An Apt Nickname

Sarah "The Barracuda" Palin is turning out to be exactly the empty-souled phony I think she is.

Zero Hedge has the story.

Even if it all turns out to be more legit than it looks, this reinforces her public image as a shameless opportunist, willing to work any angle that gives her any kind of advantage, or accrues to her personal benefit.  btw: none of this makes her a whole lot different from any of her fellows; what makes her stand out (for me) is that she's so clumsy and obvious about it.

War Is A Racket

"I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force--the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was part of a racket all the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service." --Maj Gen Smedley Butler

Huh? (update 2)

Starting at about 40:00, it goes into the heart of the matter regarding The Logical Extreme.

More No Surprises

OK, I get it now.

via Spy Talk:

At the same time Tiffany & Co. was extending Callista (Bisek) Gingrich a virtual interest-free loan of tens of thousands of dollars, the diamond and silverware firm was spending big bucks to influence mining policy in Congress and in agencies over which the House Agriculture Committee--where she worked--had jurisdiction, official records show. 

Filings by Tiffany’s lobbyist, Cassidy & Co., and other government records show that the firm’s spending on “mining law and mine permitting-related issues” in Congress, as well as the Forest Service, the Interior Department, and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management shot up sharply during the period when Callista Gingrich was chief clerk at the House Agriculture Committee.

Tiffany's annual lobbying expenditures rose from about $100,000 to $360,000 between 2005 and 2009, according to records assembled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization.

No Surprises

This is certainly not news.

Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.

Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.

What's their secret? The report speculates, but does not conclude, it could have something to do with the ability members of Congress have to trade on non-public information or to vote their own pocketbooks -- or both.

It would be news if anybody in congress actually did something about it.  The story does mention that a few Representatives have been trying to move legislation that could address this problem, but they've been at it for over 4 years now and it's gone nowhere.

Something else that would be news is if the Press Poodles would actually pick it up and at least put it in front of us.  But of course, that's not gonna happen.  News media are all owned by companies who benefit from the same inside information.  The parent companies contribute heavily to the re-election campaigns of these Congress Critters, who of course will then either pass bills that benefit those contributors, or kill regulations that restrict those contributors; the companies make more money, the Congress Critters get a nice little spiff because they have information the rest of can't get; and the contributions continue to roll in.  It's a Closed-Loop System that you get to pay for, and that you're not allowed into.  Such a deal.

And here's the kicker:  this is exactly where a truly unfettered Free Market takes us.  Everything is a commodity; everything has a price; everything is for sale.

Related: from Robert Reich.

Huh? (updated)

I've been wondering why the Repubs are trying to spin a Senate vote into a trap, and why they seem so hell-bent on letting the Dems paint them as the Medicare Villains all while seeming to think of themselves as the heroes who saved entitlement programs by destroying them, because of course, the true zealot holds himself superior to reality blah blah blah.

I'm seriously getting the feeling they're stuck in a kind of ideology whirlpool.  They're so determined to "out-conservative" each other, that it takes on an inertia that leads to critical mass and then implosion/explosion.  Maybe I'm just thinking of tornadoes or floods or disasters in general because that's in the news lately, but sometimes these random connections are valid. So against the backdrop of things that happen in understandable progressions, I'm also thinking of the mindset that ideologues eventually get into when the more radical of their ideas are proposed (or even adopted as policy), and are then rejected or ignored by "the masses" when it becomes clear those ideas weren't really all that great to begin with.

Watch this installment from The Power of Nightmares, and listen for the part about what happens when Ayman al-Zawahri comes to the conclusion that it's not just the infidels who are to blame, but that his fellow Muslims have failed to keep faith (at about 9:00).  These guys never stop to consider that they might have it just a teensy bit wrong - they always assume their followers are betraying their principles; and they always end up rationalizing the absolute need to punish their followers for those failures.

The parallels with what's happening in the GOP are rife and obvious to me. And no, I'm NOT saying the Repubs are just like al-Qaeda. I'm saying that once you've thrown in with fundamentalists of any kind, you're joining a race to the logical extreme.

Interesting (updated)

From a movie back in the day when the Democrats were Ronald Reagan and Bull Connor. And all the "good Repubs" hated guys like Eisenhower.

UPDATE : Oops - the movie's from 1940. So, gee - I got that one wrong. Don't care, it's still a great line, and Hope came up with lots of those.

Lithgow Does Gingrich

Huh?

Party first; everything else if and when we bloody well feel like it.

Leading Democrats, such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, think the Ryan plan is toxic, too. Reid plans to hold a vote this week in which Republican senators will have to go on record as supporting, or opposing, the House-passed budget bill -- which includes the Ryan plan to fundamentally transform Medicare as we know it. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, seeing the trap that Reid has laid, says each GOP senator will be free to vote his or her conscience.

To begin: scheduling a vote in the US Senate, requiring each senator to declare where he/she stands on the question of Medicare - is a trap?

Next: McConnell says he won't whip his people on this vote, and that means each Repub senator is "free to vote his or her conscience".  Just this once, y'all can vote on what ya think is best for your constituents.  But remember now, this is a special case, so don't get used to it.

Why is it OK for McConnell to say that shit out loud?
Why does it seem like I'm the only one jumpin' up and down yellin' WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

Dems v Repubs

The Repubs have a real problem with trying to figure out what to do with their crazies (aka Tea Partiers), and the Dems are pretending they don't have much the same problem.  There are lots of "lefties" who're speaking up and speaking out against what they believe are the ways Obama has betrayed them.

I guess I have to admit that even tho' I really knew better, I've been on the Obama band wagon.  I'll forgive myself for this, considering the simple fact that anybody is preferable to a complete fucktard like Jr Bush.

Anyway, Obama seems to be just as beholden to the Oligarchs as any of the rest of 'em, it's just that he seems to be a little less of a fucktard than Bush.

Weather And Climate

Some of the best I've heard on what climate change is really all about - in language I can understand. (via Balloon Juice comments)

It’s very, very simple. There doesn’t even have to BE a model, much less anything predictive- in fact it’s the opposite of predictive.

Weather is a chaotic system. Climate is a gauge of the energy in that system. Climate can be tracked in a broad, general sense. Weather cannot- it is chaotic, meaning it follows the mathematical rules of chaos as first discovered by Lorenz with (surprise!) a toy weather modeling equation.

Chaos works like this: if you have very little energy, things are stable. As the energy in the system increases, the range of possible states expands. At some points, the system can fall into predictable chaotic patterns: in weather, this would be knowing the general force of storms and cyclones, having a basic idea of how big these things are.

As the energy increases, the range of possible states continues to expand, and what you used to know about ‘how big tornadoes are’ stops being useful.

I’ll repeat that: as the energy increases (as the climate imperceptibly creeps upward in temperature), you stop being able to predict how big things like storms and cyclones will be.

If the CLIMATE stopped heating, and cooled off, the WEATHER would return to the tornado sizes people are used to.

It’s not going to do that.

As the CLIMATE continues to heat, by seemingly meaningless numbers (what’s a degree or two? right?), theWEATHER can and will start throwing up outlier events, storms and tornadoes that are unprecedented in size and destructiveness.

What we don’t know (?) is whether this is also causing the earthquakes- seems likely enough but I don’t know the laws under which tectonic plates move, they might not really be fluid enough to have chaotic behavior.

Weather does.

Climate sets the base energy level for weather.

Climate change directly causes the increase in potential destructive force of weather, because weather is a chaotic system.

It has NOTHING TO DO WITH STUDY OR THEORY! It is a mathematical formula like 2+2=4! There is nothing even slightly ambiguous about any of this!

Right now I would say, as a longterm plan get the hell out of any place, anywhere in the world, that is ‘tornado alley’ or ‘hurricane central’ or any of that. Seriously.

Because this is just a little teaser of what we will end up facing in just ten years and it’s too late to change that even if everyone suddenly woke the FUCK up.

Please, work to communicate these very basic and obvious points, because it can get worse or it can get ridiculously worse- and we as a species are stupid but we don’t really deserve what chaos can throw at us. The planet will be fine- it’s a big rock. Life on it? That’s the 100-year, 1000-year question.

another commenter asks:

I’ve heard of really, really terrible tornado seasons in the past. If this one is a result of the damage we’ve caused our own climate, why weren’t those? (If the question makes sense).

jinxtgr replies:

...As to the terrible tornado seasons: weather is chaotic. It ALREADY wasn’t stable. It’s too big to be stable.

The reason for terrible tornado seasons in the past is that weather was already chaotic.

Climate change means that it’s still chaotic but the possible maximum destruction goes up and up and up.

It’s not the fact of ‘fluke bad weather’ that’s an issue: that was already inherent in the system. What we are changing, and changing rapidly, is the scope of what that can mean.

Think of it like this: any given weather event could be considered as a marker for future events within one order of magnitude. So you get a tornado- might get another one a tenth the size, might get one ten times the size, don’t expect a thousand times the size.

Get one ten times the size, now expect a possible maximum of ten times the size of that, because you’ve established what’s within the range of possibility. Get one twice as bad, suddenly you’re considering possible storms 200 times as bad as what you once thought normal.

In a situation of climate change never assume a record weather event is something that will hit and go away forever, because it’s just demonstrated the range of the pattern of behavior. Not the maximum limit- it just demonstrated the range weather goes across now. You can safely expect that any given weather event is part of a chaotic pattern and that pattern just showed you weather could go there, anytime.

Because outlier weather can’t happen. It’s always part of the chaotic system, always showing the possible range of behavior.

If that seems like it’s worse than it used to be… o_O then what the hell have I been saying? That’s the whole point of climate change.

A Quick Thought

On marriage equality.  I watched a YouTube clip of Minnesota lawmakers passing an  amendment proposal against gay marriage.



And I keep wondering, what is it that some people have against equality? Why are so many people so dead set against seeing other humans as equal - deserving of respect and opportunity?

I think my answer is simpler than it seems. We're competitive. One of our great strengths is that we know we have to compete; we know we have to get out there and scrap and dig and fight to carve out a life for ourselves. That's a good attitude when it comes to having to win your crust of bread for the day. But when it becomes so integral to the philosophy of how you live our life that you're willing to do anything and everything not just to gain some advantage for yourself, but to actively use the coercive power of law to put your competitors at a disadvantage, then you've lost your way. You're sure as hell not being true to the US Constitution's efforts to restrict power and to balance those competing interests.

Today's T-Shirt

Today's Public Service Reminder

Interesting

Wisconsin State Sen Lena Taylor rips into the "voter ID bill" - and makes a pretty good impression IMO.

What really stuck for me tho' was her mention of Martin Luther King being a card-carrying Repub. It always startles me a little when I'm reminded of how everything seems to flip over once in a while. In the American South during Jim Crow, the Democrats were guys like Lester Maddox and Strom Thurman and George Wallace, and they were all Democrats because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. So it just makes sense that MLK would line up with just about anybody other than those guys. It's good to get these little refreshers once in a while.

Feeling A Little Awkward

David Frum has always struck me as kind of a simpish poser, and it bothers me that I find myself agreeing with him more often the last coupla years.  It could be only that I think it's good when somebody on the Repub side stands up and calls "bullshit" on them once in a while - and he's been doing that a lot lately.  Maybe that's it.

Noah Kristula-Green makes the important point that Stanley Druckenmiller’s weekend WSJ interview has blossomed in a matter of days into something like GOP orthodoxy. We’ve evolved in the space of a decade from “deficits don’t matter” to “defaults don’t matter.”

It seems flabbergasting that a conservative party could arrive at this destination.

Yet the new mood exemplifies the trend we have seen over the past three decades, whereby one after another the “rules of the game” have been discarded as the two parties play politics ever more savagely.

The filibuster evolves from extraordinary procedure to routine super-major requirement.

Secret holds on presidential nominees proliferate.

And now even the debts and obligations of the United States become a tool of politics.

Everybody seems to assume that the rules will be reasserted before the game gets too dangerous. Maybe. Let’s hope. But one year’s outrageous innovation has a bad habit of becoming next year’s new normal. Anything a Republican Congress can do to a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress can do to a Republican president. Americans like analogies to ancient Rome: a republic felled by overcentralized power. They owe it to themselves to study the Polish commonwealth: a republic wrecked by an irresponsible legislature.

Thanks, Dr Caldicott

That was just loads of fun.

Privateering

Classic - this comes as no shock to people, and so there's no general outrage, and so underfunded law enforcement agencies end up looking and acting a lot like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Yo, Democrats

This is the kind of crap that drove me away from the Repubs, and just lends real credence to what used to be the bullshit about "both sides do it". So could ya not do this anymore please?

ER

When you try to force-fit healthcare into the Standard American Business Model, you're probably going to get some pretty ugly results.

NYT:

In 1990, there were 2,446 hospitals with emergency departments in nonrural areas. That number dropped to 1,779 in 2009, even as the total number of emergency room visits nationwide increased by roughly 35 percent.

Emergency departments were most likely to have closed if they served large numbers of the poor, were at commercially operated hospitals, were in hospitals with skimpy profit margins or operated in highly competitive markets, the researchers found.

The number of ERs went down by 27% while the number of ER Visits went up 35%.  In any other business I can think of, that would indicate an impressive increase in Productivity.  But healthcare is not any other business; and Emergency Medicine is a perfect illustration of that fact.

The logic chain is fairly simple.  More patients going to fewer ERs means there are fewer caregivers per patient, which means less time can be allotted for each patient.  But treating Gun Shot Wounds and Blunt Force Trauma and Ischemic Attacks won't take any less time just because your business plan requires a greater throughput of patients.  Even with the amazing tools available to help staffers do things better, medicine is always more art than science.  It's about people; not gadgets.  The proper care of people requires time.  Take away their time, and people die.  Simple.