John McCain, I Am Here To Take You To School, Motherfucker

That may sound strong, but it was the first thing that came to mind when reading his Twittered list of wasteful spending.

I shouldn’t let it bother me, since I knew it was coming. I even told my husband, when I saw there would be a list, that I would bet all our money on scientific endeavors topping it. Still, seeing that, once again, scientific research and education (like that “infamous” planetarium we heard about ad nauseum during his debates with Obama) gets the shaft from old McNasty just kills me. And so, as is my profession, I will now explain to the old man why he’s active like a fool in opposing governmental funding of science. Here we go.

As an experimental scientist, I am going to illustrate to you how the experiment I work on has revitalized an economy abroad, thereby explaining how experimental science is stimulus for failing economies, m’kay?

I first started with my current experiment about 8 years ago. Remember what was going on in Argentina around that time? Probably not, but, boy howdy, we do. They went bankrupt. Kaput. No mas dinero. Luckily, though, they still came through with the money that had been promised for our project. Was it because they desperately want to know the origins of the highest energy particles in the universe? I doubt it (it is, after all, knowledge that it useless for anything other than sounding smart at parties, practically speaking). Nope, they did it because it was an economically stimulative thing to do. How, you ask?

Scientific field research usually requires a large, untouched area. I could explain why, but it would involve words like “light pollution” and the like, and I don’t want to confuse you. Suffice to say that, for our experiment, we had to go out to the pampas and into a tiny town with no industry in it whatsoever. I don’t mean it had a couple of small businesses; I mean there was nothing. Nada. Zip. An old, abandoned salt mine. The men there had two options: be a goat farmer, or join the gendarme. The women had two options also: marry a goat farmer, or marry a member of the gendarme. While there were schools there, it was impossible to get them to attend past the age of 13 or so, since they began to see there was no point. And then they’d start getting pregnant (the abstinence-only education really is effective, eh?), having children they couldn’t support, and the cycle continued. I knew a teacher there who had to drag her 15-year-olds to class while they were pregnant with their second child. Really, it was rough.

So in we came: 250+ scientists from around the world. And we needed stuff. Like places to stay, places to eat, and people to help us construct an enormous and costly experiment. Over the last 8 years, I have watched the hotel prices go from $8 a night to over $60. I’ve seen multitudes of new restaurants open every year. Curio stores, tour guides, bakeries, and other shops now line the streets. Everyone there has a job, mostly centered around bilking us our per diems (as I suggested to my beloved hotel proprietor). And we happily pay it, because we are academics. Which means we’re activist hippie types at heart.

We show our bleeding hearts, in part by patronizing a ton of local businesses, but also by taking the most talented of the kids in the schools there and sending him, all expenses paid, to a university in the United States. The first such recipient graduated in 3 years with honors, then went on for his doctorate.

That’s how it works, on a practical level. But why focus on increasing the scientific and intellectual curiosity of our youth, with “wasteful” projects like making planetariums up-to-date or promoting astronomy in Hawaii? While I know that Arizona has no interest and/or economic stake in supporting astronomy (sarcasm doesn’t translate to the written word very well; what I mean to say is that YOUR FUCKING STATE houses one of the biggest and most active astronomical communities in the world, one to which I’ll be bringing Irish funds to spend soon). One of the second biggest communities resides in Hawaii, a place that drew $10 million from an old millionaire’s fortune for the express purpose of bettering the astronomical research done there. So, the promotion of astronomy has, historically speaking, brought in a buck or two here and there.

Besides, lack of education and intellectual curiosity is what brought us this:

…and, subsequently, this:

Now, see? Scientific research is stimulative to jobs for people from all walks of life, and education is never a waste of time. Not even for old, bitter men.

Countrywide Making Money Off Fire They Started

Are they evil? Brilliant? Both?

From the NY Times today:

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging…

“It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it,” said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for years has sought to place limits on what it calls abusive lending practices by Countrywide and other companies.

More than any other major lending institution, Countrywide has become synonymous with the excesses that led to the housing bubble. The firm’s reputation has been so tarnished that Bank of America, which bought it last year at a bargain price, announced that the name and logo of Countrywide, once the biggest mortgage lender in the nation, would soon disappear…

“Kurland is seeking to capitalize on a situation that was a product of his own creation,” said Blair A. Nicholas, a lawyer representing retired Arkansas teachers who are also suing Mr. Kurland and other former Countrywide executives. “It is tragic and ironic. But then again, greed is a growth industry.”

Here’s where the “evil” part really comes in:

[A] PennyMac representative…offered to cut the interest rate on their $590,000 loan to 3 percent, from 7.25 percent, cutting their monthly payments nearly in half, [Margarita] Laverde said.

“I kept on asking, ‘Are you sure this is correct? Are you sure?’ ” Ms. Laverde said. Even with this reduction, PennyMac stands to make a profit of at least 50 percent, a company official said.

Ms. Laverde could not care less that executives at PennyMac used to work at Countrywide.

“What matters,” she said, “is that we know our house is secure and our credit is safe.”

I’m with Ms. Laverde. That is indeed what is important.

That said, this whole thing makes me sick. I think it makes me sicker that it’s technically legal. It sort of smacks of premeditation in that way, like they checked with their lawyers ahead of time to make sure the government would step in to help people out once they created desperate situations for them; checked to make sure they’d still be able to keep their money; and then checked that they could use said money to profit even further off this crisis that, it deserves repeating, they created. And swooping in to rescue these poor people who are grateful to be able to retain basic shelter…egads, I feel like I need a Silkwood shower just reading this.

Motherhood: 1 Year In And Counting

So I’ve not been blogging the past few days, since I was busy celebrating my one-year-old’s first birthday. For ALMOST A WEEK??? you ask. It may sound excessive, but only to those without kids. Those with them, whether or not they agreed to the over-festivities marking the 1-year anniversary of their stint as sleep-deprived vomit sponges, will understand. But, it is for those without that I am chronicling the most important thing I’ve learned over the past year. And for my daughter to read one day, so I can make her feel king hell guilty about the saccharine nightmare into which she’s turned her mother. Anyhoodle (see???), here we go.

The old “Golden Rule” (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you) is ridiculous. Well, I’ve always thought that, since my opinion of myself and how I should be treated ain’t that high. As for a guideline on how to treat others, though, I sincerely do not believe you can do better than by treating everyone around you as if they have a baby attached to them. Not in a stroller, but in their arms.

As a Baby Björn addict, I am perpetually walking around with my daughter’s sweet face directly under mine, and it never ceases to amaze me the good it brings out of people. Cars stop for us to cross the street, seats on public transportation are never a problem, and brass musicians performing in enclosed spaces lower their volume at our approach. In general, the populous I have encountered is a totally different one than other people see. And, from my point of view, though, everyone waves to, chats with, offers to help, and visibly brightens their brethren. It’s, for lack of a better word, lovely. Really.

And it doesn’t just apply to others. I am different with people when I’m with her. I’m just different in general. My whole attitude becomes, not only friendlier, but much more chin-up than it otherwise would be. Even in my situation now, working for the worst bosses I’ve ever had by a long shot (which is saying a lot, considering I also worked for a drug addict who videotaped his female employees in the bathroom for his own in-house wanking material), and enveloped in financial, bureaucratic, and other such nightmares. Getting to realize that, at the end of the day, none of that is quite so fascinating as a lip balm container…well, it’s been remarkably enlightening, to say the least. Not to mention it’s relieving to not worry about your own petty shit quite so much.

Well, I’ll Be Shitbagged and Dragged To Fucktown…

It’s anti-cussing week, cunt faces! Oh, for fuck’s sake…

This kind of bullshit always reminds me of Spalding Gray’s take on cursing, and the one that I am teaching my own young-and-moldable mind:

“But Dad, ‘oh my’ is not a bad word, is it?”

“No Forrest, I’ve told you over and over that there are no bad words. A word only starts to take on a good or bad meaning when it’s used in context, and we’ll discuss that one later. Also, ‘oh’ and ‘my’ are two words, not one.”

“But my teacher said we could not say, ‘Oh my God.’”

“Forrest, you can say any word you want. You can say ‘God.’ You can say ‘my.’ You can say ‘oh.’ You can say ‘God my oh.’ Now let’s go over the lesson again. What might your teacher think is a real bad word? Let’s take a really good bad word. Let’s take ’shit.’ Well now, we don’t have the word ’shit’ yet, do we, so we’re going to have to make it up. Create it. Done. Now, I’m going to write the word ’shit’ in the air. It starts with the letter ’s.’ Now is ’s’ a bad letter? Does it smell? No. My first name begins with ’s.’ It’s kind of a nice snaky letter. Now we make the ‘h.’ Anything bad about that? No. Now we have ‘i’ and now ‘t.’ There it is Forrest, there’s the word, s-h-i-t, written in the air. Now please don’t mistake the word for the substance in the toilet. The substance in the toilet is the thing-in-itself. It smells and it has some offensive properties. Don’t confuse the word with the substance. The word is only a signifier. Now Forrest, the Bible had it somewhat wrong, or at least the Book of John did. The Book of John says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’ The opening of Genesis is more right on. It says, ‘In the beginning God created . . .’ Now, you can forget about God for the time being and just think of the act of creation. That’s all verb. That’s all action. So we have the act, the creation, and then we have the substance created. That’s what we call the thing in and for itself, and then we have the name. You see, only after it’s something does it get named. Now look, wait, I’ve got another idea. Let’s try writing the word ’shit’ with a stick here in the dirt. Will writing it in the dirt make it a dirty word? No, because we have to carve the dirt out with a stick in order to make the word. So it really is an absence of dirt, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t agree more. There is no such thing as an inherently bad word; words only have the power you give them. The ones that derive from hatred (slurs, for example) incite hatred, and are therefore inappropriate. Those that derive from scatological/sexual origins, though, are only evil in the eyes of the puritanical and judgmental.

In the interest of “equal time,” though, LA County Supervisors, I propose a week devoid of stupid words like “cussing.” That word makes my teeth grind.

Rahm-ing The Right Into A Corner

Rahm Emanuel, you magnificent bastard.

Along with every other liberal on the planet, I am seriously LERVING this whole Rush-is-the-leader-of-the-conservative-movement dealy. What I especially love is that it means I get to heap the props on my favoritest of all the Obama’s sexy cabinet members, Rahm Emanuel, who has helped engineer a goddamned genius strategy, one which will almost assuredly keep the Democrats in power in the next elections. What we have here is just. fucking. awesome.

Rahm has cited Rush as “PE #1″ as far as the liberal movement is concerned, and has said that he is obviously the leader of the Republican party. GENIUS!!! There are very few people in the country, and on the right, that are as galvanizing as that bloated bag of Oxycontin. I assume Rahm picked him specifically for this reason, thereby linking a party in danger of becoming seriously marginalized to someone who’s as off-putting to independents and the center-right as he is to all-you-can-eat buffet purveyors.

That was a good element to the choice of Rush, but the ultimate brilliance of this ploy is in picking someone who is (a) a prominent and well-known figure in the media (much as Eric Cantor may be emerging in the public eye, he’s got nothing on Rush as far as visibility goes), and (b) so blinded by his own ego and need to stoke it that he can’t see that he is playing right into us libruls’ hands. Even Pat Buchanan (no stranger to galvanizing the left, himself) knows it, and warned about as much in a recent appearance in Hardball.  The punchline is that it hasn’t stopped Rush one bit from spouting off at the mouth about how he is the future of the party, the only one who espouses the traditional conservative values his empire was based on (He is so family-focused, he’s had three!). And it won’t.  For years and YEARS, we hope.

Oh, Rush, may you always be so oblivious. And fat. Fat jokes about you are so much fun.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. Apparently Carville cooked this baby up. I stand by my love of Rahm, though, since Carville’s got a face only his mother could love.