“He put me in a shed with the pigs, made me a bed and I lay there for 14 days until the Americans came. After that, I was a free man,” – Rudolph Brazda, the last surviving Nazi concentration camp survivior who was sent there for being gay. He died Wednesday.
Month: August 2011
TNC On Anti-Gentrification
In response to NYT articles decrying the influx of white people into black neighborhoods, he develops a plan to combat gentrification:
It occurs to me that we really need a world with more murders, more failing schools, more grocery stores with rotting vegetables, more bodegas with old milk, more teen-pregnancy, more homeless, more crack, more heroin, more fathers on the lam, more disease, more joblessness, and generally, more death. And we need to concentrate every one of those those ills in black neighborhoods.
We have seen the enemy, and it is change. Clearly the only way to preserve black neighborhoods from the scourge of white people is to render them as post-Apocalyptic as possible. It's not even enough to roll them back to the days of Jim Crow–that would mean an actual black middle class in Bed-Stuy and Columbia Heights, and great jazz clubs in Harlem.
No. We need complete cultural and social depredation, a total breakdown of black humanity until our neighborhoods resemble something out of 28 Days Later.
Chart Of The Day
Kevin Drum captions:
The economy added 117,000 jobs in July. Unfortunately, we need to add about 150,000 jobs each month merely to keep up with population growth. So the real net job growth picture is actually negative.
Re-Balancing Our Foreign Policy
Fareed makes the case:
Defense budget cuts would force a healthy rebalancing of American foreign policy. Since the Cold War, Congress has tended to fatten the Pentagon while starving foreign policy agencies. As former defense secretary Robert Gates pointed out, there are more members of military marching bands than make up the entire U.S. foreign service. Anyone who has ever watched American foreign policy on the ground has seen this imbalance play out. Top State Department officials seeking to negotiate vital matters arrive without aides and bedraggled after a 14-hour flight in coach. Their military counterparts whisk in on a fleet of planes, with dozens of aides and pots of money to dispense. The late Richard Holbrooke would laugh when media accounts described him as the “civilian counterpart” to Gen. David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command. “He has many more planes than I have cellphones,” Holbrooke would say (and he had many cellphones). The result is a warped American foreign policy, ready to conceive of problems in military terms and present a ready military solution.
Unrepentant Iraq War enthusiast Michael O'Hanlon differs.
Limbaugh’s Latest Bile
Too many Malkins and Hewitts to nominate:
In the article, Limbaugh accuses Obama of “robbing this country blind” and proclaims: “He's a burglar. All liberals are burglars. All liberals are thieves. That's what they do. It is who they are.”
Limbaugh depicts Obama's critique of tax loopholes and breaks for corporate jet owners as an attack on technology itself, predicting that he would go after the iPad 3 and the iPhone 5 and “tax the hell out of it so it ceases to exist.” According to Limbaugh, “You leave it up to Obama, and we won't need to be defeated by al Qaeda; we'll end up in the seventh century on our own.”
Christianism Watch
Tim Murphy takes a hard, depressing look at the people behind Rick Perry's big prayer meeting.
The Reality We Face, Ctd
A reader writes:
You know, I don't agree with you much any more. But you nailed it in that post.
The only real economic (I don't care about the politics of any of it) solution for what we face can be summed up in one word: time. Lots and lots of time. The single, most important thing we can do is to avoid turning what's likely gonna be a problem the lasts another 5-10 years into a problem that lasts another 15-20 years.
In that vein (and again, I'm ignoring politics altogether), here is the problem with Keynesian solutions. We're a debtor country. Every $ of additional spending is an additional $ of debt creation. The marginal utility of each new dolar of debt has been negative for a couple years now. The multiplier effect is negative.
Keynesians aren't the problem.
Keynesianism isn't the problem. The problem is where we are. It's 2010, not the 30's or 60's or 90's or even early-00's. It can't work 'at this point in time'. We've stolen growth from the future for the last 25-30 years. The future is here. We're paying a steep price. We're giving back some (maybe alot) of what we took over all those years.
The choices made in the next 2-3 yrs will tell the take of whether this mess will end up lasting another 5-8 yrs or another 15 or more yrs. I wish I trusted either party to make the right choices.
I trust Obama more than the viable alternatives.
Mental Health Break
MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
There's also EAT and LEARN for your viewing pleasure.
Fjordman Unmasked
The Norwegian anti-Muslim blogger and major Breivik influence was Peder Jensen, who had studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo. Contrast his response to Breivik with the American right's:
The blogger said he had come forward to clear his name and would now go into hiding in fear of his safety. "I don't wish to be associated with Breivik and his horrible actions," he said.
Jensen ran his "Fjordman" blog for less than a year in 2005 but continued to write on other sites critical of Islam and has called the religion an "irrational cult based on fear". He said in a blog he has never called for violence and told VG he would never write under the "Fjordman" pen name again. "I have read about the unspeakable things Anders Behring Breivik did at Utoeya," he wrote in a blog posted on July 26. "Any person doing such a thing is a monster."
Ghaffar Hussein punctures the "Eurabia" myth that Fjordman helped propagate. Charles Cameron explains why it's important to look at Breivik's intellectual influences.
The View From Your Window
West Point, New York, 9 am
The Dish 