About The Drone Thing

As usual, Hayes gets pretty close to what it's about.



The main thing to remember is that process counts.  The US was set up to put Process in front of outcome.  If we take care in how we get to the conclusion, we stand a much better chance of getting to the right conclusion.  That seems pretty important when we're trying to figure out who's next in line for a Hellfire Anal Probe.

We gotta get this one right, and I'm not convinced Obama's gonna get there for us.  Seems like he's willing to do some good Democrat things (equal rights, gun regulations, etc) but just as you start to think he's really pulling in the right direction, he cuts back and does something like this extra-legal assassination-by-drone shit.

I guess I'm just really hoping he's trying to rearrange the legalities - not to make it easier to blast somebody we don't like - but to be a little more sure that we blast the right guy(?), and to be a little surer about knowing who pulled the trigger and why they targeted any given dude.

Also hoping this isn't just another cynical move to defang the usual Repub attacks on Dems as being insufficiently BadAss.

Today's HipHop

My 2nd son said, "Hey Dad - If you wanna know what the kids are listening to these days..."



First, if you're of a certain age, try not to think about Annie Hall right now.  And then you can stop wondering about shit like "history repeats itself" or " everything runs in cycles" or "the more things change, the more they stay the same" blah blah blah.  People say shit like that because for good or ill, there's some truth to it.

When Culture and Economy are all tied up together; and when both are driven by fad and fashion; and when things can change so quickly - I guess we have to expect a certain wastage left behind as we lurch along the timeline.

Is it the latest iteration of RetroChic, and do we call it Gleaning?  Or what?

This Is How We Do It

A little Journalism; a little Community Organization; a little Crowd Sourcing; a little Citizen Participation - pretty soon it starts to add up to that thing we used to call 'democracy'.

Slate has a gizmo that lets you put in start and stop dates to pull up the total reported gun deaths in the US.

Here's a partial screen shot of the chart showing how many Americans have died of gunshots in the 55 days since Newtown:

That's a partial look - it only includes the last coupla weeks, and it only includes the deaths reported by everyday regular people.  And notice that they haven't included the number of dead Americans in the last few days (because it takes a while to gather, confirm and publish the findings).

But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.

About 5500 Americans are dead because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In 12 years of war, 5,500 dead Americans.

In those same 12 years, here in the US, well over 330,000 Americans have been killed with guns.

Today's Oxymoron

"Reasonable Conservative"

Keeping in mind the immortal words of Ferris Bueler - "Isms, in my opinion, are not good".

This bit from Andrew Bacevich at The American Conservative is actually pretty close to what I've held to be true for a good long time.

Conservatives take human relationships seriously and know that they require nurturing. In community lies our best hope of enjoying a meaningful earthly existence. But community does not emerge spontaneously. Conservatives understand that the most basic community, the little platoon of family, is under unrelenting assault, from both left and right. Emphasizing autonomy, the forces of modernity are intent on supplanting the family with the hyper-empowered—if also alienated—individual, who exists to gratify appetite and ambition. With its insatiable hunger for profit, the market is intent on transforming the family into a cluster of consumers who just happen to live under the same roof. One more thing: conservatives don’t confuse intimacy with sex.

--and--

The key to success will be to pick the right fights against the right enemies, while forging smart tactical alliances. (By tactical, I do not mean cynical.) Conservatives need to discriminate between the issues that matter and those that don’t, the contests that can be won and those that can’t. And they need to recognize that the political left includes people of goodwill whose views on some (by no means all) matters coincide with our own.

So forget about dismantling the welfare state. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare are here to stay. Forget about outlawing abortion or prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives may judge the fruits produced by the sexual revolution poisonous, but the revolution itself is irreversible.

Of course, I have to diverge from some of his points (eg: his take on "Original Sin" is actually pretty good, but I've come to view it from the opposite perspective), and some of his agenda items leave something to be desired.

The thing that gets me is that here's a guy trying to make some sense of his own thinking, and to extricate himself (and his fellows) from having been lumped in with the screaming wingnuts of the GOP.  Hope springs eternal.

Today's Gun Nut

From WSPA in Greenville SC:

The Greenville Police responded to a shooting at Haywood Plantation Apartments around 7:30 p.m. on Friday night.

A 3-year-old boy named Tmorej Smith was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head.

Investigators say the child and a 7-year-old sibling were playing with a pink handgun that they thought was a toy when the gun went off.

The shooting has been ruled as accidental. No charges have been filed at this time and the investigation continues.

Officials are reminding gun owners to keep them locked at all times and out of reach of children.

--and--

There has been a concerted effort in the gun industry to increase interest and awareness among women. An array of “cute” weapons are available, including Hello Kitty AK-47 assault rifles, a “Lady Di” Handgun, and even a delightful Mardis Gras themed “My Little Carbine”. For the especially careless girl, there is a Care Bear body armor vest.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Pix

Today's Gun Nut

This points up just how specious the "law-abiding citizen" argument is.  Everybody is a law-abiding citizen right up 'til the instant they stop abiding by the law.

A couple with four children were shot and killed in an argument over dog feces on Monday, police in Texas said.

Officers were called to a shooting at the Sable Ridge Apartments in Dallas at about 8 a.m. Monday.

When officers arrived, they found two people, later identified as 32-year-old Michelle Jackson and 31-year-old Jamie Stafford, dead at the scene from apparent gunshot wounds. An infant inside the couple's apartment was not injured.

After talking with witnesses, police began searching for Chung Kim, a resident of the complex identified by residents as a man who lived in the unit below Stafford and Jackson and was seen leaving the complex after the shooting.

US News on NBCNews.com

Today In Lawlessness

hat tip = Democratic Underground

That Dodge Commercial

I got kinda nauseous when I saw this, but I can admit also to being just a tiny bit impressed by its power.



Now, after a coupla days of Facebook Sharing of this "totally awesome (and not-even-a-little-cynically-manipulative-fantasy-fuck) tribute to The Real 'Murica", some dirty Librul at The Atlantic has to shit in the punch bowl over a few stoopid facts.

The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I'm sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I'd rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy's bizarre antics.

But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.

I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.

Taking one short step beyond the race thing (and remembering the last shot in this video), let's think about what a farm actually looks like here in 2013.  And then maybe we can talk about the simple fact that a farm isn't really a farm anymore - it's a factory.  You don't feed 7 Billion humans on a coupla chickens and a few acres of beans and millet and pygmy cucumbers.

One last thing: until the late 40s, Nostalgia was considered a mental disorder.

Just A Dang Minute

From CBS News:

Authorities stormed an underground bunker in southeastern Alabama Monday, freeing a 5-year-old boy and shooting his captor to death after a week of fruitless negotiations that left authorities convinced the child was in imminent danger.

Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, had taken the child off a school bus after fatally shooting the driver Jan. 29 and was holed up with the child for seven days, authorities said.

An FBI Hostage Rescue team launched the rescue attempt after concerns mounted that Dykes was growing more unstable and presented a growing threat to the boy's safety, a U.S. official told CBS News. At some point during the negotiations, authorities had inserted a camera into the bunker and observed that Dykes had begun brandishing a gun and acting increasingly agitated - signs his mental state was deterioriating. Rescuers stormed the bunker from an entrance at its top, set off a diversionary explosive device and ultimately shot Dykes.

But put yourself in the shoes of that kid's parents for a short moment - some asshole Doomsday Prepper has murdered a school bus driver in the process of kidnapping your son; a coupla phones calls are made and, as if by magic, the cops materialize at your door and they say - oh I dunno - they say something that can easily be paraphrased and boiled down to, "We're from the government and we're here to help you".  Is your first inclination to spit on their shoes and tell 'em to get the fuck off your porch?