Procrast-Nation

requiem-for-nick-nuccles-snider

My father is part of an upstate chapter of the Rotary Club, and as such has become the recipient of dozens and dozens of chain political e-mails. Sometimes he sends them to me asking if the contents are true or accurate. Clearly none of them are, but they are interesting as a window into the more invisible side of the conservative propaganda machine. As the people at Mediamatters and other such organizations do important work calling out Television pundits, this entire side of the equation is forgotten, except by the people who, herded by basic fear inducing tactics, feel the need to pass on the “urgent news”.

All e-mails are in block quotes, followed by my responses which are not in block quotes.

Prepare for the Largest Tax Hike in American History
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…..

Dear J——,

At 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2011, the largest tax increase in American history could go into effect if Congress fails to act.

As the Investor’s Business Daily editorial board explains:
Unless something’s done soon, the new year will also come with a raft of tax hikes — including a return of the death tax — that will be real killers.

These tax increases could cost $2.6 trillion over the next decade, stalling our economic recovery — and threatening millions of American jobs. For a family of four earning $50,000 a year, they could have an increase of $2,100.

Email Congress today and tell them to act now to stop the largest tax increase in our country’s history.

In this time of economic uncertainty, raising taxes on the American people and businesses will only compound our economic hardships. It will stifle job creation and investment, which is what we’re dependent on to stimulate the economy.

Make sure Congress hears you loud and clear. Please click here and tell Congress to act NOW — and stop another economic disaster.

Sincerely,

Bill Miller
Senior Vice President and National Political Director
U.S. Chamber of Commerce

First, one must realize that the US Chamber of Commerce is, according to Sourcewatch, essentially a cog of the Republican party, and a lobbying group for big business. Also notice it says “It will stifle job creation and investment…”, which is the standard cliche trotted out to mention Reaganomics without using the word Reaganomics. In fact, the government and not big business has been the big player in reducing unemployment as of late-most of the job creation occurring recently was due to the Census, and should be understood to be by its nature ephemeral.

If you go to the article linked in the e-mail you forwarded they say “But unless something’s done soon, the new year will also come with a raft of tax hikes — including a return of the death tax — that will be real killers.” Beyond the mistreatment of the English language, the fact they emphasize the death tax specifically should immediately tell you someone’s not being straightforward. The lack of a death tax cost the government billions this year, since more than one billionaire died, and as a result all the billions of dollars they had went to their (most likely) spoiled children. The reinstatement of this tax ensures money will someday be taken from Paris Hilton and given to one of the 299,999,999 people who need the money more or could do more wise/prudent things with it. This is good news for obvious reasons. The rest of the hikes (all less than 4%), were probably compromises forced in congress to get rid of the tax breaks for the rich that caused the deficit. If you remember the Bush bait and switch where he sent all those tax rebates out about 8 years ago, those were all chump change to trick people lower on the ladder-essentially buying their loyalty. I knew kids where their parents gave them a part of the tax rebate to remind them to vote Republican when they were able. The fact these things are gone is good.

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Overwhelm the system

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT
Barach Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.
Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of ‘83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they’re alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival … and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

– Universal health care. The health care bill had very little to do with health care. It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions). Obama doesn’t care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans will add trillions to the national debt. What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?

– Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama’s biggest contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants. They will kick-back hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama “spread the wealth around.”

– Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who’s asking for a 51st state? Who’s asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression? Certainly not American taxpayers. But this has been Obama’s plan all along. His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.

– Legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America . But it adds 12 million reliable new Democrat voters who can be counted on to support big government. Add another few trillion dollars in welfare, aid to dependent children, food stamps, free medical, education, tax credits for the poor, and eventually Social Security.

– Stimulus and bailouts. Where did all that money go? It went to Democrat contributors, organizations (ACORN), and unions — including billions of dollars to save or create jobs of government employees across the country. It went to save GM and Chrysler so that their employees could keep paying union dues. It went to AIG so that Goldman Sachs could be bailed out (after giving Obama almost $1 million in contributions). A staggering $125 billion went to teachers (thereby protecting their union dues). All those public employees will vote loyally Democrat to protect their bloated salaries and pensions that are bankrupting America . The country goes broke, future generations face a bleak future, but Obama, the Democrat Party, government, and the unions grow more powerful. The ends justify the means.

– Raise taxes on small business owners, high-income earners, and job creators. Put the entire burden on only the top 20 percent of taxpayers, redistribute the income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing to deserve it (except vote for Obama). Reagan wanted to dramatically cut taxes in order to starve the government. Obama wants to dramatically raise taxes to starve his political opposition.

With the acts outlined above, Obama and his regime have created a vast and rapidly expanding constituency of voters dependent on big government; a vast privileged class of public employees who work for big government; and a government dedicated to destroying capitalism and installing themselves as socialist rulers by overwhelming the system.

Add it up and you’ve got the perfect Marxist scheme — all devised by my Columbia University college classmate Barack Obama using the Cloward and Piven Plan.

On the first bullet, the math doesn’t check out. Health care doesn’t cost much at all compared to the overgrown and disastrous pentagon budget. (1) This is the main cause of our deficit-a deficit is desirable if you’re a member of the organization or company which is receiving the phantom money. If you can get the government to go into debt on your behalf and keep the money they borrowed, as is the case with pretty every corporation with a military contract, well, hell-its not your money you’re spending. As Jonathan once told me about confidence schemes “You never know when the jig will be up, so the most important thing is to pocket and turn around as much cash as possible before anyone gets wise. If you spent it or shifted it, the wronged party probably can’t get their hands on it again, and you’ve had a good time.”

The second bullet. Cap and Trade puts a necessary tax on services which emit massive amounts of carbon, and is, if anything, too lax a legislation. Severe punishments to discourage carbon emission/gas usage are essential because of both peak oil and global warming. Anyone complaining it “hurts the people who worked so hard to earn their hummers” or any such drivel is obviously selfish, dangerously amoral, and the government has to use its power of force to circumvent such behavior. Imagine if the person used the argument “I bought this nuclear bomb with my hard earned money, but the government won’t let me drop it!”

Third bullet. Such a non-issue, and with the same tired and cliche welfare line. Its important to notice no actual math is ever used except usually misleading or one-sided figures. What the Republican party is trying to do is to channel the resentment most people feel for their jobs and use it to make them turn on each other. In allegorical terms, its like if on a plantation, the slave owner set loose a plant, who said to the majority of the slaves “Look at Jimmy over there! He didn’t work half as hard as we did, but he still got corn bread!” They all attack Jimmy instead of the slave owner. The moral here seems pretty obvious.

Fourth. Illegal immigrants? Beyond the moral issues involving the US involvement in Latin America and Mexico which led to such a desire for these people to immigrate, there’re the, again, unsubstantiated financial claims, which are absurd. “Just giving these 12 million potential new citizens free health care alone could overwhelm the system and bankrupt America .” There are several logical fallacies/weasel words in this statement. 1) Not all ‘12 million potential citizens’ will be given citizenship. Therefore the number is inflated for rhetorical purposes. 2) Even if, by some bizarre fluke, all 12 million gained citizenship, not all of them would receive free health health care, as no one in the United States currently receives free health care except extreme welfare cases. 3) Even if they did, it seems highly unlikely to bankrupt America-we have a bit more money than that last I checked.

Fifth, on the bailout. Couple outright lies here. ACORN, which no longer exists, only received $50 million dollars in aid ever, most before the bailout. (2) This is a pittance compared to other organizations, and lost tax revenue from the corporate welfare system. The money lost from the estate tax loophole this year alone dwarfs that figure.

Sixth, basically a restatement of other things in the e-mail. Lots of double speak here. “Job creators” is doublespeak for “corporations”. Also note that in saying “Put the entire burden on only the top 20 percent of taxpayers, redistribute the income, punish success, and reward those who did nothing to deserve it (except vote for Obama).” the e-mail insinuates that the entire bottom 80% of America did nothing to deserve their money. This is insulting and downright offensive, and unless this message was only supposed to be sent out to the extremely wealthy, should alienate anyone actually reading it, something most political campaigns hinge on people not doing.

Also, how does going to college with someone (if he in fact did) make you know them any better than anyone else? How is Obama’s plan “Marxist”, except to the extremely poorly read American public, the majority of whom most likely never read any of Marx’s actual writings.

1. The Health Care bill projected expenses are $828 billion over the next 10 years. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/health/policy/24health.html) Meanwhile, the projected annual Pentagon budget next year is $708 billion, almost ten times as much. Most of this money will likely go to industrial giants such as G.E. and B.P. in the form of contracts for various services, which, by growing these organizations, further undermines the independent ability to make decisions on the part of the Federal Government. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/pentagons-black-budget-tops-56-billion/)

2. http://www.mediaite.com/online/rachel-maddow-exposes-foxs-bogus-coverage-of-acorn/

PICS OF CROWD AT SEARCHLIGHT, NEVADA TEA PARTY…..

I don’t think the Dems have any idea of what’s going to hit them come November - bet they will all be standing there with a blank stare like a deer in the headlights, asking what the hell happened.

(lots of pics in this part I’m too lazy to individually repost. Two of Obama in Heath Ledger Joker make-up, one suggesting Obama should be tarred an feathered, and a true head scratcher where a man is holding a sign that says “I need a job! My family can’t eat health care!”.)

Well!!! I guess it’s not just us “Southern Rednecks” any longer!

Pass this on… Let People know what
they don’t see on the News!

Ok, first-you do see these signs on the news. Every major news outlet has had at least one feature piece exploring the Tea Party movement, and Fox News has easily had dozens.

The tea party is a racially charged conglomeration of either ignorant or manipulative people, funded and corralled by Fox News and other various special interests into a reliable, belligerent and predictable voting block.

Arguments that the tea party is racist:

1) Even for how little Obama has lived up to the hype that surrounded him, nothing he has done has come anywhere close to the sorts of violations of civil liberties, deficit creation, and welfare situations created by George W. Bush, but because the interests who have a stake in having the Tea Party voting block around (Israeli military lobby, US Republican party, Pentagon, Rupert Murdoch) benefitted from these moves more when they were done by the Bush administration, they incited an entirely manufactured “grass roots uprising” made up of ignorant and deluded people. The anti-intellectual, attendance inflating, racially charged rhetoric of the Tea Party movement so far has more in common with the Beer Hall Putsch than anything resembling functioning Democracy. (In fact, to some controversy, Noam Chomsky made comparisons between the state of the US currently and the state of Weimar Germany.)

2) These signs: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/16/10-most-offensive-tea-par_n_187554.html This video: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/11/white_power_usa_the_rise_of

3) Different treatment of ostensibly “terroristic” acts in the news media. When a white guy flew a plane into a building in Houston, he was handled by the media with kid gloves, and numerous Tea Party related people gave it their cautious endorsement, essentially co-opting this anti-social act as some sort of manifesto. Also note the round of extremely bizarre news stories that went around marking the 15 year anniversary of the Oklahoma City Building bombing, almost all of which mentioned his ideological kinship to the Tea Party, while carefully, almost certainly deliberately, avoiding his ties to the White Nationalist/Supremacist movement.

Arguments for the ignorant/deluded nature of the movement:

1) Who do they hire to speak at their rallies and events? This is usually a good clue as to who is held in reverence by the group. They’ve repeatedly hired Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and similar. Palin in fact might be one of the most bizarre media constructions of the modern era-and make no mistake, she is a construct. All the supposedly “folksy” Twitter posting and press releases she puts out are ghostwritten by a P.R. company. Like the Oprah Winfrey show, the Tea Party movement is a large and massively overfunded and observed way in which the American public can languish in its own anti-intellectual insecurities and delusions. Think your histrionic gut feelings are more valid than hard empirical science? Well, then Oprah Winfrey has some DVDs to sell you. Think the current sad state of the nation is the result of “too many laws”? (One is reminded of the anecdote about Mozart where a nobleman once supposedly insulted his piece for having “too many notes”.) Well, then go to a Tea Party rally and see people just as inarticulate as yourself being showered with blind praise and adoration!

The sort of national discourse required for functional Democracy has been largely relegated to specialized magazines and academia in the wake of “television news.” Neil Postman was perhaps the most perceptive critic of the pitfalls of having televised journalism become the prominent form as opposed to print.

Some politicians are maligned without warrant, but many of them are simply the people that set up a better medicine show than their opposition; the spiritually meek. And as Christ said, the meek shall inherit the Earth, god help us….

I’ve been watching a lot of Dr Who recently, and I noticed the current writers have a knack for adding cheesy characters you would expect from a 60s or 70s sci-fi show. One of the more prominent ones is the Face of Boe, who is repeatedly called a traveler. So, I decided to chronicle some of his adventures, particularly the last 24 years of his life.

Taking Seratoninronin’s apt criticisms to heart on my first post in this series, I took a break in order to both catch up on my collegiate studies (still lagging pretty far behind, damn you Japanese I) and to rethink my approach in regard to it. I take his silence in the comments section as a victory; there was nothing so obviously off there as to prompt an attack. So I’m returning to the series.

In the meantime I read a good number of pieces from the John Hanhardt edited reader Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. While the reader is a quite handy and thorough collection of pieces on the topic, from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” onward. McLuhan is wrongly represented in essay after essay as the herald of some sort of electronic utopia, which makes me wonder how deeply any of the various essayists researched their topics before pontificating. While some good points were made and interesting concepts brought up in each essay, the vast majority tended to fall into Marxist analysis. The further from the source each Marxist critique got, the more the essays started sounding like Rand worshipping objectivist critiques. “This person’s idea doesn’t work because Marx/Rand said so. Utopia will be achieved once class equality/completely unrestricted markets are instated.” It got to the point of being like eating sand, and I imagine several of the writers here would’ve been thoroughly annoying in conversation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Another banjo composition for all the legions of fans who delighted at the previous one, “The Great British Petroleum Oil Slick.”

coffin-shaped-crave-case

Going over a stack of books from my college library regarding the history of television and communications theory has turned up, one or two very useful books, and a couple books of completely misguided or worthless nonsense. Communication studies, or media theory as its sometimes referred to, is a strange field in that it doesn’t really have any single parent discipline, or any single discipline which it would claim its predominantly a subset of (like psychology, which I would argue is as much related to literary/social criticism as it is to any scientific tradition.) It borrows freely from literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, architectural criticism, and science history (especially Thomas Kuhn) in equal doses. As such, the usefulness of any work done within the field is mostly a measure of the imaginative and perceptive qualities of the writer. I’m going to throw in a quick overview of one of these books with each of these short probes.

Hal Himmelstein’s 1981 survey of television/video criticism On the Small Screen was of limited use-he points out the basic problems of establishing a body of television criticism similar to the current body of literary criticism-television mostly ignores boundaries of careful aesthetic construction, and its voluminous output makes surveying it in its entirety or anything close nearly impossible. Issues of artistic worth are mostly besides the point in television, so a new critical language less based on evaluation of merit and more based on reading into motifs and distribution (the form of the medium as opposed to its content) must be established. Himmelstein goes over all of this in his introduction and then goes over a number of middling critics. McLuhan could and did say what Himmelstein says here in the space of a paragraph. Himmelstein also spends far too much time on the high-low culture debate, something which ceased to be useful with the advent of mass media besides as a way to keep young students from wasting all their time on post-modernist wallowing. This book was of limited use to say the least.

For today’s mass media product, I’m going to look at the front page of the popular news aggregation website Reddit. Read the rest of this entry »

Having finished a particularly fruitful rereading of Marshall McLuhan’s first published work, The Mechanical Bride, I felt compelled to test out some of the ideas he put forward in this work. For those unfamiliar, the book is a compendium of short one or two page essays based on print advertisements and comic strips from the early 1950s. The essays are acidic, caustic commentaries, and reading even one of them would dispell the absurd notion that McLuhan was heralding some electronic utopia; his notion of the “global village” wasn’t one of utopian togetherness but of the rolling back of individual identity and critical thought/sophistication in the era of mass communications. In order to ‘retribalize’ as McLuhan frequently called it, a certain amount of civilization must be rolled back and diminished. In an age of absolute media saturation such as the one in which we are currently entrenched, full sober awareness of the implications and roots of all cultural products we’re confronted with is simply an impossibility, and isn’t especially appealing-the most comfortable position in the retribalized culture is one of a shared and simplified opinions. We go from cliche to archetype. Art vacillates between two extremes; the art of the extremely personal and almost confessional in nature, which gives us a portrait of the artist, and the art of the purposely depersonalized which instead gives an abstract portrait of its intended audience. It is this latter type of art which I hope to explore here.

So in the spirit of Mechanical Bride, I’m going to try to do a critical dissection of a different piece of mass produced culture from recent times each day for the next month, in hopes of eventually coming to some more full understanding of what America consists of.

For my first mass media art object I chose to observe the music video for the song “OMG” by Usher, video directed by Anthony Mandler. Read the rest of this entry »

I did a post earlier about this collaborative fictional story project I have been working on for a long time.  To learn more about it, follow this link:

http://procrast-nation.com/?p=129

Anyway, the following is a brief travelers guide to help navigate this monstrosity.

Read the rest of this entry »

A picture say it all:

Read the rest of this entry »