Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I just looked and it's been almost a year since I've posted anything to this blog. I can't remember when I last posted as Dr Ralph on Facebook (and in my other guise I mostly share pictures of recent paintings from Instagram). Twitter? Bah. Most social media has become anti-social and I'm sick of it. Even for stuff that normally I would have some natural affinity for. It's tiresome and I'm tired. I no longer feel up to joining the army of angry voices out there, even though I find myself alternately pissed off and horrified. My most optimistic opinion about current events is that we, as Americans, have been stricken with a bout of temporary insanity, although truth be told, I don't think that insanity is ours alone. I don't think trying to shout louder than the folks I disagree with is going to make the situation any better. So I've decided to shut the fuck up. Mostly, anyway. I've got several friends and more than a few relatives t...

I have so far restrained myself from offering any opinions on this year's presidential race. It hardly seems necessary. I'll say this much: I had a choice of watching the debate or indulging in a martini on the porch with a good friend who doesn't share my political views. Guess which I took.

Full disclosure: I've had a Yahoo! account for well over 10 years. Yahoo got its start as "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" only to be later renamed as Yahoo! by its creators, Jerry Yang and David Filo , a couple of Stanford grad students.  While  "Yahoo" was backronymed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," Yang and Filo admitted they were drawn to the earlier meaning of the word, coined by Jonathan Swift . In his satiric novel Gulliver's Travels , Swift describes a race called " Yahoos " as savage and filthy, obsessed with "pretty stones." The term has come to mean a crude, thuggish uncultured yokel. Want an example?  You need look no further than any random sampling of reader comments from pretty much any news story posted on the Yahoo portal, especially something like this weekend's shooting of a Member of Congress. The level of discourse to be found makes schoolyard brawl...

Youngest son reports that the security check at Dulles was no big deal, contrary to the breathless predictions only a couple of days ago. No protesters, no long lines, no junk. He said he wasn't even scanned. Yet another blown-out-of-proportion story; a product of our 24/7 news cycle and a cynical few on both sides who want to game for their own purposes. Glenn Greenwald, while guilty of ramping up the amps in his Salon article, Government yells "Terrorism" to justify TSA procedures , has some pointed observations to make that pretty much leaves all the actors in this latest bit of Security Theater with eggs on their faces. First the Transportation Safety Administration: This is the all-justifying, cure-all solution for every problem: government officials run to the nearest media outlet they can find and anonymously scream "TERRORISM."  No evidence is needed; the anonymity precludes all accountability; fear levels are quickly ratcheted up; and everythi...

" The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. " -- H. L. Mencken , American journalist, essayist and social critic. Consider that next time you find yourself watching anything on the Fox Network.

The holidays are upon us. Actually they were upon us sometime before Halloween: Santa now mingles freely with Dracula and Naughty Nurse, and visions of sugar plums are replaced by 20 count bags of mini-Snickers bars. I'm bracing myself for our latest holiday tradition, the bombastic pronouncements about the " War on Christmas ." For the past several years, self-anointed protectors of Christmas  have been creating lists of which retailers are naughty or nice. This seems to boil down to who says "Holiday" in their advertising instead of "Christmas." On the Naughty list have been such Satanic organizations as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, The Gap, Banana Republic, Home Depot. This year's Naughty and Nice list has been helpfully compiled by the American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi. You may recall the American Family Association , led by the Reverand Donald Wildmon, from their previous name, the National Federation for Decency . The...

Boys and girls, here's the socialist indoctrination message your right-wing nutcase parents didn't want you to hear: 12:06 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. All right, everybody go ahead and have a seat. How is everybody doing today? (Applause.) How about Tim Spicer? (Applause.) I am here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we've got students tuning in from all across America, from kindergarten through 12th grade. And I am just so glad that all could join us today. And I want to thank Wakefield for being such an outstanding host. Give yourselves a big round of applause. (Applause.) I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it's your first day in a new school, so it's understandable if you're a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right n...

A short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia. The Freikorps were nationalistic organizations primarily composed of disaffected, disenchanted and angry German combat veterans who believed that their government had betrayed Germany and sold them out... The Freikorps were in opposition to the new Weimar Republic. The SA [Stormtroopers/Brownshirts] evolved out of the remnants of the Freikorps movement. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia that Hitler used to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties. Sound familiar?

Much has been made in wingnut circles about the supposed "beating" of Kenneth Gladney at a St. Louis town hall meeting. Mobs of union thugs beat him! He was hospitalized! Yeah, right. MediaMatters has a clip of the incident as well as a pretty damning analysis which puts the lie to the hordes of rightwing media and blogosphere all foaming at the mouth. To quote from MediaMatters : Go watch the YouTube video. (Or, the "shocking video," as Power Line hypes it.) The first thing you notice when the camera starts rolling is a union member already sprawled out on the ground with somebody standing over him. No explanation of how he got there (pushed, shoved, punched?) and Ham couldn't care less. Then yes, Gladney is pulled to the ground by somebody wearing a union shirt. (At the :06 mark.) But instead of Gladney being beaten and punched, as his attorney describes, and instead of union "thugs" standing over him and threatening him, Gladney bounce...

Jailbreaking iPhones is apparently the national pastime. I wouldn't know, since I'm a Nokia man myself (T-Mobile has me by the short hairs). Since the iPhone's launch in 2007, Apple has had a running battle with hackers who like the cool factor of the iPhone but chaff under the restrictive controls imposed by Apple on how owners can use the freaking thing. Hackers defeat controls, Apple pushes a firmware update to lock things down: repeat ad nauseum. Now, as a response to the Electronic Freedom Foundation's petition to legalize jailbreaking, Apple is screaming that the modified devices could possibly, maybe be used to disrupt cell phone tower software and create a denial of service. Never mind that millions have already unlocked their phones and we don't seem to have a problem. Oh please. I don't know which is more lame -- that Apple would be so desperate as to play the "terrorist card" -- so Bush era -- or they would be so arrogant as to t...

Hear that howling sound in the distance? It's the sound of entrenched interests realizing we may actually see some healthcare reforms come down the pike. The usual suspects: the Republicans and their friends in the immense healthcare insurance industry are making most of the noise. The noise is still faint and distant but it will get louder, much louder, as the debate warms up. Cries of Socialism, fraud, rationing of care and third hand horror stories about places where universal healthcare is the norm will abound. Bogus grassroots organizations, bank-rolled by huge corporations will miraculously spring up. Tons of postage will be spent sending out handsome glossy color mailings. Of course the Libertarians are squawking since they don't want to pay for anything, even though when push comes to shove none of them ever seems to turn down any of the government's supposed largess. You'll hear things like: Government healthcare will create a huge bloated bureaucracy Fact: in ...