What Would Durkheim Do?

So says Samantha Hopkins, assistant professor of geology at the University of Oregon, who studies diet and evolution.

My favorite part of the story:

Hopkins and her colleagues found this out by scanning the literature for data on what 1,500 species of modern mammals eat. They gleaned it from field research by biologists, who sift through poop and examine stomach contents. It is not glamorous work.

The story is actually quite interesting in terms of human evolution. Go read it so your impression of these scientists' work is not my silly quotation.

No one who pays attention to politics is unaware of what the Republicans are trying to do with the budget. James Surowiecki's conclusion gets to the serious point:

It’s true, of course, that this budget will never become reality; after all, the electorate likes most of the programs that House Republicans want to kill. The budget is, as many have said, an act of political theatre, a way for Republicans to demonstrate what they stand for. But that’s precisely what makes it so revealing: what Ryan is proffering here is something like the platonic ideal of a budget. And what his plans tell us is that there’s very little the federal government has done over the past hundred and fifty years, apart from fighting wars, that the House Republicans approve of. In that sense, the Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility. It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society. The U.S. does need to get its finances in order. It just doesn’t need to repeal the twentieth century to do so.

In order to return our society to the time of (their) ideal domination — of whites over people of color, of men over women, of bosses over workers, of the wealthy over the rest of us — Republicans must repeal all of the accomplishments of progressives in the last century. Most people don't want that to happen. So the Republicans lie about it.

They should at least have the courage of their horrific, feudal convictions.

Paul Krugman, once again, uses empirical data to expose the flaws in our democracy. He captures the hypocrisy of Republican voters nicely in the title: Moochers Against Welfare.

He mentions three possible explanations for why people in districts that elected the most conservative representatives tend to use more government programs than people in more liberal districts — the very people who seem to be most against social welfare are bigger "moochers" than the voters they rail against. Well, hypocrisy is a truly American value.

But I think the variable that Krugman has overlooked is most important: race. Those relatively poor whites in the reddest districts are opposed to social welfare for people of color, who they demonize as "unworthy poor" unlike themselves. Old fashioned American racism combined with the fundamental attribution error ("my misfortune is due to bad luck; yours is because you are lazy, stupid, evil, etc.") seems to be the best explanation.

Let's not forget that ignorance plays a huge role in this dynamic as well, given that 40+% of the recipients of government programs believe that they have never received government aid. The ideology of predatory capitalism exploits this ignorance to keep relatively less well off whites angry about public spending. It is also why Republicans, when elected, never actually enact the "small government" they blather on about.

Moochers against welfare is a pretty accurate description of the Tea Party.

Everywhere in the world — in the US and elsewhere — where democracy is tried, corrupt politicians use power to enrich themselves and their class allies. We are ruled by money. We need a new idea. We need a new world.

In the face of this failure of formal electoral processes, there is only one thing we can do: take to the streets.

Good luck to the people of Senegal.

A warning for Mitt: when Newt Gingrich calls you a liar, it is like Satan calling you evil.

The latest Rick Perry news serves as proof that it is actually possible to be too stupid to win the Republican Presidential nomination.

Who knew?

The New York Times asks if reporters should be reporters or merely stenographers.

How sad that we've come to a place where this is an actual question in the so-called newpaper of record.

It isn't about changing which party wins elections. It is about changing the corrupt party system, which stretches an electoral farce across the facade of corporate domination in the hope that no one will notice who rules.

Matt Taibbi sums it up:

Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

If the choice is between two candidates of the 1%, then the outcome doesn't really matter. The only way to challenge power is to refuse to participate in the fraud and to contest the basic terms of the process, to refuse to be governed by the capitalist class.

The triumph of ideology: around the world — Egypt, Syria, Chile, etc — people are standing up to state power to demand freedom, often facing not just rough arrests but bullets and imprisonment, and what is happening here? Just a couple of years after Wall Street speculation and fraud nearly crashed the global economy, millions of Americans are thinking of voting for Mitt Romney, corporate raider.

Oh, how I wish I had written this. Well, James Wolcott I'm not:

One reason I’m such a wayward prognosticator of rightwing trends is that I’m incapable of blacking out enough neural sectors to see the world through reptilian-brained eyes, a prerequisite for any true channeling of the mean resentments and implanted fears that drive hardcore conservatives. I also make the mistake of believing that they believe what they profess to believe, which they clearly don’t, otherwise they wouldn’t be inclining to crown Newt king of the marsh. That a thrice-married Catholic convert with a history of marital infidelity would win the flinty hearts of Tea Partiers while true evangelicals such as Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry would find themselves standing on the platform as the train whooshes by, abandoned and bewildered--well, go figure. That a third-rate futurist spieler who rides every wave of pop guru bullshit and management theory would appeal to those who pride themselves on their unyielding, unchanging bedrock values also falls into the “does not compute” category. To most of us, Newt Gingrich has the mothball mustiness of a has-been who peaked with the “Contract with America,” fell from grace with the House Republicans he led, and has fed his ego and bank balance ever since.

And, the quote of the day:

The Republican field reflects the weak-minded, strong-willed prejudices of its base, hooked up to Fox News as if it were an IV drip.

This essay by Naomi Wolf at the Guardian is perhaps the most important thing said so far about the Occupy movement. Consider:

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

The real system of power is being exposed. Both Republican and Democratic elected officials work for the 1%. Both. We have two flavors of the Chamber of Commerce Party. And if working people unite to oppose corporate oppression, then elected officials of both parties — both — will authorize state violence against peaceful citizens exercising free speech and assembly in public. Republicans and Democrats are both part of the problem, not the solution.

Make no mistake: this is a conflict between the world's owners and the rest of us.

In reflecting on this Veterans Day, it occurs to me that one of the most important differences between the left and the right in American these days is that conservatives worship violence, real and imagined—everything from fantasies about killing civil servants or elected officials, to bullying, to wars of choice. That isn't just a spectacularly wrong attitude, it is pathological.

And since defending such an attitude usually involves shameless lying in public, it is doubly pathological.

I have hope that the Occupy movement marks a turning point for us as a nation, that we are on the way to recovering our humanity.

I dread to think of the alternative.

The dude reeks of plutocracy: Bloomberg says blame Congress for the mortgage crisis.

This is where the true talent is: Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg outsmarted at every turn by smelly, unemployed, directionless kids.

Both political parties today are little more than bagmen for Big Business, of course, but Republicans do provide a little value added to the Wall Street crime syndicate. They are true believers that the world belongs to the 1%.

I'm reminded of this reading an interesting account of Mitt Romney's days as a corporate raider. I'm old enough to remember a time when people expected to have careers with one company — both working- and middle-class workers, in the office and on the factory floor. But the "shareholder value" revolution that Romney participated in as a corporate raider shifted the priority of American business from stability, which had some value to workers, to short-term growth, which was good only for speculators.

This is the economy we have today. CEOs making hundreds of times more than the average worker; jobs exported to the most exploitative global labor markets; in short, a numbers game for the biggest high-rollers. Mitt Romney helped to bring it about. We need to remember that as he campaigns to be our next President.

This is a transformative moment. This is global. Despite the police, and despite the banks, and despite the elected officials, the 99 percent have declared that we will no longer consent to be governed by the capitalist class.

From the London protest, the truth:

That is what this movement is about. ‘From the public square, to the factory floor, to those huge, undemocratic international institutions – it is about handing over not just wealth but real control to you and me and all of us, the 99 per cent,’ said Zoe in London.

‘We are the people yet we have no say. This is a global uprising to say: enough! We don’t just demand real democracy – we are creating it, right here, right now. This time we really can win.’

To the 1 percent I say: You haven't got enough room in your prisons for all of us. We're coming for you.

My photos from the labor march in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

It was energizing. Let's build on it. Take to the streets. We will destroy neoliberalism. It is only a matter of time. Capitalist class, we are coming for you.

(I marched for a while with the Wobs -- best people on the planet.)

Just wasted a few hours trying to upgrade to Drupal 7.x — it was a disaster! I must have deleted a directory that I shouldn't have in the process. I started to create the site anew using a new database, but I hated the admin interface in 7, so I figured the best solution was just to step back to the most recent version of 6.

So, basically, three hours lost and very little accomplished.

Once again, the US is on the wrong side of history.

Excellent takedown of the NCAA, the most corrupt institution in America*:

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

The fundamental principle here is that exploitation of labor is always wrong. Universities are exploiting athletes by pretending that, in the big money sports at least, they are "student-athletes"; they are not; they are workers in the sports entertainment industry. As someone said, the only amateurs in college sports are the athletes. No surprise that college administrators (and the ex-administrators that run the NCAA) talk integrity while continuing to cash the checks.

* Considering how corrupt our government is, that is saying a lot.