Today's Brando

It's all theater, all the time. And the only requirement is a willing suspension of disbelief.

Unfortunately, MAGA rubes have been convinced they can live in that suspension 24/7.

On That Fantasy Cult Trend

The short version is - people have moved away from traditional cults like Christianity, but still feel the need for the familiar comfort of the father figure.

Big takeaway: Looking at the "meta" is important, but people who get to these weird places in their lives - in their beliefs - all have an individual story on how it happened, and there's usually some kind of traumatizing event that instigates their transition.

My thing is that we're conditioned all our lives to look for stability and security in a world that we perceive to be randomly dangerous and ultimately uncaring and cruel (and to be sure, the world can be pretty fucking scary).

So we want that powerful presence in our lives. Something that makes us feel safe no matter what.

The problem is that our desire for that warm fuzzy feeling makes us willing to indulge in self-infantalization. So, in the relationship that we have to develop with ourselves as adults, we refuse to be the grownup, and we're then susceptible to manipulation at the hands of people who're looking to collect some kind of rent from us in return for telling us what to think rather than helping us figure out how to think for ourselves.

Something like QAnon is almost supremely insidious because it masquerades as "doing your own research and then deciding for yourself", while it's really just meaningless mental masturbation dressed up to look like intellectual rigor - with guns and a motivation to impose a kind of guided vigilante-ism that makes the Nazis look like an Amish picnic.

Think: The Three Stooges with automatic weapons and hand grenades.

The Cave

The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to … and setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows". 

-- George Orwell’s 1984

We all have a duty to seek enlightenment - however we define that rather pretentious-sounding term. 

And we all have a duty to talk with others about where we are and what we're learning.

Plato's Allegory Of The Cave (short clip - none of it is this easy):

Intercepted

Jeremy Scahill

A New Era Dawns

BBC News

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.

It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.

Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.

Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".

Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right" from a shortlist selected to reflect the social, cultural, political, economic and technological trends and events of the year.

Spotting the false thingie

Remember all the stuff we learned in US History way back in high school? Stuff like Yellow Journalism?

Some of y'all are too young to have had that chance because we stopped teaching the good "liberal" stuff quite a while ago, and of course, some of us are too old, and I guess we forgot too much and now here we are again.

Nov 1888

Today's Tweet

(Oops.  I had a great Tweet for this, but I fucked up embedding it - sorry about that. I'll try to find it again and fix it for ya.)

Anyway - this is supposed to be a clever dig against the Purity Police, but like I said, I blew it.

You're not pushing people away from Hillary so much as you're pushing people away from taking part in the process. You're reinforcing the thinking that maybe they can't take the chance of "voting for the wrong one" so they won't vote at all.

Low turnout favors the bad guys - it always favors the bad guys - it's why the bad guys are always trying to keep people from voting - because when everybody votes, the bad guys lose.

You're doing the GOP's work for them, and you should stop doing that.

You don't have to say anything good about Clinton, and you can go back to slagging her all you want after Tuesday.  And I promise, if you just manage to shut up for a few more days, your farts will still smell as sweet to you as they apparently do now.

hat tip = Facebook buddy BD

On That Email Thing

NYT (possible pay wall):

They have not brought a major scandal to the surface, at least not yet, and even won praise from some supporters like The Post’s editorial page, which said they showed Mrs. Clinton’s “sound policy instincts.” They’ve certainly not blown up the system, as might happen in a more closed, undemocratic form of government.

If repressive foreign governments want to make a regular thing of hacking into United States leaders’ email to undermine the country, and domestic politicians like Mr. Trump want to keep embracing that kind of “help,” then the news media may have to rethink how to handle it.

But so far, the hacks have only proved that the United States system knows how to process reality and can handle the truth, which should encourage our leaders to offer more of it.

So for that much, I guess, thanks, Vladimir Putin. Now, ready to share youremails?

There could be a lot more to "the emails" than I've seen - and fake lord knows I haven't seen a whole helluva lot, so I could be standing on the warning track way the fuck off in left field - but I've been wondering for a while why the emails are always and only about the Dems, and never the Repubs, and it seems most of the Press Poodles never make it clear that they include anything that could be considered exculpatory in any real way.

What we get is "Oooh, this could be dark and mysterious and horrible - it prob'ly isn't - but it could be, and that would mean the end of the world as we know it! But I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there and blah blah blah"

Gee - it's almost as if somebody wants us to think a certain way about something.

Politics brings out the liar in all of us, so all I can do is try to test each thing for "reasonable-ness" and follow what I can as far as I can.

But all this shit - it's a wonderment.

It Counts

hat tip = FB pal Vicki W-E

Here's The Plan

1. Drug Trump
2. Put him in a "Truman Show" White House
3. Wake him up
4. Tell him he won
5. Sell subscriptions
6. Retire National Debt in about 2 years

hat tip = Twitter dude, @harryallen

What He Said

This is how I want Obama to do everything.  And maybe it's just me, but it seems like it's only been in the last several months that he's stepping up and calling the opposition out on their bullshit responses to everything he does or says.

Talking about what needs to be done about ISIS in light of the Paris thing:

What I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow in the abstract make America look tough. Or make me look tough.

And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed and I see a 25 year old kid who is paralyzed or who has lost his limbs and some of those are people I've ordered into battle.

And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may. We’ll do what’s required to keep the American people safe. And I think it’s entirely appropriate in a democracy to have a serious debate about these issues. If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisers are better than the chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate.

But what I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership, or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with, that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people. And to protect people in the region who are getting killed. And to protect our allies in people like France. I’m too busy for that.

And of course the nutballs went straight into Deliberately Misunderstanding mode anyway.

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning”’ --POTUS

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) November 16, 2015

BTW - We've spent a good 35 years bitching about shortened attention spans, and shrinking sound bites, and news that has a life cycle of about 48 hours - how worried should I be about the 140-character Tweet becoming the dominant debate vehicle?  

Is Our Children Learning?

From WaPo:

Teachers have long been accustomed to “going along to get along” but increasingly are raising their voices to protest standardized test-based education reforms of the last decade that they see as harmful to students. In this post, Georgia teacher Ian Altman explains what he and his colleagues are really sick of hearing from reformers. Altman is an award-winning high school English teacher in Athens, where he has lived since 1993, as well as an advocate for teachers and students. He has presented at several national conferences and published in the Journal of Language and Literacy Education. He won the 2014 University of Georgia College of Education Distinguished Alumni Crystal Apple Award as well as the 2012 University of Chicago Outstanding Educator award.

Altman’s list of seven things that reformers should stop saying to teachers comes from conversations he has had with educators across the country and speaks to the fury felt by many teachers who see their expertise being devalued and their profession denigrated.

#6 is a great cross-over from the Bidness Side that is a perfect reflection of what's so fucked up about USAmerica Inc:

6. Stop using education reform clichés.
Here is a compendium of common education reform clichés:
“After consulting the research and assessment data, and involving all stakeholders in the decision-making process, we have determined that a relentless pursuit of excellence and laser-like focus on the standards, synergistically with our accountability measures, action-oriented and forward-leaning intervention strategies, and enhanced observation guidelines for classroom look-fors, will close the achievement gap and raise the bar for all children.”

You can’t talk like that and expect to be taken seriously by educated adults.

If only people in any random Business Meeting could be relied upon to laugh the Cliche-Humpers out of the room, we might make a little progress.

And the payoff at the end:

Teachers didn’t choose this fight. It has been imposed on us by a misguided and deeply conservative “reform” movement. It’s time for reformers to back off because I, and my colleagues, will do a better job if you just get out of the way.

I welcome you to disrupt my thoughts with real argument if you can. But don’t insult me and my profession by telling me just to believe what I’m told and accept the way things are.

 hat tip = FB friend LLS

Larry Wilkerson

"...the invisible hand of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations" is not an invisible hand - it's now the hand of oligarchs..."

One of the great mysteries of the colossal cluster fuck known as the George W Bush administration is that (apparently) nobody was listening to Larry Wilkerson.

Or was it that Larry wasn't speaking quite as clearly then as he is now?  Dunno, but we'd better start listening to him now if we're to have any real chance of stickin' around long enough to find out.

Anyway, from The Real News:

Connections

I think this guy is trying hard to get "conservatives" to look at things from a perspective other than from inside their own bowels; using his take on John Mellencamp's music to illustrate their basic inability to hear what "the American people" are really trying to tell them.

David Masciotra at The American Conservative:

One of the problems of movement conservatism is a resistance to—and often flat out rejection of—complexity. Too much of the American right is dominated by a mentality that views its country with childlike simplicity and awe. Any invocation of American iconography must be worshipful, and for those who combine Christianity with nationalism to create a civil religion, any sign of the cross must be celebratory of everything American.

Not that I have a lot of confidence in anybody's ability to get these meatheads either into line or out of the party, but I can tip my hat to a guy who's making some effort to move people away from the adolescent insistence that all we need is a little common sense and that every problem (and therefore, every solution) can be reduced to simple 10-word phrases that fit neatly onto bumper stickers; or that can be perfectly reflected in a 3-minute pop tune.

What's Real?

hat tip = The Rude Pundit

Back in that time, the "bad guys" were often foreign; be it your mad Sheik or your Toru Tanaka, you were always encouraged to boo at the non-white dude while men in cowboy boots stomped them.

Why bring this up? Because it's encouraging to find out that the current WWE champion is a Mexican character, Alberto del Rio, who is a widely loved "good guy." And the bad guys gunning for him are two redneck Tea Party members, Zeb Colter and Jack Swagger, whose rhetoric is just like anything you'd hear at a teabagger rally. 

Why bring this up? Because internet radio host Glenn Beck got all upset at the portrayal of his beloved nutzoid Tea Party as racist jerk-offs who spout meaningless, jingoistic bullshit. He called the WWE's fans "stupid" and wondered, "I just don't see a bunch of progressives going and buying their tickets to the WWE." That's right. Glenn Beck turned against a Republican-led company and its customers.

It's An Ambush

So, is this maybe some kind of trial balloon?  Is somebody at DumFux News trying to move them off of their mission to promote GOP interests?  Or is it just another example of what happens when a Segment Producer (or an Anchor Poodle) decides to leave the joint anyway, so he might as well come clean about a coupla things?

This shit (almost) never happens by accident - it's a wonderment.



(hat tip = Addicting Info)

Pulling Back The Veil

Maybe Sandy will provide a small glimmer of hope that more of us will see the GOP's rhetoric for the bullshit it is.

From a post on Matt Taibbi's blog at Rolling Stone yesterday.

But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree – even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself).

Vaccination Against Idiocy

Top 25 Creationist Fallacies - also, a useful primer for doing combat with the Common Wingnut.

A Small Question

Lots of righteous indignation this week when Darryl Issa (R-Haugpecker) held a committee hearing on the non-troversy over Contraception Coverage, neglecting to invite any women to participate.

Outrage was voiced by the pundits along these lines: "How does Congress debate a Women's Health issue without any women!?!"

I guess I'm wondering why anybody would accept any debate in Congress regarding ANY policy issue that doesn't include women.

You make your point stick a lot better if you can at least make it look a little less obviously political.