How We React

...to the event is what's important now.

From Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

Note to the terrorists/nutballs/wingnuts/whatever:

You're not going to make me close myself off from the world.  I won't be cowering in a Safe Room behind doors and windows sealed up with plastic sheets and duct tape.

I sure as hell don't get everything right every time, but I claim the right to keep trying; to go on stumbling forward; and you're not going get me to strangle myself in a security blanket just because you don't have enough hair on your sack to look me in the eye and call me out on the shit you don't agree with.

I live my life, and I do my little FreedomThing out in the open where everybody can see it.  You don't like it?  Well here I am, asshole.  Come and get me.

And oh yeah - almost forgot - there's 300 million of me, so fuck you.

The Kooch Fails Again

Virginia AG / Repub candidate for Gov, Ken (Kenny The Kooch) Cuccinelli has crashed and burned once again - this time in his attempt to get the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to consider his petition to affirm and reinstate Virginia's Crimes Against Nature laws.

The Fourth Circuit panel rejected Cuccinelli's petition unanimously.

Considering the fact that the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence vs Texas knocked all the stuffing out of every "anti-sodomy" law in every state, nobody but the uber-est of the uber-zealots thought he had any chance at all.  But there he was - our intrepid Culture Warrior King - flailing away; fighting to hold back the tides of change of the mid-20th-fucking-century.

Taxpayers put a fair bit of money in your pocket every month, Ken.  So we're gonna need you to do a little something more than runnin' in circles or just standin' there leanin' on your shovel.

One Way to Look At It

Yeah - OK.  So maybe this is just too over the top.

Maybe the system's not really rigged in favor of a few very high-level-mover-shaker-hyper-motivated entrepreneurs with lucrative book deals extolling their highly effective habits who just happen to be so well-connected that they get special deals and federal protection, plus they get to name practically anything they want after themselves.

And maybe you really aren't a low-life loser who can't quite figure out how to get out of his own way; somebody who'd be a lot better off if he just went to church like he's supposed to; somebody who needs to learn his lesson about how to act like a proper citizen of the empire...

...but y'know what?  I could sell it that way - I'm pretty fucking good at sellin' shit.

What're you buyin'?

Today's Pix

Music

From her "break out" album - back when she wasn't hung up writing semi-crappy tunes for the suits to put in their mostly-crappy movies.

Today's Music

Soundtrack for a Tuesday.  This has a kind of 70s vibe to it in some ways, but the poetry and the jazz tinges are right tasty.

Today's Plucky American

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice has about the best angle I've seen regarding the bombing at the Boston Marathon yesterday, talking about the old guy (Bill Iffrig) in the video who got knocked down by the first blast; was helped up; and then not only did he finish his race, but he walked the half mile back to his hotel:

I kid you not: Every local Boston channel showed at least one interview with Mr. Iffrig, pleading for a 'how bad was it? how traumatized are you? do you think you can ever recover from the horror of that life-changing moment?' sound bite, and he just would not take the bait. He got knocked down, scraped his knee, it was pretty scary. Then he got up, and a nice young volunteer made sure he could cross the finish line. Of course he finished the [unspoken expletive] race, he’d just run 26 miles and there was no point in quitting within yards of the goal. When one interviewer pushed him, he added that he’d run last year’s Marathon in the record-breaking heat, “and that was pretty bad, but today I was having a good run, right up until that bit at the end.”

We prob'ly won't know what the deal is on this bombing for a while.  If it follows the pattern, and it turns out to be something from the standard playbook of some asshole terrorist, then we need to focus on guys like Mr Iffrig, and not on some show-horse-congress-critter like Peter King; and definitely not on any of the Press Poodles who seem to believe this is their Great-American-Tragedy moment - their chance to show America what a superb Walter Cronkite impression they can do.

Here's the thing:  Americans are as far from perfect as anybody gets.  And some of us seem hellbent on doing all the things really bad guys do - things that make other really bad guys believe they have perfect justification to respond by killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people who're just trying to get by, same as them and everybody else.

The point is kinda what Patton Oswalt posted on facebook:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

The bad guys among us are not us, and they don't represent us.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Way Off In The Weeds On This One

I guess this is kinda like needing to know what you know before you can know what you don't know - which is how you know that you don't really know much of anything at all.

So the more you learn, the less you know how much or how little you actually know, depending on what you know.



My head hurts.  This shit's worse than math.

hat tip = d r i f t g l a s s

Another One Bites The Dust

Maggie Thatcher died last week in England, and now Bob (Swift Boat Butthead) Perry is dead in Texas.

It would seem god's on a bit of a roll.  And while I really do try not to celebrate anybody's death, well, it could get pretty interesting watching 'em drop like this.  It's not gonna hurt my feelings much anyway.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Republican mega-donor Bob Perry never cared for the spotlight. But writing big checks and financing one of the most famous television ads ever in a presidential campaign made the Texas millionaire famous nonetheless. 

The Big Bamboozle

Devoted to separating rubes from their money.



I won't say there's absolutely nothing "on the left" designed to make money off of a daily dose of "Oh my god - those bastard Republicans are at it again" (I get those emails every day, plus like Maher says, there's Whole Foods), but there's seriously nothing that compares with the straight up scam being played by "conservatives" of all stripes on so many otherwise good-hearted and well-meaning people.

Hillary

I'm not committing on this either way yet, but I'll say this:  I don't like dynasties, so I'll be hard pressed to support Hillary for president in 2016.  I'm not saying there's no way - I think she's done a pretty great job at State - but I really really don't like the idea of electing people from the same family as any previous office-holder.

I tho't it was a little weird, starting with Benigno Aquino in the Philippines in the 80s - he was assassinated, and so his wife Cory Aquino was elected.  I didn't like it then and I've grown less fond of it since - up to and including Clair McCaskill, and anybody else out there I'm not aware of.

No more Bushes
No more Rockefellers
No more Roosevelts
No more Kennedys
No more Clintons

If it wasn't for her daddy's name and her mommy's money, would Meghan McCain be any kind of 'leading light' in the GOP?

Does Luke Russert really deserve a national slot at NBC News?

What about Chris Wallace?

What - exactly - do Paris Hilton's credentials look like?

What makes Caroline Kennedy worthy of any consideration to be named Ambassador to Japan?

No legacies.  No inherited entitlements.

If we have to tax the fuck outa certain people's estates to kill off the Aristocracy, then that's what we should do - cuz the alternative is what's been the main tool of prevention of Aristocracy for about 40 centuries; and that is simply to fucking kill the aristocrats.

Questions?

If There Was A Class War

...my class won. --Warren Buffet

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Today's Re-Definition

GOP: Guardians Of Privilege

Let It Roll

My crush on Elizabeth Warren just won't quit.

It's been said that if you want loyalty and friendship in Washington, get a dog.  Warren is very busy not making friends in DC, which is generally a solid indicator that she's doing the hard work of representing regular citizens in the best way possible - even though an awful lot of those regular citizens are openly hostile to the help an Elizabeth Warren can make our government provide for them.

After 30 years of conditioning (gubmint sucks), I have to make an effort to remember that people aren't just gonna turn their attitudes around overnight.

We're in a pretty weird place right now.

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:

Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.