Whiskey Fire

Tomorrow is a day of ghosts

-by Jake T. Snake

Tomorrow is a big day for those of us who work in AIDS service organizations and really anyone who cares about the issue. It is the one day a year that a large number of people pay attention for a few moments and ask us "So, how's it going?"  That is a complex question. By and large well, I suppose, but I am worried. This disease that used to routinely kill people in 6-18 months has become a chronic, manageable illness. That is great news, but as with any change presents another set of difficulties. Taking care of people long term is expensive. The Director of the Center for Disease Control recently testified before Congress that each HIV infection cost approximately 1 million dollars in treatment and lost productivity. This is just dollars and cents and doesn't calculate the human cost of a chronic illness. Better treatments seem to have taken away some of the immediacy that people once felt about AIDS. I have recently heard intelligent sensible people talk about how they would try to practice safer sex, but hey! if they were infected the treatments were good and getting better and odds are they would live long enough for a cure to come along. Complacency has set in at all levels from individuals up to the federal government.

The Center for Disease Control announced this year that their previous estimates of 40,000 new infections annually in the United States were wrong and that the number is actually 56,000+. Here in lovely upstate New York we have our own epidemic that has quietly taken hold and spread. While people were justifiably concerned about the epidemic in New York City, upstate garnered enough people with AIDS that without any NYC cases upstate by itself would be the 5th highest state in the US in terms of number of AIDS cases. At our small shop the number of newly HIV+ people we have seen has doubled in one year and they are young, many in their early 20s. The bitter fruits of the abstinence only movement are beginning to ripen.

In the midst of this, the New York State legislature has cut funding to local HIV/AIDS organizations by 10% as a direct result of the crash in the financial sector. As Wall Street goes, so goes the New York State tax base and a portion of our funding. This at a time when the need for services is escalating, both prevention and care of those already HIV+. What seems to have been forgotten in the orgy of budget cutting is that HIV remains a communicable disease. While a man of my advanced years sometimes ponders  the scary demons that may await, such as heart attacks, prostate cancer, alzheimer's etc. I know that if I go out tonight and have a fling there is no chance of me picking up a heart attack. I am hopeful that the administration of an African-American who knows the devestation this disease has wrought on the south side of Chicago would consider HIV/AIDS a priority.

Politically, several things conspire to put AIDS in a difficult place. 1.) Good treatment gives people the impression that the problem has been, if not solved, then at least dealt with adequately.  AIDS can now be treated as merely a medical issue, but this is problematic given that it is still diproportionately striking African-American, Latino communities and men who have sex with men. Respecting and responding to cultural contexts with prevention messages isn't going to happen in a physician's office. They simply don't have the time. 2.) In the early days of the epidemic to garner attention and funding (and probably because at that point we believed it), we told people that everyone was at risk. History and time has proven us wrong. While it is possible for anyone to become HIV+ the epidemiology tells us that some groups just have better odds. It will probably not shock anyone that those most likely to become HIV+ are already disenfranchised because of race, gender or sexual orientation. 3.) Finally, people are just tired of AIDS and are on to the next issue du jour. We have had our 15 minutes I fear.

I can't seem to move on to the next thing. I live a haunted life and it is worst on December 1st. I remember all the wonderful people I knew who aren't with us anymore. I see their faces, I hear their voices and sometimes in the quiet moments I feel them next to me. They are with me always. I ponder the good they would have done, but could not and the myriad of ways the world has been lessened because of their communal loss. Tomorrow I will remind anyone who wishes to listen that AIDS has not gone away, remember all that we have lost and hope for a world without AIDS. As much as I love my work, I would willingly find something else to do for a living. 

So here's my challenge to all of you, look in your local paper, website etc and go to a World AIDS Day event in your community. Take your friends, pass out condoms to the ones who won't come, start a conversation about safer sex, hell, call an AIDS organization and offer your house for a safer sex party. They are big fun. Oh! and practice safer sex in your own lives, of course. See you on December 1st!

Parenting: The Ugly Truth

by Molly Ivors

This is, as Thers notes, a well-executed production of an appalling aesthetic.

And the 4YO is perfectly happy.

Queen Everything

 by Molly Ivors

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Maureen Dowd. You sit down twice a week and ruminate about feng shui or getting your chakras read or how hot you think Barack is and how that meanie old Hillary won't go away, or how Bill got oral sex this one time and wasn't it great because you got a Pulitzer for that!

It's a helluva living, you have to admit. All you had to do to stay on the gravy train was sneer at girly democrats and reminisce about your dad and do your level best to keep the status quo shallow, focused on image rather than policy. To be sure, there was a sense of forced outrage about it all, but you contributed to the kneecapping of an American president, the belittling of his would-be heir, and the elevation of the functionally retarded scion of a family with decades-long connections to genuine evil, a man who had done more to destroy America domestically, internationally, and globally than anyone could have imagined, but hey! it was all in good fun.

There were flashes on conscience in there, flashes which brought you a book contract, but some nights you knew, as you lay awake at 3am, that your relentless trivialization of the national conversation was directly responsible for the state you parodied in your book.

Still, you got paid for it, and well. If this isn't what Pinch wanted, you wouldn't be pulling down the big bucks, after all. You may even have convinced yourself, now and again, that you were providing some kind of public service.

And then tell me how you can possibly excuse yourself from culpability for a system in which actual reporting is outsourced to barely-English speakers.  If you hadn't successfully ridden the wave of trivialization that demeaned real reporting, maybe people wouldn't think press releases and webcams were an acceptable substitute for feet on the ground. This didn't come out of nowhere, Maureen. Look in the mirror.

The Candyland Riots

I contemplate a Christmas with a 9-Year-Old, a 4-Year-Old, and a 2-Year-Old.

Send. Me. Booze.

Scary Monsters, Super Freaks

One "change" that I'd like to see is the end of the idea that grown, intelligent, accomplished women are, deep down, no more mature than junior high school students.

Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama's presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "a monster," is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department -- which Clinton is slated to head....

In short, she is part of a team that is likely to work directly with Clinton, a potentially awkward situation for the two women.

After the shrieking and hair-pulling, I expect that they will have a good cry and then bond over a pint of chocolate ice cream, after which point they will talk about boys and also perhaps nuclear non-proliferation.

In the meantime someone go give a binky to Crittenden, whose cheerleading for mass killing and ethnic cleansing makes him dislike Power, as he snivels here.

UPDATE. Jules Crittenden responds!

Hey, Whiskey Fire through-clickers, that guy old enough to be drinking that? Reading clearly isn’t his strong suit, but maybe focusing is the problem. Drunk and ignorant, not a pretty site.

Uh, nice riposte. Looks like some clever young wingnut's hepped up on goofballs.
Tell it to the free clip-art dancing leprechaun gif, lightweight.

 

Holiday Greetings from Bailout Nation

by flory

More fun in Bailout Nation! This time from your friendly insurance salesemen at AIG.

We'll start with the good news:

The company announced on Tuesday that Mr Liddy would be paid a salary of $1 for 2008 and 2009, and that Paula Rosput Reynolds, who joined AIG as chief restructuring officer in October, would receive no salary or bonus for 2008.

The company said the other five members of AIG’s seven-member leadership group would not receive annual bonuses for 2008 or salary increases through 2009.

So this sounds completely reasonable - in return for our mutlibillion dollar bailout, we're gonna promise teh gubmint that we won't spend all the money on compensation for our already multimillionaire senior executives. Your basic minimum trade-off, don't you think?

Hold on....not so fast.....

One day after announcing strict limits on salaries and bonuses for its top tier of executives, AIG revealed that some of those executives will receive millions in “retention bonuses” next year

So in that alternate universe, Bailout Nation, 'retention bonuses' are magic money and don't actually count as 'bonuses'.

An AIG spokesman said on Wednesday that retention bonuses were different from the annual bonuses included in Tuesday’s statement

Well sure. 

I'm gonna try that on the IRS. No sir, Mr. Taxman, that was a 'retention bonus', it's not really money at all. 

Here's the part that confuses my liberal mind:

The retention bonuses for 130 key executives were disclosed by AIG in September, after the US government rescued the firm from bankruptcy by purchasing 79.9 per cent of the company for $85bn.

79.9% is more than 50%, isn't it? I'm pretty sure I learned that in 6th grade.

So don't we, The Taxpayers, own this fucking company? Isn't making sure this kind of shit stops what we elected the Democratic congressional majority for? And if it isn't, why are they collecting a paycheck?

Or does it not work that way in Bailout Nation?

Also -- what exactly have these people done that we actually want to pay to "retain" them? Is a mindless rampage, destroying everything in its path, now worth millions? Because if it is, I know a few three year olds who should be worth billions....

Grownups V. Hacks: Explained

Greg Mankiw writes a blog post. Thers writes the punchline.

In a post about the Obama economic team titled The Grownups are Coming, Paul Krugman writes:

Seriously, isn’t it amazing just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing.

Like Paul, I am impressed by the new economic team. I know best the three economists coming from academia--Larry Summers, Christy Romer, and Austan Goolsbee--and they are all first-rate. They are excellent choices.

But are they really in a different class than those in the previous administration? Based a standard ranking of economists' academic accomplishments, here is where these three stand (out of more than 18,000 economists), together with the rankings of all the CEA chairmen appointed by President Bush.

11. Larry Summers
21. Greg Mankiw
35. Ben Bernanke
99. Eddie Lazear
132. Glenn Hubbard
249. Harvey Rosen
391. Christy Romer
653. Austan Goolsbee

Judging by this objective criterion, it looks like the two adminstrations are drawing economists from roughly the same talent pool.

Of course, if one defines "grownup" as a person who agrees with Paul Krugman, and "hack" as a person who does not, then one might come to a different conclusion.

I think by this point a generally accepted definition of "hack" is "a person who worked for the Bush administration."

That's just how it is.

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean You Can't Call Other People Paranoid

Victor David Hanson never ceases to delight and astonish.

We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer “me generation” that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.

We haven’t seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation’s computers would simply shut down on January 1, 2000 — and with them the country itself.

That's from today. Here's Hanson from 2002.

So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their spokesmen abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the edifice of your anti-Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers from within to even more difficult questions without. Do not blame others for problems that are largely self-created or seek solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home. Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about the deaths of thousands of Americans and your relationship with the United States. America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now you are on the verge of turning its people—who create, not follow, government—into an enemy: a very angry and powerful enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come.

Et freaking passim.

Victor David Hanson makes an IMAX projector look like a pinhole camera. Which we've known for a long time, but watching him inveigh against "hysteria" is actually sort of frightening. He should really just stick to writing about stuff like the wrangling between Axl Rose and Dr. Pepper, where at least his monomaniacal bugtit-looniness wouldn't stand out so much.

Santa Says America Sucks, As Does Jesus

Wingnuts seem to get very very touchy about the holidays. Michael Medved, for instance, has had his Thanksgiving ruined by Michael Moore.

Big Lies that Poison Thanksgiving and Subvert Our Sense of Honor

Eeek! Poison Thanksgiving!

For some of Barack Obama's most ardent supporters, his resounding victory represented the first sign of redemption for a wretched, guilty nation with a 400-year history of oppression.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, for instance, considered election night "a stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair. In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity."

Actually, Mr. Moore's summary of America's origins is a wholly expected distortion, shocking in its mendacity.

Like so many other revered figures in the worlds of entertainment and academia, the portly provocateur thoughtlessly recycles the darkest assumptions about the generous nation that provides his privileged, prosperous life.

You can tell Medved is hoppin' mad because he uses alliteration. And catachresis. Don't forget the catachresis. Or maybe he's just as stupid and contemptible as his mustache.

See, Medved can't enjoy Thanksgiving unless everyone admits that slavery and the savage treatment of Native Americans were no big deal. His sense of "honor" is apparently deeply involved in making slavery, say, look much better than it seems at first blush. Do I exaggerate? No! Do I shit you? Not!

The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor. In fact, the states dominated by the slave economy counted as the poorest, least developed in the union — providing the North with crushing economic superiority that brought victory in the War Between the States.

Of more than 20 million Africans taken from their homes in chains, at most 3% ever made their way to the territory of the United States (or the British colonies preceding our nation). Americans played no part in establishing the once-universal institution of slavery but played a leading, outsize role in bringing about its abolition.

This is all very nauseating and repulsively glib, and taking this position rests upon a conception of "honor" with which I am personally unfamiliar. It also rests upon an understanding of history with which people who know history are unfamiliar. Besides that, it makes no sense, even on its face. Dealing with it point by point is like having to sip sewage in order to keep it from spilling all over the carpet. Shit. Bottoms up!

For openers, what Medved means by "our forefathers" who "built America" is "white Europeans, mainly the British." It obviously is not, for instance, black people. Or Native Americans. Or Asians. Or hell, even many -- or even most -- European ethnicities, for crying out loud. Just to be clear on this point, because it's rather revealing about who exactly Medved considers to be "Americans."

Next, slavery certainly was "vastly more productive than free labor" in the Southern states. That's why it existed there. Neither cotton nor toacco were economically trivial crops, and they depended on slave labor. And they undergirded a society and culture that may have been eventually "crushed" by the northern states, but which did not exactly go down easily -- and had political circumstances unfolded in certain not remotely implausible directons, the South might have gotten away with the shit it tried to pull. Economic determinism is garbage hindsight history. Besides, Medved's silly point refutes itself: if slavery were such a trivial matter because of Industry and Free Labor, why exactly, pray, was a cataclysmic war fought over it? Kicks? Shits? Giggles? Laughs?

Which leads us to Medved's statistics, for which one might complain there is no source, were not said statistics completely pointess as a matter of simple logic. If the number of slaves in colonial America and then the United States only comprised only 1 billionth of a percentage of all African slaves -- even it it were just four guys, sum total (which it wasn't) -- and these four guys had the obvious effect that slavery and then institutionalized racism have clearly had on the history of the United States, it would still be what historians like to call "really fucking important."

As for the bit about Americans playing a leading role in abolishing slavery, I hope Wilberforce's shade sets fire to Medved's mustache. This is also a rather astonishing way of describing the Civil War. "Our forebears," or at least I suppose Medved's, killed each other in horrific numbers so as to "abolish slavery." Good for us! How pleasantly debated! "We" likewise seem to have been remarkably enlightened when it comes to Native Americans, whom, Medved informs us, "governmental forces" never "massacred," or "sponsored" massacring, whatever that means; and when Indians did get massacred, the government "invariably condemned" such massacring, which I'm quite sure came as a tremendous comfort to the massacred. Just ask a Pequot.

I do not understand why my "honor" or anyone else's is "subverted" if I refuse to look at American history and honestly judge it according to whether or not "we" -- and here I mean the nation as it aspires to be -- have ever genuinely believed and acted like we believe that we are all "created equal." If we haven't, well, shit, let's say so. Why not? That is and should be the baseline standard for our democracy, and I don't see why I have to go out of my way to make excuses for The Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears, or for that matter Bull Connor, or hell, Prop 8, in order to have a nice Thanksgiving with my family. Medved thinks otherwise, a contention that is even more disgusting than that hair he sprouted under his nose, which is grotesque enough all by itself. Freak.

A Very Wingnut Thanksgiving

Celebrate the holiday with Red State.

If you go out and do a Google search on "true story of thanksgiving" you will be inundated with articles of how the pilgrims made war and spread disease to the Indians. Well, that is true to history, but it has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. It occured in the years following the great gathering and we shouldn't let it tarnish the glory of God's bountiful blessing and peace among two different peoples that was celebrated that day (or three days as it were).

Well, that's a relief. It's not quite accurate, but a relief nonetheless, to know that the disease and slaughter came later. Whew! The Red State writer-person goes on to explain, via Rush Limbaugh, how the story of the Pilgrims proves that socialism is bad. This is an interesting theory but perhaps slightly confused from a historical point of view. In reality, as all students of the period know, the truly lasting lessons of the Plymouth colony are to do with turkey-fucking, something we ought to all keep firmly in mind this Thanksgiving.

And after the time of the writing of these things befell a very sad accident of the like foul nature in this government, this very year, which I shall now relate. There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury being about 16 or 17 years of age. (His father and mother lived at the same time at Scituate.) He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.  Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practice towards the mare. (I forbear particulars.) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though at first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others; and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; and confirmed it at his execution.

And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.

Upon the examination of this person and also of a former that had made some sodomitical attempts upon another, it being demanded of them how they came first to the knowledge and practice of such wickedness, the one confessed he had long used it in old England; and this youth last spoken of said he was taught it by another that had heard of such things from some in England when he was there, and they kept cattle together. By which it appears how one wicked person may infect many, and what care all ought to have what servants they bring into their families.

Some may think it's hard luck about the livestock getting executed too, but I say they were asking for it and had probably led him on with provocative behavior. Anyhow, Happy Thanksgiving, and if you want my special gravy recipe, my email address is in the sidebar.