The Sacrament of Confession

I'd like this digression on obscenity to be about the abuse of language or politics or aesthetics or justice or the even the environment. But no.

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people

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The only thing in any sense just about this is that the Catholic Church worked so hard so keep this quiet in service protecting its reputation. And we get to see how nicely that worked out. It's the apotheosis of moral corruption, and hopefully the long-arc subtext of any and all retellings of what is unfortunately certain to be an ongoing situation. Any assumption that it is not is just more of the same. And as any Calvinist can tell you, even the church will get what it deserves.

Monocultures of any kind, actually

From financial wunderkind Felix Salmon, via Grist, on how monoculture is like triple-A collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), i.e., agricultural innovation as harmless as the financial innovation. ah, insight:

The point here is that a disease-resistant crop is a lot like a triple-A-rated structured bond: they’re both artificially engineered to be as safe as possible. That would be a wonderfully good thing if no one knew that they were so safe. But if you’re aware of a safety improvement, that often just has the effect of increasing the amount of risk you take: people drive faster when they’re wearing seatbelts, and they take on a lot more leverage when they’re buying AAA-rated bonds.

The agricultural equivalent is the move to industrial-scale monoculture, “safe” in the knowledge that lots of clever engineers in the US have made the crop into the agribusiness version of a bankruptcy-remote special-purpose entity.

But the problem is that bankruptcy-remote doesn’t mean that bankruptcy is impossible: just ask the people running Citigroup’s AAA-rated SIVs. If and when the unlikely event eventually happens, the amount of devastation caused is directly proportional to the degree to which people thought they were protected. When something like that goes wrong, it goes very wrong indeed: artificial safety improvements have the effect of turning outcomes binary.

Essentially, you’re trading a large number of small problems for a small probability that at some point you’re going to have an absolutely enormous problem.

GMOs make sense only from a profits standpoint - production costs minus the cost of labor = profits. In no other way does monoculture - the practice of growing a single crop year after year over a wide area - proffer anything but a route to a quicker spread of blight. Which itself is another way to say 'seeing everything from a profits standpoint.'

What could be more blighted than that?

Triumph for democracy

Obscene = this guy's presence in a decision-making position in the government, at all. Disgusting is his whining about how, because nobody gets along any more, he quit:

When I was a boy, members of Congress from both parties, along with their families, would routinely visit our home for dinner or the holidays. This type of social interaction hardly ever happens today and we are the poorer for it. It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home. Today, members routinely campaign against each other, raise donations against each other and force votes on trivial amendments written solely to provide fodder for the next negative attack ad. It’s difficult to work with members actively plotting your demise.

Screw you. You know what? You are still a boy. This whole piece is utterly disgusting.
It is a major triumph for the senate and democratic governance generally that it was able to drive this complete f%^king tool from its ranks. May others heed the call as well.

Stop Digging

The first thing you do when you realize you're in a hole, right?

Grist has this story on a recent debate between RFK, Jr., and Don Blankenship, CEO of mountaintop-removal mining firm Massey Energy Co.,:

The mystery to me going in was why Blankenship agreed to it. What possible incentive is there for a corporate CEO to put himself in a risky situation, publicly defending a widely reviled product? What’s the upside? Why not just buy some ads or hire more lobbyists?

Having watched the debate, I’m more mystified than ever. If that was supposed to be damage control, I’d hate to see damage. Blankenship had every advantage, with a friendly hometown crowd eager to applaud him and a moderator who helpfully read off pro-coal facts during commercial breaks, but he was painfully and obviously outmatched by Kennedy. I guess it’s easy to get over-confident when you’ve effectively purchased a state government and broken the law with impunity for years.

He didn’t seem even cursorily prepared. Kennedy reeled off fact after fact about declining mining employment in WV, the age of Appalachian ecosystems and the impossibility of recovering them after MTR mining damage, the enormous health and economic impacts of coal on Appalachia, the size of Chinese investments in clean energy, the number of Clean Water Act violations from Massey, and on and on and on. Every fact was geared toward a plea to West Virginians: look, this man is making himself rich by making you poor. He’s sapping your state of jobs, income, health, and a future.

In response Blankenship had nothing but ressentiment and nativism. Over and over he dismissed Kennedy’s facts as “rhetoric” and “just false” claims that “you can find on the internet,” but not once did he refute or even convincingly contest a particular claim. He asked the audience to dismiss them based purely on crude stereotypes about out-of-state environmentalists.

His very first rebuttal drew on a familiar conservative trope: environmentalists are are overly emotional and rely on extremist rhetoric rather than facts and cool reason. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than he was talking about how the coal industry is really “your neighbors” and “Sunday school teachers,” working to create down-home energy so terrorists don’t come over and kill us. He warned that pesky regulatory constraints from do-gooders mean “we all better learn to speak Chinese.” This is what reasoned, non-emotional rhetoric looks like, I guess: if you criticize my company you hate Sunday school teachers, love terrorists, and want to surrender national sovereignty to Red China.

Disaster Reporting

The tone varies tremendously on how news about disasters is conveyed, the stereotypes that emerge or are re-inforced and the narratives, fictitious or real, that take hold. Campus progress, via, published a good interview with Kathleen Tierney about the behavior of major media outlets reporting on large-scale disasters:

Do you think that because the victims of both Haiti and Katrina were poor and black, the media approached the stories with a certain perspective?

Definitely. There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. Black men especially are demonized. During Katrina, the media picked up on every rumor—whether it was raped four-year-olds in the Superdome or people shooting each other. Actually, for a paper me and a couple of my graduate students wrote called “Metaphors Matter,” we found some transcripts of TV programs in which members of the media expressed regret. They were saying, “We really blew it during Katrina; we acted on all of these rumors.” I myself was on Jim Lehrer’s show, where they were asking about the looting [in Katrina], and I got into it with a police officer, and he ended up agreeing with me that it was a myth. It’s not real. I thought the media would have learned something after Katrina, but evidently they haven’t. Here we go again

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The people of Haiti are up against a lot already without us bringing our fears of the poor and non-white to the table. This backwards reflex has us still in the cave, despite out evident progress. It's the way we can tell ourselves so much about the world to rationalize our own behavior. And not about doing nothing at times like these - but about doing so much at all other times to further this state of affairs instead of pushing it to point of elimination.

Hey, MLK day tomorrow! Let's stay home from work and simmer over those who brought us such an ungracious work stoppage with all that protest singing and German-shepherd taunting.

Really Powerful Female Characters

In advance, I promise to re-visit this more frequently. Because it's appalling. And not just because I spend so much time thinking about female characters.

This was on LG&M last week, and I'm basically stealing it - but check out SEK's point about comics, which is replicated everywhere, despite vertical clout of Sandra Bullock.

craziness

Just another name for nothing left to lose.

I saw this article a couple of days ago, about the millions of people living on nothing but food stamps. Nothing. but. food stamps. No other cash income.

And in the middle of the article, the reporter finds a Republican to denounce the situation, but (of course) he says this:

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

They literally say that about everything. But... tax cuts would help people with no other cash income. What... eventually? How about groceries this week?