Beatin' 'Em Back

Sometimes the best way to raise your own positives is to pump up the other side's negatives.

Correlation 1: Sometimes advancing your own agenda means stomping on the other side's attempt's to push for a Trigger-Happy Christianist Idiocracy.

Va Pilot Online:

Gov. Terry McAuliffe has vetoed Republican-sponsored legislation that would prohibit state censorship of certain military chaplains' prayers, a move lobbied for by the American Civil Liberties Union, but disappointing to some social conservatives.

The Democrat Thursday spiked a bill from GOP Sen. Dick Black of Loudoun County, reasoning hisSB 555 "would seriously undermine the religious freedom of National Guard members by potentially exposing them to sectarian proselytizing."

McAuliffe's veto of the bill that would apply to the state-controlled Virginia National Guard and Virginia Defense Force is the second of the governor's young term.

He vetoed a guns rights expansion bill last week.

While military chaplains can minister as they choose at voluntary worship services or unofficial private settings, they don't "have the right to use official, mandatory events as a platform to disseminate their own religious views," McAuliffe wrote in a March 27 veto letter.

American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia director Claire Guthrie Gastañaga this month urged McAuliffe to veto Black's bill, arguing "National Guard members required to attend any official event have the right not to be forced to worship in another person's faith."

Sen. Bill Carrico perceives the veto as a blow against religious freedom, not a protection of it, saying McAuliffe has taken a stand "against any bills protecting individuals' rights to conscience."

McAuliffe owes the public an answer as to why he thinks government should control "what they say and what they believe," said Carrico, a former state trooper who has fought to free Virginia State Police chaplains to offer sectarian prayers.

Recalling Black's bill passed the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates by voting margins above the requisite two-thirds veto-proof majority, Carrico, R-Grayson County, said he hopes there are enough votes to override McAuliffe's veto.  -- Julian Walker

--and--

He vetoed Del. Ben Cline's HB962, intended to clarify that gun owners without concealed handgun permits can keep the weapons in their vehicles if they're secured in compartments that aren't locked. McAuliffe considers that broadened definition a public safety risk.

An amendment from McAuliffe had required storage of weapons in locked containers but was rejected by the Republican-run House of Delegates earlier this month. Cline, R-Rockbridge County, has said the legislation is necessary to make it clear that a storage container needn't be locked to comply with the law.

McAuliffe's veto is the final action on Cline's bill this year, legislative officials said.

I'm not going to start crowing about what a great and powerful and steadfast defender of American democracy Mr McAuliffe is.  He's a 3rd Way Clintonite Neo-Liberal, and a politician who got elected because he's a step or two above a crotch stain like Kenny the Kooch.  So there will come a time when it becomes obvious that he's made a deal that he can get us to believe is good for us, but really just keeps his buddies in power and the rest of us in line.

That said, here's hoping Gov McAuliffe proves me dead wrong by disappointing me in a good way.

Instant Karma

Everybody's doin' this one, so why should I be different?



I get a little crazy too when I see the boneheaded stunts people pull on the roads just about every time I venture out.  But (so far) I've managed to keep it all inside my own car.  That's kinda the important part because it allows me the rationalization of differentiating myself from the complete asshole driving the pickup in the video.  I can be kind of a dick behind the wheel, but I'm not that kinda dick.

Logical Fallacy #7: Tu Quoque

Tu quoque /tuːˈkwoʊkwiː/,[1] (Latin for "you, too" or "you, also") or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. This dismisses someone's point of view based on criticism of the person's inconsistency and not the position presented[2] whereas a person's inconsistency should not discredit the position. Thus, it is a form of the ad hominem argument.[3] To clarify, although the person being attacked might indeed be acting inconsistently or hypocritically, such behavior does not invalidate the position presented.

Told Ya So

I have to admit that sometimes I feel a sparkly little tingle when it turns out that one of the shitty things "them damned dirty hippies" said was going to happen eventually does happen, and it gets "reported" - even though practically nobody notices.

Like driftglass says - Liberals: takin' shit for being right about stuff since before you were born.

NYT yesterday:

BEIJING — From taxi tailpipes in Paris to dung-fired stoves in New Delhi, air pollution claimed seven million lives around the world in 2012, according to figures released Tuesday by the World Health Organization. More than one-third of those deaths, the organization said, occurred in fast-developing nations of Asia, where rates of cardiovascular and pulmonary disease have been soaring.

Around the world, one out of every eight deaths was tied to dirty air, the agency determined — twice as many as previously estimated. Its report identified air pollution as the world’s single biggest environmental health risk.

“The big news is that we have a better understanding of how large a role air pollution plays in strokes and coronary heart attacks,” said Dr. Carlos Dora, coordinator of public health and the environment at the organization. “Given the astronomical costs, countries need to find a way to prevent these noncommunicable diseases.”

One More From Steve

Steve Shives at stevelikestocurse.com

Today's Tune

Comfortably Numb --Pink Floyd (cover David Gilmour, Richard Wright et al)

Put your headphones on - It's Floyd.  Relax and be groovy.



Hello,
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?

Come on now
I hear you're feeling down
I can ease your pain
Get you on your feet again

Relax
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move
But I can't hear what you're saying

When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like
Two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain
You would not understand
This is not how I am

I... Have become comfortably numb

O.K.
Just a little pin prick
There'll be no more aaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick

Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working
Good
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on
It's time to go

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move
But I can't hear what you're saying

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye

I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I... Have become comfortably numb

Songwriters: WATERS, ROGER/GILMOUR, DAVID JON
Comfortably Numb lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

Today's Quote(s)

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”  --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

hat tip = FB Friend VWE

New(ish) Discovery

YouTuber Steve Shibes





--and (let no one go unpunished)--

Helping

I don't know what to do about schools or poverty or unemployment or healthcare or crime.  I don't even know what to call it; this combination of symptoms that indicate a pervasive and (if history is any guide at all) generally fatal disease of the body politic.

Can we call it The Cycle of Shitty?

How 'bout Disintegrating Empire Syndrome due to Electoral Dysfunction?  Quick - somebody call Pfizer and threaten to give them billions of tax dollars if they don't develop a new pill to take our minds off our troubles.

I just don't know.

But I'm fairly certain that we can't keep following along blindly, buying into the bullshit of Austerity and Tough Love and Economic Shock Therapy - all of which are just manufactured terms used to keep us off-balance and to hide the fact that our "leaders" either have no workable solutions or they're determined to rule rather than serve.  Either way, not a happy choice.

Here's what I think I know:
You don't keep a guy from getting run over by a cement truck by shoving him out into traffic.
Translation - You help people by helping them - you don't help them by not helping them.  (and I can't believe ya have to say it out loud like that, but fuck me - I guess maybe ya do)

Here's my message for the guys who put up the federal budget - that's Paul Ryan in the House and Patty Murray in the Senate:
The only thing worse than a government that spends too much is a government that doesn't spend enough - so figure it out, assholes.

Gene Robinson at WaPo:

Alleviating stubborn poverty is difficult and expensive. Direct government aid — money, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and the like — is not enough. Poor people need employment that offers a brighter future for themselves and their children. Which means they need job skills. Which means they need education. Which means they need good schools and safe streets.

The list of needs is dauntingly long, and it’s hard to know where to start — or where the money for all the needed interventions will come from. It’s much easier to say that culture is ultimately to blame. But since there’s no step-by-step procedure for changing a culture, we end up not doing anything.

And just to be clear about Paul Ryan's dog-whistle crap about some kinda "...tailspin of culture, in our inner cities...", let's try to remember what Brother Jay Smooth teaches us:

Today's Irony

...but more like The Law Of Unintended Consequences - unless you're convinced that Evil Geniuses control our legislative process from outside the visible political spectrum.



Ms Seabrook came pretty close to screwing the pooch on this one by not addressing some important questions, which are basically:
What was the rationale for the fucked-up-edness in the first place?
What deals had to be struck that made the thing the way it is?
Who were the major players at the time?
Who was lobbying for one side or the other?
She never asks the questions directly, but maybe that's OK because she's trying to focus on outcome instead of process(?) - anyway, she does (kinda) get to those points eventually.

And while Mr Johnson spins a bit of conspiracy about poisoning the well, he puts up a very good conclusion - ie: if it seems like the gubmint ain't listening to you, it's prob'ly because this law makes it really hard for the gubmint to listen to you.  And since lawmakers have the power to do something about it but continue doing nothing about it, the conspiracy angle just gets harder and harder to dismiss.

Like the man said - nobody's going to get elected running against something called The Paperwork Reduction Act.

The numbers mentioned in the clip:
Hours spent every year by Americans doing their tax returns: 2,147,483,647
...which converts to 244,983 years.

Today's Pix

The Matter With Words

Crappy sound quality - high-sounding message.



You can't make it work if you can't sell the idea, but it bothers me that feeling you have to play the other guy's game is the beginning of a process that leads to your becoming those other guys.

Let's be careful out there.

It's (Supposed To Be) About Balance

JFK speaking at a meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961:



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

"Solon decreed it a crime for any man to shrink from controversy" - that bit's pretty good, but beyond that, it seems like this speech is one of those moments in history that lets us see at least the beginnings of a certain unravelling.

He says it straight out - we have to take the right of all citizens to know what their government is up to and weigh it against the need to keep "the enemy" from knowing things we really need them not to know (insert snarky crack about Don Rumsfeld here).

I guess I could spend the next few decades trying to trace thru all the flips and turns of journalism just in the last half of the 20th century, trying to figure out where "it all went wrong".  And while that may be a truly fun ride, I get the feeling it's not as useful right now as figuring out what's been driving the enormous changes we've been seeing.  I'm not just talking about the tech revolution or whatever - I think it has everything to do with the tensions that are always present between What's-Best-For-The-Most vs what's good for a fairly narrow power agenda on the part of almost literally a few very well placed individuals.

Capt Obvious says, "Robbing the house gets a lot easier once you've killed the watch dog.  And if you can get the homeowners to kill their dog for you, well then you're one clever mother fucker, and maybe you deserve all the booty you can carry, and whoa - can I give you a hand?  Some of those pillow cases look pretty heavy."

We've had to fight this fight on several occasions - kinda what got us going in the first place back in the 18th century.  So here we go again.

It's not about pointing and laughing at The Tea Party. Although it's great sport and somebody needs to do that, they're mostly people who're rightly upset, but who're being co-opted and misled.

And it's not about pissing and moaning about how the Dems have also been co-opted and now they're just as bad as the Repubs.

It's not about immigrants or brown people in general, or your upper middle class douche-y Libertarian neighbors or the jag-off at the 7-11 who doesn't seem to care about satisfying your every whim in a humble but joyous way while constantly expressing his gratitude for the opportunity to slowly starve to death on $8.50 an hour.  It's also not about the kid in the do-rag and the baggy pants, and it's not about a whole fuckload of distractions that're easy to say and easy to understand and just as easy to recognize as total crapola once ya spend half a micro-neuron thinking about it.

It's not even about being mad at the right people - or being mad for the right reasons.  It's about figuring out what to do about being mad at the right people for the right reasons.  If I ever figure that one out, I'll be sure to let ya know, but in the mean time, yeah - let's take our country back.  We can start by taking it back from Goldman-Sachs, and from Exxon-Mobil, and from Koch Industries, and from The Walton Gang, and from whoever else wants to rule over us instead of serving beside us.

A Friendly Reminder

We've probably left it all too late to keep from crashing thru the +2°C ceiling that the Climate Nerds have been trying to warn us about.

What's important now is to figure out how to get ready for the Global Cluster Fuck heading our way.  (I'm not holding out a lot of hope on that one btw, simply because we still can't figure out to stop short of bashing each other over the head with sticks and rocks for fuck's sake, but anyhoo)

There's a weekly news show on HBO called VICE.  It's only half an hour, and kinda scatter-gun, but they pick good topics and they spend a good 12-15 minutes on each story.  Kinda like what we used to think 60 Minutes used to be - but without the asshole Mike Wallace.

Here's the "debrief" on the Greenland Is Melting segment from last night's show:



HBOGO.com

VICE on the web

Fun Fact:  The Greenland Ice Sheet is disappearing at a much faster rate than they predicted 10 years ago - it's accelerated to the point where it's something like 60 years ahead of schedule.  Once it's all melted, the world's sea level will be a solid 20 feet higher than it is now.

Oh yeah - watch for the bit about how Antarctica has now joined the fun as well.

Enjoy.

Punishing Success

A short item at NYT:

Authorities are trying to determine how a 16-year-old New Jersey boy sneaked past security at 1 World Trade Center and spent two hours early Sunday making his way to the top of the 1,776-foot tower, which is still under construction.

The boy, identified as Justin Casquejo of Weehawken, entered the construction site surrounding the tower through a 12-by-12-inch hole in the exterior fence, said Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.

The teenager crawled through the hole around 4 a.m. and was caught about two hours later, Mr. Pentangelo said. A law enforcement source said Mr. Casquejo was arrested in the lobby. He was charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.

Mr. Casquejo admitted breaking into the site, according to a criminal complaint.

“I found a way up through the scaffolding, climbed onto the sixth floor, and took the elevator up to the 88th floor,” he said, according to the complaint. “I then took the staircase up to the 104th floor. I went to the rooftop and climbed the ladder all the way to the antenna.”

At least one security guard, whom Mr. Pentangelo described as “inattentive,” was fired. It was unclear if any other security personnel were at the site.
Though Mr. Casquejo seemed to be nothing more than a young thrill seeker, the breach raised questions about the level of security at the site, which largely remains a construction zone more than 12 years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 destroyed the original World Trade Center.

“We take security and these type of infractions extremely seriously and will prosecute violators,” Joseph Dunne, the Port Authority’s chief security officer, said in a statement. “We continue to reassess our security posture at the site and we are constantly working to make this site as secure as possible.”
Photos of Mr. Casquejo posted to his Twitter account show him and his friends scaling a crane overlooking the Manhattan skyline and posing on top of a bulldozer at a construction site. One photo shows someone doing a flip from a bridge into the water. He describes himself at one point as part of a parkour team, a reference to the gravity-defying urban sport that sometimes involves scaling buildings and other high structures.

Mr. Casquejo’s exploits were first reported by The New York Post.

Security is an illusion - and the more effort any given government exerts to "keep us safe", the more it fails to provide anything other than profits for contractors, way too much power for a buncha dopes with badges and low SAT scores, and a relentless corrosion of civil liberties for everybody else.

Huge hat tip to The Rude Pundit, who put the NYT bit together with MH370 to give us this:

3/21/2014

Reminders of How Small We Are: MH370 and Justin Casquejo

You can bet that there will be a movie made about 16-year-old Justin Casquejo. When the kid from Weehawken, New Jersey (the town where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton dueled to the death), got to the top of the unopened 1 World Trade Center in order to take photos to post to Twitter, he was following an impulse that in other times made people conquer mountains and rivers, doing the impossible for the first time. Imagine the view he had, alone, at the very end of night, at the very beginning of sunrise, on top of the tallest building in the country. He also demonstrated, probably unwittingly, just how tenuous, how permeable, how human our belief in security is.

If you've been to the 9/11 Memorial, you know that you have to pass through ridiculous levels of security. If you came in from New Jersey on the PATH train, you no doubt walked past soldiers armed with rifles. You had to get your ticket in advance in order for someone to check if your name is on any watch list. You had to go through a metal detector and a possible pat-down. While you were walking around the cascading pools, you couldn't help but see all the guards and police. This place, you are shown in absolutely certain terms, will not be attacked again, at least not by someone on foot. Apparently, though, not so much for the construction site that's still up around the nearly-complete skyscraper.

Often we must learn a simple lesson through violence - that schools aren't built to prevent shootings, that airplanes can be taken over with razor blades - and then we react and believe we have come up with a way to keep us safe. But, as further violence demonstrates, that safety, security in a larger sense, is a lie.

What Justin Casquejo did in the innocent, adolescent, brave, and stupid act of sneaking through a fence was to show us how meaningless our security apparatus is, how we've given over so much of our freedom to a fraud, to a thin veneer of protection that was punctured by a kid with a camera. It was, in its way, the gentlest act of terrorism one could commit. We are one sleeping guard away from anarchy. And it should be humbling not just to those who are supposed to keep us safe, but to all of us. By scaling the tower, Casquejo brought us to earth.

An even greater humbling is occurring in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. It is, without a doubt, an unendurably awful vigil for the families of the 239 passengers and crew. Putting aside the ghoulish news network coverage of the search, let us instead see the inability to find a large jet plane as a moment for sublime wonder along with the very real suffering of very real people. The loss of a plane filled with electronics and devices that are supposed to make it near-impossible to lose is another kind of humbling, another demonstration of our limits.

We live, we are told, in a shrinking world, a world where data and technology are erasing old barriers to knowledge and to understanding, to the distance between people. But sometimes an event occurs that shows us just how huge and mysterious the planet actually is. In a time when Google Earth can let us see individual trees in an African jungle, when one can go thousands of miles in a few hours of flying, the fact that hundreds of people and a large object can disappear reinstills a long-gone sense of awe at the immensity of the world, especially of the oceans. Imagine this for a moment, too: We might not find Flight 370, perhaps not in our lifetimes, perhaps not ever, because the earth is just that big.

That's the takeaway from this: We still don't know what we're doing. It's the tragic and lovely thing about humans, that we often believe we have a grasp, that we have control, even when we have constant reminders that it's an illusion.