Kit Stolz

Ron Paul is a racist paranoid homophobic crank…

…if what was published in his newletter for over ten years can be believed.

As one smartie put it, there are three options for Paul supporters, when faced with the massive weight of evidence (just see the scans of his newletters, aforelinked)

…there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

An example? Sure:

From October, l992, entitled : Carjacking: A Hip-Hop Thing to Do:

"If you live in a major city, you've probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months. In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob. What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example)."

Never in my lifetime have I seen a candidate for U.S. President endorse killing by gun.

Via Tim Dickinson.

From Romney to Rome to murder: today in inequality news

The inequality news from just one day in December 2011:

The likely GOP contender is almost certainly a member of the 1% (from a great story in the Times):

During his political career, Mr. Romney has promoted his experience as a businessman while deflecting criticism of layoffs caused by private equity deals by noting that he left Bain in 1999. But records and interviews show that in the years since, he has benefited from at least a few Bain deals that resulted in upheaval for companies, workers and communities.

One lucrative deal for Bain involved KB Toys, a company based in Pittsfield, Mass., which one of the firm’s partnerships bought in 2000. Three years later, when Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, the company began closing stores and laying off thousands of employees. More recently, Bain helped lead the private equity purchase of Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest radio station operator, which resulted in the loss of 2,500 jobs.

Much information about Mr. Romney’s wealth is not known publicly. Federal law does not obligate him to disclose the precise details of his investments. He has declined to release his tax returns, and his campaign last week refused to say what tax rate he paid on his Bain earnings.

But since Mr. Romney’s payouts from Bain have come partly from the firm’s share of profits on its customers’ investments, that income probably qualifies for the 15 percent tax rate reserved for capital gains, rather than the 35 percent that wealthy taxpayers pay on ordinary income.

The U.S. economy today is significantly more unequal than Rome at its imperial height, if you judge from the amount of total wealth owned by those at the top. From ThinkProgress:

"In the United States, the top 1 percent controls roughly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. According to the study, which examined Roman ledgers, previous estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages, Rome’s top 1 percent controlled less than half that at the height of its economic power, as Tim De Chant notes at Per Square Mile:

Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.

Of course, the millions of Romans at the bottom of the empire’s class structure — the conquered and enslaved, the poorest Romans, and the women who had little civic or economic empowerment — would probably disagree with the study’s conclusion. Still, it serves as yet another highlight of how large the income gap in the United States has become over the last three decades."

And, most startling of all, a great story in The Guardian about how in Ohio unemployed men were lured to their death by offers of $300 a week [corrected] and a trailer to live in.

[Ron] Sanson, 58, replied to a job advert on Craigslist in October looking for a watchman on an Ohio farm. The position paid just $300 a week but came with a trailer home to live in free. The applications flooded in from desperate men across the country willing to work for low pay just to have a little income.

Except there was no farm and no job.

Richard Beasley, a self-styled preacher with convictions for burglary, is alleged to have posted the advert to lure men to an isolated wood and shoot them.

Beasley and a 16-year-old schoolboy, Brogan Rafferty, are accused of shooting four men, killing three of them, who travelled from as far as Virginia and Florida as well as from Ohio. The police suspect there are more victims.

Here's a picture of Beasley's alleged co-conspirator:

“This most unusual career”: Vaclav Havel

This has been a tumultuous year, and it continues with the loss of one of world's greatest civilians, Vaclav Havel. I miss him already.

For me this is perhaps his most essential quote:

…you do not become a "dissident" just because one day you decide to take up this most unusual career. Your are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins with an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

And right on cue, from a truly spectacular piece on the rebellion in Russia by David Remnick, here comes a perfect example of what Havel was talking about, a civilian who discovers she is a dissident.

Or something:

…there are perfectly ordinary people in Putin’s Russia who find themselves wandering into a life of activism, as if by accident. In the summer of 2007, a diminutive businesswoman named Yevgenia Chirikova was walking with her husband in an oak wood near Sheremetyevo Airport called Khimki Forest. She saw that many of the trees were marked with red paint. When she returned home, she scanned various Web sites, and learned that the government had contracted to cut a huge swath through the forest’s swamps and floodplains, felling thousands of old oaks, to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Until then, Chirikova had been serenely upwardly mobile, concentrating on her small engineering company and her growing family. She enjoyed her walks in Khimki Forest, part of a greenbelt around the capital. “I didn’t know about the situation with Putin,” she said. “I wasn’t political. I was lazy.” Now she realized that if she didn’t raise her voice the trees in the forest would fall with barely a sound.

Chirikova, who looks like a homier Jean Seberg, turned out to be a charismatic civic leader, making effective speeches, keeping up active Web sites and Twitter feeds, and relentlessly drawing attention to the issue. As she organized demonstrations and acts of disobedience in Khimki Forest—members of her group set up a camp there and regularly thrust themselves in front of bulldozers, getting themselves arrested, and even beaten—she learned that the oligarch most closely connected to the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend and judo coach. She also discovered that local officials and Vinci, the French construction firm that was doing much of the work, were supremely uninterested in her movement’s argument that the highway could easily be built without doing damage to the forest. “The letters I got back boiled down to this: If it’s a federal project, then it’s legal,” she said.

Below a portrait of Yevgenia Chirikova, in the hoodie, with her enviro activist friends:

You know how proud Havel is of her, and all such protesters.

Christopher Hitchens: Why I hate Christmas

Well, at least the late, great Christopher Hitchens won't have to endure any more Christmas carols.

The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events.

Jesus Christ as Dear Leader! Brilliance.

Doubt that Hitchens would be happy at peace. Here's wishing him rest.

Tennessee Williams: I’m not a typical homosexual

(In case there was any doubt)…from an interview with Tennessee Williams:

"I'm not a typical homosexual. I can identify completely with Blanche — we are both hysterics — with Alma [Winehouse], and even with Stanley, though I did have trouble with some of the butch characters. If you understand schizophrenics, I'm not really a dual creature, but I can understand the tenderness of women and the lust and libido of the male, which are, unfortunately, too seldom combined in women."

Playboy interview, 1973

[caricature from the late great David Levine]

How to pitch an article: James Wolcott

From a first rate review by Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles TImes. The witty Wolcott, now at Vanity Fair, first worked at the Village Voice, and learned from reading other pitches how to write to intrigue:

"Avoid preamble — flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it's only a five-hundred-word slot …."

It's a lot harder than it sounds, but a good reminder on what to do, and what not to do.

Meanwhile the LA Times itself is headed for another editor and another excursion to hell. Painful. Despite all its woes, it's a good paper. To be punished for trying so hard has got to hurt.

Is it too late to stop climate change? (the Onion)

Reporting from Geneva, the Not the New York Times:

A new report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned Monday that global warming is likely to become completely irreversible if no successful effort is made to slow down the trend before 2006.

Unless greenhouse-gas emissions are drastically reduced by then, the report concludes, it will be too late to avoid inflicting a grave environmental catastrophe upon future generations.

"We have absolutely no time to waste," said Dr. William Tumminelli, lead author of the report…

It's a joke, but as usual these secret satirists get it exactly right.

Let me offer an example, from my recent trip to the ginormous annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where the Moscone Center is invaded every December by 18,000 scientists.

At perhaps the biggest press conference this year, with James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climatologist, Ken Caldeira, a leading expert on ocean acidification, and Eelco Rohling, a European paleoclimatology expert, I think most of the reporters asked the irreversibility question.

Probably the most published of scientific reporters, Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, began by asking the panel if we have passed the tipping point of global warming.

(Interestingly, he asked the question but didn't write about Hansen's warning at this conference, if his Twitter stream can be trusted.)

Perhaps the veteran AP reporter considered it old news. Hansen has been staying the same thing at nearly every one of the American Geophysical Union conferences I've attended, going back to 2007, which is that the situation is dead serious and "we simply can't afford to burn all the fossil fuels."

But it wasn't just Borenstein. The Independent, The Nation, and another reporter, each in his own way, asked the same basic question.

For Hansen, the question misses the point. Even we have tipped over into a new climate regime, as seems obvious to most Americans, we can still choose to moderate the damage.

Or not.

[Hansen in the press room at the AGU, talking to enterprising Steve Connor of The Independent]

Researchers find high levels of mercury in CA coastal fog

This is the story I found at this year's fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union — how fog off California's coastal coast may be importing mercury from the ocean on to the land.

The team, led by chemist Peter Weiss-Penzias, reported finding "very high" levels of mercury, a neurotoxin, in the fog, according to a paper presented Thursday to a geophysical science conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"These are unheard of levels for methylmercury," said Weiss-Penzias. "People have measured methylmercury downstream from old mercury mines, where the bugs [microbes] have to convert inorganic mercury in sediment into methylmercury, and the highest levels they found were four parts per trillion. Well, our highest levels were 10 parts per trillion."

Weiss-Penzias suggested that it's possible that there is a "wash-out" — a sort of invisible bathtub ring of methylmercury left behind by the fog. That's where he hopes to take his research next.

The art of John Lennon

For this day, a marvelous Tom Ashbrook interview with the warm and thoughtful Tom Riley, who has written this year's definite biography of John. Riley notes:

Beyond his music, Lennon’s talent as a cartoonist, illustrator, lithographer, and collage artist influenced every aspect of his work. His songs carve out richly textured spaces of sound, which spring from a lifelong interest in pop and modern art. With his art-school classmate Stu Sutcliffe, Lennon roamed Hamburg’s museums in 1960, talking about how rock ’n’ roll seemed poised to fulfill modern art’s promise. One night, Sutcliffe recognized the artist Eduardo Paolozzi at a nightclub with students, and approached him about his work, long before Paolozzi became a touchstone for Andy Warhol. This visual arc runs from Sutcliffe on through the classic Beatle pop art of Peter Blake (the Sgt. Pepper cover) and Richard Hamilton (the White Album package) and the Magritte-inspired Apple logo, and gives Lennon’s second marriage, to New York City–based conceptual artist Ono, hints of fate.

And from the Internet and a Portland gift shop, a Lennon quote that just won't quit.

Hope we can trust it — but it sounds like John, doesn't it?

Dumb headline of the year: Sugar bombs edition

Washington Post, you're better than this:

Some Children's Cereals Packed with Sugar, Study Finds

Really?

Didn't Calvin tells us this, what, twenty-five years ago?

I know, it's a study by the Environmental Working Group, but that's no excuse for the lack of imagination.

Here's Grist's:

Cereal Offenders

Ah. That's better.