The Brittle Hum of the Republic

GA Woman To State Judiciary Committee: DoD Implanted A Microchip Inside Me

You debate an odd bill, you hear some odd testimony. But this…

The Georgia House Judiciary Committee took up a bill last week that would “prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip,” and would make violating the ban a misdemeanor. According to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one exchange from the hearing could have been ripped right from Dr. Strangelove.

The Journal-Constitution reports that things started getting weird when a woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County told the committee: “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip.” Apparently no lawmaker took this as a warning sign, and she was allowed to continue her testimony.

“Microchips are like little beepers,” the woman told the committee. “Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission.”

“Ma’am, did you say you have a microchip?” state Rep. Tom Weldon (R) asked the woman.

“Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area,” she replied.

No one laughed. State Rep. Wendell Willard (R), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked her who had implanted the chip.

“The Department of Defense,” she said.

Willard thanked the woman for her input, and the committee later approved the bill.

Technical term for this device, we presume, is “the Sprite”.

This is from Tony Judt, a regular contributor to the NYRB, one of the smartest people around and an excellent writer. This is highly recommended.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

full piece here

Sarah Palin, in her joint appearance with Michelle Bachmann at a big fundraiser/cross-burning shindig in Minnesota, said…

“I knew we would be buddies when I met her [in Alaska] and she said that we should ‘drill here, drill now.’ And I replied, ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ And we both said, ‘You betcha.”

She also said…

“Someone had better tell Washington that that pink elephant is on the move, and Michele is leading the stampede,”

Let’s pull all this another way. This world we’ve woken up to here in modern America is too much like the one portrayed below…

It really is quite an extraordinary bit of animation and music composition to match the visual portrayal/subject, isn’t it?   (h/t Balloon Juice)

Babe Ruth and George Bush senior in a photo taken the year I was born

I’d thought that by now I’d have built a railroad.  Or a time machine.

One of very many examples of the emerging lingua patriotica (see here)

But a tip of the hat to this famous earlier example which does set a very high standard…

This was carried in Ha’aretz yesterday. Israeli peace group, Peace Now, translates an interview in Israel’s Yedioth Aranoth with Moshe Ya’along, Israeli Vice PM and Minister for Strategic Affairs:

Gestures, statements, negotiations—nothing will come of it in the end. That is the bottom line as far as Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe (Bogi) Yaalon is concerned. The former Mapainik, who has become a right-wing marker in the government, looks at the lame efforts to resume the negotiations with the Palestinians and at the gestures made by Prime Minister Netanyahu—from the announcement of the two-state solution to the decision to freeze construction in the settlements—and suggests that we not become confused. It is all maneuvers. “And I say so out of knowledge,” Bogi says. “Nobody in the forum of seven thinks that we can reach an agreement with the Palestinians.”

Q. So why all these games of make-believe negotiations? It’s possible to announce that we will not reach an agreement, and that is all.

“Because in the political establishment there are pressures. Peace Now from within and other elements from without. So you have to maneuver. But what I’m saying now has to be given over to the Americans, and I hope that they will understand.
“Some of what we have to do is maneuver with the American administration and the European establishment, which are also nourished by Israeli elements, which create the illusion that an agreement can be reached. If the leader of the opposition gets up on stage and says that she is in favor of peace, unlike the prime minister who is against peace, then honestly. Come off it.”

Take a few moments and listen to this episode of Britain’s Hold Your Plums/

I’ll just link this story and let you read it. This finding is going to gain an enormous amount of interest among anthropologists because it really does shake up the prior model we had in place to account for existing evidence on homonid migrations out of Africa. This really is an earth-shaker.
Denisova hominid

I Spy

This wonderful TV show not only brought Bill Cosby to a national audience, it was a significant cultural landmark towards racial equality. My family loved “I Spy”. Hat tip to Culp. I’m sure many actors at that time would have refused to co-star with an African American.

“In his 24 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from around the world, all cases of grave sexual offences by clerics had to be reported, under strictest secrecy (”secretum pontificum”), to his curial office, which was exclusively responsible for dealing with them. Ratzinger himself, in a letter on “grave sexual crimes” addressed to all the bishops under the date of 18 May, 2001, warned the bishops, under threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe “papal secrecy” in such cases.”

here

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress notes a wonderful Niebuhr quote:

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

Tall Stories Tiny Lies

Chris Hitchens sets to a rewrite of the Commandments

Ross Douthat on religious experience gone Burger King

Edge People by Tony Judt

Martha Nussbaum and the “politics of disgust”

The right kind of bigotry

Okavango Delta

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