim to make, but as long as we continue to treat students as customers and education as a commodity, our hopes for truly substantive changes in our country's direction are likely to be dashed. As long as education is driven by technocratic imperatives and the tyranny of the practical, our students will fail to acknowledge that precious goal of Socrates: To know thyself -- and so your own limits and those of your country as well. To know how to get by or get ahead is one thing, but to know yourself is to struggle to recognize your own limitations as well as illusions. Such knowledge is disorienting, even dangerous -- kind of like those sunglasses donned by Roddy Piper in the slyly subversive "B" movie They Live (1988). In Piper's case, they revealed a black-and-white nightmare, a world in which a rapacious alien elite pulls the levers of power while sheep-like humans graze passively, shackled by slogans to conform, consume, watch, marry, and reproduce. Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways. If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds -- a struggle against accepting the world as it's being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success. William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six years at the Air Force Academy. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. A TomDispatch regular, he also writes for History News Network and Nieman Watchdog. His essays have appeared in The Nation, Salon.com, Asia Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, and elsewhere. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu. Copyright 2009 William Astore