Greek government gives in on no-referendum pressure

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

Thanks, Aristotle, you can resume your seat now.

Holy Mother Church

Stolen entire from the ever-entertaining Charlie Pierce:

However, and I say this in all Christian love and fellowship, the Clan of the Red Beanies has got to go, and that means everyone up to and including the guy who got elected by all the other red beanies to wear the big white beanie and sit in the Chair of Peter. The institutional Church is corrupt, root and branch, and it needs to be taken to pieces and sold for parts. At this point, it is little more than an elaborate international conspiracy to obstruct justice that also happens to have a really good art collection.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/occupy-vatican-city-6519264#ixzz1bHnl9k17

As ye sew, so shall ye fail to reap, apparently

Well the racist shitheels in Alabama* have passed & had enforced new rules to ensure maximum legal hostility to illegal immigrants, including making it a felony for an illegal immigrant to have any dealings with the apparatus of the state (applying for a drivers license, requesting water deliveries, etc), making it permissible for police to check immigration status on a traffic stop, and forcing schools to check the immigration status of children's parents.**

Of course, this has had a predictable and desired (by the Alabama swinefest) result, that illegal Hispanic immigrants have been leaving the state in droves. Of course, non-brown-skinned immigrants dont even get questioned or harassed, so they aren't leaving.

This has also had a predictable and somehow unexpected effect, that the farmers using immigrant labour, are unable to get their crops harvested.

 Apparently americans aren't willing to work that long and hard for not very much money, and farmers aren't prepared to push up the wages to overcome that. So much for free labor markets

 Spencer said that of more than 50 people he recruited for the work, only a few worked more than two or three days, and just one stuck with the job for the last two weeks.

Of course, if the reich-wing get their way in California, Arizona & Texas, the same problems will multiply afresh ... California, being so dependant on illegal immigrant labour for a huge variety of farm, sanitation, & service staff, could just about grind to a halt. Excellent idea, guys, well done.






*among several other states, but this is the one being reported on atm
** I dont see how these things could stand up to examination under the US Constitution but given the savage lawbreakers and vile criminals that make up the bench of the SCOTUS, anything is possible. I give you, forex, Bush v Gore.

Right on the money

A slightly modified quote:
“Since the financial aristocracy make the laws, is at the head of the administration of the state, has command of all the organised public authorities, dominates public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from Wall Street to the meanest suburbs to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. 

A slightly modified quote: Sound like modern-day America? Well, it's Karl Marx' critique of France in 1848, just pre-revolution

or as Spinoza put it: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

happy 70th birthday Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

The columbian exchange

This was fairly interesting:
This portrait shows, right to left:

• Louis the Petit Dauphin, died of measles in 1712 along with his wife and eldest son
• Louis XIV, who had smallpox in 1647 and survived to die in 1715
• Louis the Grand Dauphin, died of smallpox in 1711
• The future Louis XV, who only survived the measles epidemic that killed his parents and elder brother because
• the woman on the left of the picture, his governess Madame de Ventadour, locked the royal doctors out of the room

It also had this bit which puzzled me:

The question, "Were New World populations significantly reduced by Old World diseases introduced after 1492?" is currently considered settled by historians, and the answer is "Yes". If this startles you, it *is* a paradigm shift from what you probably grew up learning

Really? What on earth are/were they teaching their kids in the USA about this? I would have regarded it as totally anodyne and accepted wisdom. Though the extent of it did surprise me a bit:

Ninety percent of the population of civilized Mesoamerica and Andean America perished by 1568. Civilized highlanders constituted the vast majority of America's precontact population. Consequently, their sixteenth century epidemiology determined the magnitude of "the worst demographic disaster ... in the history of the world." (emphasis mine)

 Ninety percent? Makes poor old pasteurella pestis look like a piker

Edited to add a link to this hysterical parody site! Completely OT for this post, but .... Go read it
(courtesy of the wonderful Debra Dickerson)

The Black Death

This is simply fabulous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_phBiMqKc