LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS – (CT&P) – Senator Tom Cotton (Idiot-AR) and his wife Rachel were allowed to take their male bipedal hominid home today from Our Lady of the Inbred Hospital and Chain Saw Repair Shop outside Little Rock. Senator Cotton told reporters outside the hospital that the seething mass of protoplasm will be named Gabriel Damien Cotton in honor of both Christopher Walken and Satan, The Prince of Darkness.
The spawn had been kept in quarantine since its birth in late April in order to make sure that it posed no risk to the general public. No photos of the offspring have been published by the family, which has done nothing but encourage the disturbing rumors swirling around the creature’s birth.
On May 8th, a pediatric nurse formerly employed at the hospital escaped police custody and told the Arkansas Plain Dealer that several emergency operations were done on the critter immediately after its birth, including one to remove a forked tail and two bony protrusions on its forehead.
The nurse, who wished to remain anonymous, provided several disturbing ultrasound images she said were made during the final stages of the creature’s development within the womb. The sonograms show the image of a dragon or demonic figure resembling the xenomorph made famous in the Alien movie series.
“Of course I was horrified but we were told by authorities that if we said anything we would be ‘disappeared’ along with our entire families,” said the nurse. “I finally just could not take it anymore and had to get out of there. I was later tasered and arrested at my home and taken into custody. I managed to escape last week when most of the cops left to attend the annual dog-shooting festival up in Jonesboro.”
So far the Cottons have refused to comment on the rumors and have insisted that they gave birth to a healthy human male. As she was leaving the hospital Mrs Cotton told reporters that at least the birth should finally quell an earlier batch of “hateful rumors” that she and her husband were actually biorobotic replicants produced in a secret Tea Party laboratory located in an abandoned missile silo in Montana.
“I am not a robot,” said Mrs Cotton. “I am a human being!”
The Cottons have issued a press release that the offspring will be home-schooled and kept away from the general public until advisers determine the time is right to precipitate the “End Times” and the young Cotton is old enough to take the reins of a new world government.
DAMASCUS – (CT&P) – The death of Abu Sayyaf and capture of his wife Umm Sayyaf during a raid in eastern Syria last night will provide advancement opportunities and a “chance to shine” for deputy commanders in the area, according to ISIS Supreme Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
U.S. Special Forces based in Iraq carried out the deadly raid, the White House said this morning.
Abu Sayyaf was a senior ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) leader whose roles included overseeing illicit oil and gas operations, key sources of revenue for the terror group, according to the White House. He also was allegedly involved with the group’s military operations, an accusation that his lawyer F. Muhammad al-Bailey flatly denies.
Sayyaf was purportedly killed in a firefight.
According to Pentagon sources no U.S. personnel were killed or wounded during the action.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who called a press conference today outside his cave somewhere in the middle of the fucking desert, told reporters that although he would miss his friend Sayyaf and his lovely wife Umm, the raid presented a great opportunity for some up and coming junior officers.
“I’m really looking forward to see who is going to step up and fill this important position for us,” said al-Baghdadi, as he picked lice from his beard. “I met several of Abu’s lieutenants last fall at our yearly convention and motivational retreat in Mosul. I think one of those guys will step up, take the goat by the horns and get down to some serious murder and mayhem. I can’t wait to see some of the new torture and execution techniques these guys come up with! You know the younger generation can really be creative.”
Umm Sayyaf, whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect also was an ISIL member and played an important role in terror activities, was taken for questioning to a U.S. military facility in Iraq but was quickly released because according to Delta Force officers the woman was a “giant pain in the ass.”
“I swear to God I’d rather be burned alive that deal with that gibbering bitch for one more minute,” said Captain Billy Bob McSneed of Turd Bluff, Iowa. “I don’t see how the dude lived with that woman. In my opinion we did the guy a favor by killing him.”
Pentagon sources told CNN that no further ground raids were planned at this time, but as soon as Sayyaf’s replacement was named and settled into his new job, Delta would go in and blow his head off as well.
Rather appropriately, I discovered the art world’s big news in the pages of the Financial Times. Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O) sold for US$179.4 million at auction – the highest price ever paid for a single work. The overall market for art, the FT breathlessly reported, was worth €51 billion in 2014. Even allowing for the euro’s diminished status, that’s still big bucks.
To put this in some sort of perspective, the United Nations is trying to raise about US$400 million to provide assistance to the victims of the earthquake in Nepal. In other words, with a couple of minor Picassos and maybe a Matisse, it’s job done: hundreds of thousands of lives are transformed and all that money is put to good use.
Of course it won’t happen. Not only are pieces of painted canvas worth immensely more than the lives of individual human beings – especially those of little economic significance in the “developing world” – but to expect anything different is also to fundamentally misunderstand the significance of art in the contemporary era.
Art ceased to be avant-garde and intellectually revolutionary a long time ago – when Picasso was in his prime, in fact. What Robert Hughes famously called the “shock of the new” has long since faded and art has resumed its former role as a type of decoration, albeit a sometimes imaginative, even moving one. But the most important function of art these days is as a way of protecting wealth at a time of global financial uncertainty and declining yields. Which is why the world’s wealthy are so keen to secure their personal masterpiece.
In this regard art is doubly attractive. Not only does some of it – especially the older stuff – look quite attractive, but it is the quintessential “positional good” – something so exclusive only a few can own it. In the case of trophy paintings like Women of Algiers, only one person can own it. Consumption doesn’t get more conspicuous or gratifying to the ego than this.
The commodification of art and the astronomical sums it can command was bound to attract those motivated more by the pursuit of lucre than the quest for beauty. And so it has proved. It is not just the galleries and the auction houses that have benefited from their dazzling ability to hang pictures on walls or organise international telephone hook-ups. Some of the “artists” themselves have joined the feeding frenzy.
No one better exemplifies this possibility than Damien Hirst, one of the leading figures in the Britart movement. Hirst’s real genius – the word may indeed be merited – has been in “leveraging the brand”. Having made himself a household name with a series of mildly amusing visual gags – the sharks in formaldehyde etc – he went into mass production, uncannily mirroring the trajectory of industrial capitalism in the process.
Hirst’s capacity for exploiting his workforce would do any Victorian mill owner proud, too. In 2007, Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand-painted pills, sold for £9.65 million. The workers who actually painstakingly assembled it were rather less lavishly renumerated: less that £20,000 per year, in fact. When it was suggested to Hirst that another of his productions – The Complete Spot Paintings, of which there are well over 1,000 – were actually not painted by him but his minions, he retorted that “every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand and my heart”. Not to mention his genius, of course.
That the spivs, the self-promoters and the self-obsessed should be attracted to a world where egoists and narcissists are encouraged to take themselves even more seriously than usual should not surprise us, perhaps. What is surprising is that some people are willing to pay them so much money to produce such appalling tat – Tracey Emin being one of the principal exhibits in this regard, despite some stiff competition.
Perhaps I’m simply old-fashioned and a bit of a Philistine. Yet I’ve nothing against things that are nice to look at – even beautiful. I have a framed print by Fred Williams which has given me pleasure for years. I could never afford to buy the original and I’m not sure I would if I could. We don’t actually need to own things to enjoy them, after all. On the other hand, if we want redistribute wealth and encourage artistic endeavour, there are lots of “undiscovered”, impecunious locals we could support.
Flaunting one’s ability to enjoy exclusive possession of rare and ultimately unnecessary things is actually a bit unpleasant and possibly not the sort of thing you’d want to encourage in your children. Why do we apparently admire it when practised by the handful of plutocrats who possess as much wealth as half the world’s population combined? Perhaps it was ever thus, but such behaviour seems especially jarring at a time when the unbeautiful juxtaposition of the fortunate and the forgotten ought to be evident to anyone with eyes to see.
AAP/Julian SmithHaving a platform, albeit a modest one, from which to try and catch the world’s attention is a great privilege. The number of competing voices in the blogosphere means that the size of the audience is often far smaller than one might like. In this regard, newspapers are still in the ascendant and writing for them has a good deal more impact. No-one demonstrates this possibility more vividly, perhaps, than Maurice Newman.
One thing Newman is not short of is opinions, and very consistent ones at that. But as I never tire of telling students, having an opinion is one thing; having a decent argument that is actually supported by some relevant evidence is quite another. Clearly there’s a case for speculative and provocative op-eds that don’t necessarily pass the fact-check test, but that doesn’t mean that such facts should be wilfully ignored.
What makes Newman’s views so noteworthy is not just their predictability and consistency, but that they are so dramatically and wilfully at odds with the prevailing scientific consensus in the area about which he claims to speak with authority. This is not the place to rehearse the well-known debates about climate change, but to point out that this is grist to the mill for the conspiracy theorists on the other side of the debate.
The fact is, as Robert Manne among others has pointed out, that the Murdoch press generally and The Australian in particular really do give a lot of space to climate contrarians, sceptics and outright denialists, such as Newman.
I don’t have any problem with a range of opinions being offered on contentious subjects, but it is hard not to conclude that Newman’s highly contentious, regularly repeated views are received sympathetically at The Australian because they are ideologically compatible with that paper’s pro-business, pro-development agenda, and its owner’s own sceptical views.
What gives Newman’s views additional weight and credibility for some is that he is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council – something he never fails to include on his byline. Even if Newman’s views were simply confined to his relentless criticisms of the science of climate change, one might have thought this would have made him a rather embarrassing advisor for Tony Abbott. Now that Newman has embraced some of the more paranoid and/or laughable conspiracy theories about the United Nations, it is surely time for Abbott to disown him.
Newman’s latest in a long line of op-eds for The Australian claimed that Christina Figueres, a senior UN climate change official, is part of an authoritarian conspiracy to shut down the fossil fuel industry:
… the real agenda is concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook … This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective … In her authoritarian world there will be no room for debate or disagreement. Make no mistake, climate change is a must-win battlefield for authoritarians and fellow travelers.
This might be amusing if we read this on one of the many anti-UN, anti-climate change mitigation websites that proliferate and peddle delusional nonsense about powerful figures conspiring to impose a new world order. But when we read this in our only “serious” national newspaper then it rather ironically becomes easier to sympathise with Newman’s conspiracy theories – although not quite as he imagines them.
In Newman’s reading of the new world order it is the environmentalists who are in the ascendancy, of course, ably assisted by “compliant academics and an obedient and gullible mainstream media”. If only. Even the most cursory survey of the contemporary world serves as a reminder of the difficulty of achieving any kind of national, let alone international collective action on climate mitigation and much else besides.
In reality, chaos and disorder, not centralised authoritarian rule, are becoming more common. Sadly, the UN is most noteworthy for its inability to influence anything of importance. Capitalism remains the ascendant, unchallenged economic system, despite very real doubts about its compatibility – as currently configured, at least – with anything like a sustainable environment.
Maurice, your side is winning – more’s the pity.
It begs the question of what motivates Maurice? Does he have children, grandchildren? Just on the off-chance that the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists, the UN, and all of those limp-wristed liberals and greenies aren’t involved in an elaborate conspiracy to shut down capitalism, wouldn’t it be a good idea to at least consider the possibility that there actually might be something in all this climate change stuff?
You may not be around for much longer Maurice, but your offspring will. Being confident about your opinions doesn’t inevitably make them right. It is just possible that people who have dedicated their lives to understanding the climate rather than making money might know a bit more about it than you do.
Given the unprecedentedly difficult nature of understanding much less addressing the problem of a changing environment, a little intellectual humility all round might not be a bad thing.
Bjorn Lomborg’s “consensus” approach involves ranking global development policies by their ratio of benefit to cost. But this hard-headed economic rationale can actually end up entrenching inequality.
Bjorn Lomborg is, undoubtedly, seriously concerned with poverty and inequality. Both in the work of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) and in his popular writings, this is a common theme. He has championed some very progressive ideas, including eradicating barriers to international migration. Unfortunately, he has also used rather distorted arguments and evidence about inequality to attack some of his favourite bugbears, such as subsidies for renewable energy.
The problem is that the central methodology of Lomborg and the CCC is at best blind to inequality and, in its application, could actually increase it. Moreover, there are good arguments to suggest that if we take a broader view of inequality to include intergenerational equality, the CCC methodology is not even equality-blind; it is equality-averse.
The basic idea, that of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), is straightforward and, indeed, literally high school-level economics. You work out the economic cost of a particular investment (or policy) and estimate its economic benefits (including estimates of indirect costs and benefits such as health). The idea of the CCC is that, with expert advice, policy interventions in climate change, international development, or other global challenges can be prioritised in terms of their benefit-cost ratio.
The methodology is, in itself, blind to inequality. This is because it is based on a Benthamite assumption that the objective is utility maximization irrespective of the distribution of that utility. Put simply, an investment of $100 that returns $1,000 accruing to an already rich person is, in these terms, better than an investment with the same cost that generates $800 return that accrues to a poor person.
As Duke University’s Matthew Adler has consistently argued, the CBA methodology can be adjusted relatively easily to incorporate “aversion” to inequality by simply weighting the calculation according to who pays, and whom it benefits. In a simplistic scenario in which the world is divided into “poor” and “rich”, we might for instance weight benefits accruing to “poor” people twice as highly as benefits accruing to “rich” people. Applying this weighting to our previous example would reverse the ranking of the investments.
I should stress that this is technically easy in the sense that it is quite a simple calculation, even in more realistic situations where you have gradations of wealth and poverty. But it is ethically more difficult. How much inequality aversion should we build in? This will necessarily be a somewhat arbitrary decision and subject to contested views, and indeed societies will expect to be free to make different value judgements about tolerable levels of inequality for different issues.
Lomborg might assert that this doesn’t really matter because his centre is set up to look primarily at problems affecting the poor, so policies that benefit the rich are automatically ruled out. But this is insufficient defence because the world is not just divided into “rich” and “poor”. There are gradations of poverty, and while many individuals and families move in and out of poverty throughout their lives (in a process termed churning), there are many others who live in situations of “chronic poverty”, and it is these who are often missed or under-serviced by international development assistance.
It is my contention that a CBA approach to international development would simply exacerbate this problem, contributing to a widening divide between middle- and low-income countries and groups on the one hand, and those countries and groups trapped in chronic poverty on the other hand.
Let’s take the example of immunization against infectious diseases. CCC analyses of public health often return very sizeable benefit-cost ratios for such policies, and not surprisingly so: few international development experts would dispute that immunization is, in principle, a very cheap and effective way of improving livelihoods.
Such analyses, including the CCC papers on infectious diseases, are based on an estimated economic benefit expressed in terms of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs) – basically the monetary value on one year of healthy living for one individual. The CCC papers typically take a value of between US$1,000 and US$5,000 for a DALY.
Now suppose we agree with the 2012 CCC outcome that of a hypothetical budget of US$75 billion over four years, we would invest US$1 billion per year in child immunization. Where, geographically, would we invest it? Inevitably cost-benefit analysis would lead us to invest in relatively wealthy countries, because DALYs are necessarily worth more money in a place with higher economic standing.
Likewise, the costs for administering immunizations would probably be higher in poor countries, which typically have worse infrastructure, a comparative lack of trained health professionals, and are often bedeviled by insecurity and conflict.
Lomborg and his advocates might argue that their approach was never intended to be applied at this level of implementation (and, indeed, the CCC paper on infectious diseases argues for a single DALY for precisely this reason). But my example nevertheless shows how a cost-benefit approach without inequality aversion will almost inevitably prioritise marginal poverty rather than entrenched disadvantage. The consequences are clear: the poorest of the poor would still be left out and we would end up exacerbating inequality in the developing world.
The picture is complicated even more when considering issues where the benefits are deferred – such as taking action on climate change.
Cost-benefit calculations typically deal with this by using “discount rates”. Typically, humans are not good at deferred gratification; we would much rather have $100 today than next year, so discount rates place a lower value on returns the further they are in the future.
This approach is contentious, particularly in environmental economics, where the benefits of our investments accrue to future generations rather than ourselves. Do we have the ethical right to discount the value of the lives and livelihoods of future generations against our own shorter-term financial benefit?
In climate economics, the time horizons are so long that even a relatively low discount rate can generate apparently absurd conclusions. More generally, any discount rate can be interpreted as a preference for intergenerational inequality: it systematically values the welfare of future generations at a lower level than our own.
As we have seen, where cost-benefit analysis is applied to decisions that affect a diverse, disparate population (such as the global population), it is liable to entrench inequality unless we ask who benefits, rather than just how much.
Remember that cost-benefit analysis was originally developed to evaluate decisions that affect the same group that makes the decision. This might be a firm deciding how much to invest in R&D; a government choosing what infrastructure to build on behalf of the society it represents; or, at the extreme end, a person’s individual financial decisions that affect only themself.
But now imagine deciding on a major infrastructure investment in a developing country, and having to choose between road or rail. In this situation it would seem remiss not consider who benefits. Roads might generate a better overall economic return, but might also disadvantage those who are too poor to have a car.
The larger the scale of the decision-making, the more important these distributional considerations become. It is therefore crucial that the people affected by the decisions are represented in the decision-making process. But at the CCC, where the evaluation and ranking of priorities is made by an “expert panel” (however undoubtedly eminent in their fields), this is demonstrably not the case.
Thus the global aspirations of the CCC project are its Achilles’ heel. By calculating benefit-cost ratios at the global level, without the participation of those affected by the proposals, it risks favouring policies that will exacerbate, rather than overcome, global inequality.
Despite significant budgetary constraints, the Australian government announced in Tuesday’s budget that it will invest a further A$450 million in counter-terrorism strategies.
The arrest of several young Australians, who were allegedly planning attacks on Anzac Day and Mothers’ Day, seems to have convinced most Australians that these expensive counter-terrorism measures are essential for national security.
A public expenditure of around A$1.2 billion a year, we are told, is justified in order to prevent the sorts of terror attacks that have been perpetrated in Boston, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen.
In order to thwart domestic terror attacks, therefore, the vast majority of this money will will be devoted to military deployment in Iraq, and funding for intelligence, surveillance, policing systems and information programs at home.
Various aspects of these counter-terrorism strategies and programs have been questioned by civil rights lawyers and activists, particularly in terms of data retention and journalistic freedom.
Questions have also been raised about the actual cost-benefit and effectiveness of many security measures, particularly around airport and aviation security. According to Professor Mark Stewart, full passenger body scans are expensive, time-consuming and of marginal security value, while hardened cockpit doors are of optimal cost-benefit.
There’s a reason for the “catch-all” approach of such measures. The cost of close surveillance of a single individual who may be at risk of committing a terrorist act is estimated at around A$8 million per year.
If security agencies were to conduct close scrutiny of the 200 individuals most likely to commit a terror act in Australia, the bill would be well over A$1.5 billion.
If the net were to widen far enough to include people such as Man Monis, a middle-aged Iranian refugee, who was not regarded as a high security risk ahead of perpetrating Sydney’s Martin Place siege earlier this year, then the cost would incalculable.
For that reason, if nothing else, western governments are investing in early intervention counter-radicalisation programs. The Australian government, specifically, is investing in programs that will generate and distribute “counter-narratives” which will be designed to halt the allure and propaganda of ISIS, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other Islamist terror groups.
While there are few details about these programs, it is most likely that they will be structured around advertising and social marketing models which target youth audiences.
The problem here, of course, is that the individuals who may be susceptible to the influence of radical and militant Islam are an extremely diverse group. The terrorist profiling which has been produced by security psychologists bears little resemblance to a group which includes Man Monis, Jake Bilardi (a bright but disturbed adolescent convert to Islam), the Chechen Tsarnaev brothers who attacked the Boston marathon, and the Kouachi brothers – second-generation Algerian migrants who attacked Charlie Hebdo.
This diversity is further confounded by the sorry story of young Australian women – such as Amira Karroum – who become radicalised as much through love and desire, as through religious devotion.
In fact, we cannot even say that these radicalised individuals are unquestionably devout, uneducated or poor, making any kind of conventional mass-media program unlikely to connect with a given target audience.
A focus on social media might have greater traction, particularly if designers are able to tag their counter-narratives to militant groups’ websites and Twitter feeds. Unfortunately, and as overseas experience has demonstrated, these sites and feeds are chameleon-like, changing their character, title and URLs as they are constantly closed down by site managers and security agencies.
Moreover, users and followers are themselves extremely adept at moving with the messages and creating their own support networks which continually escape scrutiny. The western adolescents, who have become increasingly wooed by the ISIS imagery and ideas, have appeared to enjoy the cat-and-mouse game as they explore and exploit the limits of public and government authority.
Thus, while security agencies and social marketers may lumber around the internet in search of susceptible adolescents, their target audiences have already moved on.
The greater problem, in fact, is the very nature of the radical Islamist appeal to young western Muslims. ISIS, in particular, has conjured a heroic and ultra-masculinist imagining. This imagining shapes their attack on western global domination into a dark and erotic politics of the body.
The potency of their appeal to receptive adolescents is extremely difficult for state authorities to understand, let alone counter. Paradoxically, this is partly because ISIS has enlisted much of the violent erotica which is a feature of western media culture – a fact the west simply won’t acknowledge.
Rather, western governments deny the parallel, invoking the rationalism and authority which they claim to be their point of difference and enmity.
This denial also affects the ways in which the Australian government is approaching the problem of radicalisation. While paying lip service to the idea of community engagement, there has been far less serious investment in this approach as a primary counter-terrorism strategy.
In particular, there has been far too little attention paid to the nature of adolescence and the ways in which ISIS and others conjure themselves in the imaginary of young people.
This is particularly important as these adolescents seek to consolidate themselves and their identity through their emerging adulthood. These growing pains are especially potent in a modern western world that fetishises freedom and choice as markers of adulthood and sexual maturity.
The internet opens those choices to even broader scales of possibility, including the possibility of self-realisation in radical ideas and an erotic violence which is inscribed by mortal risk.
ISIS provides adolescents and young adults with an identity that heroises this mortal risk. Like drug use, drag-racing or street violence, this heroic aggression proves an irresistible choice for some.
To this end, parents and family remain the critical factor for managing adolescents and their choices. If community engagement means anything, it is surely that there needs to be strong interaction and trust between families, religious bodies, education institutions and government agencies.
It seems essential that parents create a family culture in which young people feel safe enough to discuss their perturbations, politics, ideas and feelings. Where parents sense the radical or militant disaffection of their adolescents, there needs to be a safe space in which they can trust public authorities and systems to provide genuine support and assistance.
This needs to take place before the disaffection becomes amplified as criminal action.
Sadly, this trust is continually strained as security agencies seem to prefer arrest to negotiated family engagement and crime prevention. This is despite the quite simple fact that many adolescents drift away from radicalisation far more often than it evolves as militant action.
In short, governments need to focus their counter-terrorism strategies on strengthening community relations and trust. This is far more than simply controlling the hate speech of rogue Imams.
It’s about addressing the complexities of culture and encouraging a whole-of-society approach to managing our tensions and uncertainties.
Next thumbanils Link to David Pope
Canberra Times editorial cartoon for Thursday, May 14. Illustration: David Pope
Canberra Times editorial cartoon for Wednesday, May 13, 2015. Photo: David Pope
Fox News is outraged that President Obama called out the network’s horrible record on covering poverty, insisting they are simply an “honest messenger.” Media Matters looks back on the worst of Fox’s attacks on low-income Americans.
President Obama: Fox News’ Coverage Of Poverty Suggests The Poor “Don’t Want To Work, Are Lazy.” President Obama called out Fox News for their slanted coverage of poverty while speaking at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University on May 12:
THE PRESIDENT: And over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leaches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.
And, look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. (Laughter.) They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama phone — (laughter) — or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative — right? — that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress — which is much more typical — who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills. [Remarks by the President in Conversation on Poverty at Georgetown University, 5/12/15]
Fox Hosts: Our Coverage Is “Honest,” And Those Who Don’t Wish To Be Poor Should Get A Job. On May 13 Fox & Friends hosts and Fox Business host Stuart Varney discussed their confusion over why Obama criticized the network for slanted coverage of those in poverty. Varney claimed Fox News was simply “an honest messenger.” Co-host Steve Doocy agreed, lamenting that if those in poverty “don’t want to be poor,” they should just get a job. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/13/15]
Fox Correspondent: Obama Is “Insulting The Intelligence Of The American People” By Criticizing Fox. During the May 12 edition of The Kelly File, Fox’s chief Washington correspondent James Rosen claimed that Obama was “insulting the intelligence of the American people” by criticizing the network in his speech.. [Fox News, The Kelly File, 5/12/15]
Fox Contributor: Obama Has “A Distorted View Of Fox.” On Special Report, Fox contributor Stephen Hayes complained that Obama’s comments on the network’s coverage of poverty showed he has “a distorted view of Fox [News].” [Fox News, Special Report, 5/12/15]
Fox Repeatedly Hyped “Obama Phones” As Poor People’s Incentive To Vote For Obama. Prior to President Obamas’s 2012 re-election, Fox News repeatedly hyped a video of “an Obama supporter touting her ‘Obama phone'” to disparage recipients of federal programs. Frequent Fox guest and then-National Review writer Mark Steyn claimed on Fox & Friends that “the ‘Takers’ were able to out-vote the ‘Makers'” and that the American Dream was being thwarted by Democrats, who “bribe people with the Obama phones.” Steyn was repeating claims made by Fox’s Sean Hannity on his radio program, where Hannity suggested voters supported Obama in order to receive an “Obama phone.” Yet “Obama phones” never existed — the federal program offering subsidized phone service has existed since 1996 and was expanded to include cell phones under President George W. Bush. [FoxNews.com, 9/29/12] [Fox News, Fox & Friends,11/8/12] [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 10/2/12]
Fox‘s Poster-Boy For Food Stamp Recipients Is A “Blissfully Jobless California Surfer.” Fox’s 2013 special “The Great Food Stamp Binge” championed the so-called “blissfully jobless California Surfer,” Jason Greenslate, who misused the program, as the face of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps). Although Greenslate bears no resemblance to the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients, many of whom are elderly, children, disabled, or rely on the program for a short time while looking for work, the network nevertheless shamefully featured him in an attempt to mischaracterize beneficiaries as freeloaders. [Media Matters, 8/9/13]
Andrea Tantaros: I’d “Look Fabulous” If I Lived On Food Stamps. In November 2012, on the eve of Thanksgiving, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros dismissed the plight of hungry Americans and claimed that she would “look fabulous” if she were forced to try to subsist on $133 for food per month for an extended period of time, the amount that SNAP participants in New Jersey receive. [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 11/21/12]
Stuart Varney On The Poor: “Many Of Them Have Things — What They Lack Is The Richness Of Spirit.” In August 2011, Fox Business host Varney defended himself from criticism by The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart by claiming he was simply “telling the truth about poor people,” before asserting that for the poor, “many of them have things — what they lack is the richness of spirit.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co. at Night, 8/25/11]
Varney: “The Rich Suffered More Than You.” During a February segment on America’s Newsroom, Varney tried to spin a report finding that income inequality had not actually risen since the recession, due in part to income losses incurred by the wealthiest one percent during the financial crisis. Despite historically troubling levels of income inequality, Varney nevertheless still concluded that that “the rich suffered more than you.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 2/17/15]
Charles Payne: There’s Not Enough “Stigma” Directed At Food Stamp Recipients. In March 2013 on America’s Newsroom, Fox Business host Charles Payne alleged that federal benefit programs trap people in poverty and complained that there wasn’t enough “stigma” directed at poor Americans for using food assistance programs:
PAYNE: I know there’s a big thing trying to de-stigmatize food stamps, but the good part about the stigma is it actually does serve as an impetus to get people off of it. I’ll be quite honest with you. When I was growing up there was a point when we had food stamps and people in our building did, but if I was in the store buying something and my friend who lived upstairs one flight from me came in, there’s no way in the world I would let him see me using food stamps. They’re trying to take that stigma away. They’re telling more people they should use it. [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 3/28/13]
Bill O’Reilly: “How Can You Be So Poor And Have All This Stuff?” In July 2011, O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs cited a misleading report from the Heritage Foundation about the ownership of certain kitchen appliances by the poor in order to question the severity of poverty in the United States. Pointing the report, O’Reilly asked, “How can you be so poor and have all this stuff?” To which Dobbs responded “Amen, brother.” [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 7/20/11]
Fox Wondered If Children Should Work For Free School Meals. In April 2013, Fox News asked viewers if school children should be forced to work in exchange for free school meals, after a Republican lawmaker in West Virginia proposed such a requirement for a new law intended to combat child hunger. [Fox News, Fox & Friends First, 4/25/13]
Fox Contributor Lamented That “The Sense Of Shame Is Gone” From People Using “Entitlements.” During a May 2012 appearance on Fox & Friends, network contributor and New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin lamented that “the sense of shame is gone” from enrolling in government anti-poverty programs, which has helped lead to an “explosion of entitlements”:
GOODWIN: Well, it’s interesting. The thing I write about in here is the idea that shame used to be part of this. In other words, people didn’t want to accept a handout because they were ashamed to do it. There was a kind of social contract that said you don’t do it. You’re independent, you’re reliant. That was part of the American founding virtue, as Charles Murray calls them.
And yet now we look at them, we see this explosion of entitlements. The sense of shame is gone. So I focus this week on food stamps, which I think is a real cultural issue, because it’s now 47 million people in the country are on food stamps. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/21/12]
Steve Doocy: Are Low-Income, Disabled People Just “Moochers?“ Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy questioned why the number of low-income Americans receiving federal disability benefits had increased since 1960, asking, “Are more people getting sick and disabled, or are we just wasting more money?” Later, he asked, “Has the number of people on disability gone up because they are moochers, or because more people need help?” [Fox News, Fox and Friends, 12/6/12]
O’Reilly: Only An “Infinitesimal” Number Of People Would Be Impacted By A Minimum Wage Increase. On the January 21 edition of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly and network contributor Eric Shawn undermined Obama’s recently proposed minimum wage initiative and diminished the number of Americans that would be impacted by the policy. O’Reilly asserted that only “a very low number” of people make “minimum wage anyway,” falsely claiming that the number of people who would be impacted by the change would be “infinitesimal” and saying Obama has been “misleading everybody” by insisting a raise would have a big effect. According to experts, such a move would give 27.8 million Americans a raise. [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 1/21/15]
Payne: After Thanksgiving, People “Take Their Welfare Checks And Bum Rush” Wal-Mart. In October 2011, Charles Payne claimed one could understand why people were poor in America by going to Wal-Mart after Thanksgiving, and watching people on welfare benefits “bum rush” the store. [Fox News, Hannity, 10/3/11]
Fox Contributor Compares Public Pensions To “Ponzi Schemes,” Laments That More Stigma Isn’t Attached To Welfare. In August 2014, Fox contributor Charles Gasparino attacked government benefit programs, claiming that public pensions were in fact “Ponzi schemes” and lamenting that more “stigma” isn’t attached to receiving federal aid or “living in a housing project.” [Fox News, Happening Now, 8/21/14]
– (CT&P) – Members of the Religion of Peace hacked another blogger to death in Bangladesh earlier today as part of a campaign designed to show the world that peace, love, and tolerance represent the very foundations of Islam.
Ananta Bijoy Das, a blogger who advocated secularism, was attacked by four machete-wielding assailants in the northeastern district of Sylhet on Tuesday morning, senior police official Mohammad Rahamatullah told Reuters.
Rahamatullah said that the assailants were screaming “God is a great dude who lusts after the blood of anyone who disagrees with our fucked-up philosophy,” and “Remember the 7th century! Let’s go back!” as they hacked Das into pieces small enough to be placed into a battery-powered blender that a fifth attacker was carrying in a knapsack.
Das was a 33-year-old banker and editor of science magazine “Jukti,” which means “logic,” and on the advisory board of “Mukto Mona” (Free Mind), a website propagating rationalism and opposing fundamentalism that was founded by U.S.-based blogger Avijit Roy.
Das is the third blogger to be dismembered in the name of the beloved peace-loving pedophile Prophet Muhammad in broad daylight by followers of the all merciful one true sadistic and murderous god Allah.
Roy himself was hacked to death in February while returning home with his wife from a Dhaka book fair, and on March 30, Washiqur Rahman, another secular blogger who aired his outrage over Roy’s death on social media, was killed in similar fashion in the capital, Dhaka.
Roy’s widow, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who was maimed in the attack and is in hiding in the United States, told Reuters Das’ case was similar to that of her husband.
“We told him so many times you need to be careful, because these dumbass sadistic religious fanatics are a dime a dozen in countries like Bangladesh, but he just thought that this was his passion, what he was supposed to do, and he had been doing it for a long time,” she said.
Ahmed said she would not be surprised if more bloggers were targeted. “Because the killers know they can get away with this, it will continue to happen,” she said. “This is serial killing by a bunch of religious zealot assholes that want to return to the good old days of the 7th century.”
According to monitoring service SITE Intelligence Group, Islamist militant group Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh said al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had claimed responsibility for the attack.
In a statement released this afternoon, AQIS said that the attacks will continue until “everyone on earth accepts our version of Islam and we are allowed to burn all western books, treat women like dogs, murder any homosexuals we come across, and marry as many goats as we see fit. Only then will Allah’s love and blessings be bestowed on our planet and everyone will live in equal misery and ignorance.”
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.