A Blind Hog

Even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

With that in mind, let's check in with the late great WaPo, where it doesn't matter what's true or what's good or what's right (this is the age of "New Media" y'know - all that matters is delivering readers to advertisers).  But I'll pat 'em on the back on that rarest of occasions when they manage to break through the deafening clutter (that they're helping to create) with something that isn't just their usual Red Team / Blue Team bullshit:

For prosecutors, the key question is whether there was a clearly articulated “quid pro quo.” If so, the gifts were bribes. If not, they were gifts. To me, as an anthropologist, this largely misses the point.

Across the massive cornucopia of human culture, anthropologists have found relatively few universals. One of the strongest of these, however, concerns gift-giving. Gifts are given in all cultures, and to remarkably similar effect. As every graduate student in anthropology learns, gifts by their nature create social ties and a sense of reciprocal obligation. To give a gift is to expect something in return, though it undermines the power and mystique of the gift to spell out too clearly what that something is. It would be uncouth to give a friend a birthday present and say “now when it’s my birthday I expect you to give me this model of this product,” but the expectation of a well-chosen gift in return is no less powerful for that. The failure to give something in response can end a friendship.

 --and--

When politicians accept gifts such as Rolex watches and Oscar de la Renta gowns from multimillionaires, they often lack the means to reciprocate as equals. Surely, Williams has wealthy friends — his equals — with whom he exchanges gifts, but the McDonnells are not wealthy. From an anthropological perspective, Williams gave McDonnell gifts that the governor lacked the means to repay in order to subordinate him. Unable to afford, say, a $10,000 purse for Williams’s wife in return for what was given to his own wife, the governor can only return Williams’s generosity by lending him the power of his office in some way. Whether the expectation of a return was ever crisply articulated as a “quid pro quo” is really beside the point — even if it is the whole point to lawyers.

My guess is that Vaginal Bob will dodge the indictment, and maybe get slapped around a bit by an "ethics committee" stacked with politicians who will give us a great look at Irony In Action by deciding not to be so "hypocritical" as to condemn McDonnell for something most of them have been doing for as long as they've been in politics - all in the name of good government and bipartisanship and fairness.

But, of course in the end, it all fits neatly into the "Both Sides Do It" narrative.

If everybody does it, then there's nobody to hold anybody accountable for anything - and we're right back to status quo.  Never mind.

Egyptian Quickie

I don't know what Obama's supposed to do about Egypt - I don't know that any of it is up to anybody but the Egyptians.

What we all do know is that whatever Obama does, the Repubs are gonna shit on him for it, so he might as well take his best shot no matter how it plays in Punditsville or Kibitzburg or Blogistan.

So it comes down to this:  we have to look after our own, and in the Middle East, "our own" = Israel.  Without Egypt's willing support, the Arab-Israeli Peace Deal goes straight into the shitter and we're right back to 1977; and an Islamic Theocracy in Egypt (even a "democratically elected" one) is bad for that peace deal, which would be bad for Israel, which would be bad for us.

I don't like it; we seem to be stuck in a kind of World-According-To-Kissinger loop where we think the only thing we can do is to maintain the balance of terror.

Gotta be a better way.

Last One

Fuck you, NSA

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Cousin Magilla Sez

...fuck you, NSA

The Cost Of Doing Nothing

My youngest was recently recruited for a study being done at UVa's Behavioral Sciences Dept - what the hell; somebody's gotta be able to figure this joker out - anyway, while I was there yesterday signing the waivers and various other forms, pretending to be a responsible adult who's able to understand the 5 pages of disclaimers and willing to abdicate any and all rights to any and all recourse if anything goes "wrong", what I remember most about the visit was getting the feeling that we were at some cut-rate "Med School" in the Caribbean or some such.  The offices weren't dirty and dingy, but they weren't spiffy and newly painted either.  And the furniture would have to be upgraded three or four levels to qualify for the discount section at the Goodwill Thrift Store.

And I remember thinking this is another in the string of daily reminders that we're getting dragged down by what I consider our National Allergy To Paying For The Shit That Matters.

And then this pops up at HuffPo, talking about what's happening to most of our once-great research infrastructure:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- On the first floor of Jordan Hall at the University of Virginia School of Medicine is a 12-by-8 room that, at first glance, looks like a rundown storage space. The floor is a mix of white, teal and purple tiles, in a pattern reminiscent of the 1970s. Trash cans are without tops and half filled. There are rust stains on the tiles, and a loose air vent dangles a bit from the ceiling.

--and--

You wouldn't know from his giddy, optimistic tone that Dutta is currently navigating the biggest obstacle of his career. Five years after he received a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to undertake this microRNA project, he's nearly out of cash. His proposal was placed in the 2nd percentile of all grants reviewed by NIH in 2007, meaning that it was deemed more promising than 98 percent of the proposed projects.

When he asked for the same amount of money in 2012, his proposal was scored in the 18th percentile. In years past that score may have been good enough, but in the age of sequestration, NIH is supporting a much smaller pool of applicants. Late last month he was told that there would be no funding. UVA has stepped in to help, but Dutta estimates that 40 of his colleagues are in the same boat.

"I am living off of fumes," he says.

A feeling of despair has taken hold within research communities like Dutta's, Top officials at academic and medical institutions have grown convinced that years of stagnant budgets and recent cuts have ushered in the dark ages of science in America.

--and--

For-profit companies can play a role too. But they are much more likely to support projects with a clear return on investment, leaving explorative research like that being done by Dr. William Jackson at the Medical College of Wisconsin in the lurch.

Since 2007, Jackson has studied how viruses create a pool of membranes inside a cell. He hypothesized that viruses went into these "acidic vessels" in order to turn the cell into a factory for other viruses, meaning that if he could stop the development of these membrane pools, he could stop the spread of the virus itself. Most promisingly, he found that chloroquine, which is used to fight malaria, could be used to disrupt this process.

Despite the potential ramifications of such a finding -- everything from the common cold to foot-and-mouth disease is thought to follow this pattern -- the private sector won't fund the work. "There is no money to be made from chloroquine," Jackson said. "Only if the drug companies found something they could copyright or patent would they do it."

Here's a guy named JJ Thompson:

In the 1890s, Thompson was first in proposing the existence of subatomic particles, and the first to show real evidence of what he called a 'corpuscle', which soon would become known as the electron - which was nothing but the birth of The Electronic Age which is exactly how I can post this shit here on my blog (and how you can read this shit here on my blog).

Oh yeah - the guy was on the royal payroll at the time - in fact he spent pretty much his entire career as a gubmint worker - and his research was funded by the British taxpayer.

So go ahead and build your simpleton's ideology around some stoopid precept like "Starve The Beast", but try to remember that the beast you're so busy starving might be the one leaving all these golden eggs all over the joint.

Takin' It To The Streets

Fuck you, NSA

And a little taste of The Doobs:

Tommy Emmanuel

Out Of Chaos

That'd be lovely wouldn't it?  To wake up one day and hear something like, "Well, would you just look at that - we're all out of chaos today".  OK - sorry about that.  Let's get on with the incoherent rant.

The point is that eventually, patterns emerge from a series of chaotic events.

Weather is a chaotic thing, but over some period of time, we can identify a pattern called Climate.

An individual behaves in different ways day-to-day, but we can see a pattern develop, and we call it Personality.

etc

I've been feeling kinda frazzled the last several years, trying to keep up with all the weirdness that's been coming from "Politics", where it seems like somebody is making a concerted effort to change - fundamentally - the way we approach governing ourselves.

There's more than an ample number of specific examples so I'll skip forward here, and say straight up that the main proponents for these changes wear the "Conservative" label, and that most of them are also tagged with "Republican".  But for me, the two big examples that really stand out are these:

1. "Wall Street" (in the general sense, ie: Banking/Investment/Insurance/etc) came really close to blowing up the whole world.  They bought off politicians, and they bought off the regulators, and they bought off the voters - and when their little scheme imploded, they had the perfect solution - they extorted their way out of it.
2. The National Security Regime.  Don't be fooled into thinking this is all about Big Brother/Big Gubmint.  The massive structure of Security Nation was put together by people who are  zealots about small-government.  Criticizing them for being hypocrites means nothing because growing the government is not what they're doing.  They're busily taking a public-controlled function and turning it into a private enterprise - not accountable to anybody for anything.

The pattern?  Blame The Gubmint, of course.  Same shit, new day.

Blame the government for bailing out Wall Street instead of holding Wall Street accountable for causing the meltdown that left us with a very limited menu of really shitty choices.

Blame (typical no-good rotten traitorous "gov't employee") Edward Snowden for giving away government secrets instead of addressing the fact that those secrets are all pointing at the hundreds of billions of tax dollars being funneled into the pockets of a very short list of shell corporations trying to control the flow of information.  Let 'em argue about Whistle-Blower protections.  Let 'em argue about privacy.  Let 'em argue about a Journalist's Sources.  They can argue about any-fuckin'-thing they wanna argue about, but don't let 'em start thinking they can find out what's going on in time for them to do anything about it.

So I don't have to look at each crazy thing that falls out of some Repub's tater trap (and I don't have to spend any ergs trying to out-insight some Dem either) - all I have to do is look for how this new piece of bullshit lines up with the rest of the bullshit they've been piling up for the last 35 years.  

Focus on the First Thing - the GOP has turned sour; it's a one-trick pony; it needs a diaper change; they never say anything that isn't aimed at trying to make us believe our democracy doesn't work and that we should get rid of it and turn the whole thing over to a board of directors... How the fuck did these guys get to be known as Patriots and Real Muricans in the first place?  

This is a very old game, and we're supposed to be the exception to it.  We gotta get these fucks outa there.

Kids Say The Darnedest Things

Like - fuck you, NSA.

Today's Pix

I Gotcher Monday Right Here

Fuck you, NSA - Celebrity Edition:

And That's The Real Problem

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth Univ have been studying the various aspects of River Health along portions of the James River, and while they came up with some rather alarming levels of toxins present in the blue crabs taken from the river, what they really discovered was a Political Controversy.  Imagine that.

Richmond Times Dispatch:

State officials say the public is not in danger.

“We do not have any reason to believe that current microcystin levels in the James River present a health threat,” said Rebecca LePrell, the Virginia Department of Health’s director of environmental epidemiology.

 Yeah, but:

(river ecologist Paul) Bukaveckas acknowledged that his expertise lies in river health and not human health.

“The only thing I can say is that in crab muscle tissue in certain times of the year, the toxins build up to levels that the World Health Organization considers unsafe for consumption.”

And just so we know what the big deal is (Ecotoxicology report out of California EPA from 2009):

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are a family of single-celled algae that proliferate in water bodies such as ponds, lakes, reservoirs, and slow-moving streams when the water is warm and nutrients are available. Many cyanobacteria species produce a group of toxins known as microcystins, some of which are toxic. The species most commonly associated with microcystin production is Microcystis aeruginosa [1]. Upon ingestion, toxic microcystins are actively absorbed by fish, birds and mammals. Microcystin primarily affects the liver, causing minor to widespread damage, depending on the amount of toxin absorbed. People swimming, waterskiing, or boating in contaminated water can be exposed to microcytins. Microcystins may also accumulate in fish that are caught and eaten by people. Finally, pets and livestock have died after drinking water contaminated with microcystins.

In the end, at least for some folks, it's all about the money:

Blue crabs are Virginia’s top commercial seafood catch and produced a $24 million harvest last year.

“Consumers can be utterly confident that the product they are purchasing is of the highest quality,” said John Bull, a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which manages fish in Virginia’s tidal waters.

I'm not dismissing the potential for undue harm that can befall a particular business or even a whole sector when we get alarmed about something - especially when the alarm sounds a lot like "there's something wrong with the food".  That said, I need to feel more confident that the alarm isn't simply being muffled artificially (if not dismantled completely) - which has become something of a habit for way too many people in positions of power.

I have a call in to an old pal at the poison center in Richmond, but as of now, he hasn't called me back.  Update when/if that happens.

hat tip = Blue Virginia

None Of It's Real

Sunday Sermonization

Short and sweet, but I guess I should start with - Fuck you, NSA.

And Mr Obama - you could do with a little fuck you too.  I know; you have to say hardass things in a hardass way because sometimes you have to be a hardass.  I get it, but c'mon - you know for a plain fact that FISA's a joke and NSA is part of the biggest boondoggle ever because Security Nation is a good 80% theater.

We've got at least 16 'agencies' (that we're allowed to know of) scattered over god knows how many states, along with half-a-hundred Beltway Bandits filled with high-quality 'talent' like Eddie Snowden, soaking up jillions of dollars that they don't have to account for, doing shit in our names that we don't even get to know about.  What the fuck, bubba?

Gangbusters my ass - that whole conglomerated outfit belongs in Uncle Dub's barn with Mickey and Judy and a budget just big enough to cover the homemade costumes and finger paint for the scenery.

Fuck this shit.  It's Sunday - I'm goin' fishin'.

Truthers Beware

Paraphrasing Bill Maher: When you say "Bush had prior knowledge of 9/11", I know it to be bullshit because that sentence contains the two words 'Bush' and 'knowledge' together.



I know some really smart people who believe strongly that there's just too much about 9/11 that doesn't add up quite right.  And recently, somebody I respect deeply revealed she was among them - at least to a certain extent.  So I won't just point and laugh, because I continue to be curious and confused and doubtful, but also willing to look for new information and consider different angles where conspiracies are concerned, cuz...



So yeah - maybe there really is some fire at the bottom of all that smoke(?)

Today's Irony

The people who run a KFC franchise somewhere in Utah sat down together in the break room or huddled up in the boss's office or whatever, and they came up with a brilliant idea:

From Selfish Giving:

I just can’t understand what Kentucky Fried Chicken is thinking with its latest cause marketing program. This picture says it all. Buy a HALF-GALLON of soda – with 800 calories from 56 spoonfuls of sugar – for $2.99 and a buck goes to Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

First, what's the profit margin on a Mega Jug gotta be in order to allow a business to justify giving away 1/3 of the sales price?

Answer: on average, the cost of a soft drink at a fast food joint is somewhere between 13¢ and 20¢.  So if you take the high end - and even if you double it - the franchise is still way ahead.  Nuthin' wrong widdat - just sayin'.  They built their Feel-Good Campaign around the (prob'ly) biggest margin item on the menu, so let's not get too misty-eyed over their 'sacrifice'.

Second, this is one of the big reasons I don't fit in with most companies anymore.  My Stoopid-Shit-Tolerance-Threshold has gotten too low.

hat tip = facebook friend RS

Let There Be Weekend

...and let it begin with Fuck You, NSA.

Little Guy Wins One

And he may be set to win another one - big

The wild west atmosphere in Russia since the USSR fell apart, has pointed up some of the worst examples of Unfettered Market Capitalism.  But 2 days ago, we learned that a little pluck and imagination - plus a pair of brass balls - just might get you a shot at some payback.

From Business Insider:

In 2008, Dmitry Agarkov received an unsolicited letter from Tinkoff Credit Systems (TCS) offering the 42-year-old Russian man a credit card with what he found to be unattractive rates.

While most people would have just thrown away the letter, Agarkov decided to do something different. He scanned the contract in the letter into his computer and altered it in his favor, including, for example, a 0% interest rate, no fees, and no credit limit. Moreover, every time the bank didn't stick to these rules, they'd be fined 3 million rubles — $91,000 — which of course would go to Agarkov. If they broke the contract, they'd have to pay Agarkov 6 million rubles ($182,000).

Agarkov's altered contract was, surprisingly, accepted and he received a credit card. "The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client's terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form," Agarkov's lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant this week.

I'll be kicking myself for a while for not thinking of this one.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

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