We’re heading home to tasks undone!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

You ought to be very angry:
Later today, we’re heading home from this, the Hudson Valley, on Amtrak. And no, we don’t mean Acela!

In the meantime, you ought to be angry about many things found in recent newspapers.

For starters, you ought to be angry about this passage shown below from Paul Krugman’s new column. The column deals with the power of the mega-rich, about whose vast wealth most of us are less than fully informed:
KRUGMAN (9/29/14): Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income”—other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.
We were a tiny bit peeved by that highlighted passage. Here’s why:

How many years have gone by since we started identifying that key piece of sleight of hand? Back in the day, we endlessly tied it to Sean Hannity, who was endlessly pimping it out.

In that highlighted passage, Krugman is citing a tightly-scripted piece of disinformation. We identified it more than a decade ago, along with a group of companion misdirections.

Fiery liberals and mainstream journalists have aggressively let such matters go. It’s very, very, very hard to induce career journalists to discuss the highly visible ways the American people get disinformed about financial and budget matters and, in the process, get fleeced.

If a problem deals with race and sex, a different rule obtains! In those cases, the modern, millionaire corporate liberal will shout the outrage to the skies, keeping your eyeballs over there, where you can't follow the money.

The so-called “social issues” are very important, of course. They’re also very useful to the plutocrat class. Over at the new Salon, an astonishing piece by Daisy Hernandez has the commenters calling each other names. In these, and equally useful ways, we the rubes get turned against each other, as people like the awful Hernandez carry off sacks of cash.

We’ll discuss the Hernandez piece upon our return to our award-winning campus. For now, let’s return to the ways the public gets played concerning issues of wealth:

In yesterday’s Sunday Outlook section, the Washington Post presented its weekly “Five Myths” feature. Yesterday’s piece was written by Darrel M. West, a functionary at the Brookings Institution. West’s piece bore this slightly concerning headline:

“Five Myths About Billionaires”

We’ll admit it—we were already concerned. As Krugman notes today, we don’t have anywhere near enough "myths" about the ongoing role of our billionaires.

What “myths” was West prepared to debunk? Incredibly, this was the very first myth his piece addressed:

“1. Billionaires can buy elections and change public policy.”

Billionaires can buy elections and change public policy. In bold print, these obvious facts were trumpeted as a “myth” in yesterday’s Washington Post!

There’s much more to be said about that piece—and about its strange twin at Salon, in which the same Darrel M. West warns that a group of billionaires is planning to buy the next presidential election!

We don’t know when we’ve seen a more peculiar pair of pieces. We think you ought to be angry at West—and especially, at the Washington Post.

In the end, our favorite piece from yesterday’s papers appeared in the Sunday Review of the New York Times. It was written by the unbelievably foppish Anna Della Subin, a young semi-academic with whose simpering class you ought to be very annoyed.

Subin wrote about procrastination. Her essay was the the featured, front-page piece in the high-profile Sunday section.

In comments, many readers said they loved it. We were struck by this horrific passage:
SUBIN (9/28/14): [I]f procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault—and feel bad about them—rather than question our culture’s canonization of productivity?

I was faced with these questions at an unlikely event this past July—an academic conference on procrastination at the University of Oxford. It brought together a bright and incongruous crowd: an economist, a poetry professor, a “biographer of clutter,” a queer theorist, a connoisseur of Iraqi coffee-shop culture. There was the doctoral student who spoke on the British painter Keith Vaughan, known to procrastinate through increasingly complicated experiments in auto-erotica. There was the children’s author who tied herself to her desk with her shoelaces.

The keynote speaker, Tracey Potts, brought a tin of sugar cookies she had baked in the shape of the notorious loiterer Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher famously procrastinated on his “Arcades Project,” a colossal meditation on the cityscape of Paris where the figure of the flâneur—the procrastinator par excellence—would wander...

As we entered the ninth, grueling hour of the conference, a professor laid out a taxonomy of dithering so enormous that I couldn’t help but wonder: Whatever you’re doing, aren’t you by nature procrastinating from doing something else?
The conference had a biographer of clutter! Also, a theorist about queer procrastination! Every top conference does!

You should be extremely annoyed with horrible people like Subin and Potts, who wasted time baking those fracking cookies in the shape of an alleged philosopher whose life story Subin made virtually incoherent. Over the past thirty years, they and their kind have been wasting time at international conferences of the type described in that passage, creating the impression that a serious work is occurring.

Gullible newspapers like the New York Times pretend that these high academics are involved in serious work.

Unfortunately, they aren’t. As they piddle their time away, their guild’s economists keep pimping the cant of billionaires, in the way Krugman described in Sunday's Book Review section. None of their pretty class stoops to the actual work of the day—refuting the disinformation spewed by the people like Hannity.

We’ll offer you more on that horrific conference this week. To peruse its truly horrific web site, you can just click this.

That said, you ought to be very angry at useless young people like Subin. Their conferences are funded by gifts from the plutocrats and it horrifically shows.

Tomorrow, we’re back to The Houses of Nantucket County. We’ll be explaining how the world seems to work—the world which has us in our second war in Iraq.

How weird that it is left to us to describe the role of those lovely houses in the journalistic horror show of the past thirty years! That said, who else is going to do it? Career journalist will never tell you how their world actually works. The Subins, meanwhile, flounce around at Oxford with their plutocrat-financed acts of self-absorption.

That horrific international conference is linked to The Houses of Nantucket Country. Everything’s pretty in those realms. The truth is told not to escape.

At Oxford, the flâneurs are in charge. They're eating their Walter Benjamin cookies and trying themselves to desks with shoelaces. This leaves the plutocrats free to do business in The Houses of Nantucket County.

Amtrak willing, that story resumes tomorrow.

Just for the record: The theorist of queer procrastination was the regally named Lilith Dornhuber de Bellesiles, whose presentation was called The Queer Art of Procrastination. For verification, click here.

65 comments:

  1. I am a little confused about the references to our 2nd Iraq War. Wasn't the first one by George H.W. Bush and the second one by George W. Bush and aren't we now into our third Iraq War?

    Making fun of the obscure topics of academics can be a form of anti-intellectualism. William Proxmire used to do it. Once he selected a paper to mock that was written by Duncan Luce, a psychologist who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and who was awarded the President's Medal by George Bush. Proxmire mocked his paper because its title was incomprehensible. It was in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.

    I cannot defend a conference on procrastination but it does seem to me that procrastination, which is described by every student as their worst flaw, is a worthwhile topic of study. Professors do try to find catching and interesting ways to present their work at conferences -- to attract attention. There is often a kernel of new contribution to the subject despite the framing of the work presented. I assume Somerby thinks the topic is a frippery because it isn't about a cure for Ebola or how to get to Mars. If the conference were about jealousy, he would think it stupid until he reflected that the emotion is behind much domestic violence. If it were about sleep, he would think it stupid until he found out about the link to heart disease and memory loss. Procrastination may have an impact in the workplace or it may simply prevent people from doing their best work while causing them emotional distress. I am not prepared to dismiss it because someone labels herself a queer theorist or bakes a cookie. Science benefits most from free inquiry, unfettered by the need to show relevance to outsiders in a field, as Somerby surely is, with his degree in philosophy and his inability to understand that knowledge can be pursued for its own sake and still make a valuable contribution to society.

    Most funding for academic research comes from the government, because it is part of the common good, not from plutocrats.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "I assume Somerby thinks the topic is a frippery because it isn't about a cure for Ebola or how to get to Mars. If the conference were about jealousy, he would think it stupid until he reflected that the emotion is behind much domestic violence. If it were about sleep, he would think it stupid until he found out about the link to heart disease and memory loss."

      You know, if Al Gore hadn't put off calling the Time magazine reporter to correct her mischaraterization of his statement about him and his wife being the models for Love Story, he might be President.

      Unfortunately, he was too busy Reinventing Government. You may remember Inventing the Internet. It got all the attention. But Reinventing Government, Al was the one who started it all.

      Delete
    2. You seem to be replying to my comment, but I cannot find any connection between what you said and anything in my comment. Please explain how your comment is relevant to anything at all?

      Delete
    3. I could answer your question many ways.

      1) Perhaps you see the forest. You obviously see some trees. You seem to have missed THE tree, from whose acorns all Howler saplings grow.

      2) "I assume Somerby thinks the topic is a frippery because it isn't about a cure the 2000 election or how to get journalists to confess their War on Gore crimes. If the conference were about jealousy, he would think it stupid until he reflected that the emotion is behind much copycat journalism. If it were about sleep, he would think it stupid until he found out about the link to reporters missing correct quotes from Al Gore.

      3) Throwing in the long departed William Proxmire and an obscure example of the work of one of his targets was a nice, Somerby-like touch from someone complaining about relevance in commentary.

      Delete
    4. Shorter @ 12:50 response to @ 12:22

      "Love Story" means never having to justify your relevance.

      Delete
    5. I get it, the only relevance is as a stick to beat Somerby with.

      Delete
    6. The point of my example (Duncan Luce) was that just because you mock something, it isn't necessarily ridiculous. That certainly applied to the eminent Dr. Luce and it applies also to Somerby. Trolls here adopt a mocking tone but their criticisms are as empty as Proxmire's were, and as Somerby's is of the academics described in today's post.

      Delete
    7. I'm not sure I follow you @ 2:44.

      Delete
    8. @2:52

      @11:04 said this: "You know, if Al Gore hadn't put off calling the Time magazine reporter to correct her mischaraterization of his statement about him and his wife being the models for Love Story, he might be President.

      Unfortunately, he was too busy Reinventing Government. You may remember Inventing the Internet. It got all the attention. But Reinventing Government, Al was the one who started it all."

      It is entirely unclear to me what Al Gore has to do with anything Somerby wrong today. Perhaps the commenter is saying that if Al Gore had paid more attention to silliness the media wouldn't have been able to take him down. I don't understand the reference to Reinventing Government or the commenter's equating that with inventing the internet (which Gore never claimed to have done). The whole comment comes across as a knock against Gore and ultimately against Somerby for claiming that Gore was undermined by media coverage of his campaign. Perhaps the point is that if Gore hadn't been so serious he might have won. But as I recall, he was being attacked for being too serious, too stiff, not someone to drink beer with, anyway.

      At least Gore, unlike Obama, would have funded research and we wouldn't be facing the challenges of Ebola, climate change, an aging population, and so on, with a weakened research infrastructure due to years of starvation under first Bush and then Obama's austerity measures.

      THAT may be the lasting legacy of the media's takedown of Gore. It always bothers me when Somerby starts saying that the professors should turn themselves into journalists so they can protect us from our actual journalists, instead of pursuing the research activities that will be the only thing standing between us and a whole series of pretty scary future scenarios, not to mention their contribution to our economy through discoveries that fuel innovation. Yes, some academics are studying procrastination, and others are studying how wind currents shape geography, and others are studying how neurons form new pathways. They study all kinds of things -- because science follows interest, not need, and if you don't fund all of it you will weaken our future survival, because no one can predict what piece of new knowledge will be required decades from now.

      For example, some people here care about Gore because they remember his campaign and share Somerby's frustrations. Some care because they see the relevance of what happened before to what is happening now. Some only care because Gore was funny yesterday and is still a source of humor to make Somerby appear foolish and to undercut whatever they dislike about him or his concerns. I fit the commenter into the latter category because he or she didn't seem to belong in the other two.

      Delete
    9. Wow. Duncan Luce would role over in his grave with pride.

      Had I known Obama was going to starve research through austerity measures, I would have taken my time in jumpring off the John Edward's bandwagon and may never have gotten around to it at all.

      Delete
    10. I wonder if Somerby was ever beaten with a stick as a child,
      or simply allowed to play in whatever nearby ditches he liked and never adequately punished for any life long scarring he may have inflicted on "friends."

      Delete
    11. Frippery sticks.

      Delete
    12. Everything anyone needed to know about Obama's intentions was there in his campaign statements. Apparently only Clinton supporters read them.

      Delete
  2. There are some major problem's with Krugman's premise and even more with the West piece in the Post. I've thought about a number of flaws in his Salon article as well. But after reading the foppish Subin myself yesterday in my own Times, I've decided to be guilt free when not making anything more than general points promptly in blog commentary boxes.

    I'll get back to specific complaints after walking the dog.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. While you are out, work up some anger over the failure of blogger to fully explain the chains of transmigrating Brodie groaners.

      Delete
  3. Just for the Record: How many years ago was the conference in Oxford first planned?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Poor Tio Bob.

    "people like the awful Hernandez carry off sacks of cash."

    Somerby for: Her book got published? Why can't mine?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Who do you want to pick the next Democratic candidate? That's what this is about -- not Somerby's book on Gore's campaign. These same slick practices are being used today. Is that how our presidential candidates should be chosen?

      Keep focusing on Somerby instead of the issues and the same thing will happen in 2016 as happened in 2000.

      Delete
    2. You mean Biden will be the nominee and be beaten by Jeb Bush?

      Delete
    3. I think Clinton will probably run against Romney.

      Delete
    4. Clinton's close association with plutocrats is mentioned by
      West. I, of course won't let that deter me since her plutocrats are our plutocrats. I won't let the media convince me she's practically a plutocrat either, because I remember when she left the White House with only the clothes on her back, her devoted family, their debts and a sack of keyboard "w"s to tide her over until her first Senate paycheck.

      Delete
  5. You assume his only motive is envy and then ridicule him for it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What other purpose does "carry off sacks of cash" serve in the sentence?

      Delete
    2. To remind us that our media is being bought off by plutocrats.

      Delete
    3. Do you need a reminder?

      Delete
    4. Plenty of people seem to. Look at the comments to Dowd's columns or the readers of Salon, even Bill Maher had Joan Walsh on as a panelist, representing liberals. He doesn't seem to have gotten the message. So, yes, we all need more reminders -- until the commenters on those pages start asking why Dowd still has a column and other questions like those posed here regularly.

      Delete
    5. And the evidence of Hernandez carrying off "sacks of cash" is?

      Delete
    6. To a guy who spends his days blogging while waiting for the phone to ring calling him to his next corporate comedy gig, "sack of cash" means "regular paycheck"

      Delete
    7. Well said @ 2:57. A few more reminders from Somerby and
      those Dowd and Salon commentary boxes will be filled with voices scorning those witches Dowd and Walsh. Everyone will join voices with readers of the Howler and demand that they be fired in the name of dead Iraqi's and the guy who almost got killed by Chris Matthews.

      Delete
    8. Sarcasm @3:15, but why do you think Limbaugh is having trouble maintaining his station list? If people starting saying what they think of Dowd more often, she would perhaps retire and we might have an actual liberal columnist at the NY Times. That might lead to more liberal votes for Democratic candidates -- can't hurt to have this constant denigration of the Clintons turned off instead of her teaching bright young 20 something New Yorkers think it is fashionable to mock them because solid candidates are ever so boring.

      Delete
    9. Sarcasm @ 3:28, but what makes you think an actual liberal columnist might lead to more liberal votes? Liberals don't know how to do anything but talk down to "others."

      And why would we want to silence voices denigrating people for carrying off sacks of cash for giving speeches?

      Delete
    10. I'll tell you why Limbaugh is having trouble maintaining his station list.

      Limbaugh's listeners at one time came in just one variety -- Old.

      Now they come in three varieties -- Older, Much Older and Dead.

      Delete
    11. They have been complaining to his sponsors.

      Delete
    12. Here's the deal with Limbaugh's sponsors:

      The recent campaign to silence conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh is led by ten liberal activists engaged in a more than four-year long effort to destroy Limbaugh by targeting his advertisers, including a Media Matters executive vice president.

      A former Kent State university professor even targeted a small businessman advertising on Limbaugh’s show using her official university email account.

      Information compiled by Limbaugh’s team — and first provided to The Daily Caller — demonstrates that nearly 70 percent of the tweets targeting Limbaugh’s advertisers come from the same ten Twitter users, all of whom are actively involved in the “Stop Rush” campaign, which keeps a database of all of Limbaugh’s advertisers.


      See http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/23/revealed-conspiracy-to-destroy-rush-limbaugh-is-small-organized-deceptive/

      Delete
    13. Welcome to free market capitalism in a democracy, David.

      Or is your goal to "silence" those who would organize a campaign that tells the sponsors who keep Limbaugh on the air that they don't much like the bile he spews daily?

      After all, how can Rush possibly stand up to a Kent State professor and 10 Twitter users? Why, the poor boy is utterly defenseless against all that?

      Delete
  6. OMB (The Word of the OTB...King Zarkon Revised Version)

    "We were a tiny bit peeved.....How many years have gone by since we started identifying that key piece of sleight of hand? Back in the day, we endlessly tied it to Sean Hannity, who was endlessly pimping it out."

    Now we focus endlessly on the Pimp of Piddle, Rachel Maddow and other Children of the Corn who melt your liberal minds.

    "In these, and equally useful ways, (you) the rubes get turned against each other, as people like the awful (Hannity) carry (on unattended)."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wonder if Bob has heard of Bartlett & Steele. They've been writing about this long before The Daily Howler was a twinkle in Bob's eye.

      Probably not, since Bob seems to think he's the first to tumble on the fact that the tax burden has been shifted enormously to the middle class and poor since the Reagan years, and that Krugman is a Johnny come lately.

      Delete
    2. Media Matters does a fine job of monitoring the atrocities on the right.

      Delete
    3. Leaving Bob free to monitor the atrocities on the left,
      @ 2:41?

      Delete
    4. Sure, but at least Media Matters does it while not pretending to be "on the right" themselves.

      Bob, however, will don his sheep's clothes before delivering his lectures about Meredith Vieira's house and the necessity to teach five-year-olds Croatian while sticking up for the poor, beleaguered common man like Roger Goodell.

      Delete
    5. Not fully explained there Anonymous @ 2:52.

      Roger Goodell has been made a Salem Witch due to unsubstantiated claims about what he believed Ray
      Rice said to him. Al Gore was made a Salem Witch due to substantiated but ignored claims of what he said a reporter wrote about what Erich Segal said about Tipper and him.

      Delete
    6. And at least one Bobfan actually believes the above.

      Delete
    7. Only trolls think Somerby is not a liberal. The rest of us recognize his credentials as an old-style liberal. He is very far from the new progressives exemplified by academia, for example, who he has been complaining about -- the people who put Obama into office. There is a split on the left and he is clearly on one side of it, while YOU and other trolls here seem to be on the other (if you are not here from the right yourselves or Maddow-interns or just mentally ill).

      Plenty of us noted the problematic behavior on DKos where so-called progressives advocated adopting the tactics of the right because Obama needed to be elected by any means necessary. Others were more squeamish about values and truth and didn't want to become the enemy just to defeat him. We objected to the way the left trashed Hillary Clinton using the tactics of the right -- because the path needed to be clear for The One. We objected when Bill Clinton was called a racist in order to attract Hillary's minority voters. These sorts of things are still going on. Somerby wants us to be BETTER than the liars and crooks on the right. He wants us to stick to Democratic principles, not find billionaires of our own to manipulate the voting process in the same manner as the right is doing.

      That doesn't make him a fake liberal. It makes him someone worth reading and listening to.

      You are aware that the founder of Media Matters came from the right, aren't you? It is a bit odd that you think Media Matters is purer than Somerby.

      Delete
    8. A true troll, such as myself, never ever claims to speak for other trolls. Therefore my opnions are mine and mine alone.

      Bob Somerby is the epitome of liberalism. His career epitomizes liberal values in action and why liberalism is where it is today.

      Delete
    9. Bill Clinton, after Obama's win in the South Carolina primary, said, in effect, no big deal. Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary, too.

      Sorry, but that was a damned dumb thing to say, and he deserved everything he got for saying it.

      And that is Bob's big problems. His heroes are always excused for the damndest, dumbest things that come out of their mouths ("I took the initiative in creating the Internet") while he always looks for the tiniest way to twist what his targets say out of all context, then jumps on his high horse to tilt some more of the windmills in his mind.

      Bob is a classic example of the '60s "radical chic" as Tom Wolfe called them. They were all in the streets when they were undergrads, then they became teachers, stockbrokers, accountants, shop owners.

      Again, Bob at one time may have been "liberal" in terms of anti-war and pro-civil rights. But he has abandoned those principles a long time ago, and moved to the right -- right along side his heroes the Clintons and his old roomy, Al.

      They are the so-called "New Democrats" who are by now pretty much indistinguishable if not to the right of the old progressive wing of the Republican Party that has now been relegated to the history books.

      As Thomas Frank puts it, the Republican Party moved to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan. The response of the Democratic Party was ---- to move to the right.

      Whatever "left" is left, it is now beginning to bubble over issues of diversity and inclusion (marriage equality) and the wealth produced by a nation of workers that must be shared by the workers (income equality).

      These are issues you never hear Bob speak in favor of, only to deride the people speaking them in the most vile, personal terms he can conjur because his thought process and vocabulary is limited to meanness.

      In other words, he's a cranky old fart with a Harvard degree who was once going to change the world. And the world wound up changing him into a cranky old fart.

      Delete
    10. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    11. Anon @ 6:47 PM, one of the duller of the multiples writes:

      QUOTE
      Bob is a classic example of the '60s "radical chic" as Tom Wolfe called them. They were all in the streets when they were undergrads, then they became teachers, stockbrokers, accountants, shop owners.
      END QUOTE

      Cheese and rice, the "radical chic" weren't people who were at one time in the streets demonstrating on the way to becoming teachers and shop keepers! "Real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line" were people the radical chic would only gawk at if they were on display at a party where the chic like "Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Gian Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland, Richard Avedon, Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Jennie Tourel, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Steve Sondheim, Adolph and Phyllis Green, Betty Comden, and the Patrick O’Neals" were in attendance. Nary a Somerby arc in sight.

      At such a party you might find "Otto Preminger in the library and Jean vanden Heuvel in the hall, and Peter and Cheray Duchin in the living room, and Frank and Domna Stanton, Gail Lumet, Sheldon Harnick, Cynthia Phipps, Burton Lane, Mrs. August Heckscher, Roger Wilkins, Barbara Walters, Bob Silvers, Mrs. Richard Avedon, Mrs. Arthur Penn, Julie Belafonte, Harold Taylor, and scores more, including Charlotte Curtis, women’s news editor of the New York Times, America’s foremost chronicler of Society..." all of them qualifying as among the chic but perhaps not all of them necessarily in good standing as rads.

      Party hosts like Leonard and Felecia Bernstein met the test, so much so that they had "white servants, not Claude and Maude, but white South Americans. Lenny and Felicia are geniuses. After a while, it all comes down to servants. They are the cutting edge in Radical Chic. Obviously, if you are giving a party for the Black Panthers, as Lenny and Felicia are this evening, or as Sidney and Gail Lumet did last week, or as John Simon of Random House and Richard Baron, the publisher, did before that; or for the Chicago Eight, such as the party Jean vanden Heuvel gave; or for the grape workers or Bernadette Devlin, such as the parties Andrew Stein gave... well, then, obviously you can’t have a Negro butler and maid" according to Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

      "The first big Radical Chic party, the epochal event, so to speak, was the party that Assemblyman Andrew Stein gave for the grape workers on his father’s estate in Southampton on June 29, 1969. The grape workers had already been brought into New York social life. Carter and Amanda Burden, the “Moonflower Couple” of the 1960s, had given a party for them in their duplex in River House, on East 52nd Street overlooking the East River. Some of New York’s best graphic artists, such as Paul Davis, had done exquisite posters for “La Causa” and “La Huelga.

      The grape workers had begun a national campaign urging consumers to boycott California table grapes, and nowhere was the ban more strictly observed than in Radically Chic circles. Chavez became one of the few union leaders with a romantic image...."

      King, stop @6;47 PM before he posts again.

      Delete
    12. Bothered that much by people who disagree with your notion that Bob is the planet's greatest, deepest thinker?

      Delete
    13. 10:38 - that's straw man logic. can you do better please? have a good one.

      Delete
  7. Whose houses in Nantucket County have we visited?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Meredith Vieira and Andy Cooper's?

      Delete
  8. We look forward to BOB's further exploration of the horrific conference on Procrastination which took place three months ago at Oxford, which last we checked is related to American discourse because Rachel Maddow studied there beginning in 1995 but procrastinated and did not complete her doctorate until 2001.

    We hope it will not be postponed again and again like Houses of Journalist County. It was a long time coming but boy did we get mad when we found out the luxury that Vieira woman wallows in.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I planned to make fun today of your current "contribution" to this forum, but I didn't get around to it.

      Delete
    2. Speaking of procrastination, how is "How He Got There" coming along? Anybody know?

      Delete
    3. The old KZ was smarter and a better writer. More psychologically damaged too but it's all good.

      Delete
    4. Wow, now that's a line we've only heard a few hundred times. Always fresh as the day it was born.

      Delete
  9. A good column by Bob. But once again, I have to point out that if there were a real demand on the part of "the left" for traditional leftism (for example, a passionate interest in the effects money has on policy, on income inequality, on the plight of the poor), then there are plenty of places to get it. But almost no one goes to those places. And when they do go there, it's to preen and strut and demonstrate how smart they are rather than to try to do something. As long as the system more or less works well enough for enough people, it's going to continue like this, because people don't see a reason to change. As long as.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Pretty adequate post.
    I merely stumbled aloft your web log and basic to say that
    I acquire extremely enjoyed annual your web log posts
    Romantic msg

    ReplyDelete
  11. There are some interesting points in this post but I don’t know if I see all of them heart to eye .
    There is some validness but I will hold opinion until I look into it further.
    Good clause, thanks and we want more! Added to Feed Burner likewise.
    way2sms

    ReplyDelete
  12. Somerby highlights some profoundly silly people pretending to be important to make a point, and surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, boutique libs are angered. Maybe he struck a little too close to home.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So the only people who can possibly think Somerby ran out of worthwhile things to say years ago and is now reduced to acting like a chimp throwing excrement to amuse himself can only be angry "boutique libs" -- however you define that indiscriminate word.

      Here's a thought. And it comes from Somerby himself.

      Why so eager to label and characterize people you disagree with? Does that relieve you of the obligation of hearing what they say if you can automatically put them in some other "tribe"?

      What would Malala say?

      Delete

  13. There are some interesting points in this post but I don’t know if I see all of them heart to eye .
    There is some validness but I will hold opinion until I look into it further.
    Good clause, thanks and we want more! Added to Feed Burner likewise.
    md-waysms

    ReplyDelete
  14. Here is Delhi election survey opinion exit polls results seats vidhan sabha CM candidates date prediction news assemble announcement manifesto aap vs bjp final party budget chief minister government
    http://www.delhielection2015result.com/

    ReplyDelete
  15. Here is Delhi election survey opinion exit polls results seats vidhan sabha CM candidates date prediction news assemble announcement manifesto aap vs bjp final party budget chief minister government

    ReplyDelete
  16. I am truly pleased to read this website posts which carries lots of helpful data, thanks for providing these kinds of statistics.
    Bigg Boss 9 winner name
    Winner bigg boss 9
    Winner of bigg boss 9

    ReplyDelete