Greed is great, greed is good

News from the Dept. of Obvious, a new study finds wealthy people, lie, cheat and view greed as a virtue. And not just on big stuff. They'll cheat for $50. They see no problem with lying to advance their goals and greed? Piffle. That's just "enlightened self-interest." A good thing in their gilded book.

Apparently, this is particularly common in economic studies majors. Something I can confirm with anecdotal evidence. Fully two thirds of my critics who have openly praised greed also claim to be economic professors or experts of some kind.

The researcher posits that "pairing ethics courses with economics may be beneficial" in changing the dynamic. Good luck with that. The problem is these people have no empathy and their world view is intractably solipsistic. Their moral clock didn't just stop ticking, it never had any juice to begin with that I can see.

And they're cheap. They'll nickel and dime you to death. There are of course exceptions, some few are extraordinarily generous, but as a whole, the more money they have, the more likely they are to stick you with the tab. And the worst are the trust funders. They never had to work to earn their money. They only work to hold onto it.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Are there no workhouses?

Just when you think they've hit rock bottom, the GOPers dig to a new low:

Newly minted Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said in a lecture posted to his YouTube channel that Congressional laws banning child labor are forbidden by the US Constitution.

Well I guess you could call this the GOP's first attempt at actual job creation.

Via Woody, the man of a thousand blogs. I'm stealing this comment from Rick on his Facebook page as the best response: "We musn't deny our citizens the opportunity to "bootstrap" it. Welfare is demeaning, and only encourages laziness. Our children don't need hand outs, they need hand tools."

Really. Maybe we could get them little pickaxes and send them into the coal mines... [photo via]

[Big thanks to Comrade DougJ, the man of a thousand nyms, for the very kind link.]

Happy Anniversary PZ

A belated congratulations to PZ Myers celelbrating his 31st wedding anniversary yesterday. Just go read his post where he contrasts his moral values with Newt Gingrich.

Oh okay, I'll give you one line.

It's a strange situation where the political party with more ex-wives than candidates, that houses and defends a disturbingly amoral network of fundamentalist operators is regarded as the protector of the sanctity of the family.

Trust me. Read the rest.

Shameless, part II

by Capt Fogg

Malcom Nance knows whether waterboarding is torture or not, even if Michael Mukasey doesn't know and if God's own president doesn't think you know. Nance is a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego. He's a counterterrorism consultant for the Government's Special Operations, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies and he's had it done to him. Even though he knew he wasn't going to be killed, those who undergo such treatment in some sordid basement in a third world hellhole don't know that and like most of us, they'll say anything to make it stop.

Nance was waterboarded and supervised the waterboarding of 300 other men, not to elicit information, but so that our men would know what might await them at the hands of some evil empire on a par with the United States of America.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Daily News today, Nance tells us that no matter how you look at it, waterboarding is torture.

"In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch."

I doubt Mukasey would be able even to watch such a proceeding without being overcome. I doubt that most people would, but the truth is, such evil really does lurk in the hearts of men and the most ordinary people will do the most heinous things given the opportunity and the immunity and there are countless histories to prove it.

But our prospective Attorney General is capable of being evasive and we're capable of looking the other way or telling ourselves that "these people," these "terrorists" deserve it, even when they're kids picked up on the street in random sweeps or for having a suspicious name or because some enemy denounced them. face it we're capable of almost anything.

"One has to overcome basic human decency to endure causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you questioning the meaning of what it is to be an American."

says Nance, but moral dilemmas don't exist in our administration and are usually avoided by our citizens and beyond the degradation of all our claims of leadership, our pretended ideals, we have created by this sort of action, a worldwide culture of anti-American hate that will not go away in our lifetimes, if ever.

It's well that history will remember Bush as the man who murdered America, but it is not well for us. I think we have been tried and found wanting, our values reduced to meanness our democracy eaten away by the cancer of patriotism and we haven't the slightest ability or inclination to seek redemption.