Those of you in the know are aware of the current events in my life; this little ditty is how I'm now choosing to confront what's happening. There's no better way, really.
The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
"Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism"
The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism ("disagreement is treason").
"Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference."
Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
"[T]he Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
"[T]he Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."
Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
...it really is time for you to run. Please, for the love of everything good about this country, Al, please enter the primaries to reclaim your rightful office. We've been through enough and we're as ready as ever for your presidency (again).
Mental health professionals complain their hands are tied in two ways when they try to help people like Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui -- a lack of funding for mental health services in general, and laws that makes it tough to treat people against their will.
They say the 23-year-old student's shooting rampage sheds new light on flaws in the U.S. mental health system.
To right here, right now. My dear friend Jen lost one of her closest in Virginia this week, Professor Jamie Bishop. Across the country, there are hundreds of other shocked people like her, at a loss for explanation. How could this man fall through the cracks, as we've heard over and over again.
Snip, to a potentially catastrophic of our own state mental heath system:
Shortly after Odom’s tenure began, the N.C. General Assembly passed legislation revamping the mental health care delivery system. The aim was to get people out of state-run hospitals and back into the community, where an array of private providers would care for them. Local care would be overseen by area mental health programs, which became local management entities or LMEs.
The goals were admirable. In addition to bringing care closer to home, by privatizing the system the state hoped to offer consumers more choice.
But from the beginning, the reform has been an almost unmitigated failure, with constant turmoil between the state, the LMEs and private providers.
Should Odom's "reforms" succeed, we have the potential for 100,000 children "falling through the cracks." I'm not reaching here.
This is for real.
Secretary Odom needs to resign now, and Governor Easley: you owe our children an explanation.
I spent the day yesterday lobbying Raleigh (with a young lobbyist, even) for a reversal of the catastrophic decision to slash the mental health reform program the state and providers have fought so hard to create. It seems Governor Mike Easley, Lt. Governor Beverly Perdue, and Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom (c'mon googlebots, spider this post) have decided to hide away from the issue and impending disaster, while the Legislature is largely and bipartisanly pissed off. I will remember this, Bev, during primary season. Remember Ned Lamont?
It's a complex issue, and good pal and bloggy comrade Screwie Hoolie has established an excellent backgrounder on the issue, to whom I now defer:
SAVE OUR SYSTEM
* On April 5, 2007 Sec. Odom approved slashing Community Support rates 33%.
* By April 12, 2007 many mental health agencies across the State have announced massive layoffs.
* The new system is only 1 year old.
* 100's of companies across the State are teetering on the brink and will close in the next 30 days or face bankruptcy.
* In Western NC alone 20,000 mental health, substance abuse and developmentally disabled consumers will be without any services.
* Across NC this number is in the 100,000s.
WHY COMMUNITY SUPPORT?
* Community Support is the linchpin of the Mental Health Recovery Model and Mental Health Reform.
* Without Community Support Reform DOES NOT work.
* DHHS found “over utilization of community support” and budget over-runs the first year of $500 million.
* Community Support is a BRAND NEW service as of 3/20/2006.
* DHHS created a budget not knowing how much it would cost.
* NOW we know.
* At beginning of reform, costs are higher the first 2 years--THESE are start up costs.
* After 2 years costs will decrease.
REALITY CHECK
LIE: Mark Benton, DMA deputy director, repeatedly quoted that 98% of community support being done by paraprofessionals (high school graduates, no experience).
FACT: 100s of Professional Provider Agencies exist and have a mix of Qualified Professionals (Bachelor's plus experience or Master's), Associated Professionals--college degree and experience and Para-professionals.
LIE: The MAJORITY of providers are abusing the system
FACT: Recent Audit done by DHHS only sampled the “outliers”--those agencies billing the most per client--167 agencies of over 1000. Professional Provider Agencies who volunteered for the audit were ignored.
LIE: a 33% REDUCTION is the only way to address the large budget shortfall and over-expenditure of community support.
FACT: Secretary Odom made this decision without consulting legislators or providers. Legislators have other solutions. Sec. Odom will not listen.
LIE: Dep. Director Benton repeatedly quoted as saying “NO PROVIDERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS” with this rate slash.
FACT: Most providers will go out of business within 30 days--the new system will be destroyed.
DEMAND SEC. ODOM RESCIND THIS RATE SLASH. DEMAND SERVICES BE RESTORED BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
Should the good Secretary continue ahead with the horrid plan to take this service away from our most vulnerable, not only will I join with thousands of others to demand her resignation, I will exercise my first amendment rights in such a way that will leave little room for diplomacy.
Demand that our kids and families receive the respect from their government they are entitled to BY LAW. [more]
North Carolina: more money for old buildings, less concern for mental health
Our great state has been reworking its horrid mental health infrastructure for years now. In the process, consumers of services and their families have been strapped in to a roller coaster which peaks at new services, and suddenly drops again as these services are savaged to appropriate monies elsewhere. A result of this reform was to create an amalgam of two different services; Community Based Services (one-on-one mental health interventions in school, home, and community) and case management (linking and brokering mental health resource access). This service was implemented last March, and while some agencies have over-used it, it's been the best recovery-based model of service delivery we've seen for some time. Of course, I can say that because it's what I do, and I love what I do. I've counted many successes in my clients over the years, and they are progressing rapidly toward independence from the "system."
Here's a snippet from the most recent memo from the state regarding its targeting of CS for budget cuts:
It came down the wire yesterday that the state has decided to cut the rate of reimbursement for Community Support by 35%, which will effectively isolate thousands of consumers from receiving the mental health services they need and deserve. Many agencies will likely shut down. It will, in effect, create the mental health crisis the services was created to avoid. My agency has already responded to this by alerting consumers to the state's desire to shift more money (apparently) to upkeep of public buildings, which is allocated the same amount of money which the state under-projected for this service, $30 million [.pdf]. The $20 billion budget gives 23% to Health and Human Services, 60% goes to education, 10% to roads and public safety, etc. Sure, HHS already gets a large portion of the budget, but despite the glimmering Research Triangle, poverty is still a major problem in this, the most over-taxed of states in the East (while corporations enjoy countless tax breaks). Poverty has a profound impact on mental health and substance use. Disrupting this service now will only result in greater expense later.
Cut. Off. Nose. To. Spite. Face.
Seriously, the state needs to take a deep breath, get into a calm quiet place, and ask itself WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING? Today, I'm collecting letters from the parents and kids I service, and will be faxing them to the offices of Senator Nesbitt and Representative Insko, demanding that the state stop and think about cutting this service so drastically, while assuring that our old buildings look spotless for tourists. I'm not reaching... that's exactly the size of the problem.
Tarheels, earn yourself a gold star and raise your voice against impacting the lives of countless kids and families with this reactive, thoughtless, negligent decision. If the kids can't depend on the state, than they must depend on your objection to this impulsive move... just as they depend on their CS Workers to help their families recover from mental illness and renew their right to a healthy childhood.
As things crumble for the politically vile and ethically spent White House, some interesting items have some to light regarding their email system, which could in fact blow the lid off of some very interesting crimes and misdemeanors felonies:
GWB43 is the name of an internet server owned by the Republican National Committee. The White House has its own internal email system, ending in the .gov suffix, as mandated by the Presidential Records Act. The law requires that public business be conducted on a public server. Yet documents made public in the course of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal reveal that key Administration figures used such email addresses ending with "gwb43.com." ...A list of domains that share mailservers and nameservers with gwb43 reveals numerous sites connected to either powerful Republicans or to the Religious Right. On the mailserver list, we find domains connected to Bush, Newt Gingrich, and ohiogop.org. [snip: GWB43.com is hosted by SmartTechCorp, allied with key administration friends and cronies]. ...One does not need to exercise much imagination to see how anyone using the net for nefarious purposes would want a "friendly" hosting company handling ultra-sensitive duties. Hosting companies keep records of who does what. If you are using computers to do something you don't want the world to know about, you don't want those records available to just anyone. As the controversy over the 2004 elections gathered steam, Karl Rove made a joke about fixing the election returns from a computer in the White House basement. This remark struck some observers as the sort of jest that the villain in Rope might have uttered: "Yeah, sure, I strangled my friend for no good reason and hid his body in the cupboard! Now seriously, how about that drink...?"
So, this ties in with the Attorney Purge scandal, and interestingly, a single piece of email might prove to be a huge indictment of Domenici, Wilson, Rove, W, et al:
New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici’s chief of staff sent a cryptic thank-you note to Karl Rove just as the senator was recommending replacements for David Iglesias, the fired U.S. attorney in New Mexico, according to internal White House and Justice Department documents. Buried in Justice Department documents released two weeks ago, the Bell e-mail was not initially noticed by congressional investigators because it was sent to Rove’s political e-mail account—not his more clearly recognizable White House e-mail address. It is not clear from the content of the e-mail what Bell was thanking Rove for. But the thank-you note is the first indication that Rove himself may have been involved in replacing Iglesias. It is the dismissal of Iglesias—fired after Domenici complained about his handling of a local corruption investigation—that has raised the most serious questions of political interference in the U.S. attorney controversy. “This absolutely corroborates what I’ve been saying all along—this is a political matter, not a performance matter,” Iglesias said when a Newsweek reporter read him the e-mail today. “What is he thanking him [Rove] for? It’s thanking him for getting Dave out of the picture.”
It may be full of tubes, it may take two whole days to "send an internet," but by golly, its very nature cannot shelter the truly nefarious. Well played, internet!
Prospect Mag: We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.
:( Expectation's a bitch. It will get worse if we give up on it. With the rise of what Harvey calls "cultural creatives," there's so much great potential to transform the world. But, alas, here's what the thinkers say.
"Instead of left/right we’re moving to open/closed."
"The coming cleavage is between zealots and realists."
"In the future, the main conflict in developed countries will be between conservative populism and liberal elitism."
"The new struggle is between the best of the Enlightenment legacy (rationalism, scientific empiricism, separation of church and state) on the one hand and, on the other, various forms of obscurantism and value-free relativism, often disguised as “anti-imperialism” or “anti-universalism” to give profoundly reactionary attitudes an alluringly radical veneer."
Concentric sprawl at the edges of discrete metropolitan centres is not the only model of substandard housing growth. There is also the built-up corridor, which takes shape as the hinterlands between smaller and larger cities become developed, or strictly speaking underdeveloped, and an elongated urban swathe begins to form, like that of the Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region, effectively a serpentine city 500 km in length, with a megacity at either end and two bulges – medium-size cities – in between. A similar urban ribbon is developing in West Africa; by 2020, according to an OECD study, it will run for 600 km from Accra to Benin City and contain 60 million inhabitants. Davis believes it will be ‘the biggest single footprint of urban poverty on earth’.
In the new science, we tell you the results of the experiment so you don't have to bother.
Methinks that the Bush Administration Quagmire directly imports their "science" advisers directly from the Dark Ages via a magical time-warp-hole which has opened somewhere near the fleshy nether regions of one Mr. Karl Rove. As evidenced by:
Polar bears, sea ice and global warming are taboo subjects, at least in public, for some U.S. scientists attending meetings abroad, environmental groups and a top federal wildlife official said on Thursday. Environmental activists called this scientific censorship, which they said was in line with the Bush administration's history of muzzling dissent over global climate change... The matter came to light in e-mails from the Fish and Wildlife Service that were distributed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity, both environmental groups. Listed as a "new requirement" for foreign travelers on U.S. government business, the memo says that requests for foreign travel "involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice, and/or polar bears" require special handling, including notice of who will be the official spokesman for the trip.
Hogwash. Humbug. Well, lest the secret leak out that dinosaurs weren't really put on Earth 6,000 years ago to test man's faith:
The U.S. Geological Survey is the latest government agency that is feeling the heat from the Bush administration, which appears to be clamping down on research that may go against official policy. New government rules now require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The scientists under this new requirement study everything from caribou mating to global warming, but the new rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents. In fact, even minor reports or prepared talks are under scrutiny now. When asked to clarify, officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm say the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.
And the inanity extends even out into the sweet pristine cosmos, which surely contains heaven somewhere:
...Deutsch not only faked his resume but more importantly had been censoring scientific publications produced at NASA by applying a religious Creationist rewrite of technical research...The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion. It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
So, for the next two years, we are left to imagine what it will be like when we resume the Golden Age of Science while we settle for, well, A-Somewhat-Shoddily-Applied-Faux-Gold-Finish-Sealed-With-Polyeurothane-
And-Gently-Presented-On-A-Pat-Robertson-Approved-Platter-To-Dear-Leader age of would-be science. In the meantime, George, Dick and Karl, no cataclysms plz kthxbi :)
Every Sikh temple throughout the world has a Langar (Punjabi for "free kitchen"). This is not a soup kitchen. It's not exclusively for the poor, nor exclusively for the Sikh community. Volunteering in the cooking, serving and cleaning process is a form of active spiritual practice for devotees, but the service they provide asks no religious affiliation of its recipients. Our guide's chorus was, "Man, woman, color, caste, community," meaning you will be fed here regardless of how you fit into any of those classifications. This spirit of inclusion and equality is reinforced by the kitchen's adherence to vegetarianism, not because Sikhs are vegetarian, but because others who visit may be, and by serving no meat, they exclude nobody...
...The Gurwara Bangla Sahib langara has been feeding Delhi residents since 1935. Day in and day out a factory of human hands churns out what one member of our group observed as a day's peace of mind for hungry members of the community. "If you get your day's meal," he said, "you can relax. You can survive."
If you look back at the record, what was the main reason for the U.S. attack on Vietnam? Independent development can be a virus that can infect others. That’s the way it’s been put, Kissinger in this case, referring to Allende in Chile. And with Cuba it’s explicit in the internal record. Arthur Schlesinger, presenting the report of the Latin American Study Group to incoming President Kennedy, wrote that the danger is the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which has a lot of appeal to others in the same region that suffer from the same problems. Later internal documents charged Cuba with successful defiance of U.S. policies going back 150 years – to the Monroe Doctrine -- and that can’t be tolerated. So there’s kind of a state commitment to ensuring obedience.
Going back to Iran, it’s not only that it has substantial resources and that it’s part of the world’s major energy system but it also defied the United States. The United States, as we know, overthrew the parliamentary government, installed a brutal tyrant, was helping him develop nuclear power, in fact the very same programs that are now considered a threat were being sponsored by the U.S. government, by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kissinger, and others, in the 1970s, as long as the Shah was in power. But then the Iranians overthrew him, and they kept U.S. hostages for several hundred days. And the United States immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein and his war against Iran as a way of punishing Iran. The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance. So that’s a separate factor.
Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling
You know your empire’s crumbling whenthe folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don’t bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why.
You know your empire’s crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome.
You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending your grandchildren’s money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country).
You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated.
You know your empire’s crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you’re still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you’re not making anything anymore.) Etc. Etc.
single piece of email might prove to be a huge indictment of Domenici, Wilson, Rove, W, et al:
Methinks that the Bush 
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