Feels Like Monday

Sarah Bareilles, The Milk Carton Kids, and Chris Thile - Live From Here:

Hoping For The Harbinger

13,000 people working for one of the largest grocery chains in New England went out on strike and began picketing a local store in Somerville MA on Friday.

Elizabeth Warren stopped in to see them - and brought some donuts and coffee.

“This is a company that made $2 billion in profits, that then got a fancy tax break in Washington from the Republicans and now wants to squeeze our workers right here in Massachusetts,” Warren told the workers. “Well, we’re not going to put up with it.”

Speaking to reporters, Warren reiterated the message that she has been campaigning on for years, that the wealthy are taking advantage of the working class. “This is the problem all across this country is that those at the top think that they can just keep sucking out every bit of profit and leave nothing for the working people, the people who actually get out there and make it happen every day,” Warren said.

“What people are asking for here is they’re just asking for fair wages, they’re asking for health care benefits and just as shot at a decent retirement,” she said.
Say whatever you want about Warren - maybe you feel the need to shit on her for being opportunistic and trying to make political points and blah blah blah.

First - she showed up. She talks about this kind of thing all the time - and she showed the fuck up.

Second - making political points is what politicians do. It's what we want them to do. It's what we pay them to do.

Third - where was that champion of the workin' guy POTUS? Anybody know? Oh yeah - golf. And why would we expect anything different from him? 

Shit - that fuckin' idiot probably can't even spell UFCW.

Muddle Through & Stumble Forward

Professionals and practitioners in the Behavioral Sciences should be enjoying a kind of Golden Age. 

But then again, maybe we arrived at that Golden Age 90 years ago (when Bernays codified the techniques), never left it, and we're just living the latest and greatest iteration of it now, as we see the endeavor to understand why we behave the way we do almost fully weaponized and transformed into a Dark Art.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker:

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

- and -

(side note/kicker - when the hyper-capitalists are crowing about Milton Friedman's favorite wet dream of "Rational Self-Interest" being the best possible motivator for the clear-eyed and pragmatically entrepreneurial self-made-and-self-congratulating hero, keep this one in mind)

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

The Trickle-Downers need us to believe that we're all just being noble and independent-minded when we behave like animals turning against our own.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

We needed the ability to reason so we could keep from being snookered by our fellow tribesmen.

So when the "Survival-Of-The-Fittest" gang starts yammering about the natural order of things, they're just manifesting the fact that they've been bamboozled into volunteering to do all the work, while the Rent-Seekers - the real moochers - collect the lion's share of the proceeds.

Ever wonder why they call it "the lion's share"? And why we're constantly being preached at about how being the lion - the "Alpha Male" - is not just the best way, but the only way to establish and maintain good order?

And in keeping with the manipulative way this concept is being pimped, we're picking up and internalizing, and self-imposing the "know your place and stay in your place" attitudes of a plutocratic hierarchy.

- and - 

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

- and not meaning to end on a downer, but damn, how do we not? -

Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

"Conservatives" are not trying to take up back to the 1950s. They are intent on taking us back to the 1750s.

Rock The Arts

A not-so-still life.

Mayor Pete

Yes - you have to articulate the values that inform your policy.

But you can't ignore the absolute need to demonstrate how those values - through the implementation of the policies - work to improve people's lives. 

Not to solve their problems for them, but to remove obstacles that the Republicans (mostly) have been putting in everybody's way for more than a generation.

Pete Buttigieg:

Go Katie Go

Yes - more moms on Capitol hill please.

Hero of the week. Wow. https://t.co/RyEe3YzCH8

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) April 13, 2019

Today's Eternal Sadness

Every year, more Americans are killed by grade-school kids with guns than are killed by illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorists combined.

Atlanta Journal Constitution:

A 6-year-old girl has died after being shot by her 4-year-old brother in Paulding County on Monday evening, authorities said.

The girl was identified as Millie Drew Kelly on a GoFundMe page set up to help with the family’s expenses.

The accidental shooting happened about 6 p.m. inside a car parked in the driveway of a home on Laurelcrest Lane in unincorporated Dallas, Paulding County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ashley Henson previously told AJC.com.

“They were all loaded up to leave the home and the car wouldn’t start,” Henson said. Their mother hopped out to find the source of the problem, and somehow the young boy got hold of a handgun, he said.
- and -

After speaking with the children’s mother, detectives believe the handgun was retrieved from the center console, and the 4-year-old accidentally discharged it. 

“Our hearts break for this family and we hope God puts his healing hands around them during this difficult time,” Sheriff Gary Gulledge said in a statement Thursday morning.

No charges will be filed.

We don't have an immigration problem. And we don't have a Muslim Terrorism problem.

We have a gun-violence problem - fueled by a hyper-macho culture that spouts bullshit rhetoric about killing our way out of our problems, and is happy to cash in on our misery by supplying us with the means of our own destruction.

Paramecia, People & Petunias

The Powers Of Ten:

Policing The Womenfolk

Vox:

A bill recently introduced in Texas would make it possible for women to get the death penalty for having abortions.

The bill would criminalize all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and would make it possible to charge a woman with homicide for having the procedure, according to the Washington Post. The state of Texas allows capital punishment for homicide.

Rep. Tony Tinderholt, a Republican state legislator who introduced the bill, says it wouldmake people “consider the repercussions” of having sex.

“My bill simply accomplishes one goal,” Tinderholt said in a statement to media on Wednesday. “It brings equal treatment for unborn human beings under the law.”

So I guess it's time to reprise a little thing I posted a while back.

Let's say you have a chance encounter with a woman of your acquaintance at the grocery store or whatever - you don't know her well, but you know her - and you notice this usually very fit, very svelte woman is looking a bit round. You ask how she is, and rolling her eyes and giving out a big sigh, she tells you she's pregnant - again - almost 5 months into this one, which is the 4th time around - 9 years after her last one - and she is obviously not all that thrilled, having gotten the first 3 kids well into school and just getting her career back on track and this throws a pretty big wrench in the works, etc etc.

You exchange pleasantries and go on your merry way.

A year or so later, you see her again. She's looking her usual great self, and you ask about the new baby. Without going into detail, she tells you "it just didn't work out". You notice she doesn't seem to be all that sad about it, and you find yourself wondering if she's done something illegal.

What is your civic duty at that point? Do you call the authorities and report what seems to you to be her suspicious behavior?

That stoopid thing in Texas isn't going anywhere - not this time - but they keep doing it because it brings in the Taliban cash, and riles up the rubes to get out the vote, and one of these days, they might make it stick.

But in the end, here's the thing, Skeezix:

• Tadpoles ain't frogs
• Caterpillars ain't butterflies
• Ain't nothin' goin' on in my daughter's uterus that's any of your fuckin' business

So fuck the fuck off, you fucking fuck.

The Un-Crisis

While what's left of the president's cabinet secretaries (Barr and Mnuchin particularly) are stalling, covering up, and stonewalling, Cult45 continues to pimp the fear - because they've got nothing else.

The Empty Wheel:

THE FACTS: THERE IS NO CRISIS AND NO EMERGENCY, JUST TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN

After mixing it up with a old conservative over spring break — someone who doesn’t watch Fox News but spends too much time with people who do — it’s clear Trump’s and Fox’s lies have deeply infected right-wing minds.

They believe Trump’s falsehoods about a crisis at the border, that there was reason for Trump to declare an emergency.

They’re also incapable of fact checking. They’re authoritarians and believe whatever current authority figure tells them; the motivation to validate authority doesn’t exist.

They appear unable to analyze what they do see to make an independent assessment of their own. It doesn’t occur to them to ask, What would be so bad a family with toddlers and infants would flee their home, walking over a thousand miles for more than a month and through a desert to escape?

They’re sheep — our country is regressing under the leadership of fascist sheep.

I wanted to cram a bunch of facts in this conservative’s head but I honestly don’t know if they’d bother to read anything I gave them because I’m not a Fox talking head.

Fact: Trend data from DHS’ Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) about so-called illegal immigrants border crossings indicates it has trended lower over the last 15 years: