An irrelevant freak show
Aug 23, 2017
News To Me
The best thing I've come across in a long time.
From HuffPo (hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while):
A native Virginian, a railroad magnate, a slaveholder, and an ardent secessionist, Mahone served in the Confederate army throughout the war. He was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most able commanders, distinguishing himself particularly in the summer of 1864 at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg. After the war, Robert E. Lee recalled that, when contemplating a successor, he thought that Mahone “had developed the highest qualities for organization and command.”
How did such a high-ranking Confederate commander wind up missing in action in a Charleston gift shop? Not, I think, by accident.
By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.
From HuffPo (hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while):
A native Virginian, a railroad magnate, a slaveholder, and an ardent secessionist, Mahone served in the Confederate army throughout the war. He was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most able commanders, distinguishing himself particularly in the summer of 1864 at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg. After the war, Robert E. Lee recalled that, when contemplating a successor, he thought that Mahone “had developed the highest qualities for organization and command.”
How did such a high-ranking Confederate commander wind up missing in action in a Charleston gift shop? Not, I think, by accident.
By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.
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| Maj Gen William Mahone, CSA |
Today's Quote
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements Of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now - while they're happy.
--Dorothy Parker
Bamboozle Me, Baby
Ben Carson went to Phoenix - and the obvious reason was to be exploited as "my African-American".
WaPo, Philip Bump:
And, as simply as that, a law was likely broken.
There are a lot of ways in which the federal government could be used to reward political friends and allies, of course, appointments being just one example. But the power of the government can also be leveraged to political advantage. Imagine a candidate who appeared at a campaign rally to be endorsed by the heads of each branch of the armed forces, for example. That would carry a lot of weight.
In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law, a measure meant to preserve the impartiality of public servants. “The law’s purposes,” the Office of Special Counsel’s website explains, “are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”
Add it to the list. 45* cares nothing about these little-people rules.
Obeying the law?
Ethics?
Honorability?
That shit's for suckers - which is exactly why I call 'em rubes. They support 45* because he embodies their fantasies of having the power to live outside the norms, ignoring the simple fact that those norms - those rules - are there to protect them from Daddy State assholes like 45*.
WaPo, Philip Bump:
And, as simply as that, a law was likely broken.
There are a lot of ways in which the federal government could be used to reward political friends and allies, of course, appointments being just one example. But the power of the government can also be leveraged to political advantage. Imagine a candidate who appeared at a campaign rally to be endorsed by the heads of each branch of the armed forces, for example. That would carry a lot of weight.
In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law, a measure meant to preserve the impartiality of public servants. “The law’s purposes,” the Office of Special Counsel’s website explains, “are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”
Add it to the list. 45* cares nothing about these little-people rules.
Obeying the law?
Ethics?
Honorability?
That shit's for suckers - which is exactly why I call 'em rubes. They support 45* because he embodies their fantasies of having the power to live outside the norms, ignoring the simple fact that those norms - those rules - are there to protect them from Daddy State assholes like 45*.
Today's Tweet
The big bamboozle
To recap: Trump is threatening a government shutdown unless his fellow Republicans fund border wall he promised voters Mexico would pay for.— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 23, 2017
Aug 22, 2017
Whoa
The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.
The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.
“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.
“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.
So allow me to reiterate: 45* keeps making all kinds of stoopid noise about beefing up the US Military's ability to wage war in MeatSpace, when the fight is going on in CyberSpace.
There's A Difference
Vox:
If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.
That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:
The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.
If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.
That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:
In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable. …In comparison, when Hispanics killed black men, about 5.5 percent of cases were called justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, it was 3.1 percent. When blacks killed whites, the figure was just 0.8 percent. When black males were killed by other blacks, the figure was about 2 percent, the same as the overall rate.
The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that research like this is not being supported properly by a government that insists on hiding the truth - or worse, denying the truth.
Gun violence studies have all but disappeared at CDC, almost exclusively because "conservatives" have written prohibitions against it into the legislation funding that agency.
We've seen the same kind of thing at FDA and NIH, and now federal funding to study and report the health effects of coal mining is being eliminated.
Good luck trying to make good decisions without good evidence.
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