It Was A Metaphor After All

So OK, congrats to the Patriots for a pretty amazing comeback win last night.  

Tom Brady is probably the best ever at quarterback.  And maybe it's because he cheats. Or maybe not.

And you can argue that Bill Belichick is the best coach ever. And maybe it's because he cheats. Or maybe not.

And maybe New England is the best franchise ever. And maybe it's because they cheat. Or maybe not.

I say, "Teach the controversy".

Anyway, the top trending hashtag on Twitter this morning is #NotMySuperBowlChamps, and it's all about setting the game as a metaphor for the election and gloating about it.

Breaking: Jill Stein announces demand for a re-match because Russia hacked the football. Send her lots of money. #NotMySuperBowlChamps

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 6, 2017

#NotMySuperBowlChamps https://t.co/69yNWU2WNs

— Yashar (@yashar) February 6, 2017

We're all so clever.

It's the spectacle that's important - especially to The Daddy State.  Bread and Circuses. It gets the blood up and inspires us ever forward.

And yes, I know - the whole bit about drawing the parallels with Rome and the Gladiators is old and tired. But y'know what? If it wasn't so fucking obvious all the fucking time, maybe we could stop doing it. Or maybe not.

I'm just glad I can put it down and walk away again -  for a while.

Black History Month 6 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Slavery Was Mostly About the Denial of Human Rights

A line of thinking that has gained popularity is that the institution’s worst crime was that it denied enslaved African-Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens, according to historian Edward Baptist. Baptist pointed out that it did those things, of course, but it also killed people in large numbers, stole everything from those who did survive and made them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire. Baptist claims that once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could emerge, whispering that African-Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

My Super Bowl Prediction

I've been thinking about this for a while. Something that keeps popping into my mind is the fact that I've watched every Super Bowl. I've been in front of a TV on Super Bowl Sunday every year for 50 years. 

50. Fucking. Years.

And I'll be there again today. Not because I feel a weird need to blindly continue a personal tradition, but because this is being hyped now as something much bigger than just a game. And that in itself seems pretty bizarre - the thought that an event that couldn't possibly get more over-hyped is now being overly over-hyped into America's Mutual Orgasm Of Battle-Porn.

The team representing the blackest city in USAmerica Inc - and the political home of The American Civil Rights Tradition - is up against the team from a city that is known for (and in some ways, proud of) being the most racist city anywhere; the team with a quarterback, a coach and an owner who're publicly good buddies with 45*.

So while there is nothing at all to the bullshit of God Will Decide This By Taking Sides In Mortal Combat, I'm pretty sure that's how it'll be characterized by the side making the claim that their cause is represented by the winner of the game.

A fucking game.

BTW - here's hoping the so-called president Donald (The Pissant) Trump gets his ass stomped by Genuine Home-Grown Hero John Lewis.

What's Goin' On

Watching "And Still I Rise" on PBS, thinking about "how far we've come".

Looking at how we've all lost a lot of ground in general the last 20 years, but knowing if I've lost a lot, then there's a shitload of black folks who're losing everything.

Some are being pushed into depressed neighborhoods with fewer jobs and shittier schools, and stuck in the whirlpool of ignorance poverty and crime that sucks an awful of the people into what's become a Coin-Operated Prison System.

And it occurs to me - intentionally or not, we're in the process of enslaving black people for the 3rd time.

Gotta be something better.

It's The Mendacity, Stoopid

Chez Pazienza at Daily Banter:

It's difficult to express both the audacity and the insidiousness of what Conway's doing here (what she's been doing for months, really). Her comment about the nonexistent Bowling Green Massacre is a masterwork of calculated mendacity, the kind of thing that would be admirable if it weren't so dangerous. You can't help but wonder if Conway didn't do the Italian chef finger kiss to herself after she came up with it. Go back and read it one more time. She creates a phony event that she uses specifically to assault the media for its unwillingness to cover, knowing full well that four things will quickly happen: 1) The fake event will immediately become "real" for Trump's people, lodging in their collective consciousness, especially as the lie is repeated again and again as it becomes its own story; 2) they'll assume the reason they had never heard of it was precisely because of a full-on conspiracy by the dishonest media, making it a self-reinforcing delusion; 3) Trump loyalists and media shills will begin reverse-engineering facts to fit the lie, giving it "credibility," or at the very least providing her enough plausible deniability to feign outrage; 4) she'll get double the bang for her buck because once journalists begin calling her out on the lie, she can again slam them for not accepting her apology or asking her to clarify her comment.

It's genius. Evil genius. Which is exactly why it needs to be fought against tooth and nail.

Here's why: not simply because Kellyanne Conway's lie wasn't an accident but because it was a strategy. The goal of Conway is to deliberately muddy the waters between fact and fiction so that the two are indistinguishable. The reason for this? Because doing so debases the truth to the point where it simply doesn't matter anymore. This is important because the truth -- cold, hard fact -- is the Trump administration's worst enemy, as it is the enemy of authoritarian governments in general but of Trump specifically because he lives his life complete unmoored to it. What's more, the truth is what a free press derives its power and authority from, and the Trump administration has already declared the press "the opposition." What better way to destroy that opposition, then, than to take away the importance of that for which it stands.

Bob and Chez podcast - twice a week, the episodes are usually up late-ish in the evening every Tuesday and Thursday.

Robert Reich

Resistance Report 02-03-17

Tax returns, conflicts of interest and the blind trust
Russia
Cronyism and Ultra-Nationalists
Attacks on democratic institutions
Steve Bannon

Black History Month 5 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Slavery a Southern Phenomenon

Slavery in the United States is often thought of as a “Southern problem.” Indeed, many students, and even teachers, are unaware of the role the North played in the history of American slavery or the extent of slavery in New England because it is often ignored in textbooks, according to Sarah Kreckel, a curriculum writer at Brown University. Long thought of as the birthplace of abolitionism, New England has a more complex history of slavery and the trade in enslaved people than many realize. Colonial North American ships began to participate in the slave trade as early as the 1640s. Almost all of colonial America’s slave ships originated in New England. As pointed out by Herb Reich in the book Lies They Teach in School: Exposing the Myths Behind 250 Commonly Believed Fallacies, the first colony to legalize slavery was Massachusetts in 1641, where slaves worked in the vast tobacco fields.

Today's Alt-Fact Barbie

Back To The Gilded Age

A little reminder of the damage a bad president can do.

Vox:

Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a lot of discussion in medical circles about bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to drug innovation in America.

This idea is embodied in Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, who has reportedly been helping the president vet a pool of candidates to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

Thiel, a libertarian iconoclast, has repeatedly made the case that the FDA gets in the way of drug innovation by making it too difficult for new medicines to get to the market. Some of the FDA candidates he’s identified — including Silicon Valley’s Jim O’Neill and Balaji Srinivasan — have similarly argued that the agency should dump its requirement that drugs be proven effective before reaching the market, and that we’d be better off if the FDA operated more like a “Yelp for drugs.” In other words, bringing the same speedy and disruptive approach to medical regulation that Silicon Valley brought to the taxi and hotel industries, for example, will unlock cures — fast.

But Thiel and his pals miss a very important point about developing new drugs: Manipulating biology isn’t the same as manipulating computer code. It’s much, much harder. Speeding up medical innovation will take a lot more than just stripping down the FDA — it’ll take huge leaps forward in our understanding of biochemistry and the body. Health care is also different from taxis and hotels in another key way: Consumers can’t really judge the safety and quality of medical products by themselves.

Trump to remove USDA animal welfare protections from cruelty for dogs. A reminder from 9/16: he's never HAD a dog pic.twitter.com/NykVqnG6Nj

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 4, 2017

So, like, one of the things Da Gubmint is there trying to do for you is to keep some asshole from killing your dog.  If you can't quite work yourself up to giving a fuck about people, maybe you could think about finding a little compassion for their fucking house pets.

More from the Vox piece:

One of the key notions that undergirds the Peter Thiel view of the FDA is that if the agency just got rid of some of the pesky restrictions for drug approval, we’d usher in another golden age in drug development. (Thiel declined our interview request.)

To test this idea, I asked a longtime pharmaceutical scientist (and conservative), Derek Lowe, for his views. In his 28 years in the lab, Lowe has seen hundreds of thousands of compounds tested on a huge variety of drug targets, and never, not once, has he brought a drug to market.

The reason? “We don’t know how to find drugs that work,” he said.

For every 5,000 compounds discovered at this "preclinical" phase of drug development, only about five are promising enough to be tried in humans. That’s a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Drug innovation comes from painstaking tinkering and a dash of luck. “It’s very tempting for someone who has come out of IT to say, ‘DNA is code, and cells are the hardware; go in and debug it’,” Lowe said. “But this is wrong.”

Let's just try to remember one or two itty-bitty things, OK?

You were supposed to have read that shit way back in high school, y'know.

Learn a little more about FDA

Today's Pix