Pink triagnle

Monday Morning Surrealism

Thesis: Hegel.

Antithesis: Cholera.

Synthesis: Progress!

Chavez is crazy–but how crazy?

Answer: In the words of Christopher Hitchens, “very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.”  Unsurprisingly, the man who believes the United States possesses and has used an earthquake machine claims the moon landing was faked. (The US dropped the money on the giant rocket to do so, but in the end saved on catering–or not.) More surprisingly, he has now raided a corpse for charms, trinkets and blessings.Via the Washington Post:

Shortly after midnight on July 16, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reached back in time. He presided at the exhumation of the remains of Simón Bolívar — Latin America’s greatest independence hero, who helped liberate the region from Spain in the 19th century, and the object of Chávez’s personal and political obsession.

The skeleton was pulled apart. Pieces were removed, such as teeth and bone fragments, for “testing.” The rest was put in a new coffin with the Chávez government’s seal. Chávez, who also tweeted the proceedings, gave a rambling speech in which he asked Christ to repeat his Lazarus miracle and raise the dead once more. He also apparently conversed with Bolívar’s bones.

“I had some doubts,” Chávez told his nation, paraphrasing the poet Pablo Neruda, “but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’ ”

By presidential decree, every television station in Venezuela showed images of Bolívar in historic paintings, then images of the skeleton, and then images of Chávez, with the national anthem blaring. The message of this macabre parody was unmistakable: Chávez is not a follower of Bolívar — Chávez is Bolívar, reincarnated.

Chavez is at least as crazy as Pope Steven VI.

Sharon Angle does not understand the purpose of a free press

…or she does, but doesn’t care for the notion because it doesn’t serve Sharon Angle. She thinks news outlets should be the “friends” of politicians, so they should only “ask the questions we want to answer” so they can “report the news the way we want it [reported].”

Angle, modeling herself after Sarah Palin, has isolated herself from all inquiries by the mainstream media, and restricted her Q&A sessions to sympathetic organs like talk radio or Fox News. Famously, she fled her own press conference attended by reporters she invited before answering any questions.

This is nothing if not un-American. The free press was intended to be the citizen’s most powerful check on the power of elected officials, a means by which to report exactly what government officials wanted to keep silent. In the words of the Tea Partier’s favorite Founding Father,

“I am persuaded that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.” –Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787.

The failure of American evolutionary education

Thanks for ruining my evening, Jerry Coyne.

As of 2008, 149 years after the publication of The Origin of Species and 83 years after the Scopes trial, the curriculums of only four (4) states in the US explicitly mention human evolution in science standards.

One in six high school biology teachers believes in young-earth creationism, as does 47-48 percent of the general population.

The only thing that can cheer me up now would be videos of cats in boxes, and pictures of stuff on cats. Wait, what…thanks, Jerry Coyne!

Glenn Beck is so smart, s-m-r-t, I mean s-m-a-r-r-t

Necromancer and Crypto-Maoist Glenn Beck is hosting an online lecture series he humbly titled Glenn Beck University. Michael C. Moynihan tallies the factual errors so far:  

• The Communist Party of the United States didn’t start as the “Communist Working Party” in 1917.
• It is not true that “if you were a Marxist” in 1960s, you were a “Soviet sympathizer,” as former members of the International Socialists can attest.
• The Nazis did not “learn propaganda” from Woodrow Wilson.
• Beck says that “Most of Europe was preparing for war in 1917.” Europe had been at war since 1914; the Americans joined in in 1917.
• The Venona decrypts were not “released in the 1980s,” when the Soviet Union was still in business, but in 1995. Nor was Venona “compiled” by the KGB; Venona was the codename given by United States intelligence services to the collection of intercepts. Incidentally, Beck, demonstrating his lack of familiarity with the subject matter, stumbles when identifying Venona, first calling them the “Verona papers.”
• No one claims Castro was “democratically-elected,” except, perhaps, the brothers Castro themselves.
• Obama’s mother, who grew up in Kansas, did not attend the Elisabeth Irwin School (“The Little Red Schoolhouse”) in New York City.
• Beck’s history of late Weimar Germany manages to be both totally incoherent and completely wrong, such as this comparison of the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Nazis: “The National Socialists, the Nazis, did round up the communists. OK? But the communists, they rounded up the store owners first. Nazis, number two. The old and infirm. Number two on communist’s list, farmers and landowners. Three, I think it was Jewish on both sides.”
• A list of “1963 communist goals from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)” Beck presented on his television show (and available here on his website) are not from the CPUSA, but reprinted from The Naked Communist, a bizarre book of conspiracy authored by John Birch Society lunatic Cleon Skousen.
• In the aftermath of the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla, Beck argued that anti-Semitism is the inevitable byproduct of socialism. “Socialism and anti-Semitism have complemented each other throughout history.” “How many [Jews] have to die,” Beck asks, “to remember who keeps killing them?” The idea that anti-Semitism flourishes under left-wing regimes because Jews are associated with capitalism is certainly true, though it ignores the long history of far-right anti-Semitism and the Tsarist-era pogroms and blood libels. In far-right circles, Jews, like Bela Kun and Leon Trotsky, were associated with communism and the revolutionary left.

It is apparent that Beck the history preacher isn’t terribly familiar with the very material that so fascinates him, as demonstrated by his difficulty keeping names straight. The former FSB agent poisoned in 2006 was Alexander Litvinenko, not Alexander Lavinko. The Soviet agent accused of “losing China” was Lauchlin Currie, not “Laurie” Currie. His fellow agent in the Silvermaster group was Harry Dexter White, not “Harry Dexter.” During a brief digression into the activities of the Baader-Meinhof groups, Beck received a little help from off-camera: “In the 1970s, the left wing German terrorist, Ulrike Meinhof, he sounds friendly. He said—oh, it’s a she?”

Takeaway lesson: Foreign=unfriendly sounding.

Historians declare FDR greatest president

Via the Washington Times:

For the fifth time in five surveys, Franklin D. Roosevelt tops a Siena College survey of the best U.S. presidents, the school said Thursday. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson — the four faces of Mount Rushmore — are all runner-ups, according to 238 historians, presidential scholars and political scientists who participated in the Siena College Research Institute Survey of U.S. Presidents.

Since 1982, the Loudonville, N.Y., college has periodically asked scholars to rank American presidents on 20 categories, including imagination, foreign policy accomplishments, and ability to avoid crucial mistakes.

How could any thinking person rank Franklin Delano Roosevelt over Lincoln? The latter saw the country through an existential crisis perhaps more urgent than WWII. And he devoted a career to the abolition of the worst humanitarian crisis the world had yet seen, and perhaps will ever see, Atlantic slavery. Roosevelt failed to act decisively against either of the gross human disasters of his world. I am speaking of his silence on “Uncle Joe” Stalin’s war against his own serfs, and the Shoah.

FDR ignored the Holocaust for many years, for no other reason than the placation of anti-Semitic New Deal critics. Internally, Roosevelt half-heartedly suggested the State Department coordinate relocation of German Jews to Central America, but nothing became of the program, and he staunchly refused to grant asylum to refugees in the US. In 1939, he did nothing to answer the telegraphed requests for protection from thousands of Ashkenazis seeking to land the passanger freighter St. Louis in Florida. Those thousands were denied entry into the US, deported, and shipped back to Europe. Many would die in Nazi extermination facilities.

For his record on the Holocaust alone, Roosevelt’s name deserves connotations of infamy. Some of his apologists will acknowledge this, and change the subject to talk about the success of his economic programmes. Then, of course, there is the mobilization of industry for victory in WWII. But, regardless of whatever material benefits the New Deal might have affected, and regardless to the ultimate success of military Keynsianism, his approach to domestic politics should not be taken as a model by the liberal-minded. For Roosevelt also showed what might be called a flexible attitude towards autocracy. There are, of course, the unprecedented five terms he served and ran for. And it is commonly known that he tried to “pack” the Supreme Court with an additional three justices after certain policies of the New Deal were found to be unconstitutional.  Then there is the United States Executive Order 9066, which mandated the indefinite interment of Japanese Americans on no charge but ethnicity.

Roosevelt is not even among my forgivable presidents. To call him even a “good one,” let alone the best among the good, seems to me a surrender to cultural relativism. Vindicating Roosevelt not only forgives the racism and anti-Semitism of his culture, but absolves it of its sins.

Robert Byrd, dead at 92

Via the NY Times. The Democratic Senator had represented West Virginia since 1959, marking the longest tenure to date of service in the higher chamber. Between 1952 and 1957, he also served in the House.

However, he’s been something of an embarrassment to non-Virginian Democrats and the Democratically inclined. Byrd started his political career in 1942 as a recruiter for the Klu Klux Klan. At some point between 1946 and 1947, he would write a Grand Wizard, saying

The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.

Decades after the Civil Rights era, Byrd would disown the Klan and publically apologize for his associations. In recent years, he has been given 100 percent scores for his voting record by the NAACP and other African American lobbies. Not knowing Byrd’s heart, I can’t say whether this was resultant of a genuine turn-around or overcompensation for a lingering, secret, and politically inconvenient bigotry.

In any case, the era in which a former KKK Grand Cyclopes can be reelected to the United States Senate for five decades has passed. No matter what Byrd died believing, I count that as progress.

Ain’t no party like a Communist Party ’cause a Communist Party don’t learn from tragically obvious historic precedents

Today marks the 192nd birthday of the author of the most complete system of analysis ever devised, which fails to take into account only human nature—Karl Heinrich Marx.

Might that we all follow the good man’s own example and declare,

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

-letter to Eduard Bernstein, 1882

Library of Congress to archive Twitter. All of it.

For some reason. And no, I’m not kidding.

This is not the way I wanted to get into the Library of Congress. At least not for the first time, anyway.

The Word Warrior’s contribution to our nation’s records is here. Scroll through for links to random stories I didn’t want to take the time to blog, a masturbation joke, and my voluble doubts about the utility of Twitter.