Jamison Foser says ...

8 Words of Wisdom for Week Ending 3/20/2009 #4

Honeybees are pretty important. See, humans need food. Without it, we die. And bees not only produce honey, they pollinate all kinds of crops -- onions, cashews, celery, strawberries, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, apples ... you get the picture. Honeybees play an important role in our food supply, and our economy. And honeybees have been disappearing at an alarming rate in recent years, for reasons that are not fully known.

Here's how the state of Pennsylvania described the problem last May:

Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff today said the commonwealth will increase funding to continue research on the potentially devastating "Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder."

"Honey bees are critical to Pennsylvania agriculture and to our state's economy," said Wolff. "Pollination from the honey bees determines fruit set and increases fruit quality at an estimated value of $80 million. We can't afford to be lax in dealing with this problem."

According to a study by two Cornell University professors, honeybee pollination accounted for $14.6 billion worth of crops annually between 1996 and 1998.

Honeybee research doesn't sound so funny now, does it?

Now, you can't expect most Americans to know this. Most Americans don't give much thought to bees beyond hoping they don't get stung by one. And that's fine: The life cycle and migratory patterns of bees, and their resultant effects on avocado and cucumber growth, are fairly obscure subjects. We can't, and shouldn't, expect the typical American to know about or act upon these things. After all, there are a lot of obscure but important things that, as a nation, we need to know about and act upon. We can't know about and act upon them all individually; it's literally impossible.

That's another of the reasons we have a government: to know about and act upon the things we cannot know about and act upon individually. It's one of the reasons we watch television and read newspapers, too: They have the resources that we lack to learn about important but obscure things, and the ability to educate us. (This is where some defenders -- and critics -- of the news media will remind me that the media's job isn't to educate the public, much as I might wish it was; their job is to make money. To that I say: How's that working out? Maybe it's time to try a more serious approach.)

Source - Media Matters

No comment other than to ask you to read the entire article at the link provided above. It does a terrific job articulating the role the people need the government to play, and an even better job of indicting the media for playing around while the conservatives do stupid things. Great stuff.

Frank Schaeffer says ...

8 Words of Wisdom for Week Ending 3/20/2009 #1

Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom. And since the Republicans are now anti-American members of an Obama-must-fail insurgency, lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy: talk doom, and keep the economy in a panic and we may get what we wish for.

Don't conservative Republicans object to the lies? No, because the Republicans don't have any actual and traditional conservative followers left. The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward -- there-is-no-global-warming -- rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

The Republican religious nuts are rooting for Jesus to "rapture" them, not for America, and the neoconservatives are rooting for war and the Israeli hard liners, not for America. Truth (and sanity) are out the window.

So, what is the problem with lying to our faces, say, claiming that all American's taxes are going up when 95% of American's taxes are going to go down? Why not claim Obama is a socialist, even if he's not? Why not say anything at all to drive our country into a pit when losing is seen as winning? That, is all the Republicans have to offer America: more lies on a path to destruction from which the Republican "leadership" plans to resurrect themselves and "save" America from Obama.

Source - The Huffington Post and Crooks and Liars

I saw Mr. Schaeffer's post at Huffington, and then Crooks and Liars posted a video interview with him. The quote is from his Huffington Post piece. Do you want to learn about how the religious left operates? Mr. Schaeffer is your man.

Pissed Off

8 Thoughts About the Stimulus for 2/9/2009 #7

I'm starting to seriously wonder about the electoral decisions made by the people of South Carolina. You see, to Gov. Mark Sanford, the systematic collapse of the American economy isn't a bad thing; it is a fair and just outcome. It is the "free market" working as intended.

Republicans love to talk about their ideals, as most ideologues do, but ideals pale in comparison to people. The simple fact of the matter is this: the people who will be hurt the most by the struggling economy did not play any role in the creation of the mess. As for the people who causes the mess, even if we shut down every corporation whose executives made bad decisions which contributed to this crisis, they would not be living in poor houses, only the worker bees at the bottom of the scale will.

This "it's not the government's place" stuff is a load of crap. People are suffering. It is a moral imperative that we take every step we can, not just to alleviate the suffering, but to restore our economy to the prosperous state that the American people deserve.

Stupid Conservative

8 Random Items for 1/8/2009 #7

Fox News moron Brit Hume says ...

(T)he New Deal -- everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed.

Funny, but I don't think that is the case. History shows that the New Deal ensured the very survival of millions of Americans during the depression, and, if not for the very conservative attempt to balance the budget in 1937, might very well have pulled us out of the depression. As for what did pull us out of the depression, that would be World War II, or more specifically, the largest government spending project ever undertaken by our nation.

I apologize for the redundancy in the headline.

Of Couse

8 Random Items for 1/7/2009 #2

You see, the problem is with their communication, getting the message out, you know, twittering. It has nothing to do with what they actually have to say. The capacity for denial in today's Republican party is astounding, and trust me, I know something about denial. I'm a Democrat.

Remember my friends, conservatism can never fail, even when it does.

Hang 'Em

8 Random Items for 12/8/2008 #4

I don't actually want to see the five Blackwater contractors who gunned down a number of innocent Iraqis, including young children, in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. I'm against capital punishment and I have to remain true to that belief. However, the crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq should be punished every bit as severely as if the same crime had been committed here.

Contractors abuse has been rampant during this war. It is just another failure of the conservative philosophy of government.

Privatization Works!

8 Random Items for 12/5/2008 #7

Yet another example of the benefits of privatization for the United States of America. As usual, the profit motive results in a better quality service. Consider the ice situation.

The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that “still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces.”

There's also KBR's sterling handling of human remains.

“Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains,” the lawsuit states. “The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces.”

Of course, this is just our armed forces we are talking about. Besides, isn't a little extra suffering for our troops a fair price to pay at the holy grail of small government? As dday says at the link above, "I suppose you could provide bodily-fluid free ice to US forces, if you wanted to increase the size of government to outrageous degrees. Or you could believe in the shining glory that is private enterprise and the free market."