Donna Brazille Speaks to Racism and Says No Way

Donna Brazille rocks. She is conversationally eloquent and tells it to the people, all the people.

At The Yorker Festival: click here for video 4 min

Progressive Decay: St. Louis

Compassion: Scientifically Proven to Improve Health

Data from a new Emory University study suggests that individuals who engage in “compassion meditation” based on a thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice (called "lojong" in Tibetan), appears to effectively reduce the inflammatory and behavioral responses to stress that have been linked to depression and a number of physical illnesses. The practice revolves around fostering a sense of heightened compassion for others.

This is the best news I've heard in a long time. Finally, people can satisfy their own self interest by focusing on compassion rather than the judgment we usually run to for validation. Hmmm. This could be big.

Here's the link.

Frank Paynter and I talk scary shit

Frank Paynter is a comforting voice without the denial too many comforting thoughts demand of us these days. I mean, did we really just give our future GDP to fucking bankers? Has the road to martial law not been paved with 100% lawyer-certified goldshit bricks? Are there a million people on the homeland security watch list? Did we really kill a million Iraqisa? Torture? Disappearing? Held without charges? "Freedom Zones?"--it's just too much, especially in light of the presence of military crowd control specialists on US soil, tasked with putting down any civilian insurrection--not in so many words. Read it yourself.

Naomi Wolf has the naked and very raw sound of truth about her that's amplified by the very possible hazard that might await. The White House has absolute, unequivocable, disappeared-maybe-yes-you-too, power these days. When does power not get used?

I realize who haven't been following the low level chatter on this subject for as long as I have may think this is nuts as it gets, that I'm a whacked out conspiracy theorist with no tether on reality. Let's all hope so--those who partake, pray on it mightily, because nothing would please me more than being invade-Iraq wrong on this issue.

Why has Bush so thoroughly paved the way to declare martial law, built secret prisons, made it extra-legal to spy on Americans, hired his own army, reserved the "right" to detain who he wants without just cause, etc., etc., etc., when he's already taken over our children's tax dollars in a premature ejaculation of criminal largesse to proven and well-paid despoilers of the public good? Sorry, my sentences get long when I'm worried.

I don't sleep like I used to. Maybe I'm over-tired and overwrought. But I really am afraid that I'm not. I would love to spin myself into a little cocoon of magic in which this all went away, we have our lovely President Obama in January, and Bush, et al, slink into the ignominy and public humilation they labored so diligently to earn.

Let me know what you think after clicking the links and reading through all this.

Bremer, Bird and Fortune: Distraction for a Trying Day

British humor tends to the dry, but there's no escaping the funny in this lovely bit of British humor. Dinner party conversation turns to recycling and as though a truth serum is in the pasties, we hear how these upper crusters really feel about being put out to save the environment.

Favorite line? "The terrorists have won."

Incoherent marble-mouth niglets? Video makes the white underbelly of America vicious.

This video is hot on reddit under the title "Black teenagers take Obama cult joke too far." First off, what cult joke? Second, what's the bfd? It's inappropriate as a school activity, sure, but shades of Nazi Youth?

I'm much more worried about Blackwater.

This kind of performance art has a long tradition in the African-American community. When we lived in a school district that was both 80% African American and remarkable, we saw these chant and dance routines several times a year at school assemblies. We always had stellar marching bands, too.

Thematically, it's a bit weird when the kids shift from "Yes I can" rhetoric to talking points about Obama's health plan. I mean, "healthcare for those who can't afford Medicaid," (?).

What I found truly alarming though were the comments. NightDragon2883 wasn't alone in his sympathies when he wrote, "At least when the Hitler Youth had their marches and chants you could understand what they were saying, unlike these incoherent marble-mouth niglets [emphasis mine]. Gonna be a fun 4 years if this douchebag gets into office."

NightDragon might have had a clearer view of the video had he removed his hood first. Gawd, I can't believe the hatred-stoked fear some white people have of black folks--evolution, please hurry. Things are looking ugly in the pale and fetid underbelly.

Control and Magical Thinking--Lack of One Leads to the Other

Mind Hacks has an interesting post about an experiment in this week's Science that found "reducing participants' control increase[s] the tendency for magical thinking and the perception of illusory meaning in random or patternless visual scenes."

From imagining images where there are none to believing a mini-mall full of virgins are just waiting for that bomb to blow so they can have their wanton way with you is a long trot. But it's on the same slippery slope.

Like Dan Quale said, the mind is a terrible thing to lose, and we're culturally encouraged to let faith leap off even the tallest buildings without ever asking ourselves empirical questions.



Magical thinking is a placebo that can be like a crack pipe full of rocks for those so inclined. I'm not concerned with what consenting adults do with their gray matter, but too often they demand that all must toke, or suffer their consequences.

I don't want to take away anyone's security blanket, but after magical thinking reaches a critical mass, it's like putting anchovies on half a pizza. The stink spreads.

Nature

Feel kinship for her awful kids, just keep her out of the lower 48

Look closely as Palin's daughter flips the bird as if born to the barn.

I forget which one of her tikes this is, Trigger or Snapping Turtle--something like that. See how charming she is, flipping the fuck you at her brother? Word is the governor's boy, the soldier, was threatened with jail time for dealing drugs unless he pulled his act together in the military. And Miss Alaska must so be looking forward to becoming a grandmother! It's a risk you run when the only thing kids know about sex is that they shouldn't do it, but it's wonderful. We had a village idiot around here get pregnant the same way--she had no idea could feel so good and make a baby, too. It's a puzzle all around.

Like a lot of folks, I can relate to rotten kids. If you don't think your kids are rotten, you probably don't much about how they really are.

Joe Six-pack knows his kids are rotten. He and his wife Shawnette love to chase their gamey meat with a cold can of Stag. He doesn't trust anyone who wouldn't go to his church. He is convinced that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child--contrary to all evidence at home, but it's the authoritarian world view that keeps him comfy. He's a follower for the most part, because life is unfair. But given a little authority, he tends cruelly toward the heavy end of the nighclub.

He and his wife don't tell other about those intense dreams involving the arctic governor letting her hair down.

Rove is a smart, smart man to have picked a peck of Palin. If anyone could feed into the smaller side of the American psyche, the part that believes Fox is fair and balanced, it's this lovely lady.

Governor Palin does have a wink and a catchy tune, but she's too slow to dance to--not when the whole fucking shooting match is at stake. She's ready for a seat on "The View," not as Miss Runner Up to the biggest, oldest cheese in America.

Disarmingly charming, self-satisfied and incurious, she's easily dishonest and proudly unsophisticated. All the while, just like Dubya, she's dead certain of all that rattles around in her head.

We really, really need to stop recruiting from the that end of the DNA pool. She does have that reptilian sort of intelligence that makes her dangerous. She's cunning, that one, and vindictive. She says her rudder's stuck on true north, but she'll wiggle it around if she thinks she can get away with it.

I bet all that McCain thinks about is wiggling rudders.

Republicans will have to steal another election to get her to D.C. They couldn't possibly pull it off a third time, could they?

First, get towels and a man with three dangly toilet parts

French and Saunders at their best.