Surely this is not the case.

Today, as always, dedicated sophists of all ideologies would like to so discredit the bastions of expertise that moderately educated people no longer have any assistance in discerning the truth or falsehood of of the sophists' claims.

With respect to everything from global warming to the financial crisis, without years of study it is impossible for the average joe to determine when the current crop of ascendant experts is correct, or when those who snipe from the sidelines--attacking methodology, questioning motives, flinging as much mud as possible--actually have a good point.

Some might argue that this quote lights the way forward: Perhaps we should automatically disbelieve--not just distrust, disbelieve, every statement that one can't verify oneself.

But it seems to me that this is just another way of giving up on actually engaging the world. What do you think?

Quote from Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 64, via Sullivan. | Image credit.

I'm stuck in the Miami airport for the foreseeable future. I've decided to pass the time by letting as many kids as possible know that, despite the propaganda they hear, drugs are awesome. How do you keep yourself occupied in airports?

Addendum: I find that parents tend to get the wrong impression if you walk up and start talking to their kids about how awesome fucking is, which is why I've decided to focus on the pro-drug message.

Hockey is pretty awesome in HD.

Jesus Fucking Christ. That's how much cash the U.S. Treasury has proffered in loan guarantees to the finance industry. That's about six months worth of GNP. Probably some of the debt will turn out good, but in the absence of any plan to help the people who owe money to the banks, the prospects look dim.

It's tempting to focus on the injustice. The owning class made this mess and now their plan seems to be to insulate themselves from the consequences by taking advantage of the fact that free market ideologues will control the White House for another two months. This situation is, as Jason said in comments, disgusting.

But, as with many of the policies of the Bush Administration, focusing on the injustice threatens to distract attention from the catastrophic stupidity. We're all in deep water here, but the financiers think that they can stay afloat by standing on the rest of our shoulders. What they don't see is that when the rest of us drown, they'll be stuck treading water with no shoreline in sight.

This far into the Bush Administration I had thought that my capacity for outrage had been exhausted. Guess not.

Just to throw in something constructive: Josh Marshall has the right idea about how we ought to be setting our priorities:

The bottom line, I think, is that the money has to go toward building real stuff -- primarily infrastructure -- and pumped into the hands of people who will immediately spend it, i.e., middle and lower-income people who will spend it on necessities. |TPM|

Also: By my calculations, the guv'mint has promised 300 times as much to the financial industry as the auto industry was asking for.

Y'see, it's worth $200 billion in loan guarantees and $20 billion in cash because Citigroup is run by financiers rather than auto-industry executives, and financiers, as we all know, are astute managers whose unquestioned competence insures that they won't skulk back to the public trough begging for another handout.

Snyder will return to the Wildcats after three years away. Snyder, who is 69 years old, compiled a 136-68-1 record at Kansas State from 1989-2005. He replaces Ron Prince, who finished with a 5-7 record this season and 17-20 overall in three seasons with the Wildcats. |ESPN|

I absolutely, positively have to step away from the internet, but:

Citi is not only too big to fail, it’s too big to rescue with any of the half-measures that have been tried so far. Only outright nationalization is feasible, and that will probably require joint action by a number of governments; Citigroup’s global operations are too big for the US to handle alone. After that, the kinds of tinkering discussed at the G20 last week will be irrelevant. It’s now unsurprising to read (on CNBC!) predictions that all US financial institutions will be nationalized within a year. That’s probably an overstatement: as long as the economy doesn’t really crash, there are plenty of small banks and credit unions that will survive, but few of the big names will be among them. |CT: Quiggen|

My first thought, naturally, was "caption contest".
The following would have been my entry:

Now you can easily, quickly and comfortably increase the size of your bulge with the IJ Bulge Booster. It’s unbelievably simple but amazingly effective. Just pull the waistband on like a pair of underwear and push your boys through the opening created by the contoured support strap and that’s it! Your package will be lifted up and pushed forward, creating a remarkable increase in your male profile. |Source|

I find myself wondering why it wouldn't be simpler and preferable to either: (a) stuff a sock down there; or (b) make do. Perhaps you, gentle reader, are wondering how I became acquainted with the International Jock Bulge Booster. Blame Violet Blue.

This is going around in email and chat. It seems to have come from here.

It's "Baby Got Back" translated into Latin, and then back into English:

Domina Mea Exstat a Tergo
Mixaloti Equitis

"By Hercules!
Rebecca, behold! Such large buttocks she has!
She appears to be a girlfriend of one of those rhythmic-oration people.
But, as you know, who can understand persons of this sort?
Verily, they converse with her for this reason only, namely, that she appears to be a complete whore.
Her buttocks, I say, are rather large!
Nor am I able to believe how round they are.
Lo! How they stand forth! Do they not disgust you?
Behold the black woman!"

Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.
For who, colleagues, would not admit,
whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body
beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits
so that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches
have been deeply stuffed with buttock?
Alas! I am captured, nor am I able to desist from gazing.
My dear lady, I want to come together with you
and make a picture of you.
My companions were trying to warn me
but those buttocks of yours arouse lust in me.
O! skin wrinkled and smooth!
Did you say you wish to enter my vehicle?
I am entirely at your disposal
because you are not an average hanger-on.
I have seen her dancing.
Forget, therefore, about blandishments!
Such sweat! Such moisture!
I am borne along as if by a four-horse chariot!
I am tired of reading in the gazettes
that flat buttocks are judged more pleasing.
Ask any black men you wish: the answer will be
rather that they prefer fuller ones.

O colleagues (What is it?) O colleagues (What is it?)
Do your girlfriends have large buttocks? (They certainly have!)
Encourage them therefore to shake them! (To shake them!)
To shake them! (To shake them!)
To shake those healthy buttocks!
My mistress stands out behind!

In other news, this article neatly skewers my taste in hip hop: Stuff White People LIke: #116 Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore.

Jonathan Cohn takes an honest look at autoworker compensation.

Well. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey in Wasilla yesterday. Then she took questions from the television press while standing in front of the turkey slaughtering operation. Some of you might not want to watch the video, but I've just got to post it.



(via, though I totally would have seen it I hadn't been watching basketball)

That's how many times Janet Reno collapsed while serving as Attorney General. Mukasey, like so many Bush appointees, pales in comparison to his Clintonian predecessor.

Obama is giving a lot of signals that his agenda is going to be to link massive fiscal stimulus to projects that are intended to address global climate change. As policy, this strikes me as exactly right. Politically, well, we shall see what we shall see.

For my part, I'm optimistic. I think Obama's political initiatives are often best looked at through the lens of his background in community organizing. In that vein, one of the pieces of wisdom that gets handed down in the organizing business is that a campaign needs two kinds of hooks. There has to be, on the one hand a piece to satisfy the self-interest of supporters, and on the other a piece that appeals to some sort of moral cause or principle. Purely from the point of view of building strength, the closer the link between the two the better.

In this case, the faltering economy makes the self-interested piece possible. Unemployment just hit a 16 year high. The middle class has been shrinking for a decade and buying power, already in long decline, is threatening to dive off a cliff. A green jobs program, in this context, is first and foremost a jobs program.

The moral piece, obviously, is the green. You need the moral piece because it addresses supporters who need to be reassured that the benefits they receive from the fiscal stimulus package -- which have no doubt about it, is going to require deficit spending -- are deserved. People care about their own self-interest, but they also care about fairness and the common good. Put another way, "give me a job!" is a less ennobling demand than "give me an opportunity to save the fucking planet!"

I think it's fair to say that this exchange is dominating coverage of the seemingly doomed auto industry bailout.

"There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

"It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious."

He added, "couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it."|CNN|

Yes, the executives heading up the big three automakers are chowder heads. This is not in dispute. Nor is it the issue.

On the plus side, there's always the possibility that the bailout will rise again, stronger than before. You might think, for instance, that any acceptable bailout must involve those jet-setting jerks tumbling ass over teakettle out the door. Well, political support for your version of the bailout just went up a notch.

By way of contrast:

President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer.

We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reigns on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline.

We're facing a national crisis, not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of the polar ice caps are melting. There's only so much oil left under the Earth. We're going to run out of that, if not in our children's time, our grandchildren's time.

There's got to be a plan set out to find other ways to transport ourselves in other ways than using fossil fuels. |CNN: Michael Moore|

I was chatting with a biologist who works on aging, and he said that, as far as folk remedies go, two seem to stand out in terms of their success in fighting aging.

1) Semi-starvation. A very, very low calorie diet can lengthen life expectancy significantly.

2) Drink the blood of the young (although a transfusion might be better). As we grow older our stem cells die off, and this causes many of the symptoms of aging. By introducing the blood of the young into our system, we can replenish our supply of stem cellls.

My biologist friend, by the way, claims not to engage in either practice. His hopes lie instead with gene therapy. "Living forever would be a mark of professional success," he told me.

Looks like it all could have been avoided. I withdraw my support for the bailout.

A short excerpt from Big Labor Boss's stemwinder:

BLB: Whoa, there boys! Don't misunderstand me. We gotta turn this deal down because it's too fucking sweet.

(Boos and calls of "Huh, huh, huh?")

BLB: That's right, too fucking sweet. Sure everything is going pretty great for auto makers and America right now. Hell, we're kings of the fucking world people, but it ain't gonna last. Nope, there are some dark fucking times ahead. Right now, even as I address this crowd, there are men in the Pentagon that are plotting to seize on the flimsiest of evidence that the North Vietnamese attacked our brave sailors in Vietnam. This will widen a war against a determined guerrilla foe. The widening war with cause a cultural rift that right-wingers will be able to frighten most of you with for the next four decades. I'm telling you right now, your granddaughters will marry Negroes and your grandsons will be queers. Our eventual defeat in Vietnam will send the nation into a existential funk. Our apparent military vulnerability will be exploited by OPEC which will -- hey, hey, calm down people. Give me a minute here. I know what the fuck I am saying -- OPEC is going to embargo oil. Embargo. This will lead to people wanting to drive small, fuel efficient cars.

(Laughter)

BLB: No, I'm fucking serious. First it will be a company called Datsun, which will eventually be called Nissan, but that's neither here nor there. Toyota will kick all of our asses. Fuck, even the Koreans will take us to school. I shit you not.

Ted: BLB, won't we start making small cars too? Better cars? More efficient, better built? We are the fucking best labor force in the world!

BLB: Afraid not, Ted, although I appreciate your support for my seemingly insane prediction of the future.

|GBOR: Those Short-Sighted Sons a' Bitches|