Smart Guy

If you want to get anything done - in business or in politics or in your daily existence or whatever - the first thing you do is jam as many smart guys as you can fit into any given space, and then shut up and listen.

Here're some bits from David McRaney:

Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters, and in this episode we learn how he turned his haters into fans with what is now called The Benjamin Franklin Effect (read more about the effect here).

Listen as David McRaney reads an excerpt from his book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” explaining the psychology behind the effect and how the act of spreading harm forms the attitude of hate, and the act of spreading kindness generates the attitude of camaraderie.

At the lowest level, behavior-into-attitude conversion begins with impression management theory which says you present to your peers the person you wish to be. You engage in something economists call signaling by buying and displaying to your peers the sorts of things which give you social capital. If you live in the Deep South you might buy a high-rise pickup and a set of truck nuts. If you live in San Francisco you might buy a Prius and a bike rack. Whatever are the easiest to obtain, loudest forms of the ideals you aspire to portray become the things you own, like bumper stickers signaling to the world you are in one group and not another. Those things then influence you to become the sort of person who owns them.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect:

The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.

The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.

Why do I love my kids?  Aside from humans having evolved a genetic predisposition to love their children, it's at least partly because I do good things for them (I try anyway).

Why does it seem so many "conservatives" hate poor people?

I'm going to stop a little short, and not try to shoehorn everything into this one concept, but damn - this makes a lotta shit clearer for me.

Today's Irony

No particular reason I chose this one, it just kinda popped into my head.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa];[7] June 14,[1] 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.[8]

As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout South America and was radicalized by the poverty, hunger, and disease he witnessed.[9] His burgeoning desire to help overturn what he saw as the capitalist exploitation of Latin America by the United States prompted his involvement inGuatemala's social reforms under President Jacobo Árbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow at the behest of the United Fruit Company solidified Guevara's political ideology.[9]  Later, in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.[10] Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.[11]

So the guy spends his entire adult life working to combat the darker impulses of Capitalism, only to have his image (and practically his whole persona) posthumously hijacked in service to at least some of what the CIA killed him for fighting against.

The Hook Brings You Back

Hook --Blues Traveler



It doesn't matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel I'll convey
Some inner truth or vast reflection
But I've said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don't matter who you are
If I'm doing my job then it's your resolve that breaks

Because the Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook brings you back
On that you can rely

There is something amiss
I am being insincere
In fact I don't mean any of this
Still my confession draws you near
To confuse the issue I refer
To familiar heroes from long ago
No matter how much Peter loved her
What made the Pan refuse to grow

Was that the Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook brings you back
On that you can rely

Suck it in suck it in suck it in
If you're Rin Tin Tin or Anne Boleyn
Make a desperate move or else you'll win
And then begin
To see
What you're doing to me this MTV is not for free
It's so PC it's killing me
So desperately I sing to thee
Of love
Sure but also of rage and hate and pain and fear of self
And I can't keep these feelings on the shelf
I've tried well no in fact I lied
Could be financial suicide but I've got too much pride inside
To hide or slide
I'll do as I'll decide and let it ride until I've died
And only then shall I abide this tide
Of catchy little tunes
Of hip three minute ditties
I wanna bust all your balloons
I wanna burn all your cities to the ground
I've found
I will not mess around
Unless I play then hey
I will go on all day. Hear what I say
I have a prayer to pray
That's really all this was
And when I'm feeling stuck and need a buck
I don't rely on luck because

The Hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The Hook...
On that you can rely

Sometimes They Just Lie

A quick review:
We have to expect politicians to twist things a bit.  They say things in a certain way that makes them or their ideas or their philosophy sound better.  It's just good salesmanship.

Of course, the problems start when you take what's true and twist it into something that bears no resemblance to the truth.

You can take a fact, and tell everybody it's a lie.

And you can tell a straight-up lie, and then by repeating it over and over, people will come to to accept it as the truth.

Politicians of a certain stripe (mostly of the Republican persuasion these days) have become exceedingly masterful at that last part.

From NYT:

Of all the myths and falsehoods that Republicans have spread about President Obama, the most pernicious and long-lasting is that the $832 billion stimulus package did not work. Since 2009, Republican lawmakers have inextricably linked the words “failed” and “stimulus,” and last week, five years after passage of the Recovery Act, they dusted off their old playbook again.

“The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results,” wrote Speaker John Boehner. “Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, millions of families are still asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ ”

The stimulus could have done more good had it been bigger and more carefully constructed. But put simply, it prevented a second recession that could have turned into a depression. It created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years. (There are the jobs, Mr. Boehner.) It raised the nation’s economic output by 2 to 3 percent from 2009 to 2011. It prevented a significant increase in poverty — without it, 5.3 million additional people would have become poor in 2010.

And yet Republicans were successful in discrediting the very idea that federal spending can boost the economy and raise employment. They made the argument that the stimulus was a failure not just to ensure that Mr. Obama would get no credit for the recovery that did occur, but to justify their obstruction of all further attempts at stimulus.

Late Saturday Nite Tune

That's All --Laura Fygi

A Quick Reimnder

We've renewed the foofaraw over the Confederate flag because some dumbass redneck in the Georgia chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans insists on staying stoopid.

Look, guys, ya gotta get a coupla things straight - and I'll use some visual aids here to help get it through your cement-lined vacuum-packed little heads.

This first one is what we call The American Swastika:

But this is the one you need to concentrate on, because it's the last flag of The Confederate States of America - and that makes it the only one that fucking matters:

Are we clear?

Today's Pix

Friday Nite Tune

Perfidia --Laura Fygi

Today's Lee Camp

If you own the past, you're a big step closer to owning the present.

Or if you prefer the real thing:

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” --George Orwell, 1984

Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity:

Today's Poem

We don't need miracles or miracle workers.
We are the miracles, and we can do the work.

5th Philosopher's Song --Aldous Huxley

A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne--
But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, forward Homunculus,
If you'd quietly died!

Best be makin' the best of your miraculous little self.

The Con Academy

Try to keep this in mind the next time you're tempted to get into it with somebody you just know is full o' shit.

And just in case you were wondering about what Mama Rand tho't about all this:

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. --Ayn Rand

Ownership Society

Or more accurately: The owners of our society.

The last item on the To-Do List of Capital in the US is to purchase the government, which is all but complete now.



I don't advocate blowing shit up.  I don't condone it; I don't approve of it; I see nothing but rationalized stupidity in a term like Creative Destruction, and it doesn't matter if you apply it to wrecking our manufacturing sector or you try to use it to justify revolution.   I've spent my life trying to learn how to build things up and make them work, so I don't want anybody thinking I see anything noble or heroic in the actions of some jag-off who decides to set fire to something just to watch it burn.

But that's not to say I don't understand the impulse.

Logical Fallacy #2 - False Cause

There's a good number of sub-headings under False Cause (aka: Questionable Cause).
I grabbed this one from Wikipedia just cuz it's my fave:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: "after this, therefore because of this") is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) that states "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened to simply post hoc. It is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation does not imply causation), in which two things or events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence appears to be integral to causality. The fallacy lies in coming to a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors that might rule out the connection.

Today's Pix

Where's The Outrage?

From RTD:

RICHMOND -- A felon and admitted longtime gunrunner caught on Interstate 95 headed to Boston with handguns in the trunk of his car is set to be sentenced Tuesday in federal court.

Anthony T. Champion, 33, of Columbus, Ga. who pleaded guilty in November to possession of a stolen firearm, faces up to 10 years in prison when sentenced by U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer.

According to court documents, Champion was stopped by a state trooper near Doswell on Jan. 31, 2013, and nine handguns in a cloth bag were discovered in the trunk of his Toyota Camry -- two were stolen and one had the serial number obliterated.

Gun freaks and Libertarians oughta be teamed up and jumpin' all over this one.

Doesn't a US citizen have the right to take his guns with him on a trip up north?

Doesn't he have the right to make a living selling guns (the ones he owns anyway) to whoever he wants to sell 'em to?

And why do we care if the serial number on one of those guns was obliterated?  It's his gun - he can do what he wants with it.

Since when is it OK for the lawdogs to search a guy's car just because he gets a little nervous and decides to stop by the side of the road and take a short walk to clear his head?

What's this country comin' to?

Interesting Tidbit:  In 2010 and 2011, 825 guns that were used in crimes in New York were traced back to Virginia (eg).  It stands to reason that some number of people were arrested here in The Old Dominion for some kind of illegal-ness connected with those guns in New York.  I wonder if any of the cops (here or there) who made arrests in any of those capers were adherents to some bullshit outfit like the Oath Keepers.  Cuz, y'know - 2nd Amendment is a holy sacrament and if we don't hold it inviolable, Jesus won't love us anymore and then we're really in trouble and ... and actually, as you widen it all out, it just gets weirder and weirder.

God, Guns, and Goons In Uniform - what could possibly go wrong?

Record Intact

The Polk Awards were announced this week, (kinda kicking off Awards Season) which means we've passed another solid year of outstandingness in world journalism, during which DumFux News extended its unblemished record of perfection having received a grand total of ZERO awards for reporting of any kind.  Again.

Brooklyn, N.Y. - Four reporters who revealed the extent of secret surveillance and massive data collected by the National Security Agency are winners of the 65th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism announced today by Long Island University. The four – from the British newspaper The Guardian and The Washington Post – were among 30 recipients from 15 news organizations who were recognized in 13 categories for work in 2013.

Reporting by those honored also triggered probes of statehouse corruption in Virginia and political payback in New Jersey, explored the gap between rich and poor in urban and rural locales, produced telling accounts of mass death in Bangladesh and civilian killings by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, exposed dark sides of pro football and major league baseball and examined community responses to mental illness that ranged from ineffective to absurd.

DumFux News has been around since 1996, and they've never won anything for anything.

No awards. Ever. No Peabody. No DuPont-Columbia. No Loeb. No Murrow. Not even an Emmy. Nada.

Today's WTF

Of all the douche nozzles on the air in whatever capacity - Joe Scarborough, David Gregory, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Marino, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Howie Long, Alex Jones etc etc et-fucking-cetera - how is it this guy has just recently managed to scrap his way back - to a thoroughly stupid time slot on a barely findable sub-heading of a sports channel that's not even available on an awful lot of basic cable packages; and one that can't quite figure out when the show might or might not run?  WTF!?!



The guy quotes Eddie Izzard for fuck's sake - on a sports show.  You honestly think that doesn't take some doing?  And do you think some of us don't know this is one of the guys (if not the guy) who made a 24-hour sports channel worth watching in the first place?)

Olbermann
ESPN2
Mon-Thu
11pm (usually - sometimes ya just hafta guess)

Lettin' It Get Ugly

It's important to remember that correlation is not proof - it doesn't necessarily mean that one part of the correlation is the cause of the other part(s).

Keep that in mind.

NYT editorial by SAMUEL BOWLES and ARJUN JAYADEV

Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980.

And that’s just a small fraction of what we call “guard labor.” In addition to private security guards, that means police officers, members of the armed forces, prison and court officials, civilian employees of the military, and those producing weapons: a total of 5.2 million workers in 2011. That is a far larger number than we have of teachers at all levels.

What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890 — a year when, in case you were wondering, the homicide rate was much higher than today.

5.2 million of us - it means that more than 1.5% of our total population is fully engaged in "protecting" the wealth of some Americans from other Americans.

It Isn't Ending Well

I'll have to listen to this a few more times to get it all, but I have some serious doubts that my mood will improve.



We have a capitol building chock-full of people who're really good at getting elected, fucking with each other, and practically nothing else.

With the economy in free fall, Obey met with his Republican counterpart Jerry Lewis of California to start writing a bill.

“And Jerry just grinned and said ‘Dave, I’m sorry, but we’ve got orders from headquarters, we can’t play, we can’t play,’” Obey recalls. “He said it twice.”
Whatever Republicans thought privately – some of them told Obey they agreed that Congress needed to pass a stimulus bill – they weren’t going to publicly help the new president help the economy.

But that wasn’t the scariest thing, Obey says. He realized many fellow House members – Democrats and Republicans – simply lacked a sophisticated understanding of the economy and government spending policy.

“One of the problems that you have today, is that a lot of members of Congress just don’t know a hell of a lot anymore,” Obey says.

We are so fucked. 

Seems A Little Silly

...but sometimes ya gotta beat the horse even after it's dead(?)  I honestly don't know what else to say about it.  Climate Change (most probably due to AGW) is a real thing, and somehow, we still have a substantial percentage of people who just can't bring themselves to recognize it.

I refuse to give Marsha Blackburn any time on my little blog here; and I sure as fuck hate even acknowledging a preening fluffer like David Gregory; so I'll just give ya'll this little bit: