Drip, Drip, Drip

Drip, Drip, Drip: Tax breaks for US corporations ($1.8 trillion a year) equal the entire discretionary portion of the federal budget, and are more than twice the amount of the current budget deficit ($702 billion). In 2013, there were 4,000 Americans in the top 1% of income earners who – thanks to tax breaks – paid no federal income taxes at all. None. How'd it go for you?

(To answer the question: Susan and I had to pay a few hundred bucks this year. We pay almost every year.)

This appalling and unjust inequality in bearing the public burden is what's wrong with this country, but nobody finds it atrocious. Nobody talks about it. Nobody gets angry about it. And nobody does anything about reforming a political system that will without question further shackle the American people to the service of the ruling plutocracy. The problem, as I've noted unceasingly, is the woeful ignorance and stupidity of the mass of the American people. They would really be dangerous to the prevailing order if it were otherwise. But it would take a thunderbolt from Zeus to make that happen. Maybe several.

Look What $1 Trillion Will Buy

Did you know that the president's 2015 budget request for all national security-related programs amounts to over $1 trillion? Yes, you are reading that correctly. It's not a misprint. Before going any further, just mull that number for a moment. Do you know how many starving people that could feed for two or three years? how many schools, bridges, highways, water treatment plants, wind and solar farms, light rail systems, and on and on could be built with this amount of money? But what are we going to buy with this? We're going to buy so-called "national security."

I'm not even going to go into my usual rant about how much of this is wasted, pissed away every year on everything from boondoggles for the brass, to unneeded weapons systems, to recruiting advertising, to special forces operators in roughly 175 countries in the world, to 12 battle carrier groups for the Navy, and so forth, etc., etc., etc. No, this time I'm going to just bewail how huge the number is. Monstrous in every way.

The military's friends and shills in Congress are whining that even this outrageous budget is not enough. Don't forget that the Republicans managed to exempt the DoD from the crippling budget sequester that every other department of government is bearing.

Read this piece "An Inadequate Defense Budget? Compared to Whom? Compared to When?" You know the answers to the questions . . . but it's laid out pretty neatly here.

The relationship of US defense spending to that of presumed threat nations and the girth of contemporary defense spending compared to a time of greater threat does not call into question the adequacy of the size of today's US defense budget; it calls into question the competence of current US political and military leadership, both in the Pentagon and in Congress.

This is the Way to Deal with . . .

 . . . people who think people on food stamps are shifless freeloaders, people like the lovely crowd at Fox News. The way is the way Jon Stewart does it with complete mockery and disdain. You will enjoy this clip. Please note that you have to click forward after the first video to get the entire sketch.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

Real Quick History Lesson

This is very cool.

Watch as 1000 years of European borders change (timelapse map) from Nick Mironenko on Vimeo.

Communist!

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today.

I can hear the shrieks renting the air from the right already. You can be sure that Francis will be called: a socialist, a Marxist, a communist at the least. And probably a lot of other things. Whaddaya think the chances of "governments" following his advice are?

Bring Back Our Girls

What's the story on these 200+ teenaged girl students seized by this off-the-wall group of Islamist terrorists called Boko Haram in Nigeria? Are you kidding me? These children have been gone now for about 25 days, and the world is just getting around (within the past few days) to noticing that the Nigerian government hasn't done squat to find out where these kids are and rescue them. Of course, their parents and relatives have been screaming bloody murder since it happened. But it's just recently that we've heard from the country's president, Goodluck Jonathan (Is anybody else struck by the absurdity of this name, and especially under the circumstances?) to the effect that the problem is too big for his country's resources to fix.

So now we have the spectacle of the U.S., among other countries, sending a special team of "helpers" over there--no military apparently, just hostage negotiator and intel type people--to see if they can find these kids almost a month after they were seized and their school and dorm burned down.

Methinks it might be a little too little too late.

Fossilized . . .

“We must not be fossilized in the past,” he said after being asked about transfers of priests from diocese to diocese that enabled them to escape investigation and prosecution. “This was a policy practiced decades ago, mostly.”

                         --Words of Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative in Geneva 

I read in the New York Times that Bishop Tomasi reports that almost 850 priest had been defrocked from 2004-2013 and another 2,500+ disciplined for sexual abuse. Moreover, since 1950 the Church has paid over $2.5 billion in compensation to victims and more millions on therapy and other costs associated with litigation and investigations. And over $260 million over the past 10 years doing background checks on people serving in the Church.

Big deal. Are we supposed to forget about the other stuff? What he doesn't say is how many bishops have lost their jobs for facilitating the abuse of kids for decades by simply moving miscreants around and/or paying off victims for silence. The answer is less than five. There are hundreds of these guys still out there in their positions of authority and privilege because Rome simply chose not to go after them. It was an understandable decision, after all, since Rome, which sees all and knows all, covered the whole sordid mess up for years and years until it could not contain things anymore. It's still doing it. The Vatican has been pretty damn sparing about what it says on this subject, and now we're being told that we should dwell on things that happened in the past . . . . mostly.

St. Pope and St. Pope

Last week--on April 28, to be exact--the Catholic church declared two recent pontiffs saints of the Church. I could here launch into a long disquisition about the very notion of sainthood, that some people can be so much holier than other people and how the Church for some reason ascribes this holiness overwhelmingly to members of the clergy and religious. Gee, I wonder why a hierarchical institution like the Roman Church would place priests, bishops, nuns, and brothers higher on the holiness scale than the rest of the poor shlubs out there having all those kids?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The two new saints are Pope John XXIII, who is most famous for calling the Second Vatican Council into session--most Catholics don't remember this since the Church has spent all the years since it closed trying to undo its impact--and Pope John Paul II, who reigned as pope longer than anybody else, and used his long pontificate to stamp out doctrinal dissent, appoint dogmatic troglodytes to the episcopate to ensure his conservative theology outlived him by many years, and of course, keep the lid on any information about the worldwide sexual scandal among the clergy. JPII was also instrumental in stifling liberation theology in Latin America and in shenanigans that ousted the communist government in his home country of Poland.

I'm much more inclined to give benefit of doubt to John XXIII, but he too was around when the sexual misconduct was raging in the Church . . . I would not have canonized the guy so quickly. Both these popes were brought to sainthood with unseemly haste. It usually takes decades, if not centuries. One wonders just what the rush was.

Here's another commentary on this subject, one that got me to thinking about it. This commentator is far gentler than I.

Just a thought regarding today’s news of the current Pope canonizing two former Popes.  This is rather like the chairman of a corporate board of directors giving a couple of former CEO’s huge retroactive bonuses. Source 

Oh, did I mention I was opposed to making these guys saints?

Ya Know . . .

. . . my man James Kuntsler can sure turn a phrase. I wish I had half his gift for invective. Alas, entertaining as the language might be, and it certainly is, we also have to come to grips with the fact that it's all true. This is what's truly unfortunate. Pick your issue--there are plenty enough here--and then think about the fact that they all beset us, not just that awful one you just picked. (Source: here)

Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth.

Wanna Get in a Fight?

If you do, play the greatest composers of all times game. Here's the first list I encountered in a Google search on the subject:

1. Bach
2. Mozart
3. Beethoven
4. Wagner
5. Schubert
6. Schumann
7. Chopin
8. Listz
9. Brahms
10. Verdi
11. Mahler
12. Tchaikovsky
13. Rachmaninov
14. Handel
15. Haydn

Haydn at 15? Are you kidding me?

Here's the next (NY Times) and the next (History Lists) and the next (Top Tens) and the next (Discogs):

1. Bach                 1. Bach                 1. Beethoven
2. Beethoven            2. Mozart               2. Mozart
3. Mozart               3. Beethoven            3. Bach
4. Schubert             4. Verdi                4. Chopin
5. Debussy              5. Tchaikovsky          5. Tchaikovsky
6. Stravinsky           6. Chopin               6. Vivaldi
7. Brahms               7. Vivaldi              7. Haydn
8. Verdi                8. Puccini              8. Schubert
9. Wagner               9. Handel               9. Brahms
10. Bartok              10. Stravinsky          10. Handel

1. Bach
2. Mozart
3. Beethoven
4. Wagner
5. Haydn
6. Brahms
7. Schubert
8. Schumann
9. Handel
10. Tchaikovsky

Notice that there's no disagreement about the Holy Trinity at the top. But after that, it's Katy, bar the door. I'm not going to put a list out there. Suffice it to say my top ten would definitely have Franz Joseph Haydn, and it would not have Tchaikovsky.