The Real Contagion

From Brother Charles at Esquire:

There is a very sad story in Cleveland concerning what happens when the TV lights dim, and when one 24-hour news-cycle crisis abates and another one erupts somewhere else.

You may recall that, back when Ebola was going to kill us all in our beds because President Barack Nkrumah-Kenyatta wanted all of western civilization to start spitting up its own entrails, a 29-year-old nurse named Amber Vinson contracted the disease and, before she was aware of that fact, flew to Cleveland, and then drove to Akron, for a wedding. She shopped for a dress at a place in Akron called Coming Attractions. Then, after the wedding, she flew back to Dallas, where she became symptomatic both of Ebola infection and of cable-news hysteria. The sad punchline is that, because of the publicity around Vinson's visit, and the subsequent mindless terror, Coming Attractions announced it was going out of business.

People stopped patronizing a store where their favorite Nightmare Du Jour went shopping - because they were afraid of getting the dread disease - never stopping to think that maybe they weren't in any real danger since the owners/employees of the store - the people who were there all day every day - weren't fucking sick.

But hey - we live in a time when it's important to be oblivious to having been issued your opinions by Corporate News, and that those opinions must never be examined in the light of actual evidence.

And so, unfortunately, once again, the clear-eyed pragmatic capitalist rubes fail to reach the obvious conclusion that being stoopid is bad for business.

Too Close For Comfort

Makes me wonder if "witnesses" and the sketch artist are just having us on a bit, or if we've arrived at the point where the Radical Assholes are feeling so immune to the law that they can do anything they want, knowing they can hide behind a veil of notoriety - claiming Political Witch Hunt if anybody decides to go after 'em.

(tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is a fucking genius)

Today's Quote

"If your concerns about violence are limited to property damage and looting, and you have never shed two tears for the history of institutional violence, murder, colonialism, segregation, lynching, genocide and police brutality against peoples of color, your words mean nothing; they mean less than nothing. Your outrage, in such a case is grotesque, an inversion of morality so putrescent as to call into question your capacity for real feeling at all. So long as violence from below is condemned while violence from above is ignored, you can bet that the former will continue–and however unfortunate that may be, it is surely predictable. If you’d like the former to cease, put an end to the latter, and then I promise you, it will."  --Tim Wise

DoJ Stats from 2010:

Federal Grand Jury Presentations = 162,000

Federal Grand Jury Indictments = 161,989

(that's better'n 99%)

Cases of cops shooting people presented to a grand jury = 81

Number of cops indicted by a grand jury = 1

(that's a shade over 1%)

Somethin' ain't jake here.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Today's Pix

Love The Cops

..or they'll go all PMS on yer ass.

A Short Video

Let The OCD Wash Over Me

I Am Charlie

Today's Religious Fanatics

Y'know, when I look at Islam in terms of maturity, I think it's more or less fair to say they're at about the same stage of development now as the Christianists were at in about the 14th century.  So really, it just happens to be the Islamists' turn to be kinda nutty right now.  I'm sure we'll be getting back to raping 10-year-old alter boys, and dropping bombs on imprisoned civilians, and shooting certain OB/GYNs in no time at all - be patient.

And I realize I'm doing this in a cheap and superficial way, but then again, I'm not the one flying airplanes into buildings and running around in some desert shithole playing Ali Baba and the 40 Fuck Wads, and then pretending I'm doing it all because I'm so deeply devoted to showing god's love for his children.

So I just wanna say first that I stand with anybody willing to go out on a limb to point out how monumentally stoopid all this religious crap is.

And second: 

Fuck you guys.  Come and get me.  Assholes.

It Just Gets Weirderer

...and weirderer and weirderer.



I gotta wonder why the producers at DumFux News decided to put Duke on their air when it seems like they just wanted O'Reilly to pimp the usual False Equivalence crapola.  It did in fact come up, but it was kinda lost in the the clutter of Duke's flailing rants about Jewish Media and Jewish Bankers and Wars for Israel etc.  And pimping his book? WTF was that about?

Also too, I'm thinking O'Reilly wanted to have Duke on to show everybody what they ought not to be doing and/or saying, in order to re-assert the GOP Establishment thing(?), but that doesn't make a lot of sense either because Duke ends up saying very much the same thing DumFux News has been saying, and as convinced as I am about how The Rubes will swallow anything Rupert feeds 'em, it's still gotta be possible to push their credulity a little too far - doesn't it(?)

Anyway, that bit was as close to being a complete disaster as you can get, and it reaffirms for me what driftglass has been saying for a good long time, which is that the GOP is getting  what the GOP has been wishing for.

I guess I'm thinking somebody's trying to figure out the next few moves as The Southern Strategy continues to evolve.  Repubs have to come up with ways to go on rousing the rabble without scaring too many more "regular folk".  It's almost like they're finally realizing their message has actually morphed into something like, "Yeah, the GOP really is being run by a buncha racist assholes, but when ya stop to think about it, you're a racist asshole too because you've agreed with enough of what we've been saying all along to keep voting for us - so fuck it - let's just admit we're all racist assholes and we can all be racist assholes together."

One last thing - Duke has "threatened" to make public his "associations" with other prominent Politicos if they don't lay off his buddy Scalise.  Now, if it's a bad thing to reveal those associations, doesn't that mean David Duke is a bad guy? And doesn't that also mean David Duke is admitting he's a bad guy?  Or is David Duke suddenly the good guy because he's threatening to reveal the true ugliness of it all?

All these little flips and turns make my head hurt.