Slouching Towards Oblivion

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Trump Inc Podcast


Not quite what the name might imply - this is WNYC looking into 45*'s finances.

This one looks at how 45* managed to go broke running a joint that basically had a license to steal.



I stayed at the Taj a few times when I was selling hospital stuff in the 90s, manning an exhibitor booth during the annual meetings of New Jersey ER docs.

It was always in February, but still, the place never had any kinda crowd at all.

A few dozen in the gaming rooms, never more than 8 or 10 people at any of the bars, and you could walk into any restaurant in the place and get a table any time - never any live entertainment, even in the big theaters.

And these meetings were always scheduled over a weekend.

I never noticed anything, of course.  It just gives me more of a really creepy feeling thinking about one more shitty thing involving Donald Trump, to go along with thinking about what shitty things he and his gang are pulling every day he stays in office.

Fever Swamp

Lies
Damned lies
Statistics
Politicians
The internet

Don't forget what we're up against.

WaPo, Craig Timberg & Drew Harwell:

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.

The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.

I see plenty of examples of spin -and some pretty hard spin - on "the left", but most of the nonsense that qualifies as truly toxic garbage is coming from "the right".

So don't fall for the Both Sides bullshit.


Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Today's Tweet


I think it's easy to see why some people scoff at the notion of Global Climate Shift. 

They look at these graphs (eg) and they see about a 1°C rise over 150 years - having heard the semi-panic in "the liberal voices of the left" about the catastrophe coming if it rises another 1 or 2 degrees. 

I hear this one all time: "It takes 150 years to go up 1°, so in the next 150-200 years - before it's a real problem - they'll come up with something to fix it and make it OK."

Of course, that's old news because the pace is accelerating, and the point of no return is not just closer than they figured a few years ago, but could be right on top of us now.

Most "conservatives" I know aren't big on Continuing Education, preferring the comfortably numb position of assuming all that new stuff is just Political Correctness. Plus the voices coming from "the right" have been telling them for 30 years it's all nonsense because "the truth is always somewhere in the middle", and they buy into that shit even when it's a question of 2+2=4 vs 2+2=6. So they can blow it off as just more political noise that they don't need to worry about.

We get so conditioned that when we see the "once-in-a-lifetime storm" is happening about every 2 or 3 years, we can regard each one as the anomaly instead of understanding that this freaky shit is actually the new norm.

I think that - along with some other things - is starting to change. 

Because the pendulum swings.

Nature Bats Last


While we're having to waste time arguing over stoopid shit that should be obvious to a cave snail, we've got a problem that is fast-becoming truly unsolvable.


 
Live Science, Mindy Weisberger
During the Arctic winter, when the sun hides from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around a bone-chilling minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). But this year, the Arctic is experiencing a highly unusual heat wave.

On Feb. 20, the temperature in Greenland not only climbed above freezing — 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) — it stayed there for over 24 hours, according to data from the Danish Meteorological Institute. And on Saturday (Feb. 24) the temperature on Greenland's northern tip reached 43 degrees F (6 degrees C), leading climate scientists to describe the phenomenon on Twitter as "crazy," "weird," "scary stuff" and "simply shocking."

Weather conditions that drive this bizarre temperature surge have visited the Arctic before, typically appearing about once in a decade, experts told Live Science. However, the last such spike in Arctic winter warmth took place in February 2016 — much more recently than a decade ago, according to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And climbing Arctic temperatures combined with rapid sea-ice loss are creating a new type of climate feedback loop that could accelerate Arctic warming, melting all Arctic sea ice decades earlier than scientists once thought.



Last week, it was warmer at Cape Morris Jessup in Greenland than it was in Paris.



That Thing About Guns


The Conversation, Jeff Daniels:

While President Donald Trump has not shied away from offering suggestions on how to prevent school shootings – including one controversial idea to arm teachers – what often gets overlooked in the conversation is research on the subject that has already been done.

This research includes one major study of school shootings conducted in part by the very agency charged with protecting the president of the United States himself - the U.S. Secret Service.

Has this research been ignored or just forgotten? I raise the question as one who has studied averted school shootings and the news coverage that followed.

Two months after the Columbine tragedy in 1999, experts from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service collaborated to study the “school shooter” phenomenon. They published the study on their findings in 2002. The study focused on examining the thinking, planning and other behaviors of students who carried out school attacks. Particular attention was given to identifying pre-attack behaviors and communications that might be detectable – or “knowable” – and could help prevent future attacks.

The Key Findings of that report are nothing new (click on "one major study" in the 2nd graf above). We hear about the efforts aimed at prevention every time. But every time, the debate gets hijacked, and we start arguing about the 2nd amendment, and a Big Brother Database, and good guys with guns, and blah blah blah.

Another thing: the 2nd amendment does not allow for anyone to own any gun.

We hear a lot about "The Heller Decision" - when SCOTUS affirmed "the right to keep and bear arms" applies to individuals and not just a collective (ie: Militia).

But remember one thing - Antonin Scalia (the guy who wrote that majority opinion) said the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment are not limitless - there's nothing in the amendment prohibiting congress from imposing some restrictions.

So let's focus on the first effect of this widespread misunderstanding of the 2nd amendment: The public's easy (ish) access to the kinds of guns intended for use only in war.

And also too - call me nutty, but I'm set-in-stone sure that gun violence somehow has something to do with guns.

Today's Pix

(click and be happy)


















Monday, February 26, 2018

The Big 2A



Like everybody else arguing in favor of a framework of sensible gun laws, I always get a lot of pushback from ammosexuals that eventually boils down to: "shall not be infringed - that's the phrase that matters, Libtard - SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ".

(notice how I left out all the typos and spelling errors and grammatical hernias, in order not to make fun of the knuckle-headed rubes who're dumb enough to think that way - cuz I'm just a nice feller)

So anyway, their 4-word absolute-ittude has been a real stopper (in that they think that's all they need), but I think this might be a pretty good rebuttal:

You're ignoring 85% of what the 2nd amendment says - so we get to ignore 85% of the rights you claim the amendment confers on you.

In fact, I'll cut that back to just 50%. You can have either "keep" or "bear" - your choice.

This popped up on Twitter and it's what got me thinkin':

The Conversation, Saul Cornell:

The Second Amendment is one of the most frequently cited provisions in the American Constitution, but also one of the most poorly understood.

The 27 words that constitute the Second Amendment seem to baffle modern Americans on both the left and right.

Ironically, those on both ends of our contemporary political spectrum cast the Second Amendment as a barrier to robust gun regulation. Gun rights supporters – mostly, but not exclusively, on the right – seem to believe that the Second Amendment prohibits many forms of gun regulation. On the left, frustration with the lack of progress on modern gun control leads to periodic calls for the amendment’s repeal.

Both of these beliefs ignore an irrefutable historical truth. The framers and adopters of the Second Amendment were generally ardent supporters of the idea of well-regulated liberty. Without strong governments and effective laws, they believed, liberty inevitably degenerated into licentiousness and eventually anarchy. Diligent students of history, particularly Roman history, the Federalists who wrote the Constitution realized that tyranny more often resulted from anarchy, not strong government.

I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations.

Consider these five categories of gun laws that the Founders endorsed.

#1: Registration

#2: Public carry

#3: Stand-your-ground laws

#4: Safe storage laws

#5: Loyalty oaths

Today's Tweet



We got a copy of his insurance card, right? And let's run a credit check on his mom to make sure she can handle the co-pay. 

Oh yeah - call the guys in IT just in case we need 'em to set up a GoFundMe page on this one.

Today's Quote



(Pass this one along to your congress critters)

"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don't belong here."
--California Treasurer Jesse (Big Daddy) Unruh, referring to lobbyists

Good Guy Punished



Houston Chronicle, Jay Jordan:

Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.


The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police.

"There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life."


The weird part (which isn't weird at all): He started out as a good guy without a gun, but by the time the cops got there, he was the good guy with a gun, and the cops shot him because he was the guy with the gun.

Weird part #2 (which also isn't weird at all): I'm wondering if this is going to make NRA-TV.

At first I tho't they wouldn't wanna be anywhere near this one. But those guys are pretty remarkably good at selling, so I think we can fully expect a Turnaround. 

"If Mr Garces had been appropriately armed, then the would-be shooter is the only one to have been shot."

But it still comes down to this: Gun violence in this case was thwarted by unarmed people - and we don't know that the perp really intended to shoot anybody in the first place.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Amy Siskind


The Mueller probe made news this week with new indictments, and the probe’s fourth and fifth guilty pleas. A comparison of public knowledge on where the probe was headed was made to the “tip of the iceberg,” as charges against a previously unknown Dutch man whose father-in-law is a Russian oligarch came Tuesday. Trump’s White House continues its high-drama chaos with continuing threats of firings and actual resignations, and amid controversy over access to highly classified materials.
Week 67 hi-lites:

1. On Saturday, at the Munich Security Conference, US lawmakers from both parties and top national security officials told Europe’s foreign policy elite to ignore Trump’s tweets, Trump’s main mode of communication.

11. Trump tweeted that the FBI missed “signals” sent out about the school shooting because the agency was too focused on Russian collusion, drawing widespread condemnation, including from survivors on Twitter.
12. Asked about Trump, Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland student who is helping organize gun-control marches in DC and other cities on March 24 said, “the best thing for us to do is ignore him,” calling his words “disgraceful.”
15. On Monday, WAPO reported according to a White House official, after the flurry of negative news to hit the regime in the last week, the school shooting which killed 17 was viewed as a “a distraction or a reprieve.”
18. Politico reported the Trump regime is trimming language on women’s reproductive rights and discrimination from the soon-to-be-released State Department annual report on global human rights.
19. By order of the regime, passages which deal with women’s access to contraceptives and abortion will be removed, and a broader section which chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination will be pared down.
20. The State Department report is relied on by a range of people, from U.S. lawmakers to political activists. Officials say these late, unusual revisions reflect Trump regime orders while many key roles remain unstaffed.
75. BuzzFeed reported Mueller’s team has now identified more than $40 million in “suspicious” financial transactions to and from companies controlled by Manafort. Mueller’s October indicted listed just $18 million.
82. Manafort and Gates received large amounts of money for their work in Ukraine from 2006–2015 which they laundered by bringing it into the US as corporate loans, also avoiding reporting the money as income.
83. When the money dried up, Manafort and Gates lied to lenders about their finances, and set up a real estate scheme under which they were able to obtain millions in financing in 2015 and 2016.
84. Lawfare reported while there are no allegations about the Trump campaign directly, the indictment alleges bank fraud between 2015 and 2017 during which Manafort and Gates were both involved with Trump.

Silence

Lemme see if I've got this straight. The community - students, cops, school admin etc; the community, following protocol and due process, exerted its collective authority over a few individuals and suddenly, there were no kids shot to pieces at school.


I'll make a radical assumption and say most of the cops in Leonardtown are all for their 2A rights. And yet, there's the chief talking pretty proud about taking those guns away from citizens - when there's good reason for doing it.

It's not simple, because it's never simple, but:

  • If there are no cars, nobody dies in a car crash.
  • If there are no airplanes, nobody dies in an airplane crash.
  • If there are no 10 story buildings, nobody dies falling 10 stories to the sidewalk.

And nobody has ever died from being hit with a hand-thrown AR15 bullet.

So get fuckin' real, ammosexuals.

BTW, makes me wonder a little why the Press Poodles chose not to point this one up.

Refresher

Good guys get killed too - even the guys with the guns. And sometimes they get killed because they're the ones with the guns.

Yeesh


Parkland survivor Cameron Kasky has been speaking out, expressing his opinion on how we need to get something done - maybe something as radical as gun safety laws - to prevent mass shootings.

Cameron Kasky has been getting death threats from NRA supporters.

Think Progress:

Kasky isn’t the only teenager getting death threats for their activism against the NRA. David Hogg, also 17, has fiercely advocated on television for improved gun control laws in the wake of the mass shooting which left seventeen of his classmates and teachers dead. Over the last week, he has been a central target for conspiracy theorists believing that he is in fact not a student but a “crisis actor”. One video claiming Hogg was an actor got more than 200,000 views and was the top trending video on YouTube before it was taken down.
Let all that soak in for a minute.

Just fuckin' yeesh.

Today's Face Palm

45* says Gun-Free Zones are dumb things and only poopy-head libruls think they're OK.

ABC News:
Donald Trump spoke in favor of gun rights at the National Rifle Association convention today, but security and staff at several of his prized hotels and golf courses told ABC News that guests are not allowed to carry guns there.

The Trump Organization, meanwhile, claims that’s not true.

“We strongly believe in the 2nd Amendmentand are against gun free zones. While laws vary substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, we allow security personnel and other licensed individuals the ability to carry a firearm in an effort to protect themselves, our guests, associates and the general public,” a spokesperson told ABC News by email.

A few Trump properties where guests are not allowed guns:

Trump National Doral = (305) 592-2000
Trump National Jupiter GC = (561) 691-8700
Trump International GC = (561) 682-0700
Trump International hotel - Las Vegas = (702) 982-0000
Trump Mar-a-Lago = 561-832-2600.

Today's Tweet



I keep insisting "conservatives aren't all that stoopid." Cuz nobody can be that fucking stoopid.  And they keep proving me wrong.

 

Friday, February 23, 2018

What We're Aiming At


18 U.S. Code § 201 - Bribery of public officials and witnesses
(a) For the purpose of this section -
(1) the term “public official” means Member of Congress, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner, either before or after such official has qualified, or an officer or employee or person acting for or on behalf of the United States, or any department, agency or branch of Government thereof, including the District of Columbia, in any official function, under or by authority of any such department, agency, or branch of Government, or a juror;
(2) the term “person who has been selected to be a public official” means any person who has been nominated or appointed to be a public official, or has been officially informed that such person will be so nominated or appointed...

Margaret Carlson, writing in The Daily Beast:

It’s all well and good for Paul Manafort to spend 15 years in prison for money laundering, and Rick Gates to plead guilty to cut a deal, and Alex Van Der Zwaan to miss the birth of his first child because he lied to the FBI.

But it would be an injustice if, once again, those around the president suffer and he is left unscathed. He was the beneficiary of the highly questionable Russian contacts his campaign made and desperately tried to keep secret leading up to the 2016 election, which speaks of collusion and much worse. Trump couldn’t have chosen two top advisers with more contacts with the Kremlin than campaign manager Manafort and national security adviser Michael Flynn. He could hardly have praised Russia President Valdimir Putin more. And he could have hardly benefitted more from Russian interference than to win.


- and -

...It is Title 18 United States Code, section 201 that specifically makes it a crime for a public official to take “anything of value,” a bribe, in exchange for government action, which can be prospective.

Note that above I wrote “public official.” That’s because the law is generally wielded against public officials. Problem: Mueller is investigating conduct before Trump became one. Enter Waxman. He points out that in 1962, Congress extended the bribery law to cover activity prior to the assumption of office. It did so, he says, in order to close a “loophole” afforded those “who assume public office under a corrupt commitment.” The upshot? Trump became covered by 18 USC not when he was sworn in but as of July 21, 2016 when he became his party’s nominee in Cleveland, Ohio.


And one last tasty little tidbit - 
It could be a coincidence, but Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin lawyer who was at the Trump Tower meeting, had long been fighting a money laundering case in New York and suddenly won a favorable settlement after Trump’s election.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

What It Did

The 1994 moratorium on assault rifles did what it was intended to do - it drove down the  numbers of dead Americans due to mass shooting incidents.

WaPo, Christopher Ingraham:

Critics of bans on assault weapons, however, say they do little to save lives. The NRA correctly points out that assault weapons are used only in a tiny fraction of gun crimes. The gun rights group also notes that a federally funded study of the previous assault weapons ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Similar points have been made in arguments against a new ban in publications running the ideological gamut from Breitbart to the New York Times to HuffPost.

But the 1994 assault weapons ban was never intended to be a comprehensive fix for “gun violence” writ large. Its purpose, according to gun violence experts and the lawmakers who wrote the bill, was to reduce the frequency and lethality of mass shootings like the ones in Parkland, Sandy Hook and elsewhere. And on that front, the data shows it had a significant impact.




In the last few days, I've had people tell me (people I've known for a long time) - they've told me I'm lying to them when I present facts about things. It's almost like they've decided the numbers themselves don't even exist anymore, much less the facts those numbers illustrate.

I had one guy tell me I was lying when I pointed out that congress, in the mid 1990s, had cut the funding for CDC to study gun violence as a public health issue (they did it in a sneaky way, but they did it), and they added an amendment to a spending bill instructing CDC not to "advocate or promote gun control". So, of course, any study where the authors conclude that their findings suggest gun control measures might be appropriate is deemed in violation of that "non-advocacy" rule.

You may also have heard a while back all the noise about family docs and ER clinicians being told to shut up and stop asking patients about guns in the home.

I pointed to all of that when discussing the gun issue on several sites, and got nowhere.  I went back and dug up some of the articles available in the archives, and showed them to my debate opponents, who dismissed them out of hand simply because they were Washington Post, and so they couldn't be trusted.

As usual, this gets worse before it gets better.

Today's Randy

Randy Rainbow

Today's Pix

(click to embiggen)