Michael K. Gorman: Addiction

Reader Jay Sheckley of Berkeley’s Dark Carnival bookstore forwarded another cartoon from the talented Michael K. Gorman [previously] with this note, which includes a link to a magazine story about research on the addiction of making bang-bang:

FROM CULT ARTIST Michael K Gorman, the perfect illustration from the truth that must be told about gun addiction. Don’t forget to read the Forbes article and share all this.

Chart of the day: Satisfaction, American-style

From Gallup, a new poll reveals that we’re happiest with the military and the war on terror:

Headline of the day: Gee, who’d a’ thunk it?

From a University of Indiana press release:

New Study Reveals Sex to be Pleasurable With or Without Use of a Condom or Lubricant

What the hell is it with the Catholic church?

Now we’re not the religious sort, and we think the notion that eating round crackers is an act sacred cannibalism is a bit daft, but we’re also sure that some of the things we believe, seen from the perspective of the future or by a visitor from Alpha Centauri would seem equally loopy.

So let’s forget things theological and look only at things criminal, like using the power of the priestly office as a handy dandy lever for exploiting the orifices of small children, all whilst professing to practice sacred celibacy — something which seems to happen a lot.

In a sane world, priests who do such things should be defrocked and handed over to secular authorities, but the reality has been something quite different.

Rather than strip the fucking Fathers of their office, the church often plays a shell game, shifting them from parish to parish, archdiocese to archdiocese, apparently to give them the opportunity to sample as many prepubescent bodies as possible. What other reason could there be? If the bishops and cardinals really wanted to scupper their ruts, then they could banish them to isolated, nearly empty monasteries, of which the church owns plenty.

Consider the latest nasty revelations from Los Angeles, where the central player in a vicious little coverup was a hugely popular cardinal.

From Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, and Harriet Ryan of the Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Read the rest.

We suggest that the proper place for such scofflaws as Mahony is the general population of one of the state’s prisons, where inmates provide a special form of ministration to folks who sexually abuse small children.

Cardinal sins indeed.

UPDATE: It’s happened in Germany, too. And this year.

Quote of the day: Science, pros, prose, and cons

UC Santa Barbara anthropologist John Tooby, Co-director of Center for Evolutionary Psychology, writing for Edge.org in response to the question, 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT? [emphasis added]:

[C]ooperative scientific problem-solving is the most beautifully effective system for the production of reliable knowledge that the world has ever seen. But the monsters that haunt our collective intellectual enterprises typically turn us instead into idiots. Consider the cascade of collective cognitive pathologies produced in our intellectual coalitions by ingroup tribalism, self-interest, prestige-seeking, and moral one-upsmanship: It seems intuitive to expect that being smarter would lead people to have more accurate models of reality. On this view, intellectual elites therefore ought to have better beliefs, and should guide their societies with superior knowledge. Indeed, the enterprise of science is—as an ideal—specifically devoted to improving the accuracy of beliefs. We can pinpoint where this analysis goes awry, however, when we consider the multiple functions of holding beliefs. We take for granted that the function of a belief is to be coordinated with reality, so that when actions are based on that belief, they succeed. The more often beliefs are tested against reality, the more often accurate beliefs displace inaccurate ones (e.g., through feedback from experiments, engineering tests, markets, natural selection). However, there is a second kind of function to holding a belief that affects whether people consciously or unconsciously come to embrace it—the social payoffs from being coordinated or discoordinated with others’ beliefs (Socrates’ execution for “failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges”). The mind is designed to balance these two functions: coordinating with reality, and coordinating with others. The larger the payoffs to social coordination, and the less commonly beliefs are tested against reality, then the more social demands will determine belief—that is, network fixation of belief will predominate. Physics and chip design will have a high degree of coordination with reality, while the social sciences and climatology will have less.

Because intellectuals are densely networked in self-selecting groups whose members’ prestige is linked (for example, in disciplines, departments, theoretical schools, universities, foundations, media, political/moral movements, and other guilds), we incubate endless, self-serving elite superstitions, with baleful effects: Biofuel initiatives starve millions of the planet’s poorest. Economies around the world still apply epically costly Keynesian remedies despite the decisive falsification of Keynesian theory by the post-war boom (government spending was cut by 2/3, 10 million veterans dumped into the labor force, while Samuelson predicted “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced”). I personally have been astonished over the last four decades by the fierce resistance of the social sciences to abandoning the blank slate model in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is false. As Feynman pithily put it, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Chart of the day: FDR rolls over in his grave

From Gallup, results of a poll on the satisfaction of Americans with corporations and the national government:

From the report:

Americans are much more positive about certain aspects of these two entities. For example, in this same Jan. 7-10 survey, in answer to a different question, 74% said they are satisfied with “the nation’s military strength and preparedness” and 67% are satisfied with the nation’s “security from terrorism.” Both of these, of course, are largely a reflection of the federal government’s work. Previous research has also shown that government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA, and FBI have positive images.

What’s more, Gallup’s annual update on the image of business and industry sectors shows that 73% of Americans have a positive image of the computer industry. This industry includes many small businesses but is dominated by major corporations such as Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Headline of the day: Now that’s an original sinner!

From the Connecticut Post:

Sources: Cross-dressing meth priest liked sex in rectory

Marshall Davis Jones : “Touchscreen”

Delivered at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, Jones delivers what us simply the most searingly eloquent and concise evisceration of the pretense and sham of the corporatized realm of social media. H/T to Adbusters.

Chart of the day: Growing sour on the system

From the latest Gallup Poll, evidence younger Americans are growing more skeptical of their political system, with nearly two-thirds ranking it average or below compared with other industrialized nations:

Headline of the day: Jonesin’ for some browsin’

From the Los Angeles Times:

Girls accused of spiking parents’ milkshakes

A daughter and her friend allegedly put sleeping pills in the drinks so they could break a rule and use the Internet past 10 p.m.

Quote of the day: Hand, mightier than the Penn

From Adam Green’s marvelous “A Pickpocket’s Tale,” in the latest New Yorker:

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

Newspeak and the semantic antics of spin

RT’s Marina Portnaya tackles one of our favorite bugbears, the surrender of the American news media to the neologisms of political spinmeisters:

And don’t you just love “low information voters”? As opposed to, say, ignorant voters? But then that latter term would rightly direct some of the blame towards the news media, which do so much to insure that very ignorance. . .

Quote of the day: Oarless boating up fecal creek

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his delightfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

We’re now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy — some new kind of cheap or even free energy — comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery — the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client “primary dealers” (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What’s more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The  fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary  fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that “recovery” is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become “energy independent” or that we have “a hundred years of shale gas” as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

Chart of the day: Tough times a-comin’ in 2013?

From the latest  Gallup poll, clear signs Americans don’t see silver linings in 2013’s clouds:

Headline of the day: Something Yule regret

From the London Telegraph:

Adulterers beware: Christmas Day the peak time for ‘text message bustings’

It is meant to be a time of peace and love. But Christmas Day has become the day of the year when unfaithful husbands are most likely to be caught out, according to one of Britain’s top divorce lawyers

Costs of Christmas could end homelessness

A report from RT’s Marina Portnaya:

Kind of reminds us of what we once read somewhere.

Ah, yes. It was in that book all Christmas lovers pretend to embrace. Specifically, in Matthew 19:16-25. . .

And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, That is God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

He saith unto Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The young man saith unto him, all these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow Me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Quote of the day: Elderly actor, opposite text

From the Los Angeles Times, Dick Van Dyke, 86, on his recent marriage to a 40-year-old:

“When you marry a young girl, you marry her iPhone.”

Headline of the day II: Calling Lost and Found

From the Washington Post:

Surgeons left 4,857 objects in patients over the past two decades

Headline of the day: We are shocked. Shocked.

From The Atlantic:

Research Says: Studying Economics Turns You Into a Liar

The Dancing Cop comes out of retirement

Though he retired in 1988, Tony Lepore returns to duty for 10 days every holiday season for a command performance as the Dancing Cop of Providence, Rhode Island, drawing crowds and smiles as he directs traffic.

In an age when police are becoming militarized and increasing distant from the communities they’re supposed to serve, it’s refreshing to see an officer accomplish his very serious purpose with elan and delight.

For more on Lepore, see this Associated Press story from Rodrique Ngowi.

And here’s Lepore at his dancing best in a Boston Globe video:

H/T to Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I.