Mar 23, 2014

The Matter With Words

Crappy sound quality - high-sounding message.



You can't make it work if you can't sell the idea, but it bothers me that feeling you have to play the other guy's game is the beginning of a process that leads to your becoming those other guys.

Let's be careful out there.

It's (Supposed To Be) About Balance

JFK speaking at a meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961:



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

"Solon decreed it a crime for any man to shrink from controversy" - that bit's pretty good, but beyond that, it seems like this speech is one of those moments in history that lets us see at least the beginnings of a certain unravelling.

He says it straight out - we have to take the right of all citizens to know what their government is up to and weigh it against the need to keep "the enemy" from knowing things we really need them not to know (insert snarky crack about Don Rumsfeld here).

I guess I could spend the next few decades trying to trace thru all the flips and turns of journalism just in the last half of the 20th century, trying to figure out where "it all went wrong".  And while that may be a truly fun ride, I get the feeling it's not as useful right now as figuring out what's been driving the enormous changes we've been seeing.  I'm not just talking about the tech revolution or whatever - I think it has everything to do with the tensions that are always present between What's-Best-For-The-Most vs what's good for a fairly narrow power agenda on the part of almost literally a few very well placed individuals.

Capt Obvious says, "Robbing the house gets a lot easier once you've killed the watch dog.  And if you can get the homeowners to kill their dog for you, well then you're one clever mother fucker, and maybe you deserve all the booty you can carry, and whoa - can I give you a hand?  Some of those pillow cases look pretty heavy."

We've had to fight this fight on several occasions - kinda what got us going in the first place back in the 18th century.  So here we go again.

It's not about pointing and laughing at The Tea Party. Although it's great sport and somebody needs to do that, they're mostly people who're rightly upset, but who're being co-opted and misled.

And it's not about pissing and moaning about how the Dems have also been co-opted and now they're just as bad as the Repubs.

It's not about immigrants or brown people in general, or your upper middle class douche-y Libertarian neighbors or the jag-off at the 7-11 who doesn't seem to care about satisfying your every whim in a humble but joyous way while constantly expressing his gratitude for the opportunity to slowly starve to death on $8.50 an hour.  It's also not about the kid in the do-rag and the baggy pants, and it's not about a whole fuckload of distractions that're easy to say and easy to understand and just as easy to recognize as total crapola once ya spend half a micro-neuron thinking about it.

It's not even about being mad at the right people - or being mad for the right reasons.  It's about figuring out what to do about being mad at the right people for the right reasons.  If I ever figure that one out, I'll be sure to let ya know, but in the mean time, yeah - let's take our country back.  We can start by taking it back from Goldman-Sachs, and from Exxon-Mobil, and from Koch Industries, and from The Walton Gang, and from whoever else wants to rule over us instead of serving beside us.

Mar 22, 2014

A Friendly Reminder

We've probably left it all too late to keep from crashing thru the +2°C ceiling that the Climate Nerds have been trying to warn us about.

What's important now is to figure out how to get ready for the Global Cluster Fuck heading our way.  (I'm not holding out a lot of hope on that one btw, simply because we still can't figure out to stop short of bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks for fuck's sake, but anyhoo)


There's a weekly news show on HBO called VICE.  It's only half an hour, and kinda scatter-gun, but they pick good topics and they spend a good 12-15 minutes on each story.  Kinda like what we used to think 60 Minutes used to be - but without the asshole Mike Wallace.

Here's the "debrief" on the Greenland Is Melting segment from last night's show:



HBOGO.com

VICE on the web

Fun Fact:  The Greenland Ice Sheet is disappearing at a much faster rate than they predicted 10 years ago - it's accelerated to the point where it's something like 60 years ahead of schedule.  Once it's all melted, the world's sea level will be a solid 20 feet higher than it is now.

Oh yeah - watch for the bit about how Antarctica has now joined the fun as well.

Enjoy.

Punishing Success

A short item at NYT:

Authorities are trying to determine how a 16-year-old New Jersey boy sneaked past security at 1 World Trade Center and spent two hours early Sunday making his way to the top of the 1,776-foot tower, which is still under construction.
The boy, identified as Justin Casquejo of Weehawken, entered the construction site surrounding the tower through a 12-by-12-inch hole in the exterior fence, said Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.
The teenager crawled through the hole around 4 a.m. and was caught about two hours later, Mr. Pentangelo said. A law enforcement source said Mr. Casquejo was arrested in the lobby. He was charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.
Mr. Casquejo admitted breaking into the site, according to a criminal complaint.
“I found a way up through the scaffolding, climbed onto the sixth floor, and took the elevator up to the 88th floor,” he said, according to the complaint. “I then took the staircase up to the 104th floor. I went to the rooftop and climbed the ladder all the way to the antenna.”
At least one security guard, whom Mr. Pentangelo described as “inattentive,” was fired. It was unclear if any other security personnel were at the site.
Though Mr. Casquejo seemed to be nothing more than a young thrill seeker, the breach raised questions about the level of security at the site, which largely remains a construction zone more than 12 years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 destroyed the original World Trade Center.
“We take security and these type of infractions extremely seriously and will prosecute violators,” Joseph Dunne, the Port Authority’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “We continue to reassess our security posture at the site and we are constantly working to make this site as secure as possible.”
Photos of Mr. Casquejo posted to his Twitter account show him and his friends scaling a crane overlooking the Manhattan skyline and posing on top of a bulldozer at a construction site. One photo shows someone doing a flip from a bridge into the water. He describes himself at one point as part of a parkour team, a reference to the gravity-defying urban sport that sometimes involves scaling buildings and other high structures.
Mr. Casquejo’s exploits were first reported by The New York Post.
Security is an illusion - and the more effort any given government exerts to "keep us safe", the more it fails to provide anything other than profits for contractors, way too much power for a buncha dopes with badges and low SAT scores, and a relentless corrosion of civil liberties for everybody else.

Huge hat tip to The Rude Pundit, who put the NYT bit together with MH370 to give us this:

3/21/2014

Reminders of How Small We Are: MH370 and Justin Casquejo

You can bet that there will be a movie made about 16-year-old Justin Casquejo. When the kid from Weehawken, New Jersey (the town where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton dueled to the death), got to the top of the unopened 1 World Trade Center in order to take photos to post to Twitter, he was following an impulse that in other times made people conquer mountains and rivers, doing the impossible for the first time. Imagine the view he had, alone, at the very end of night, at the very beginning of sunrise, on top of the tallest building in the country. He also demonstrated, probably unwittingly, just how tenuous, how permeable, how human our belief in security is.

If you've been to the 9/11 Memorial, you know that you have to pass through ridiculous levels of security. If you came in from New Jersey on the PATH train, you no doubt walked past soldiers armed with rifles. You had to get your ticket in advance in order for someone to check if your name is on any watch list. You had to go through a metal detector and a possible pat-down. While you were walking around the cascading pools, you couldn't help but see all the guards and police. This place, you are shown in absolutely certain terms, will not be attacked again, at least not by someone on foot. Apparently, though, not so much for the construction site that's still up around the nearly-complete skyscraper.

Often we must learn a simple lesson through violence - that schools aren't built to prevent shootings, that airplanes can be taken over with razor blades - and then we react and believe we have come up with a way to keep us safe. But, as further violence demonstrates, that safety, security in a larger sense, is a lie.

What Justin Casquejo did in the innocent, adolescent, brave, and stupid act of sneaking through a fence was to show us how meaningless our security apparatus is, how we've given over so much of our freedom to a fraud, to a thin veneer of protection that was punctured by a kid with a camera. It was, in its way, the gentlest act of terrorism one could commit. We are one sleeping guard away from anarchy. And it should be humbling not just to those who are supposed to keep us safe, but to all of us. By scaling the tower, Casquejo brought us to earth.

An even greater humbling is occurring in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. It is, without a doubt, an unendurably awful vigil for the families of the 239 passengers and crew. Putting aside the ghoulish news network coverage of the search, let us instead see the inability to find a large jet plane as a moment for sublime wonder along with the very real suffering of very real people. The loss of a plane filled with electronics and devices that are supposed to make it near-impossible to lose is another kind of humbling, another demonstration of our limits.

We live, we are told, in a shrinking world, a world where data and technology are erasing old barriers to knowledge and to understanding, to the distance between people. But sometimes an event occurs that shows us just how huge and mysterious the planet actually is. In a time when Google Earth can let us see individual trees in an African jungle, when one can go thousands of miles in a few hours of flying, the fact that hundreds of people and a large object can disappear reinstills a long-gone sense of awe at the immensity of the world, especially of the oceans. Imagine this for a moment, too: We might not find Flight 370, perhaps not in our lifetimes, perhaps not ever, because the earth is just that big.

That's the takeaway from this: We still don't know what we're doing. It's the tragic and lovely thing about humans, that we often believe we have a grasp, that we have control, even when we have constant reminders that it's an illusion.

Logical Fallacy #6 - Ad Hominem


Per Wikipedia:

An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.[2] Fallacious Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy,[3][4][5] more precisely as a genetic fallacy,[6] a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance.[7] Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact.

Ad hominem arguments are the converse of appeals to authority, and may be used in response to such appeals.

Mar 17, 2014

Skipping To The Chase

...and also too, a new acronym: ACD = Anthropogenic Climate Disruption

The "good news" is that Climate Change has been on a minor hiatus; tho' not really, since the bad-news part is that all the shit we were expecting somewhere down the road is  pretty much on pace to become one ginormous fuckburger way sooner than we tho't it would.

Here're the last bits from a long piece at truthout (with a link to a report from those treehuggin' pussies at DoD):
Hence, they are also unlikely to believe anything that comes out of the "progressive" and "left-leaning" US Pentagon, which just released its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review Report, which states:
"Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions - conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."
Every single piece of information you’ve just read is only from the last month.
This is what catastrophic ACD looks like.
This information may lack the dramatic background music and thrilling scenes that would accompany the Hollywood blockbuster movie that many in the United States might expect advancing ACD to look like. However, it is real. It is happening right now. And it is time for all of us to pay attention.