Q: “What did you do during your youth, Grandma?”
A: “I complained on Twitter about people I considered insufficiently radical."
— Anna Holmes (@AnnaHolmes) March 17, 2015
It’s the first day of Spring, we’re due for more snow tonight, and this cold has halved my IQ while doubling my bile level.
What’s on the agenda in your neighborhood as we start the weekend?
Baud
Work.
And calling people out on Twitter.
kindness
Still at work. Counting the minutes till 4 left coast time.
Don’t feel bad about the snow. It was 70 here in N. Cal today.
raven
Bunch of questions for Cole about the dog on the last thread.
Baud
@raven:
Don’t people know Cole doesn’t read this blog?
gelfling545
I cleaned out my herbs & spices drawer in honor of the first day of spring. Some of those jars were old enough to vote. Tomorrow, the refrigerator!
Also I’m celebrating the birthday of my eldest daughter.
geg6
Trying to talk my guy into Chinese takeout tonight. Then vegging out in front of the tv with a glass of wine.
I need to chill out. So pissed after talking to a friend who is running for the county register of wills (don’t even ask me to explain why that’s an elected office or about our bloated county row offices). He was at the Democratic endorsement meeting last night and described a process so stupidly corrupt that it makes want to scream. County Dem leadership here is indistinguishable from the GOP’s and explains why their policies are really no different than that of the Teabaggers. Makes me stabby.
Sunday I’m taking the niece to see “Insurgent.” Maybe it will give me some pointers on how to deal with these assholes.
raven
@Baud: We’re hoping Anne might help.
Warren Terra
On the Balloon Juice home page, I just saw the most Balloon Juice ad ever, for this click bait: 15 reasons why you should never have pets
Amir Khalid
@Warren Terra:
Link doesn’t go anywhere. Please to fix?
geg6
@raven:
I hesitate to say this, but I can contact Cole directly if needed. Let me know if I need to.
Another Holocene Human
Young Turks News Show is live right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEC4Ij7HCS0
Just finished up talking about Perry and false conviction, moving onto James O’Keefe
NotMax
Trying to convince myself it is worth driving into town.
That am down to one lonely bottle of wine in the larder is a powerful incentive.
Another Holocene Human
@geg6: rich suburbanites control GOP and Dem on local level. hard to get good candidates and when you do get non-crazy, non-corrupt candidates it’s hard to get them over the finish line
GOP don’t mind that their process is shit because they’re delusional.
A local level Green party or something like that would have been awesome. Too bad Nader was another one of those crazy/grifters.
Another Holocene Human
Actually, labor is pretty good at putting up non terrible candidates but labor is so far into the minority and beat down that it’s not the force that it used to be.
piratedan
have to say ty for the time and space given to the Progressive Caucus Budget, shared in on Facebook and hope to see another thread where we link to it’s nuts and bolts and can discuss the choices made and why. We keep bleating that we don’t give enough time and space to “our side”, this would be a good opportunity to do so further and get people talking about why isn’t this the kind of common sense shit that should be getting discussed in Congress.
shelley
@gelfling545: Happy Birthday to her!
Yup, snow pouring down here too. I’m finishing up the illustrations to a children’s book set in Jamaica, so it seems double cruel. When I’m done-into the fleecy bathrobe, a couple glasses of Pinot Grigio and the search for a good movie.
geg6
@Another Holocene Human:
Labor is still pretty big here, but they are so incestuous with the local Dem leadership that they are useless.
Warren Terra
@Amir Khalid:
Let’s try this again (I’m on phone, and clumsy): link
geg6
Oh Jeebus. I used a bad word and I’m in moderation. Help me, Cole!
gogol's wife
Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow.
I am turning into Jack Nicholson.
raven
@geg6: Here’s what it said:
Shana
@gelfling545: I remember trying to do that at my dad’s house once, about 15 years after my mother died. There were bottles and cans that I know for a fact were there in my childhood but he’d be damned if he’d throw anything out.
I’m getting ready to do the same here next week in preparation for Passover. Lots of trips up and down stairs changing over dishes.
different-church-lady
The entire city of Boston is cold-cranky right now. There are times in this city when 30 degree cold feels so much worse than 18 degree cold.
geg6
@raven:
I’ll try to alert him.
PIGL
It was -20C here this morning, and all my pals in YVR have posting daffodils and cherry blossoms for weeks. I am grumpy, and have to spend all weekend reviewing technical appendices to project reports that not a dog will ever read. That make me more grumpy.
FlyingToaster
As of 6, it had started snowing in H₂OTown, with accompanying jeers from WarriorGirl — “Maybe we’ll get 12 feet of snow this winter, Mom!”.
I’m watching Tom&Jerry with her now.
Another Holocene Human
Liberal media is so fragmented … unless you want to go full radical and listen to Democracy Now. Which is good but I don’t think I could take that right now.
The Guardian is breaking news stories about the US. Al Jazeera isn’t bad. There’s MoJo, Alternet, and Rawstory (which are all crossposting, RS has the best commenters). Grist for environmental news/cause for depression. TYT is mostly commentary, so basically MSNBC but they can swear. TWIB is commentary too, but more entertaining/educational imo. Who’s funding journalism? How do progressives get the word out? Facebook? I guess it’s Facebook. Ugh.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Packing and praying my flights home from The People’s Republic aren’t delayed or canceled.
I haven’t been home for more than 2 weeks at a stretch yet this year.
NotMax
@Shana
Thanks for the heads-up. Only time of year that matzo farfel is on sale here (and even then one has haunt multiple stores to find it). Have to stock up on enough to make matzo brei for the next year.
Forget the other stuff. Regular single box of matzo runs from eight to ten bucks. Screw that. However, macaroons go on 50% off sale after the holiday, so they’re only four clams then.
different-church-lady
So, apparently the idiotic young professionals of America have moved on from putting every sentence into a maddening series of individual texts to putting phrases and solitary words into a maddening series of individual texts.
PHONEBUZZ: “Are you available to work”
PHONEBUZZ: “tomorrow”
PHONEBUZZ: “on a project?”
And the irony here is these are people who work in a communications profession.
NotMax
@FlyingToaster
A cold weather accompaniment.
Don’t fret too much over the raw eggs. If you milk or water is above 165 degrees F, the eggs are heated sufficiently that bacteria can’t readily survive.
Zinsky
One of my favorite T-shirts says, “I can’t believe I am still protesting this shit!”
mclaren
Q: “What did you do during your youth, Grandpa?”
A: “I ridiculed progressives like mclaren who offered serious proposals to fix a broken America (massive infrastructure build-out financed by gov’t bonds, nationalize big pharma and turn drug development over to the NIH; build a second nationwide passenger rail system on a parallel set of train tracks; rebuild cities to eliminate freeways insofar as possible and increase walkability & light rail transit; make all state colleges zero-tuition; put in place a guaranteed minimum income; intensively build-out solar & nuclear power while retiring coal & natural gas power & putting in place carbon cap & trade; end the War on Drugs and ending foreign wars by dismantling most of the U.S. military, retaining only Coast Guard and other facilities for coastal defense) by calling him `mentally ill’ and `in need of therapy’ and `ranting and raving.'”
Cervantes
@mclaren:
Interesting agenda. Is anyone in elected office, or running for office, proposing such things? If not, how would you try to make them happen?
Cervantes
@Zinsky:
“Change is transitory.”
mclaren
@Cervantes:
Lots of people are currently proposing such policies — just not people in power. William S. Lind and a host of other military reformers, most of whom spent 30-plus years in the Pentagon at various high levels before retiring, explicitly suggest dismantling most of the U.S. military. Lind points out that aircraft carriers are so vulernable to supersonic skhval torpedoes and pop-up missiles that they’re now useless, while almost all of America’s surface navy would be sunk in a matter of minutes by subs in any naval engagement. Subs are the only capital ships left, and since most of America’s submarines are ballistic missiles subs, useless relics of the Cold War, most of them should be retired too.
The airforce hasn’t had a single dogfight since the Vietnam war, and all current airplanes are rapidly being made obsolete by remotely-guided airframes that can bank more sharply and pull far higher G-forces without pilots in them. So all current manned jets (except for the close air support A-10) are obsolete and should be mothballed.
The U.S. army itself has announced that tanks are a relic of the past: recently the army protested to congress that they don’t need the amounts of money being allotted in current funding bills for tanks. Instead, the U.S. army plans on shifting to at a 30% robotic force by 2030. So most current army artillery and tanks and so forth are viewed by the Pentagon itself as obsolete and ready for retirement.
Lind has explicitly stated at least 80% of the current U.S. military is obsolete or useless and should be junked. Read Lind’s “On War” columns archived at Defense in the National Interest.
Lind is just one of many voices, including Chuck Spinney, Chet Richards, and many others. These people have advocating exactly what I’ve been advocating about the military since the late 1970s — there are no shortage of such people, it’s just that the Beltway insiders pay no attention to them at all.
Likewise, urban renewal advocates have offered many fresh and economically viable proposals for changing our cities to make them more energy-efficient and walkable. In fact, “walkability” is the hot new topic among young architects. It’s just that the city controllers and city planners in places like Los Angeles are tied down by the massive overhang of existing freeways and badly-designed urban centers surrounded by exurbs, so it’s a chicken-and-egg issue. The federal government could break this gridlock by providing funding and planning for wholescale redesign of our cities…but when we take a look at the latest highway bills offered by Republicans, what do we we? Bills that reduce funding for mass transit. Once again, plenty of people advocating what I’m saying — just not inside Washington D.C.
Once again building a nationwide separate passenger rail system has been proposed many times. In some forms, the proposal involves a high-speed bullet system along dense corridors on the east and west coasts with separate passenger trains running at regular speed as branches, in other proposals it’s simply a brand-new second set of tracks and trains to serve passengers. America’s rail system is excellent for freight — one of the best in the world. Problems for passenger trains crop up when the passenger trains must be moved off to siding to let freight trains through, causing huge delays, because both passenger and freight train systems in America use the same set of tracks.
There are so many proposals for ramping up solar and nuclear power that it’s unnecessary for me to point them out. Some of this is already happening — coal companies are starting to pay lobbyists to introduce bills in some states to prevent solar build-out because it endangers coal companies’ profits now. Many nuclear advocates including Bill Gates have proposed smaller-scale pebble-bed or thorium reactors that are inherently safe: they can’t melt down. These proposals go back to the 1970s. Once again, just not from inside Washington D.C.
How I would propose to make these things happen is to stop pissing away well over a trillion dollars a year on a national security state that serves no purpose but to spy on Americans and get involved in endless unwinnable foreign wars. A trillion dollars a year is a lot of money. You can build a surprising amount of infrastructure and nuclear and solar power griddage and big-pharma replacement using the NIH for a trillion dollars a year.
Just to give some simple practical number:
Current experts estimate our infrastructure needs at about 4 trillion for basic maintenance. That’s not building new light rail systems or altering cities to make ’em more walkable, just dull b oring things like fixing our potholes highways and reparing our collapsing bridges and shoring up our broken municipal water and sewage systems.
Well, by largely dismantling the U.S. military we could afford that 4 trillion within 4 years. Bang. Done. So once we’ve got our basic infrastructure back up to par, what do we need next? More expensive projects, like a nationwide nuclear/solar build-out. That can be done with a combination of tax incentives (solar) and federal bonds (nuclear) plus some seed money from the federal government. Say, 5 or 6 trillion dollars. Once again, that’s only 5 or 6 years since we now have 1 trillion free per year to spend without our worthless useless military gobbling up a trillion per year.
Once we’ve done these basic expenditures (which would take around 10 years), then we can use that one trillion per year to reinstate the old Federal revenue sharing policy that Ronald Reagan shut down. With Federal revenue sharing, states no longer have to pay for their colleges by themselves, so they can reduce their tuition to zero. A friend of mine was at Berkley in 1966 and said the only cost was that every student had to join the student union — $20 cost per year. They did it with federal revenue sharing. We can put that back in place today.
Nationalizing big pharma is just a political decision. That would cost nothing.
There’s nothing inherently ridiculous or outlandish about any of these proposals. The issue is merely that the lobbyist-captured pols inside the Beltway don’t like them.
Zinsky
@mclaren: All good ideas. Thank you. I was having a debate/argument with a conservative friend and I pointed out many of the things you do. The latest aircraft carrier and support fleet that was built cost in the neighborhood of $14 billion! And our enemies, like ISIS, don’t even own a rowboat as far as I know. As you point out, Iran could sink one with a couple of well-placed Exocet missiles. Why are we spending half the budget of the Department of Agriculture building these dinosaurs? After our debate, my conservative friend agreed with me. Same goes for the F-35 fighter plane – a complete boondoggle and waste of taxpayer money! We need to point out, time and time again, to conservatives that the Pentagon is the one wasting our tax dollars, not social programs!