Today's Video

Things are not always as they seem (duh) - an important concept to keep in mind when it comes to choosing a candidate.

(Stay with it - the explanation is pretty informative):

So, ya gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?  Let's be careful out there.

(hat tip = Facebook buddy VW-E)

How Wrong?

Real wrong.  I ran a little video on my little blog here not all that long ago, showing Jim Webb's announcement that he was running for POTUS - and I remember saying I'd give the guy a look because he did some decent things in his one term in the US Senate (not the least of which was simply keeping George Allen out of that seat). 

Anyhoo - I've been wrong about a lot of things, but never wronger than thinking Jim Webb  as a candidate for Prez was worth more than a spit shine a dead man's shoes.

Samantha Bee:

The OpEd piece Ms Bee refers to is still up at WaPo, and I was kinda struck by a line Webb uses in the last paragraph:

Mark Twain once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”

OK, but let's look at the behavior of both Jackson and Tubman thru the lens of those standards - which, btw, change over time.  You don't get to suspend the rules to suit your convenience - we play the full nine innings here.

In the early 1800s, Jackson was doing what most people were doing, and it all seems to be in line with the standards of his time. 

Tubman was doing things that were illegal in the mid-1800s; things that were considered by at least half of her contemporaries to be seditious and treacherous and evil.

Looking back on it all, which one was actually doing the good things, and which one was doing the shitty things?  What would you want to be remembered for - The Underground Railroad or The Trail Of Tears? 

So by Webb's metrics, Bull Connor (eg) was an OK guy because we need to think of his complete assholery as something other than complete assholery because he was a man of his time and so we have to judge him by the standards prevailing in Alabama in 1963?  What-the-actual-fucking-fuck?

Webb decries the PC / White Privilege criticism while arguing a position that is totally embedded in it. 

Here's the thing, Jim - when you've got your head up your ass, even if you open your eyes, all you're gonna see is your own shit.  I need you to work on that one for me, OK?

Sunday Funnies

It Ain't Broke

Ordinarily, I'd ask - why don't all those clear-eyed pragmatic capitalists understand this and do something about it?

I'm not asking that anymore because I think they do understand it; they've done pretty much what they intended to do; and it's working pretty much as they intended it to work.  So this is not some software bug.  It's not a glitch.  It's a feature.

This is what Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism ends up looking like.  When you reduce everything to a simple transaction; when every decision is based almost solely on Risk/Reward/Penalty, then you've removed the ethical dividing line between Right and Wrong - they become interchangeable - and suddenly those aren't people any more; they're revenue opportunities.

Seems like we've been here before.

  

It Sounds Familiar

Way back in the old days, if the boss wasn't pretty watchful, one of the pranksters would sneak onto the mainframe and start some weird shit thing like:

10 PRINT TO SCREEN: HELP ME - I'M STUCK IN AN ENDLESS LOOP
20 GO TO: 10

And the terminal would eventually lock up and the supervisors would get all pissed off and we'd laugh and laugh cuz it'd take a good 20 minutes to clear the memory partition and restart the sector - or whatever magic the uber-nerds did to get it all back up and runnin'.

And somehow, we didn't know we were just being assholes.

Well, now we seem to have kinda the same thing going on in certain sectors of our politics.

We gave a lot of money to rich people to fix the economy, but it didn't work

So we gave a lot of money to rich people to fix that, but it didn't work

So we'll give a lot of money to rich people and see if that works

And somehow, they don't know they're just being assholes.

It Is To Laugh

If it was any less tragic, it wouldn't be funny.



And there it is - right there at the end.  Did you catch it?  

It's always some variation on, "Yeah, but the Democrats" - what driftglass calls "the razor in the apple".

This was a 4-minute piece about Trump dropping in on the enemy encampment in DC.  They spent the whole time saying not really much of anything except that a buncha Show Ponies got together for a little meet-n-greet, followed by the usual grip-n-grin photo ops etc, and while it sounded like we were kinda getting a little subtext about the really bad shit going on in the GOP, in the end, the Press Poodles at PBS just have to bring it back to the crapola False Equivalence that keeps the coffee mugs and the tote bags flying off the shelves and blah blah fucking blah.

Today's GIF

It's not luck - it's math.

Understanding the math, you can make a cool thing happen

Think of it as the difference between being a badass...

...and being a dumbass

So let's review: Not good luck, and not bad luck - just math. 

OK?  We all good?

Happy Triskaidekaphobia Day, everybody!

A Poem

The Oxymoronic English Contradictionary --Brian Bilston

Alone together for once,
I told her how I thought that, in my unbiased opinion

The incidence of oxymorons in the English language
Had been growing smaller.

"That's old news", she said
Adding that it had been the case for almost exactly ten years.

Things got pretty ugly,
But this in itself felt strangely normal,

For ours was a bittersweet relationship;
A civil war of violent arguments

I found myself annoyingly endeared to her
While she regarded my puritanical streak as seriously funny.

Our contradictions
Compliment each other perfectly

"Same difference",
I whispered loudly.

But she, with a sad smile,
After telling me how I'd left her speechless,

Went back to reading
Her textbook on business ethics.

Today's Pix

Trump Sucks

A lot of times, we need validation. We need some reassurance that others think the same way we think about something.

So just in case you weren't really sure about just how awful Donald Trump is; in case you needed any confirmation at all - that it's not just you - here's a handful of reactions from outside USAmerica Inc (and most of these are our friends):

Cuba

Ireland

British Prime Minister David Cameron called Trump’s anti-Muslim comments “divisive, stupid and wrong.”

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox called Trump a “hated gringo” and “ugly American,” and said that “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.”

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón pointed out that Trump’s policy isn’t just offensive — it also doesn’t make sense. “It’s going to be completely useless,” Calderón said. “The first loser of such a policy would be the United States.”

Earlier this year, Trump said he’d consider halting oil sales from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. In response, Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal urged Americans to “make the right choice” and not vote for Trump. Turki, who is Muslim, also disavowed the presidential candidate’s Islamophobic comments.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s economy minister and vice chancellor, said that Trump is “not only a threat to peace and social cohesion, but also to economic development.”

Saving the best for last:

That last one's from an Aussie ex-pat named Illma Gore, who filed a police report claiming she'd been punched in the face by a Trump supporter in LA, for having posted the picture on social media.

Sometimes, this joint is just too fuckin' weird for words.