Baltimore is Another Wake-Up Call. America, stop Hitting the Snooze Button.

Over and over again, we get these wake-up calls. Over and over again, America listens for a little while, and then goes back to its usual state of willful ignorance. Rinse and repeat. STUPID.

It’s not like we haven’t seen this before: people are oppressed for so long and in so many ways, they can’t take it any more and lash out in blind rage. Baltimore today, Ferguson yesterday, and running back through history: Watts, Little Rock, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, all the way back to ancient Rome and its predecessors. An insular ruling class oppresses the masses, and eventually the masses revolt.

And there are always those who TELL the ruling class what is going on, pleading with them, exhorting them to change the arc of history, to learn from history, to not repeat the mistakes of history. So it was, and so it is. For example, here are the words of Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage, and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle-class and working-class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US to third-world dictatorships, like China and others; plunged tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil-rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

Pretty clear, isn’t he? America can (and should) listen to him, wake up and take action. But no, America will probably just roll over, smack the s*** out of the snooze button on the alarm, and go back to sleep. Eventually, the wake-up call will be so loud, it can’t be ignored any longer.

By then, it’ll be too late. America will finally wake up, only to find out that it died in its sleep.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Reagan’s Teabagging followers are wrong: Government is GOOD for Business.

Latest example of Adam Smith’s wisdom: Chattanooga, Tennessee. Since the private sector wasn’t going to provide the requisite infrastructure to support 21st-century businesses, the local and Federal (but not state) governments did the job. And now businesses are clamoring to relocate to the city with some of the best Internet access in the country:

Chattanooga rolled out a fiber-optic network a few years ago that now offers speeds of up to 1000 Megabits per second, or 1 gigabit, for just $70 a month. A cheaper 100 Megabit plan costs $58 per month. Even the slower plan is still light-years ahead of the average U.S. connection speed, which stood at 9.8 megabits per second as of late last year, according to Akamai Technologies.

As federal officials find themselves at the center of controversy over net neutrality and the regulation of private Internet service providers like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), Chattanooga offers an alternative model for keeping people connected. A city-owned agency, the Electric Power Board, runs its own network, offering higher-speed service than any of its private-sector competitors can manage.

” People understand that high-speed Internet access is quickly becoming a national infrastructure issue just like the highways were in the 1950s,” Berke said. “If the private sector is unable to provide that kind of bandwidth because of the steep infrastructure investment, then just like highways in the 1950s, the government has to consider providing that support.”

The comparison to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway is appropriate. One might also consider the government’s essential role in providing electricity, water and flood control, and a host of other infrastructural necessities on which businesses rely.

Businesses need to make a profit. It’s what businesses do. No ethical (or rational) business would or could build something like public infrastructure. If a CEO were to propose building a, say, city-wide fiber network that would not make his or her company a profit, they would be (rightly) escorted to the door with their personal effects and never allowed back into the building. In fact, they could even be sued.

That is why governments are good for business: they provide an environment in which businesses can provide goods and services, and by so doing earn a profit. Anybody who thinks otherwise should try starting a business in a place with little or no government and see how they fare. Somalia comes to mind.

We should also note that the state government of Tennessee is full of Teapublicans and is a royal mess: they think that the Randians and Paulbots are correct about Reagan’s “government is the problem” crap. Indeed, the state is busily shooting itself in its supply-side foot. The Feds and Chattanooga locals pulled off their huge Internet success in SPITE of their Red State, not because of it.

(Teapublicans like to pretend that Adam Smith was somehow an Ayn Rand/Ron Paul/Rand Paul anti-government ideologue. But anyone who has actually READ his work knows that he was a lot smarter than that: he knew that some things that businesses wouldn’t build on their own were necessary for the people, society, and indeed businesses themselves to survive, thrive, and prosper.)

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

As predicted, “Voodoo Economics” has created a “Zombie Economy”.

This blog sneers ofttimes at “Republicans” and their stupid-f*** “supply-side” economics. (Here is one example of said mockery.) The gist is: tried and true data-based economic practices are the way to succeed, and Randian, Lafferesque Voodoo economic policies are the way to fail.

In Kansas, one of several states that have decided Ayn Rand was the false Goddess they shall worship, Voodoo economics have had the result most of those in the Reality-Based community have predicted:

In Kansas, the right wing has completely run the show in the state capitol since the 2012 elections, when Sam Brownback (who became governor two years earlier) led a purge of moderate Republicans who were acting as a brake on his agenda in the state Senate. Kansas is now a laboratory for what would happen if conservative Republicans gained full control of government. Empowered state Republicans slashed taxes for the rich, arguing that an economic boom would follow. It didn’t, as job growth in Kansas has underperformed the national average (as has Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, another state that moved hard right around the same time). But what did follow was a huge hole in the state’s budget (while liberal-dominated California is running a surplus and paying down debt).. (Emphasis via Cranky)

In state after state, the predicted results have occurred: Voodoo economics have created a sort of Zombie economy. What might seem just a mildly amusing turn of phrase is in fact a devastating blow to those of us not in the 1% (said 1% motherf***ers not being in the least incommoded by the Undead Economy). The economy is limping along, barely alive as far as most of us can tell, and that is not a sustainable path.

In Kansas, Wisconsin, Ohio, and indeed across the nation, we see the results of “Republican” policies: and rotten results they have proven to be. Using millions of people to test their voodoo theories was unethical at the outset, and has since sucked most of the life our of our economy.

Unlike the zombies one sees in movies, our Repub-afflicted economy can be healed and brought back to life. All that is needed is to lay off the voodoo, apply some healthy policies, and the rotting ambulatory corpse of our nation will be restored to health.

And the first step of that cure? Get out and vote. Vote against each and every “Republican” in every race, in every location. Banish the witch doctors and bring back the trained, educated professionals that had served us so well for centuries. Ditch the dream of Supply-Side, and awaken to reality.

That ‘dream’ turned out to be a nightmare the likes of which even Romero could never have envisioned, anyway.

Mr. Blunt and Crankly

75 % Atheist + 25 % Catholic = 100 % Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan is one of the most seriously deranged and dangerous individuals in contemporary government, and the very idea of his being one dressage accident away from the Presidency fills Mr. Blunt and Cranky with dread. Ryan’s personal ideology is hugely wacked-out, but hidden behind an earnest  exterior and Eddie Munster hairdo, so most Americans are not aware of just how great a threat he poses to us as citizens, and to the future of our nation as a whole.

“Conservative” Catholics (and like-minded Christians of other varieties) tend to cherry-pick biblical verses that align with their prejudices and make life easier for themselves: take one part Jesus, two parts Paul, add a dash of Leviticus, mix vigorously and voila! Custom-made theological comfort food.  That is, b y the way, a pretty fair representation of the formula used by the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Southern Baptists and others who oppose choice, and support the destruction of the safety net and the abolition  of the separation of Church and State. By trolling the Bible and selecting which bits and bobs suit their existing natures, they can come up with a way to call themselves Christians without having to work too hard at all that difficult loving, non-judging, forgiving stuff.

Paul Ryan adds a scary new dimension to this paradigm. To the selflessness of Jesus, and the sternness of Paul and the Old Testament, he adds the selfishness and Atheism of Ayn Rand. This allows him to think himself a Christian while allowing the poor to starve, women to be abused, minorities oppressed and so on. He can apply Atheistic Darwinian Ayn Rand thinking to anyone he doesn’t like or want to deal with, and the Christian bits to those that he does like. If you think about it, this is a very succinct and cogent analysis of Paul Ryan and his growing legion of adherents. It also explains how someone who claims to be a Catholic can take the seemingly heartless and anti-Christian (indeed, sometimes inhumane) positions that Ryan espouses.

Yes, we know, he claims to embrace Ayn Rand’s egocentric and socially Darwinian philosophy while rejecting her Atheism. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do this. Don’t believe it? Read her books. Then read the Gospels. They are fundamentally incompatible. What Ryan is doing is intellectually, morally, spiritually and constitutionally inconsistent, and the fact that he is able to think in such a manner indicates that he has some pretty serious mental competency issues.

The reason this is dangerous? Americans come with values and belief systems aplenty, but you would be hard-pressed to find, say, a Hasidic pagan. Or a Moslem running a pork barbecue. Such self-contradictory attitudes are clearly ridiculous, and would be laugh-lines in a comedy sketch at best; but never a seriously considered moral code.   Ryan’s contradiction goes beyond even those crazy examples: he simultaneously acts on a belief in God and the absence of God, and further seems quite comfortable with that. The man is a lunatic, plain and simple: too, Ryan intends to impose his insane “moral” views upon the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

Abortion? He picks Paul over Ayn. Feeding the poor? He picks Ayn over Jesus. The Constitutional guarantees of equality? Ayn over the Bible and the law of the land. And so on. Whatever is easier, more comfortable, or enhances his wealth or that of his family and friends, that is what he considers moral at any given time.

No one, be they Atheist or religious, can count on Paul Ryan. He will flip-flop and switch sides as it suits him and his paymasters. Whatever he wants to do at any moment, he can find a source within one of his contradictory value sources to justify his greedy, egotistical, self-centered mood du jour. Beyond one single constant (“What’s good for Paul is good for the nation”), he cannot be predicted, and thus he cannot be trusted.

An Atheistic Christian for President? If you are not scared s***less by that prospect, you are not paying attention.

Mr. B & C