Thank You, WND

posted on 5/16/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

WND (formerly World Net Daily) and I may have had our  differences , but commenter Michael Hahn is really on to something here regarding President Obama:

Thank you, Michael Hahn. Thank you, WND. That will do.

These Thin Skinned Christian Crybabies Would Like To Whine At You

posted on 5/13/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

"Wh-wh-why can't I force people to pray how I want?!"

 
The advent of video sharing online has led to many amazing things, from the humble  Arnold mash-up  to the lofty grumpy cat  smile video . It has also led many organizations – both those I loathe and those I love – to apparently scrap their marketing departments entirely and wallow in the gutter of “viral” videos. This is unfortunate.

Exhibit A: Anonymous. This crafty hacker anarcho-collective is savvy and fun-loving enough to  light up  the Westboro Baptist Church’s web presence like the world’s most obscene and hilarious Christmas tree. Happy face! Presented with the opportunity to make a video, however, their efforts quickly devolve into the standard puddle of internet  horribleness : the dramatic music, the silly logos, et cetera et cetera. Sad face!

If a web video call-to-arms induces chagrin when it comes from a source I quasi-like, you can imagine how I feel about this little treat from the starry-eyed youngsters (or, rather, their adult exploiters) at “Reach America”:

I’ve already  posted  a longer version of my thoughts on this subject than I plan on launching into here, but I’d like to complement my thought on those poor, persecuted American Christians with a few direct responses to the youngsters in the above video, because here at Salt City Sinner we care about the children, because the children are our future.

“Christianity is being completely frozen out of America.”

Yes, it must be hard to be a Christian in a country where over 80% of the population is Christian, along with every President, 95% of Congressmen, most Supreme Court Justices, and pretty much every elected official from dogcatcher on up. Life can be so cruel.

“Why can’t I pray in school?”

Newsflash, crybaby: you can!

"B-b-but you're making prayer PRIVATE and VOLUNTARY!"

You are free to pray the day away until your little knees are scrubbed raw!

What you CAN’T do, as a result of this weird relic you might have heard of called “the Constitution,” is force others to pray to your god. Again, life can be tough sometimes.

“Why do I have to tolerate people cursing MY god—“

You know what? I’m just going to stop you youngsters there.

When I attended Millcreek Junior High, lo those many years ago in the storied land of Bountiful, UT, I had thick spectacles, a bowl cut hairdo, and was 1 – 2 years younger than the other kids in my grade, which, when you are dealing with an age group wrestling with puberty, counts more than you might think. I was bullied MERCILESSLY – real bullying, as in knees to the face or groin, not fake, crybaby “bullying,” as in being cruelly deprived of the right to use the power of the State to force everybody to worship my deity of choice.

Apparently, modern Christians think bullying and persecution mean being unable to force everybody to think their way. For supposed freedom lovers and devotees of the marketplace of ideas, this seems like a pretty low threshold to induce whines and screams that they are being oppressed.

A Day At The Tar Sands Conference

posted on 5/7/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

 

“Excuse me, but did you drive a car here today?” a man asked, his voice loaded with the combination of theatrically weary sarcasm and belligerence that I’ve come to think of as The Talk Radio Voice.

“Call ‘em out, Paul!” a man crowed on from the crowd.

“You’re just a hypocrite!” Paul continued. “A hypocrite!”

It was a little after one in the afternoon on a beautiful Tuesday, and the view from the sixth floor of Rice-Eccles Stadium’s press and VIP tower was exquisite – a sweeping vista of Salt Lake City that is in my experience unrivaled (in one of my many previous incarnations, I booked a gala event for a nonprofit I was working for in this very room for that very view). Against the light streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, framed against that view, were a band of  brave souls  who had come to interrupt Juan Palma, the Bureau of Land Management's Utah State Director, as he delivered an address titled “Energy development on federal lands in Utah -- is government a development constraint?” (good question!)

Paul – the angry “excuse me” guy – and the well-dressed protesters were on either side of Palma, who seemed embarrassed and a little bit flustered, and kept trying to wallpaper over the unpleasantness with a series of toweringly lame statements. “Ok, thirty more seconds,” said Juan. “That’s the thing about America; everybody has an opinion,” said Juan. “We’re calling the cops,” one of Juan’s less placatory lieutenants finally barked, and call the cops they did.

All of us – Juan, Paul, the protesters, even (indirectly) the cops – were there for the 2013 Unconventional Fuels  Conference , hosted by the University of Utah’s Institute for Clean and Secure Energy. Despite the “clean” that puts the C in ICSE, the name of their – and this conference’s – game is tar sands.

In a  previous post  I outlined what tar sands are and why you should care, but here’s the world’s shortest recap: oil/tar sands are loose rock formations that contain a very thick, sticky form of hydrocarbon called bitumen. Until recently, not many people cared very deeply about tar sands, because they are very difficult to extract. However, relatively recent technological innovations, as well as oil prices, have made these forms of oil profitable (in the short term) to extract. The problem with this is that tar sands produce more carbon emissions to extract than traditional sources of oil (about 12% more per barrel), suck up and pollute huge amounts of water throughout the extraction process, and in Utah will be hauled out of the earth via open pit mining (better known by its colorful nomme du guerre “strip mining”).

At the beginning of the conference the MC asked everyone – by a show of hands – to indicate what group they hailed from. There were a handful of people who claimed “environmental NGO,” a healthy dollop of academics, and a sizable contingent of government employees of one type or another, but by far the largest group represented in the conference audience was that from which Paul the impromptu counter-protester hails – the investors, contractors, consultants and other various creatures of energy companies.

The first half of the conference was wonky and dealt with carbon sequestration, computer modeling and risk prediction (one digression dealt with experimental natural gas combustion at one of the University’s laboratories and the outputs of pure oxygen versus common air – it was wonky, but I was paying attention!).

After a break, the Man from BLM took the mic and that was when something slightly too articulate to be called pandemonium broke out. As the protesters loudly read from scripts about their opposition to tar sands mining in Utah, one man quietly circulated and handed out fliers aimed at investors that sketched out arguments against tar sands mining in economic terms. When the cops arrived – and jeepers, they were quick to respond – the protesters were unceremoniously hauled out, one pretty roughly from the look and sound of it.

Why were the  protesters  – who were pretty varied in age, gender and ethnicity -- bothering these polite-if-glassy-eyed technocrats? Part of the explanation hangs on a conversation I overheard one disgruntled gentleman have with the woman at the reception table. “Just not polite,” he grunted. “Yes,” she agreed in a concerned tone. “There are good arguments to be made on either side, but there are plenty of places to have those arguments.” She was half right. There are very good arguments to be made about fossil fuels and the future of Utah. But good places?

True, there are toothless public-input sessions held by the BLM and other agencies, and even the occasional  town hall meeting  – but the underlying assumptions about energy’s place in the course of human events aren’t being questioned, and they should be. For all the deep number-crunching and modeling going on in the science portion of the conference, no mention at all was made of the alarms being sounded by other, equally smart number-crunchers and modelers regarding climate change or carbon emissions. Instead, a large public university – the University of Utah – has a large institute (28 faculty and over 60 students spanning eight departments -- I told you I was listening!) with “Clean” and “Energy” in the name, and that institute flogs tar sands.

Maybe the protesters are right about this conversation now requiring a civil disobedience portion. Maybe the time for being polite is over.

GARDENING -- Can You Dig It?

posted on 5/2/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

in one of my very favorite photographs of all time, L. Ron Hubbard interrogates a tomato

As spring finally and gloriously breaks over Salt Lake City like a trash sack full of champagne flutes, it is time to return to the comforting bosom of the rich loam! To return and, alas, to say goodbye to my current raised garden bed.

Salt Lake City, you see, is  installing  a streetcar line in the Sugar House area. In addition to closing 11th East (the main foot-and-car-traffic thoroughfare) for a few years, which has  led to protests  from local merchants, the construction will be leveling the community gardens where I have had a plot since early 2012. Our garden has formed a committee (that granola hippie solution of first and last resort) to determine where all of us poor gardeners will land next year. Until then, it's back to my home away from home for another season of growing delicious things to eat.

Right now, of course, the old gal ain't much to look at:

...but things are just getting started. For perspective, here's how the plot looked last year when it was going like those proverbial gangbusters:

Last year's  season  yielded way more carrots and basil than I could cope with, along with a hearty quantity of tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplant and beautiful heirloom radishes that were crisp and white and spicy and looked like they had secret blood-colored flowers in their centers.

I learned some valuable lessons about growing onions and broccoli last year. First, I learned to harvest my onions a lot earlier than I did, and to space them more generously. Second, I learned not to grow broccoli, because it pisses me off and isn't worth the trouble (long story).

This year will be more of the same, with the addition of wormwood (which I'm fairly certain is legal to grow as long as I don't ferment and bottle it) and probably some alternate varieties of pepper. None of the peppers I grew last year except for the long, skinny red Thai ones were hot enough for my taste.

Some of my carrots decided to return to haunt my plot:

...along with this hardy fellow:

...but for the most part, I've got a blank slate to work with (which I like).

Of course, I will not be adding very many soil amendments this year, due to the fact that all my hard soil-oriented work will soon be crushed under a bulldozer, for Progress. It's hard to motivate yourself to do serious vermiculture or soil cultivation, beyond things that will make your plants happy in the short term, when your plot has an expiration date. Not that I'm bitter that Salt Lake is trashing a vibrant, joyful community garden for the sake of commercial development and more crappy strip malls or condos, oh no.

Here's hoping that the nice weather holds for a while, and that the many gods and goddesses of earthy fertility see fit to bless me with onions this year!

The Raw Story Would Like To Drop Some "Science" On You

posted 4/22/2013 by the Salt City Sinner 

As both of this bloggue’s readers know, I am no great fan of free-market economics. I am also no great fan of climate change deniers. I am, additionally, no great fan of the music of Peter Cetera, but that is beside the point (actually, my hatred of Peter Cetera is never REALLY that far from the front of my mind, but to everything there is a season &c.).

Why, then, would I object to an  article  posted on popular liberal blog The Raw Story with the promising title “Study finds belief in free market economics predicts rejection of science” ?

Spoiler alert: I object to it because it is total and complete crap.

Here’s the methodology that some researchers from the University of Western Australia (GO FIGHTIN’  TRUCKS !) employed:

The study of 1,377 people who visited climate change denial blogs found endorsement of laissez-faire free markets predicted the rejection of climate science and other established scientific facts, such as that HIV causes AIDS or that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer.

Climate denial blogs! Why, that is the same type of impeccable sourcing that Colin Flaherty of WND  used  to  prove  that hordes of bloodthirsty black savages are roaming the streets of America laying waste to the property of hardworking whites! Raw Story should be proud – Flaherty is, after all, the gold standard of online-journalistic credibility and integrity.

Hey, jackasses! I’ve taken all of one semester of statistics in my life (social sciences FTW) and even I know how to  Google “ selection bias !”

Furthermore, in addition to my semester of statisticatin’, I have something on the order of a decade of scouring right-wing blogs for horror and hilarity under my belt, and I will tell the good folks at Raw Story this much: you could “prove” things that are a lot more frightening and click-grabbing than climate change denial or free-market ideology via this extremely scientific technique.

Personally, I'd go with something related to Reptilians:

Glenn Beck, Hammer Of Truth

posted on 4/20/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

A conspiracy theory without Glenn Beck kicking in his two cents is like a kiss without whiskers as the saying goes (or is it a soup without salt?). Joining the illustrious ranks of such deep thinkers as Alex Jones, Beck is now convinced that the official story on the Boston bombings is so much flim-flam and hocus-pocus. Like a newly hatched baby turtle’s irrepressible urge to seek the sea, or a flower’s instinctual strain for the light of the sun, Beck’s internet vanity press, The Blaze, is inevitably advancing the theory that all this Boston carnage has something to do with Benghazi.

“Huh?” you say. Well, that’s not really a word, mister, but I’m willing to forgive it in this case because, seriously, huh?

It’s not necessarily surprising that Beck’s first and most authentic reaction to the tragedy in Boston was to  use it  to  sell gold . Glenndolf Beckler is, after all, a good capitalist, although his theory about why gold prices are plummeting (hint: it’s a government conspiracy) is so weird and poorly reasoned that even Business Insider was left  flabbergasted . It’s also worth keeping in mind that this is a man whose idea of a “gotcha!” moment linking progressives to fascism involves fascists travelling back in time to put the old Roman symbol of the fasces on an American dime:

So Beck on his best day is not what I’d call an impeccably informed or well-reasoning source of commentary.

Even so, his continued attempts to pillory a “Saudi national” already cleared by investigators and scrubbed from almost every right-wing blog at this point are pretty breathtaking, even for old Glenndolf Beckler. Even though most conservative narratives about Boston have evolved – hell, even as weirdos like Alex Jones have updated their theories to reflect new information – Beck set his heels early, and has been doubling and tripling down since then.

While authorities were looking for two ethnic Chechens from Kyrgyzstan, Beck was quick to  remind  us that his attentions were not about to waver, no matter what the facts had to say:

I want you to hear me carefully. There is so much information going through here. It is critically important that you understand that this is suspect #2 that just died and suspect #3 that is still on the loose. Suspect #1 – the government is going to try to hide suspect number one. Do not forget him.

Don’t worry, though, citizens! The federal government and the elites and the intellectuals and cable news and 90% of conservative blogs and the police and human beings in general may have decided to focus on the actual suspects in the Boston attacks rather than a young “Saudi national,” but Glenn Beck isn’t losing focus. Glenn Beck is about to deliver a mighty, crushing Hammer of Truth (his signature pro-wrestling move) from the top rope of Justice if NOBUMMER doesn’t play ball:

 I can hardly wait, Glenndolf. I can hardly wait.

The Vortex, The Void

posted on 4/19/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

Bombings in Boston. A man with loaded weapons on the White House grounds. Poisoned letters. A massive explosion in Texas.

It has been the kind of week that makes you feel like it’s quite possible you’ve simply gone insane; that some fantastic machinery cooked up in the architecture of your sleeping brain must have lumbered into your waking life. Surely none of it is real, right?

A lot of Americans (and I’m including myself here) are incredibly poorly equipped to deal with the brutal and unpleasant nature of the world that we have, in part, helped to make the way it is. It’s worth noting that the entire country has apparently lost its collective mind over the attacks in Boston that killed three and horribly injured dozens, but that on that same day in Iraq, a string of bombs in Baghdad killed 55 people and injured countless more. Obviously any connection between the two – Boston and Baghdad – only exists (if at all) in a tenuous and non-causal way, but it still needs to be strongly emphasized that even one of the worst days in recent memory in America is pretty much kids’ stuff compared to daily life in many, many places, some of which got to their present state directly or indirectly because of U.S. foreign policy. I’m not copping some idiotic and callous “chickens coming home to roost” attitude, here; just pointing out that even during horrible tragedies here Stateside, it’s absolutely imperative that we keep our wits about us and our perspective intact. 

downtown Boston, rush hour during lockdown (photo by Andrew Tangel)

Keeping our perspective intact also means acknowledging that most of the people who died in that Texas explosion were volunteer firefighters and other first responders. It means remembering, as so many have pointed out, that the first instinct of a lot of people in Boston when the bombs exploded was to rush toward the danger, to help others. It means remembering that many people, including marathon runners, gave blood in the aftermath of the blasts, or found some other way to try to make a positive contribution, to help other people. In a larger sense, it means remembering everyone who protested or protests America’s bloody adventures abroad, or who joins the Peace Corps.

There’s a yawning vortex of lunacy surrounding recent events, though.

Just the other day, I  posted  my thoughts about Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and popular radio personality who is quite convinced that the United States government is somehow pulling the strings in Boston.

 (To some extent, some alarming strings are being pulled or not pulled in Boston and elsewhere: as a Judd Legum of ThinkProgress  put it , “Things we’ll do to keep people safe: Lock down an entire city for hours. Things we won’t do: a five minute background check before you buy a gun.”)

I knew already that Jones’ winged internet monkeys are an unhinged bunch, and that Jones’ following borders on a cult of personality, much Ron Paul people do. I did not know the extent of it, however. Shortly after the suspects in the Boston bombings were identified, a bunch of Guy-Fawkes-avatared friends of friends started randomly cropping up on the Facebook comment feeds of a libertarian friend of mine. To a one, they were not only convinced that the whole thing was a hoax – they were, perhaps more astonishingly, convinced of the earth-shaking power of Jones’ soapbox rantings.

As one said:

Alex Jones is saying it looks like they had a bunch of patsy's [sic] ready to go. Then when Alex started predicting what they were going to do, they had to back track and regroup. They had Saudis in one group, and a redneck type with the same type of back pack ready to go. 

This guy, in other words, was not only convinced that Alex Jones had figured the whole thing out, but that the elaborate, sinister government conspiracy was panicked into corrective action by his truth-telling.

Say what you want about the security state, about the Boston lockdown, about the TSA or the FBI or the drone program. I myself think that the state in general is about as trustworthy as a starving alligator turned loose in a daycare center. But when you accept into your worldview the possibility that a man who is, objectively speaking, a moron and a lunatic...

...has somehow not only sussed out the hidden machinations of the powers that be, but is in fact scaring the dickens out of those supposedly omnipotent powers, you have seriously lost your ability to think rationally along the way.

Once upon a time, I was discussing the great situationist essay The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking For Oneself with someone I greatly respect. That person compared ideology -- all and any ideology -- to a telescope or a lens that one uses to view the world. "The problem is," he said, "that some ideologies are like trying to look through a kaleidoscope instead of a lens."

When blood and thunder rain panic on us, when the world is revealed as the black and frightening justiceless place that it sometimes is, it's easy to retreat into the void, to succumb to the sick siren song of the vortex, to look through a kaleidoscope rather than a lens, to see sinister invisible hands where the much more terrifying truth is that there is nothing there that makes any sense at all.

Here's hoping that it passes, like a fever, or a bad dream.