I had something else lined up for tonight, but I read in the Times today that Crispian St. Peters died recently, so I changed my plans. He had precisely one hit here in the States, and truth to tell, it was not such a great song, but it’s one of those tunes that sticks with you. In fact, if you’re not careful you can’t get rid of it. I understand the Germans have a word for the phenomenon (ah, here it is). Mark Twain wrote a very funny short story about the affliction, and how to get rid of it, the events of which took place on Farmington Avenue, a hop, skip and a jump from where I grew up. Anyway, this is one of those songs. Go ahead. Listen to it. Now listen to it again. Once more, maybe. Let it sink in a bit. Now, see if you can get it out of your head in any way other than banging said head against a wall (and even that won’t work) or somehow inflicting it on someone else. It’s called Pied Piper.
I discovered in the Times obituary that before Pied Piper he had a hit in England with You Were on My Mind, which was a hit here by a group called We Five. His version is actually much better, since the We Five (who were also one hit wonders) converted it into a happy song. Here is his version. Maybe, if you already have Pied Piper running through your head, this can help get rid of it, or maybe it will just replace it.
Well, according to the Treasury, we taxpayers have now been fully repaid for all those Tarp loans. But it’s important to note that those loans were basically interest free, and in fact the banks made money on them.
Seems that Carly Fiorina dissed Barbara Boxer’s hairstyle, which trivial incident is worthy of a front page article in the New York Times, which appears dedicated to the proposition that the incident is both totally trivial and monumentally important. Personally, trivial or not, I hope it hurts Fiorina, but I’m a partisan hack.
What I find interesting is the length some reporters will go to to get ridiculous “expert” quotes that prove or disprove the meme they are trying to push. What’s amazing about this one is that the reporter in question is a woman. Yet, take a gander at this:
“If you are dissing their hair, you are dissing their personality and their lifestyle,” said Billy Lowe, a celebrity stylist who owns a hair salon in Los Angeles. “It is probably the one thing a woman spends most of her time on every day. It’s always on their minds. Your hair is your personality.”
Of all the people in California to ask about women’s relationship to their hair, who does she pick: a high end hair stylist who makes a living off of narcissistic women who may, in fact, have the money and idle time to obsess about their hair. His customers self select. It’s all he sees so he extrapolates and tars all women.
I don’t know a single woman who obsesses about her hair. My wife is a woman. I can’t get inside her head, but judging by her words and actions she spends “most of her time” thinking about her job, her kids (they’re gone but she still worries), politics, her garden, organizing political functions, etc. Hair is unlikely to make the top 100 on her list of concerns, and I’m sure she’s not alone. Most women, as opposed to those who go to celebrity stylists, are struggling to get by in a world that the husbands of women who go to celebrity stylists have rigged against them. They don’t have time to think about their hair, which is one of the accidental benefits of being in the class of people who are getting screwed by the people who have wives who can afford to obsess about hair.
I was just watching Countdown and, in typical breathless Olbermann fashion, they were reporting on a proposed “deal” whereby BP would agree not to pay a dividend if, somehow, the federal government turned down the rhetorical heat. This is apparently BP’s idea, and it is reported that it is unlikely to fly.
Apparently the new British PM is putting heat on Obama to turn down the heat on BP. Supposedly, the British government is concerned because BP is one of its largest corporations, and if BP tanks, it could affect the pensions of millions of Britons.
It appears to be the too big to fail argument, applied to an oil company. As always, in order to justify helping the corporation, we will start hearing about the collateral harm-the harm to pensioners, in this instance. We will be told that BP deserves a bailout, either directly, or indirectly by relieving it of liability, in order to help these poor innocent pensioners.
So, to help the pensioners, in one way or another we will have to funnel money through BP, where a certain amount of it, for that’s how these things work, will wind up as bonuses for the folks who destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. After all, they need their lives back. It would never occur to the powers that be that it would be more efficient to just bail out the pensioners, and leave BP to fend for itself.
Some good news out of Washington, sort of. The Senate beat back an attempt by Lisa Murkowski, the person who only appears sane when contrasted with her nemesis, Sarah Palin, to deprive the EPA of the right to regulate greenhouse gasses. Had the resolution passed, presuming it would have had legal effect, it would have destroyed any chance, no matter how remote, that the Senate will pass any type of energy legislation. It’s only the threat of the EPA doing something sensible that furnishes the incentive for the Senate to do something half-baked and inadequate.
We can thank Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic establishment for one third of this:
Murkowski’s resolution had 40 co-sponsors, including three Democrats – Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Tuesday night Bill Clinton stood on stage with Lincoln and embraced her after she beat a real Democrat. Two days later she stands tall with the Republicans to block any chance, no matter how slim, that we will take some effective action to deal with climate change or our dependence on oil, for make no mistake, this vote was all about protecting the oil and coal industries. We can take cold comfort from the fact that come January, she will be replaced by a person who calls himself a Republican.
I sometimes feel I’ve passed on too much from Pharyngula, but Myers has admitted that his readers tip him off to stories, a luxury I don’t enjoy, so I don’t feel too guilty. I had to comment on this because it involves one of my favorite historical figures.
A Spanish director has made a movie about Hypatia. I first read about her while plowing through Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Believe it or not I read every word of that multi-volume tome, excluding a few footnotes. What can I say? I was young and foolish. In any event, her story stuck with me long after I forgot the details of most of the rest of the history of the world. I’ve since read a biography of her.
Hypatia lived in the fourth century. If memory serves, she was both a philosopher and mathematician, and was roughly equivalent to a university professor. She lived in Alexandria, which was, at the time, perhaps the last bastion of learning in the Empire. To say the least, she did not keep in her place. She even drove her own chariot.
She lived at a time when the Western mind was closing, not to open again for over a thousand years. Christianity had become the official religion. The Christians argued among themselves about esoteric points of doctrine and reason was abandoned by all but the pagans, who experienced persecution far more vicious and pervasive than anything to which the Christians were subjected.
Besides the characteristics I’ve already mentioned, Hypatia was a pagan, which stands to reason because she stood for reason. The combination of all her qualities made her particularly toxic, and she met her rightful fate. A mob of Christians, spurred on by “Saint” Cyril, dragged her naked through the streets until she was dead, to the greater glory of Jesus, Amen.
I have no idea how faithful the movie is to the facts, but it appears from the trailer below that Hypatia is the good guy, meaning the Christians are the baddies, which is definitely in line with the facts. The movie was a blockbuster in Spain, but apparently can’t find a distributor here, though it has all the hallmarks of a hit, including someone Myers characterizes as a star (Rachel Weisz), though I admit I’ve never heard of her, which means nothing, given my knowledge of current film.
What does it say about the decline of this country that a movie like this can be shown in Catholic Spain, the former home of the Inquisition, and more recently of Franco, but it can’t be shown in the United States, the country that practically invented religious freedom (can’t forget Holland) and which was founded on enlightenment principles? But it’s easy to see why there have been no takers so far. Can’t you just imagine Bill Donahue hyperventilating about this one? Hypatia would feel right at home, and not in a good way.
Nowadays, one has to take anything the folks at FIredoglake have to say with a grain of salt. It’s a bit of a Jane Hamsher cult, and she seems to be a bit over the top in her criticisms of Obama. Even allowing for that, this post appears to be cogently argued. If it’s true, or even close to true, the Gulf Coast is in for big trouble.
Senator Nelson of Florida, who should know, implies that the well casing and well bore are compromised. This may make stemming the leak impossible until the relief wells are dug, and its a direct result of BP’s use of substandard materials, all of which must be known by the Administration.
If, in fact, BP used so many shortcuts in the drilling process, and who can doubt it at this point, it does seem rather strange that the Obama administration, as the Firedoglake post points out, is so willing to put the best face on what they are doing out there. They seem to be buying into failure, to the point where BP’s eventual failure will be their’s as well, even though their actual responsibility for the disaster, and the failure to stem it thus far, is almost non-existent. It would seem that from both a PR and policy standpoint, it would make more sense to take a hard line with BP, publicize its failures, past and present, distance yourself from them at the same time you ride herd on them with regard to the present efforts to stop the leak, and be brutally frank about the likely results. It only makes sense to get out in front of the bad news and keep blaming BP in advance of actual events There is no logical reason why the Administration needs to cover up for BP in order to get their best effort out of them; in fact, it may be the case that adopting a critical position might work better.
Yet another example of Obama’s tendency to unnecessarily align himself with the loathed (see, e.g. Goldman Sachs). Bush was an oil man through and through, but he was ready to throw one under the bus when it was politically convenient (e.g., “I didn’t know Kenny-Boy Lay“). Obama could do the same with more political consistency, but he seems constitutionally unable to draw blood.
A few days ago I linked to a story about a school principal in an Arizona town that ordered the faces whitened on a mural. The mural depicted actual children in the school system. He did it in reaction to racist telephone calls he received, which were encouraged by a right wing city councilman who had a radio show.
The artists refused to whiten the faces, the councilman lost his radio show, and the principal has apologized. Maybe Arizona has hit bottom.
Bush-era CIA medical personnel conducted experiments on detainees in CIA custody to provide legal cover for torture as well as to justify and shape future torture techniques, a just-released report from the Physicians for Human Rights alleges.
“The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation,” said Frank Donaghue, the CEO of PHR, a nonprofit organization of health professionals.
