It Got Me Thinkin'

Which is always a little dangerous, but anyway - here's a little bit of a thing:



'Conservatives' are always yammerin' about how they want Gubmint to run more like a Bidness.

My contention is that's pretty much exactly what we've been seeing for 20 or more years, and here's why I think it:  Congress Critters are privy to lots and lots of information that's either not known to the rest of us, or that they get to know about way before we get to know  about it; AND, they get to make rules and regulations that can easily tilt the money chute a little (or a lot) in the general direction of their own bank accounts and portfolios.  So while we have managed to put certain safeguards in place to make it harder for them to give themselves raises in their salaries, we've done practically nothing to keep them from creating a very slick and lucrative money-laundering apparatus that funnels shitloads of cash into their pockets, even if it does happen behind a thick veil of toxic fog.

Meanwhile, Corporate Bosses get to do this in a slightly more open way - but it's still pretty fucked up.  CEOs and Directors and Senior Execs get paid a lot, but the way they make the real money is by putting policy decisions in place that benefit them greatly at the expense (often) of everybody else.

Ask a simple question: why are so many companies spending so much (~$2.4 TRILLION) buying their own stock?

Then ask: what's the Comp Plan look like for those Bosses?  

I'm betting dollars to dingleberries that those guys are gonna make more than a few bucks over and above their salaries if the company stock performs well, and what better way to boost the value of a share of your stock than to make it look like it's a hot property because "somebody's snapping it up like crazy"?

And when you're in bed with the politicians who conveniently vote against close enforcement of the rules you've already gotten them to weaken, then collusion and cronyism and outright bribery become the orders of the day, and simply the usual and customary way of doing business.

It gets really complex and convoluted, and I'm not pretending to know what all is wrong or what all needs to be done.  But I think it points back to the need for Separation-Of-Powers solutions; we have to rebuild the firewalls - the ones that keep Businesses and Governments and individuals from becoming too big and too powerful.

Cuz always remember - a business is not a democracy.

Snarky Jab Du Jour

Just A Tho't

"A mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan



hat tip = Facebook friend VWE

So, Earth is all we've got.  It's home and there's literally nowhere else to go.

And then there's a guy like Charles Koch (just an example), who seems to be going to great lengths to fuck up the joint, making life in our little corner of the universe less and less likely to continue.

If some nutball ammosexual suddenly got all tree-hugger-y and walked up to Ol' Chuckles and poked 5 or 6 holes in Mr Koch's torso with a Glock .40, do ya think the shooter's lawyer'd have a chance to get him off by claiming it was justifiable under the Stand Your Ground statutes?

Just wonderin'.



(No - seriously, you knuckleheads - don't be out there pullin' shit, OK?)

Almost In Passing

I've been trying to think my way through all this Mike Brown / Eric Garner stuff; crashing around in my head looking for some boiled-down guiding principle to apply that might help me sort it out.

And then: The law must be a shield, not a sword.

For a good 2,000 - 10,000 generations, The Law was used and abused as a way to rationalize Might-Makes-Right.  As long as I had some reasonable expectation of being able to take you in a fist fight, I could jack your shit; and fuck you if you don't like it cuz fuck you, that's why. All the big guys did it cuz that's just what a big guy could do.  And it worked - Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Britain, etc etc etc - you get the idea.

Unfortunately, saying it that way makes it sound like we'd have to look way far back to find good examples, and that makes me think we're feeling a little too comfortable about ignoring the need to examine our motives and our reasoning, and our willingness to shrug it all off like a buncha fuckin' Eloi.

But gosh, it seems we don't have to look back very far to find some examples of people doing some pretty fucked up things because they had the juice to make the law do whatever they wanted it to do in order to pad their bank accounts or act out their domination fantasies or whatever their issues were at the time.

--slavery in America was lawful; and so was Jim Crow after that.

-- the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was mostly lawful under German law, and according to most written international law in effect at the time.

-- apartheid in South Africa was established by law.

-- Saddam Hussein claimed at his trial in Baghdad in 2006 that his order mandating the execution of 148 persons in response to an attempted assassination of him was lawful.

-- the Israeli military justified their heavy use of cluster bombs during the 2006 war by stating that “[a]ll the weapons and munitions used by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards” (Shadid 2006, A01).

-- the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq was lawful according to American interpretation of law.

The law has to be a shield.  It has to be there to protect us from overbearing, over-reaching, evermore ambitious and power-craving despots.  When the law instead protects the police (eg) from being held to the same standards of justice as apply to everybody else, then the law has become a sword against the people, and it will be changed by the people one way or another.  It has to be changed because it's become a contradiction.  And while contradictions exist, they can't prevail.
(all you 'conserva-tarians' might recognize that one from the Sacred Texts of Our Lady Ayn of Rand)

For my own self, I kinda like The American Exceptionalism way, and I'll keep trying to do it that way.  But if it has to be changed the old-fashioned way, then I'll be sadly watching from the bench, unsurprised.

I just really hope we can get back to being that exception.

I Hope Not

These 2 movies are not bad.  Some decent values statements, and some really good Movie Moments.

I only wish I could shake the creepy feeling that they're really just 2-hour ads for companies with piles of money so ridiculously gigundous that they can produce feature-length infomercials, and get us to pay twelve bucks a head for the privilege of absorbing their Corporate Branding Messages.

Today's Olbermann

Since he got back on the air, it seems like ESPN has been doing its best to hide him from us by bouncing his show time all over the damned place.

As of last night: ESPN2 at 5pm, and repeating once or twice a day at odd hours on other of the ESPN channels - like I said, ya gotta hunt for it.

Anyway, the guy can be a little bombastic and a bit precious on occasion, but there's no better truth-teller anywhere on TV.

Friday Music

Arms Of A Woman --Amos Lee





Gimme One Reason --Tracy Chapman





I Will --Beatles





For No One (cover) --Emmylou Harris





And So Begins The Task --Stephen Stills





Laughing --David Crosby

In Case You Missed It (updated)

...or in case you've forgotten what real journalism actually looks like:

BY ROLLING STONE | December 5, 2014

To Our Readers:
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone's editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie's credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie's account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn't confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. 

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

Will Dana
Managing Editor

It's something of a big deal because when you get it wrong you have to own it, and you have to stand up, and you have to say you got it wrong.  Which is something that happens once in a while, but which is something that seems never to happen in a certain segment of "the media" where they get it wrong a lot and never say so.  

But this development does nothing to lessen the rather dire state of affairs on- and off-campus. We have a problem here and we're not gonna get any nearer to finding the solutions we need unless everybody's willing to stand up and speak the truth as they see it - even when the truth is that they kinda blew the report by not properly vetting the fucking source - which just gives all the wrong people all the perfect excuses to do exactly what RS seems suddenly to be doing, which is to blame the fucking victim.

FUCK ME FUCKLESS WHAT THE FUCK!?!  ISN'T THAT PARTA THE FUCKING PROBLEM IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE!?!

Ahem - sorry - channeling Charlie Skinner there for a minute.

The thing that does change right now tho' is that all the usual Smarmroaches will probably come scurrying out to start chanting "Death to The Demon Liberal Media", and the rubes can go back to feeling smugly comfortable sitting and waiting for the Daddy State to tell them what to misunderstand about the next episode of All My Phony Outrage.

hat tip = Facebook friend HH

NPR Awakes

I don't do NPR much anymore because they've been beaten into submission, and they almost always skew to the Both-Sides malarkey.  But when they get one right, I wanna be here to say they got one right.

Part Of An Oldie

Tim Wise talking about Racial Profiling and the idiocy of some of our law enforcement policies.  

To wit:
Brown Males are 3 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the cops, even tho' White Males are 4 ½ times more likely to be in possession of contraband on those fairly rare occasions when they do get stopped and searched. (this bit starts at about 7:45)