As Bart at Bartcop points out, Romney once told the story of putting his Irish Setter Seamus in a crate tied to the roof of his station wagon for a 10-hour drive as a way to make himself seem more human to voters. The man actually chuckled over this horrendous anecdote. Uh huh, good times, Mitt, especially for your terrified pooch. Was Romney seriously thinking, “Yeah, this folksy tale will get me in good with the dog lovers out there”?
As Melinda Pillsbury-Foster’s possibly ironic presidential campaign said in a press release Jan. 14, 2012
Meow-Meow, animal companion to Arthur Foster, eldest son of Democratic candidate for president, Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, today called for Mitt Romney to be strapped to the roof of the car for a trip to the dog house.
While Meow-Meow, an orange tabby, also known as M&M, is not overly fond of dogs he called all species to move for solidarity on this issue of outrageous cruelty. M&M pointed out the heinous act included washing the Romney animal hostage down with water when he could not hold himself and then, ignoring the wind-chill factor, returning Seamus to the POW camp on the roof of the car.
At the same time M&M, calling for an investigation by a to-be-called pack of senators, averred that Romney should not be spayed until or unless there is a second incident.
Although he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, most people these days barely know who influential guitarist Peter Green was or who he played with or that he composed “Black Magic Woman,” Carlos Santana’s calling-card hit. He also started Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood, and played in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, yet he never attained the stature of an Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, contemporaries on the ‘60s British blues-rock scene. Below is something ‘completely different’ from Green’s early fare, a slow and spacious original instrumental without any flurry of notes or other Guitar God histrionics, 1969’s “Albatross”:
H/T to Mathew Tyler Wilson.
Here’s a bonus video, Peter Green with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers from 1967 doing Green’s instrumental, “The Supernatural” (and you can hear why Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page love this guy’s playing and consider him a major influence on their styles):
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
— Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964.
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
— “Strength in Love,” 1963.
“We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” — “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” — Speech in St. Louis, Missouri, March 22, 1964.
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’ ” — “I Have a Dream” speech, August 28, 1963.
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Jon Huntsman, the half-sane ‘moderate’ in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, is finally calling it quits, unable to make much headway in a party that denies history, science and common sense in their delusional pursuit of the perfect corporate-theocractic nation that is unpopular with most Americans. Here’s an excerpt from the LAT story:
Seems incredible, but that’s the conclusion of psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker uses the ‘Big Picture’ view of human history to arrive at this conclusion, and he makes a good point regarding the dramactic change in attitudes that started during the Age of Enlightenment and resulted in the founding of the United States and its constitutional form of democracy that protected its citizens against the power of the government, enshrined the rights of individuals, and made rulers temporary and subject to the will of the people at a time when monarchy and the ‘divine right of kings’ was the prevalent form of government in the world. These days, democracy is the prevailing type of government, and even most of those countries that still retain a monarch usually have some limiting parliamentary control over the power of the king or queen. For proof of this, compare the powers of England’s King Henry the VIII to the UK’s current Queen Elizabeth II. If we can get the obscene profits out of war-making, I can see a new Age of Enlightenment in the 21st century where diplomacy replaces armed aggression as the way to settle disputes between nations, just as most people find a way to resolve personal disputes without resorting to violence. Some believe that the human tendency toward violence is immutable, a permanent part of our DNA, but they are trapped in a prison of their own creation. Others, like Pinker, have seen the change in human nature over the centuries and know that psyches are malleable and, sometimes, in the long run, most of us opt for the right decision, although we may take a painfully round-about path to get there. As H.G. Wells once wrote: “If we don’t end war, war will end us.” It’s possible, in the near future, humanity will decide to think and survive.
Many believe the 20th century represents the pinnacle of human violence, but psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the opposite is true.
Joshua Holland
AlterNet.org
January 13, 2012
Humanity’s lust for violence has undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars. That’s the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”
Pinker writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics based on European coroners’ inquests and local records dating back 800 years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.
Does Pinker’s research validate his thesis? And if so, what forces might explain such a profound shift in human society?
A brief excerpt below from the devastating just-released documentary of Mitt Romney, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” (see full-length version here), that shows Romney and his partners in crime at Bain Capital only functioned as ‘job creators’ by accident and routinely cut employees jobs, wages and benefits to maximize profits for Bain. Regarding his bragging on the ‘job creating’ success of Staples and Domino’s Pizza, most of those jobs were low-paid service work, and not the kind you can plan a future, buy a house, or raise a family on. At Bain, Romney was a viperous, immoral Old Man Potter-meets-Gordon Gekko crapitalist who believed in the obnoxious notion of ‘creative destruction’** which translated from CorpoSpeak means Romney and Bain destroyed jobs and profitable companies for their own gain. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out last month:
“But like other leveraged-buyout firms, Romney and his [Bain Capital] team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
“Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
“Bain managers said their mission was clear. ‘I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,’ said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. ‘The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.’ “ […]
“No one came from Bain and said, ‘How can we hire more people?’ [Michael] Rumbin [a vice president of technology management at one of the company’s Bain gutted] said. ‘It was, ‘How do we turn our investment around and make a lot of money?’ Which they did.’ ” — Tom Hamburger, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold, “A Look at Mitt Romney’s Job-Creation Record at Bain Capital,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 3, 2011.
Brad Reed at AlterNet adds:
“And then there’s Mitt Romney, the patron saint of the 1%, who has shown a similar lack of empathy for our nation’s economically downtrodden. When asked what he’d do to help solve the massive foreclosure crisis that has put millions’ of families’ homes underwater, Romney replied that the best course of action would be to halt efforts to stop the foreclosure process’ and thus ‘let it run its course, to hit the bottom and let investors buy the home.’ Or put another way, Romney wants to allow people to suffer so some rich asshole can swoop in and make a profit from their misery. That’s right Christian of you, sir.” — Brad Reed, “8 GOP Primary Moments That Would Make Jesus Weep,” AlterNet, Jan. 2, 2012. [Emphasis mine.]
Andrew Leonard at Salon.com sums up:
“In the 32 years since Ronald Reagan was elected president, there has never been more widely expressed antagonism and anger toward the practitioners of corporate-raider, leveraged-buyout, excessively compensated CEO, shareholder-value capitalism than there is now.
“And that’s Mitt Romney. That is who he is. He can flip-flop about everything else, but there’s no way to wriggle out of his essential nature. He’s the 1 percent — even Newt Gingrich says so.” — Andrew Leonard, “The long overdue downfall of Gordon Gekko,” Salon.com, Jan. 9, 2012.
Here’s the question: why should the middle-class and working poor sacrifice their jobs and economic security to make useless corporate grifters like Mitt Romney and Bain Capital rich? Second question: why would anyone ever think of making a self-serving, corrupt conman like Mitt Romney president?
** “From the 1950s onwards, the term “creative destruction” has become more readily identified with the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter,[4] who adapted and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), he developed the concept out of a careful reading of Marx’s thought (to which the whole of Part I of the book is devoted), arguing (in Part II) that the creative-destructive forces unleashed by capitalism would eventually lead to its demise as a system.[6] Despite this, the term subsequently gained popularity within neoliberal or free-market economics as a description of processes such as downsizing in order to increase the efficiency and dynamism of a company.” — From the Wikipedia entry for “Creative Destruction.” See the article for links.
If Mitt Romney ever manages to get himself elected president, here’s what the country will look like under his reign. Although nearly as sociopathic, at least the loathsome Bush Boy was a failure as a ‘bidnessman’ and a little dumber than Romney.
The private equity business appeals to personalities lacking in conscience and empathy. Need Mitt apply?
By Gary Weiss
Salon.com
Jan. 13, 2012
No one can make Mitt Romney look good — not even a crazy man with a program that’s slightly to the right of Juan Peron. Ron Paul, currently the second most popular Republican presidential candidate, may be nuts but Romney is arguably a lot worse: the standard-bearer of the worst aspects of borderline sociopathic, bottom-feeding American capitalism.
I don’t mean to call people names. I speak as a bona fide expert on these subjects, having covered business and written a book about a sociopath and having known many professionally through the years. I’m merely trying to provide a dispassionate analysis of Romney’s life and career, especially (but not exclusively) his record as a job-destroying corporate warrior at the Bain Capital buyout firm.
When he was head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was driving in the countryside one day when he came upon a shepherd with a huge flock of sheep crossing the road.
Stopping his car, Romney yelled at the shepherd, “I will bet you $10,000 against one of your sheep that I can tell you the exact number in your flock.”
The shepherd thinks it over; it’s a big flock and this guy’s obviously a city boy, so he takes the bet.
“973,” says Romney.
The shepherd is astonished — that is the exact number! The shepherd says, “Okay, I’m a man of my word, take an animal.” Romney grabs one of the sheep and begins to tie it the roof of his car.
“Wait,” cries the shepherd, “Let me have a chance to get even: double or nothing that I can guess your occupation.”
Romney says “Sure. What’s my occupation?”
“You are a ruthless corporate raider from a leveraged buyout firm,” says the shepherd.
“Amazing!” responds Romney, “You are exactly right! But tell me, how did you deduce that?”
“Well,” says the shepherd, “put down my dog and I’ll tell you.”
As Bart at Bartcop points out, Romney once told the story of putting his Irish Setter Seamus in a crate tied to the roof of his station wagon for a 10-hour drive as a way to make himself seem more human to voters. The man actually chuckled over this horrendous anecdote. Uh huh, good times, Mitt, especially for your terrified pooch. Was Romney seriously thinking, “Yeah, this folksy tale will get me in good with the dog lovers out there”?
