New Year's Eve

Untitled (6" x 6" encaustic medium on wood panel)

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Untitled (12" x 12" encaustic medium on wood panel)

Christmas Eve ...

... it was snowing mightily today, but consider:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

"inner galaxies.03.07" (encaustic, 24" x 24" on birch panel, 2010)

Thursday, November 11, 2010

"eyes have it" (cold wax and oil with collage, 12" x 12" 2010)

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

At work in the studio on a 48" x 60" panel, October 29, 2010

Saturday, November 6, 2010

"serenity in red" (encaustic medium, "24 x 18" 2010)

Thursday, November 4, 2010

"greenscape" (encaustic medium, 12" x 12" 2010)

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

"dewscape" (encaustic medium, 12" x 12" 2010)

Sunday, October 31, 2010

"high summer" (cold wax and oil, 24" x 32" 2010)

Ads we'll never see again ...

(Thanks, Al.)

Quoting ...

HOPE Dan Savage doesn't mind me blogging a portion of his column from this week's The Village Voice:

Gay Kids Are Dying, Fuck Your Feelings

October 14, 2010

I was listening to the radio yesterday morning, and I heard an interview with you about your It Gets Better campaign. I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life.

If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preference, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man, and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint.

To that end, to imply that I would somehow encourage my children to mock, hurt, or intimidate another person for any reason is completely unfounded and offensive. Being a follower of Christ is, above all things, a recognition that we are all imperfect, fallible, and in desperate need of a savior. We cannot believe that we are better or more worthy than other people.

Please consider your viewpoint, and please be more careful with your words in the future.

—L.R.

I'm sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.

No, wait. I'm not. Gay kids are dying. So let's try to keep things in perspective: Fuck your feelings.

A question: Do you "support" atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there's no "Christian" movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or people divorcing and remarrying.

Why the hell not?

Sorry, L.R., but so long as you support the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, it's clear that you do believe that some people—straight people—are "better or more worthy" than others.

And—sorry—but you are partly responsible for the bullying and physical violence being visited on vulnerable LGBT children. The kids of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or in your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. And while you can only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, your children have the option of attacking actual gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.

Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Gay and lesbian children.

Try to keep up: The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from the lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies about us that vomit out from the pulpits of churches that "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your children license to verbally abuse, humiliate, and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your children—having listened to Mom and Dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry—feel justified in physically abusing the LGBT children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" queer kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we're seeing the fruits of it: dead children.

Oh, and those same dehumanizing bigotries that fill your straight children with hate? They fill your gay children with suicidal despair. And you have the nerve to ask me to be more careful with my words?

Did that hurt to hear? Good. But it couldn't have hurt nearly as much as what was said and done to Asher Brown and Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas and Cody Barker and Seth Walsh—day-in, day-out for years—at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the image of the hateful and false "followers of Christ" they call Mom and Dad.

Addendum ...

It couldn't figure out how to cross the street ...

Addendum ...

AN interesting viewpoint.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
— Benito Mussolini

Monday, October 4, 2010

Entrance to one of the West Side Studios on West Alameda, Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 2010

THIS story about the suicides of teen-agers bullied because of their sexuality puts light on more than the pressures these kids faced.

It puts light on the ignorance and immorality of parents who obviously taught their children to hate others because of the sexuality with which they were born.

It puts light on the assorted religious scum that preach hate from their pulpits.

It puts light on the media filth that blog or broadcast in support of such ignorance and hate.

Every bully, every religionist, every online, broadcast or print media figure whose calculated venom contributed to these suicides is, in a word, a murderer.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

a wet transfer exercise

Sunday, September 5, 2010

abstraction.09 (20" x 16" cold wax and oil on wood panel, 2010)

Saturday, September 4, 2010

abstraction.08 (24" x 12" cold wax and oil on wood panel, 2010)

Friday, September 3, 2010

abstraction.35 (28" x 16" cold wax and oil on wood panel, 2010)

Addendum ...

... in the garden at 18 Shake Rag Street, Mineral Point, Wisconsin

Saturday, August 28, 2010

... in the garden at 18 Shake Rag Street, Mineral Point, Wisconsin

Addendum ...

... in the garden at 18 Shake Rag Street, Mineral Point, Wisconsin

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

HEY, what the heck if a bunch of people get really sick. Let's not tinker with those profit margins now, right?

Addendum II

HOWARD, who gives a damn about facts these days ... the liars, the venal and the ignorant rule.

Addendum

TERRIFIC column by Frank Rich this morning. In a few words, the News Corp. crowd (that's Saudi-supported Fox News) is lying, traitorous scum.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

THE 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city," says Parag Khanna in Foreign Policy. Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming "How to Run the World."

Saturday, August 21, 2010

THE Village Voice gives us the real skinny on what's around Ground Zero (and I've been there and the Voice is right on accurate).

Addendum II...

SO if they want to be so goldurned independent, why don't they quit bitching and just send all that money back to Washington?

Addendum ...

MAUREEN Dowd is right on this morning in helping us understand why Barack Obama may well be a one-term president.

AND San Francisco's Mark Morford is, well, a really funny writer.

Monday, August 16, 2010

SOCIAL Security is under attack from the right wing and Paul Krugman's argument that this attack is a fraud I find credible. A quotation:

About that math: Legally, Social Security has its own, dedicated funding, via the payroll tax (“FICA” on your pay statement). But it’s also part of the broader federal budget. This dual accounting means that there are two ways Social Security could face financial problems. First, that dedicated funding could prove inadequate, forcing the program either to cut benefits or to turn to Congress for aid. Second, Social Security costs could prove unsupportable for the federal budget as a whole.

But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.

Meanwhile, an aging population will eventually (over the course of the next 20 years) cause the cost of paying Social Security benefits to rise from its current 4.8 percent of G.D.P. to about 6 percent of G.D.P. To give you some perspective, that’s a significantly smaller increase than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which Washington certainly didn’t consider a crisis, or even a reason to rethink some of the Bush tax cuts.

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

It would be easy to dismiss this bait-and-switch as obvious nonsense, except for one thing: many influential people — including Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission — are peddling this nonsense.

Addendum ...

THE Times' Charles Blow is in good form this morning, calling out both right and left: And why not let the kids run the country for a while?

Quoting ...

VOTING Republican is like peeing in your drinking water.

... said a caller to a talk radio show, heard while driving.

Friday, August 13,2010

HERE'S the most "reader recommended" (571 readers at 9 a.m.) comment on Paul Krugman's column today in the New York Times:

Mark E White
Atlanta
August 13th, 2010
12:45 am

How true. Our leaders seem paralyzed by fear of Fox News loudmouths and the relentless selfish "just say no" policy of republicans and so-called centrist democrats.

Clearly our dysfunctional culture of selfish greed and nimbyism continues to slide us into ever further decline. It's all about "my taxes, my Medicare, my personal piece of the American pie.

Only people a shallow, craven culture could easily accept growing foreclosures and record unemployment, but get all lathered up over the abstract concept of a 2% increase in the national debt. And still expect lower taxes on the rich and watch passively as congress protects tax breaks for foreign corporations that outsource work from Americans — but enjoy the benefits of the fiction of American corporate citizenship.

In the meantime our children and grandchildren can't find jobs because there aren't any. Worse, they have to endure self-righteous slander that they are lazy — from the very people who, in their greed, outsourced and gambled away those very opportunities.

Until we finally find it in our hearts to stand with our communities and those harder-hit than ourselves, we are in for a depression as long and cold as an investment banker's heart — and as dark as his conscience.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

REALLY enjoyed reading Gail Collins' column this morning.

Monday, August 9, 2010

TRULY, it appears the United States is dumbed down in more ways than one. After all, who really wants to be "challenged or edified"? Might involve a little productive mental activity? Do we do that anymore? (Good thing a few folks do, I guess.)

Or, as Neil Postman posited the point in 1985, are we just "amusing ourselves to death"?

Addendum III...

ABOUT 30 years ago, Neil Postman wrote a book titled "Amusing Ourselves to Death." If the College Board is correct, that seems to be just what we are doing.

Addendum II...

HERE are some rational words from another and different Nobel economist: "Think structural."

Addendum ...

TO call this guy a "flimflam man" is too kind.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

READ the decision of the federal judge overturning California's Prop 8 ban on same-gender marriage here (pdf). The money quote:

Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples. FF 76, 79-80; Romer, 517 US at 634 (“[L]aws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected.”). Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

CONCLUSION

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex
couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

IT is gratifying to be reminded that this country is NOT a theocracy. It is a secular state, which is why everyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe. They are NOT free, however, to impose those beliefs on others who may wish to believe something else.

No religious sect or denomination is obliged to marry anyone it doesn't want to marry. But two individuals are not married until the state says they are married, and what the state and the religious call marriage is, in fact, a form of civil law contract in which the gender of the two parties entering into that contract is irrelevant. This is a rationalist secular view that is, of course, offensive to would-be theocrats. I will suggest that anyone wishing to live in a theocracy consider Saudi Arabia, Iran or Israel. In the meantime, let the rest of us enjoy simply being the human beings that we are.

It will be interesting, though, to see how near to a theocracy a right-wing Supreme Court will want us to be.

Monday, August 2, 2010

THE comment below, offered to an Opinionator essay about the Arizona immigration law, helps explain, perhaps, why Republican congresses during the George W. years did nothing about immigration reform and now wants to claim, inaccurately, that Obama isn't doing enough:

Michael Wolfe
Henderson, Texas
July 31st, 2010
9:38 am

There was an article in the Times about Obama and immigration about a month ago. It said that, from Reagan to Bush, Jr., the Presidents all ordered the INS (then the ICE) to make raids, TV crews and newspaper in tow, to show they were doing something about immigration. This only affected a few thousand (out of millions) of undocumented workers.

President Obama, according to the article, turned enforcement over to the IRS, a much larger and more tenacious organisation. Before, businesses could deduct payroll expenses from their taxes without providing legitimate SSNs; Obama ordered that all businesses must now provide, for all employees, valid SSNs or face fines large enough to close the businesses. Fake IDs that fooled the INS and ICE cannot get past the IRS computers, and millions of undocumented workers have lost their jobs. But quietly, with no raids and arrests for the TV cameras. With no way to obtain jobs, they have no way to support themselves if they remain in the US, so they are very quietly leaving.

For which the right is justifiably complaining: the old way provided ample entertainment to mollify irate citizens on the nightly news without imposing undue burdens on businesses who need sub-minimum wage labour to remain profitable. ...

Indeed, it seems "the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants and auditing hundreds of businesses that blithely hire undocumented workers," according to the Washington Post. But isn't that what the rightwingers and the nativists say they want? Or is it really, as usual, all about money?

Addendum ...

DID you know your kindergarten teacher could be worth about $320,000 a year? (This is for all the anti-tax bitchers and moaners who seem to think teachers should work for minimum wage — or less.)

Friday, July 30, 2010

QUESTION: What should medicine do when it can't save your life?

Can you answer for yourself? Atul Gawande, a surgeon and staff writer at The New Yorker, suggests some possibilities in an important essay. A quotation:

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

SORRY, Ms Dowd, but you didn't mention the question General Mattis should have been asked: Can you estimate, on an annual basis, how many American lives it will take to keep happy the stockholders and employees of Halliburton, Rayethon, Lockheed, GE, the various private contractors and all the other military-industrial hangers-on?

Addendum II...

BUT Andrew, please, we must keep on feeding The Beast — the military-industrial complex that Ike so kindly warned us about in 1956.

Addendum ...

WONDER if the scumbag "dirty trickster's" ego was adequately gratified to be mentioned in Frank Rich's column today.

Here's the most highly reader recommended comment about Rich's column:

Talleyrand
Basel, Switzerland
July 25th, 2010
9:06 am

Hi Frank,

Yes, Vilsack was hasty and not smart and he should, if not resign, then at least learn a solid lesson that he can share at the next cabinet meetings. And that is to take a breath and keep the GOP rats at bay. Because ultimately, it is that so-called party — which, after its despicable performance these past 18 years should never even be close to wielding power — that caused the problem. They are a hindrance to government, they are engaging in frivolous battles against the entire nation at a time when we need cohesion. They are in fact guilty of obstruction, just as if you would drive a tractor purposely in front of an ambulance rushing to the scene of a major disaster.

But they saw their chance: Obama inherited the biggest mess we have had since the early 30s (and back then there were no wars to deal with), and they figured rightly: They can stay in the news, they can slow things down, and a population of voters used to instant gratification at any cost will jest see the symptoms (continuing high unemployment, continuing wars) and not the cause.

Because that is what it is all about. In a nation of well-educated, conscientious voters, the GOP would no longer stand a chance of winning anything in November. But in the Era of the Drama Queen, with the deafening Internet-generated noise in the background, they can somehow draw attention and then deflect the blame. The GOP and most of its candidates for the November run are a disgrace, indecently short-sighted, power- and publicity hungry. And that is what wins.

If you have never been in a good fight, not of words, but of fisticuffs, you'll know that small men are dangerous. I have seen Yorkshire terriers attack large dogs, and they do it in really nasty ways. The GOP is like that. It is filled with small men and women, small in mind. They have no ability to think things through, no real depth, no vision. That is why they purport to hate everything academic or concepts like hope. That is why they always refer to God and pump themselves up with phoney and even fraudulent patriotism, because these are planks that allow them to avoid the hard work of using their heads, of coming up with some intelligent program and real strategy. They are the Party of No, Mr. Rich, and that is 30% shorter than the word Yes.

Even when the GOP is in power it's like that. They always purport to be under attack, when they themselves are attacking. They have started up on the reverse racism issue, re-issuing Archie Bunker for a class of voters that is so hard at work, so distracted by the sheer tsunami of nonsense floating around the Internet, it has no time to pick up a real book and read. A voting class unused and unwilling to think things through.

And our media are unwilling to clear matters up. TV is a noisy crowd of talking heads, one sillier and more uneducated than the next. The Internet is just noisy.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

DANIEL Schoor was the last of the true and great national journalists. There are none these days.

AND here's an essay, in The Nation, that will certainly cheer you up.

Friday, July 23, 2010

REALLY enjoyed this comment in response to Paul Krugman's column in the Times this morning. It's so, well, Coulter-esque:

Karen Garcia
New Paltz, NY
July 22nd, 2010
11:43 pm

Those Bush tax cuts and their vibrancy sure made life a lot better for us hoi polloi, didn't they? Conspicuous consumption by the wealthy just fills me with vicarious joy. I get a thrill every time I see a Mercedes Benz commercial on TV, because I know that every purchase will be for the greater good. According to Mitch McConnell and his friends, we're just so darned ungrateful for being trickled down upon. I await those golden drops of Republican beneficence with baited breath.

The rich folks are getting nervous that their selfless gift of not paying taxes is about to run out — and (gasp!) they're actually starting to cut back on their spending. There was an article right here in the Times just a few days ago about sales of expensive toothpaste tube squeezers unexpectedly increasing. Before you know it, we'll see chauffeured limousines in Walmart parking lots.

It's getting so bad that a record number of millionaires are running for state and national office this year. Otherwise, things just won't get done. Good politician help is so hard to find.

But the most daunting event had to be when not one, but two Abercrombie and Fitch stores in New York became infested with bedbugs recently. The carriers apparently were frat boys who had been reduced to slumming in lower-end shops.

The resurgence of the ultimate frat boy, George Bush, cannot come soon enough. Just don't remind the GOP that it was Daddy who warned about voodoo economics. If you asked Mitch McConnell, he'd probably say Poppy Bush is just so yesterday. It's Junior we want, and Junior we must have.

Addendum II...

IT is always enjoyable to read Andrew Sullivan when he points out the remarkable ignorance and venality of the Palin-Gingrich reactionary right wing. Of course they don't respect — or want — religious freedom. They are as theocratic as the Taliban.

Addendum ...

IF you have an interest in the artistic qualities of urinals, click here.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

WHILE warming up on a bicycle at the gym Monday afternoon, I caught the text trailer on Fox News. Someone named Parker was saying that closed union shops were impeding job creation around the country. The TV's sound was off, so I don't know what people were actually saying, but the trailer keep saying that unions were preventing job creation.

So, with a quick Google later, I found this quotation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2009, the union membership rate — the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union — was 12.3 percent, essentially unchanged from 12.4 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions declined by 771,000 to 15.3 million, largely reflecting the overall drop in employment due to the recession. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over.

So, 12.3 percent of the wage/salary workforce is unionized, and although the BLS doesn't say how many are in closed shops (not all unionized workers are in closed shops, so far as I know), this statistic means that 87.7 percent of the wage/salary workforce is NOT unionized.

Are we to believe that companies employing 12 percent of the workforce are keeping the companies employing the other 88 percent from creating more jobs? Gee, that 12 percent must be really intimidating. Or is this just another example of the fictions that constitute "news" at Fox?

SOME really sensible advice is offered by Lexington in The Economist.

Monday, July 19, 2010

DOES technology help make us dumber? An interesting question.

Untitled (beeswax, silk and watercolor) 9" x 12" 2010

Addendum II...

IT is good learn that someone is calling out the right-wing propaganda machine. It's called Fox News Watchdog.

Addendum ...

GOOD for Krugman: He lays out the voodoo economics of the Republican witch doctors.

Friday, July 16, 2010

THE commentary of William Pfaff is almost always on point: In this instance, what Obama should have told BP.

Quoting ...

Look, if you had told me that we had just arrested 11 Finns who were spying on our schools, then I’d really have felt good — since Finland’s public schools always score at the top of the world education tables. If you had told me that 11 Singaporeans were arrested spying on how our government works, then I’d really have felt good — since Singapore has one of the cleanest, well-run bureaucracies in the world and pays its cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year. If you had told me that 11 Hong Kong Chinese had been arrested studying how we regulate our financial markets, then I’d really have felt good — since that is something Hong Kong excels at. And if you had told me that 11 South Koreans were arrested studying our high-speed bandwidth penetration, then I’d really have felt good — because we’ve been lagging them for a long time.

But the Russians? Who wants to be spied on by them?

— Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times.

Quoting ...

“IT wouldn’t do us a whole boatload of harm to reinstate some values to contemplation. Part of the pressure on older people to be successful and give back and volunteer and be active and play tennis is that we are a culture of doing. We don’t really know how to be. That’s something that late life gives us, is time to be. But that’s stigmatized.”

—Anne Basting, director of the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, commenting to the New York Times.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

PROJECT Censored is an interesting "alternative" news site — for what the "mainstream" will not tell us.

Addendum ...

ENJOYED Paul Krugman's column today. He calls the "Obama-is-antibusiness" rhetoric what it is: bullshit — and explains why it's bullshit.

Friday, July 9, 2010

YOU are right on, Andrew, right on the mark. Three cheers for the Tenth Amendment?

Addendum ...

MICHAEL Steele and Ron Paul are no more divorced from reality than the fools who support them.

INDEED, the question is not what will happen to books but rather what will happen to our book shelves — our "memory theaters."

The Fourth of July

"city windows" [Quincy skyline] (22" x 30" monotype 2008)

BE sure to read Frank Rich's essay commemorating the day.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

"split personality" (24" x 24" encaustic 2010)

Thursday, July 1, 2010

A lone clemantis vine in the throes of summer.

IT is always refreshing when a commentator speaks truth to a right-wing demagogue hell-bent on a religious war. (Yes, I know, we have to keep on feeding The Beast.)

Addendum ...

THEN there's FAIR's take on the Rolling Stone piece and the point corporate media missed.

Friday, June 25, 2010

THE Times' in-house conservative, David Brooks, provides an excellent analysis of our current "culture of exposure." A quotation:

... the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

So we get scoundrels, cynicism, and stupidity. We get what we deserve. As the old cliche goes, what goes around comes around.

Addendum II...

AS one who enjoys a Scotch and water now and then, this snippet of data from The Economist was of interest.

Addendum ...

YES, why, indeed, do the Washington Post and the New York Times attempt to rewrite history?

Sunday, June 20, 2010

"untitled" (6" x 6" watercolor, silk and beeswax, 2010)

IN case you missed Rolling Stone's "inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years — and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder."

WELL, if it's a "shakedown" to make BP pay some of the cost of the disaster for which it's responsible, then shake some more. There's some history to this. A quotation:

Or take the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself, which was preceded by so many instances of corner-cutting and poor decision-making that an accident was practically preordained. Drilling one of the deepest wells in history, the project used only one strand of steel casing, when it should have used at least two. Halliburton recommended that BP use 21 “centralizers,” which help ensure that the well doesn’t veer off course as it goes deeper into the earth, but the company used just a half-dozen. BP failed to conduct a crucial test to make sure that the cement holding the well at the bottom of the sea was sturdy enough.

And the engineers for BP on board consistently ran roughshod over subcontractors like Halliburton, who openly worried that BP was making decisions that could have catastrophic consequences. “This is how it’s going to be,” one BP engineer reportedly said, overruling a contractor on the critical question of when to replace the drilling mud — which keeps explosive natural gas from flowing out of the well — with seawater.

What makes this all the more shocking is that BP was drilling what’s called a wildcat well, meaning it was drilling in an area that no other company had drilled before, so it had no knowledge of the conditions. For most oil companies, that would be all the more reason to take extra precautions. Yet BP did just the opposite.

MEANWHILE, the magazine n+1 suggests Americans may need to take up the study of Marx.

Addendum ...

AN interesting critique of Obama and his "relationship with America."

Saturday, June 19, 2010

AN interesting take on the New York Times story that apparently wasn't really "new" news.

Addendum ...

JOE Barton, the Republican congressman from Texas, is now sorry for calling the BP liability fund a "shakedown." Or so he says. Barton understands the meaning of "shakedown," though. Oil and gas interests gave him more than $100,000 since the start of 2009, the AP reports. It has to do with the House committee he's on. It's interesting that Missouri's Roy Blunt, another Republican, got even more: more than $133,000.

Thursday, June 17, 2009

THE County Board is discussing the pluses and minuses of placing power-generating wind turbines in the county, which caused me to search through photographs I took in Germany during a Sister City trip. The two photographs below suggest the extent to which Germany makes use of wind:



These were taken in 2004 — six years ago.

In general, Europeans do several little things to conserve energy: motion sensors that turn on lights in public areas, such as apartment building lobbies, when people enter and turn them off when no one's there. You place your motel door key in a slot inside your room to power on lights; when you leave you must remove the card and that means you cannot leave lights burning while the room is vacant. I wonder how much energy we would save if this country did a few simple things like that — mainly, make it easy and almost automatic to save.

But, of course, we Americans don't do rational: We must have a crisis on which to blame a president and absolve ourselves of our profligacy.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

IF you want to know what's really going on in the Gulf with BP, check out The Oil Drum. Unlike all the "blame Obama" crap you see or hear from TV's talking heads, these guys can give you real info.

Monday, June 14, 2010

MY God, what are "get-government-off-our-backs" Republicans coming to? Why, we've go Newt demanding Obama "save the Louisiana coast, save the fisheries, save the wetlands." We've got a California Repub demanding he use "the full force of our government." Romney demands "a leader" (like Stalin, maybe?)

Fortunately, the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman gently points out the slime-ball hypocrisy of the right-wing crowd that passes for the Republican Party these days.


THIS rainy, muggy June so typical of the Mississippi Valley sprouts some odd creatures in the front yard.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

"Mugg Island" (20" x 40" acrylic 2010)

SWEDEN is leading the way toward a "new kind of manly." Interesting.

WE are in the end-phase of the modernist conceit in art, writes Ben Lewis in Prospect.

Addendum II...

I'VE sometimes said that Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had since Dwight Eisenhower. Looks as if Barack Obama is trying to outdo Clinton and/or Bush II in that regard — and not only in going after leakers.

MEANWHILE, The Economist understands that "No" is neither an idea nor a solution.

Addendum ...

"...with this spill, we are helpless — by deliberate design" — but will there be consequences for the real culprits?

Friday, June 11, 2010

"spring rain" (12" x 12" oil and cold wax medium, 2010)

Thursday, June 10, 2009

THE Times' in-house conservative, David Brooks, recently wrote a column on the value of the humanities. As a former editor, I found this comment about the column especially poignant:

Carole A. Dunn
Ocean Springs, Miss.
June 8th, 2010
12:26 pm

People who study the humanities, as opposed to science and math, have never been given the kind of respect they deserve. I was hired during the 1980s by one of the big banks to rewrite their computer training manuals because the science and technical people who wrote them didn't have enough command of our language to make them understandable. The people at their tech center thought I was a gift from God, but they still paid me a lot less than the baboons that wrote these confusing books to begin with. Not only was their grammar so bad that I had to spend a lot of time scratching my head trying to figure out what they meant, I noticed the lack of logical thought patterns. I had the mistaken idea that being logical was an important part of science and technology.

Later on I worked as a proposals coordinator for one of the big engineering and construction firms. I hate to say it, but the work I was handed by foreign engineers, primarily from India and Sri Lanka, was generally grammatically perfect and I didn't have to spend much time correcting things. Most of the American engineers, on the other hand, were a bunch of functional illiterates, and I had to waste a lot of time trying to figure out what they meant.

Here in Mississippi, the state universities don't even require a foreign language for acceptance. When I went to school, my high school required a minimum of two years of Latin for college prep people before we could take any other language. Studying Latin helped me more with the English language than any other course, but I don't know if any high schools teach Latin anymore, let alone require it.

Let's face it. We are a country on its way down. Ignorance, greed and mendacity rule the day. Even with our emphasis on science, over half the country doesn't even believe in the theory of evolution. And look at the fundamentalists, who believe that every word in the bible is the direct word of God, and take it all literally. They are incapable of understanding what they are reading, and have become a dangerous influence on the country. More and more, the ignorant of the land think they, and they alone, are the "real Americans." Those who can think logically and rationally are called elites, atheists and communists. We're doomed; maybe we should all look forward to "the rapture."

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

"Oscar" (16" x 20" acrylic 2010)

AS my late father would say, "There's always some people with just enough sense to pound sand in a rathole."

Sunday, June 6, 2010

"late summer" (12" x 12" encaustic 2010)

HOPE I can live long enough to see the Millenials in charge. They seem to be the only portion of the population with some common sense (be sure to read the comments).

FOR an adult understanding of what the Constitution means, read retired Justice David Souter's commencement address at Harvard University.

Addendum ...

SLOWLY, ever so slowly, we seem to be growing up, becoming adult, and acknowledging it's OK to be a human being the way the Good Lord made us.

Friday, June 4, 2009

"early summer" (12" x 12" encaustic with collage, 2010)

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

"webbed" (encaustic, 12" x 24" 2010)

EVERY so often, the Times' David Brooks gets right to the heart of the matter. A quotation:

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf.

On the other hand, they demand that the president “take control.” They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage.

They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change.

At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government. ...

Well, yes. But I'm not holding my breath, considering that the role these days of the national media, especially television media and more especially cable "news" media, seems to be to perpetuate ignorance.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

"Mugg Island" (16" x 16" encaustic 2010)

MEANWHILE, checking out FAIR's blog is always a good read.

Friday, May 28. 2010

"untitled" (12" x 24" encaustic 2010)

Addendum IV...

AH, but Tim, the free-loaders and bitchers-and-moaners love her.

Addendum II...

BUT hey, Bob, we wanted the government off our backs, remember? So why should it have anything to do with an oil spill?

Addendum ...

HEARD David Cay Johnston on "Charlie Rose" the other day (or was it C-SPAN?), and "Free Lunch" might be a book the Tea Party folks ought to read — and then ponder who their funders are.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

FRANK Rich issues a valid warning to Democrats: A "Randslide" may be coming.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

SO I read the New York Times online every morning ... seems I should then read the FAIR blog to learn where the NYT screwed up.

THE Times' David Brooks, in his Friday column, told the story of an angry voter named Ben. Read this column. Then consider this selected comment of many comments.

Elizabeth Fuller
Peterborough, NH
May 20th, 2010
11:33 pm

You're making it sound as if it is government that is making things unfair for Ben and those like him. Was it government that outsourced jobs? Was it government that created the huge pay imbalances between CEOs and the people who work for them? Was it government that forced banks to charge 29% interest rates on credit card balances? Was it government that invented financial products that ruined the retirement funds and savings of so many people?

No, it was lack of government and a belief that things run more smoothly when unfettered by government regulation. It is not our political system that undermines the relationship between effort and reward; it is the way business is structured, and it is the way markets work. Markets, for demographic reasons alone, richly reward undisciplined talk show hosts and manufactured pop stars who may not be putting in half the effort of a truly dedicated teacher or an office cleaner who works two jobs to eke out a living for his or her family.

If Ben is smart, he may be finally realizing what many before him have learned -- that the market is amoral and unjust, and that hard work alone can't always overcome the unfairness thrust in one's way. He may be growing up enough to understand that right and wrong are infinitely complicated constructs that cannot be reduced to the idea that they are contained in the relationship between effort and reward. Does the good that those who work in obscurity and without financial gain among the world's poor have anything to do with the relationship between effort and reward? A thoughtful Ben may be finally understanding what people mean when they say virtue is its own reward.

If Ben gets angry only because he feels he's not getting all he deserves, if he doesn't make the leap to acknowledge that without government "interference" life can be very unfair for many of us, then his anger and extremism will probably get nothing done. But if in his own discomfort he finds the key to making society more just and workable for all, then his anger and "extremism" may be much more effective than centrist gentility.

OR this comment:

Barbara
Boston, MA
May 21st, 2010
4:18 pm

Well, Mr. Brooks, your Ben is clearly a white man. Yes, it is true that hard work is its own reward. I started out at age 17 with 3 folders of poetry, 45 cents, and a toothbrush. But the claims of "it is not fair," are too simplistic. For women, gays and lesbians, the disabled, people of color, and others, fairness is not on the table. When a woman's greatest security question is, "Is it safe to walk to my car," and she has to think of that issue at least once a week, no, it is not fair. When gays and lesbians pay their fair share of taxes, but cannot benefit from programs such as Social Security because they cannot marry, no, it isn't fair. Ben had some difficult issues, but his privilege of being a white man makes it possible for him to frame things in such simple terms. Justice is not won by the moderate center, who compromise away everything for nothing. Finally, Ben seems willing to blame the government, when as other posters here pointed out, it was the rampant greed of corporations and the dismantling of effective government regulation that led to the state we are in...

And no, moderation is not what is needed when the US Coast Guard refuses to let TV camera crews film the disaster in the Gulf at the behest of BP, a foreign corporation. Moderation is not what is needed when the government so often colludes with mega corporations to deny justice, fairness, and a living wage and environmental safety to people. Action is. And on that note, boycott BP, and do whatever small step you can to conserve energy. And if you can get pictures of the Gulf, post them online - the press can't tell us what we need to know...

Friday, May 21. 2010

THE real question, says Krugman, is: Will the U.S. become Japan? Says he: "... fear of imaginary threats has prevented any effective response to the real danger facing our economy." Interesting.

Addendum IV...

WELL, sure, when you try to placate the Tea Party racists — and race (as well as economic decline) is what this outfit is really about — you're likely to get caught at it.

Addendum III...

ANY country or culture that expresses belief and pride in such unmitigated ignorance is inherently evil.

Addendum II...

THE Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman usually writes a sound column, in this instance on the "sentencing kids to life" matter.

Addendum ...

THE Times' Timothy Egan believes "the vote of 2010 might be a mashup for the ages, one of those rare referendums on real stuff." A quotation:

In the Kentucky senate race, those pistol-packin’ partisans who think President Obama was born in Kenya and want government to go away are claiming Rand Paul, who routed the party establishment pick, as one of their own. This is a good development. For who makes up the Tea Party? At their rallies, you see a lot of people on Medicare and Social Security.

Now they have Rand Paul, with his libertarian heritage, to carry the banner. Dr. Paul has promised to fight for “liberty and limited government.”

If we take him at his word, he should move against the biggest obstacles to liberty and limited government in the federal budget: Social Security and Medicare. Since 1966, those two mandatory programs for old people have grown from 16 percent of the federal budget to nearly 40 percent. Medicare now covers about 45 million people. Those deficit-contributing citizens, all those people at Dr. Paul’s rallies with spare time on their hands, would be a logical target.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

REMEMBER when it came out years ago that Dick Cheney said he didn't serve in Vietnam because he had better things to do? And when it came out how Bill Clinton equivocated over his draft status while at Oxford (but was at least honest enough to write his draft board about it)?

Larry Pressler, a Republican and former U.S. senator, offers an informed dissertation on that kind of thinking — and the consequences of it we experience today. It's an essay very much worth reading.

Addendum ...

IF you see something ... .

MEANWHILE, consider what a good Jesuit thinks of the lies and slanders perpetuated by Beck and Limbaugh.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

AN ancient Latin proverb: Dulce bellum inexpertis. "War is sweet to those who have not experienced it."

THE Times' Charles M. Blow is even more impassioned than usual about "liberals in limbo."

HERE'S in interesting essay on "how childhood has evolved."

LAST, Frank Rich is much to kind to the venal filth that inflict so much damaging ignorance and needless wrong in this country. If there is Hell, a just God will make sure that Rekers, Dobson and their ilk burn there. Just my humble opinion.

Addendum ...

YOU'RE right on, Paul, that the United States is not Greece ... but the people-haters will probably convince some gullible folks otherwise.

Friday, May 14. 2010

THE racist scum driving Hawaiian civil servants to despair will, no doubt, scream the loudest about wasting taxpayers' money.

MEANWHILE, The Economist bashes Mr. Obama for being a technophobe.

AND the placebo effect is regaining popularity. Just ask your doctor.

JUST for the heck of it, a 2004 photo of sunset on the Mississippi River:

Monday, May 10, 2010

MORE than 13.4 million people like this:

Saturday, May 8, 2010

I knew there was a reason some people act and/or think like, well, Neanderthals.

ANOTHER self-righteous hypocrite at the Family Research Council gets caught. And what lies they tell.

AND there's the German view of the Greek debt crisis.

MEANWHILE, here's what Joe Lieberman's buddies have been up to recently. (Aren't these guys "terrorists"? So let's strip them of their citizenship. Right, Joe?)

Addendum ...

OMG, we should NEVER, NEVER stop a terrorist from buying a gun. Yes, they too have a right to bear arms. Of course. As they say, only in America.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

AS Bloomberg Businessweek reported back in January, it is possible to find a hospital that cuts costs and delivers high-quality care as it innovates — and it does not lose money on Medicare patients. It's Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington.

(This article was found, incidentally, in a hospital waiting room. Wonder if anyone in this hospital's administration read it?)

Addendum ...

A sensible comment on the current oil spill.

Friday, April 30. 2010

ADAM Smith was not an "advocate of pure capitalism," writes Amartya Sen in New Statesman, contrary to what the political right wing would have us believe (and they would have us believe a great deal more nonsense as well). Sen is dealing with Smith's first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," more than his second, more famous, "Wealth of Nations." A quotation from Sen's excellent essay:

The spirited attempt to see Smith as an advocate of pure capitalism, with complete reliance on the market mechanism guided by pure profit motive, is altogether misconceived. Smith never used the term "capitalism" (I have certainly not found an instance). More importantly, he was not aiming to be the great champion of the profit-based market mechanism, nor was he arguing against the importance of economic institutions other than the markets.

Smith was convinced of the necessity of a well-functioning market economy, but not of its sufficiency. He argued powerfully against many false diagnoses of the terrible "commissions" of the market economy, and yet nowhere did he deny that the market economy yields important "omissions". He rejected market-excluding interventions, but not market-including interventions aimed at doing those important things that the market may leave undone.

Smith saw the task of political economy as the pursuit of "two distinct objects": "first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and second, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services". He defended such public services as free education and poverty relief, while demanding greater freedom for the indigent who receives support than the rather punitive Poor Laws of his day permitted. Beyond his attention to the components and responsibilities of a well-functioning market system (such as the role of accountability and trust), he was deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy. Even in dealing with regulations that restrain the markets, Smith additionally acknowledged the importance of interventions on behalf of the poor and the underdogs of society. At one stage, he gives a formula of disarming simplicity: "When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." Smith was both a proponent of a plural institutional structure and a champion of social values that transcend the profit motive, in principle as well as in actual reach.

Addendum ...

HERE'S a wonderful quotation from a reader of Gail Collins' column in today's Times:

Jumper
South Carolina
April 29th, 2010
1:31 am

Arizona, Oklahoma and South Carolina are dominated by a breed of Republican conservative called a “free luncher.” They believe in free lunch. They cut taxes way below levels that support necessary services and expect services to magically pay for themselves. Voters don’t ask about who is going to pay. Paychecks and operating revenue come magically.

Free lunchers cannot accomplish anything substantial since they cut their revenue streams when they cut taxes. Their substitute for accomplishment is setting up straw men for diversions whom they heroically defeat. They prove they don’t vote against Jesus, they find new ways to vote anti-abortion, and they keep the world safe from … well, just about everything different from them.

Aristotle warned that unfettered democracy would degenerate into mob rule. I don’t recall hearing what to do if those elected morphed into a mob.

Darn, and here I thought the Tea Party folks were the only "free lunchers" around.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

TRANSCRIPT of President Obama's remarks in Quincy on Wednesday, via Lynn Sweet and the Chicago Sun-Times, with applause and audience comments included.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Quoting:

The goal of every culture is to decay through overcivilization; the factors of decadence — luxury, skepticism, weariness, and superstition — are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Cyril Connolly, (1903-1974)

Luxury, skepticism, weariness, superstition: Somehow, these words have a quite contemporary feel to them.

Addendum ...

YES, "imagine if the Tea Party was black" — you might start to get an understanding of the phrase, "white privilege."

Sunday, April 25, 2010

AN essay one cannot resist: Tom Wolfe on Mark Twain.

Addendum II...

DAVID Brooks offers a truly sensible analysis of the current state of American politics. We centrists are hurting amid the current "war."

Addendum ...

HAVE a page in this book, a project started by Gary Reef on the Ning site, Lovin Mixed Media:

Sunday, April 18, 2010

A Chinese-American right-wing ideologue once again sees the coming demise of China (in 2001, he predicted China's imminent collapse) — while a former Wall Street insider sees the U.S. and Chinese economies now "joined at the hip," thus creating "Chimerica." (Finished reading Zachary Karabell's "Superfusion" last week.)

For 4,000 years, the Chinese have had a way of confounding those who profess to understand them.

Addendum III...

THE Tea Party cohort may be wealthier and more educated than "the general public," but they are also appallingly ignorant, as Gail Collins explains.

Addendum II...

THE assertion that conservative Suppreme Court justices "apply the law" in a neutral manner according to the "original meaning" of the framers is, in a word, a lie.

Addendum ...

IT'S about time.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

"untitled" (cast acrylic monotype, 10" x 10", 2010)

YES, LZ, being an ignorant bigot is a choice all too many people still make.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

MAYBE we can't build a railroad anymore, but at least Apple makes a really good computer.

IF you don't know what the word "glocal" means, The Economist explains.

Speaking of global stuff, Tom Friedman provides a sensibly rational analysis. A quotation:

... both major parties have now completed their primary 20th- century missions, first laid down by their iconic standard-bearers. The real question is which party is going to build America’s bridge to the 21st century — one that will strengthen our ability to compete in the global economy, while practicing much more fiscal discipline.

Addendum II...

SO how does the federal government cut taxes for "a person" who doesn't pay any tax?

Addendum ...

FRANK Rich has a column today that's worth reading in anyone's quest to figure out Obama.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

"split decision" (acrylic collage on canvas, 40" x 30", 2010)

THE Economist explains what is ahead for the American economy — the "biggest transformation in decades."

Saturday, April 3, 2010

"feeling lonesome" (South Park, Quincy, Illinois, March 29, 2010)

WELL, a gay wedding (actually, a civil partnership) in the Household Calvary, the United Kingdom's most elite branch of service. A refreshing attitude.