Old Home Week

On the 145th anniversary of my (occasional) home town.

From Wikipedia:

In 1870, the Colorado Central Railroad laid tracks through the area on its route from Golden to link up with the Kansas Pacific Railroad and the Denver Pacific Railroad at Jersey Junction, 3 miles (5 km) north of Denver. On December 1, 1870, Benjamin F. Wadsworth and Louis A. Reno platted the Ralston Point townsite along the railroad. To avoid confusion with other communities along Ralston Creek, Ralston Point was soon renamed Arvada in honor of Hiram Arvada Haskin, brother-in-law of settler Mary Wadsworth.[11] Her husband, Benjamin Wadsworth, became the first postmaster of Arvada. Colorado was granted statehood on August 1, 1876, and the Town of Arvada was formally incorporated on August 14, 1904. A vibrant agricultural community, Arvada claimed the title "Celery Capital of the World."

I had a semi-crummy old farmhouse at 7898 Reno Dr.  The landmark water tower was right next door.  The water tower survives, but both the house and the street were erased to make way for "progress".  So I guess Mr Wolff is to be taken quite literally in this case.

Cyber Monday (NSFW)

I held off as long as I could.  Now let's get out there and shop our asses off, people.  The planet's not gonna fuck up itself, y'know.

We'll start with a nice assortment of ornaments for your Holiday Tree:

Pix and Memes and Toons and Stuff

Today's Weird

On a tip from my brother, I went over to Fandango to look at the trailer for a new movie called Spotlight.  I clicked on the start arrow and ended up having to see 2 video ads before I got to the trailer.  

So, in order to watch the commercial for the movie - it's a commercial; I went in search of a commercial because I wanted to see a commercial.  And as if that's not bad enough, I had to sit thru a coupla commercials I didn't wanna see before they'd let me see the commercial I did wanna see.

I'm trying to decide if I'm a little bummed and/or aggravated at the extreme levels of monetization going on, or if I'm more than a little impressed that somebody's figured out just how captive we are to this kinda crap.

Or maybe I'm just pissed that I'm willing to put up with the whole mess.  My head hurts - I may start drinking early today.

Score Card

For those of you scoring at home - or even if you're all by yourself - somebody's gotta be trying to keep track of all the shitty things Trump has said or done - things that so many of the Press Poodles tell us will blow him up and scatter his remains to the four winds.  But then, somehow, he stays around because the "lefty librul lame-stream media" are unable to resist breaking away from any and all programming to make sure we all get to see Lil Donny doing whatever he does that will surely disgust all of us, while we are never quite disgusted enough to stop watching that crap which of course is why they keep showing us that crap.

Anyway, here's a (probably) partial list:

• outraged prisoners of war by doubting the heroism of Vietnam veteran John McCain, because he allowed himself to be captured
• he appeared to accuse Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly of asking him tough questions because she was menstruating
• accused Mexican immigrants to the US of being rapists
• claimed that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently ejected from a rally deserved to be “roughed up”
• appeared to mock a New York Times journalist for his disability and then accused the journalist of “grandstanding” on that disability in his response
• falsely accused Muslim Americans of cheering on the 9/11 attackers
• agreed with suggestions that all such Muslims should have their names tracked on a database
• Trump’s Twitter account recirculated racially charged but falsified crime statistics from an actual Nazi sympathiser
• complained that many of these incidents were exaggerated by the political media, saying 70% of whom are “scum”

Suck It Up And Listen

Time for a little homework now, kids:



ha tips: Facebook buddy LM-M and MoJo

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

Today's Latenite

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Today's Podcast

Ripping the scab off the big festering ulcer on the national ass - all of those being apt metaphors for the GOP, btw.

And oh yeah - ya gotta get all the way to 36:15 for the cool holiday surprise - for me anyway.  

But first, there's a bit of brilliant at about 9:00 when driftglass hits one out, talking about Matthew Dowd, using a font size metaphor.

Colbert

This popped up quite a few places.  Just need to get it in before I lose it.

I think it has to start taking it's toll after a while.  Any attention is better than being ignored as far as Trump cares - he knows it's hard to find 'bad' publicity.  But there's a point where you become Terminally Uncool.  Like when Dick Nixon's handlers knew he needed something to help him "connect with the youngsters" in the late 60s, and so they invited Up With People to perform at The White House, and then at some rallies.  Fuckin' disaster was all that was.

Here's a little taste (sorry).  Although it does feature a very young Glenn Close - but don't listen to the whole thing.  Seriously - it could give you diabetes. Don't do it:

Anyway, when people are laughing, and they're laughing not because you elicit some pathos, but because you're pathetic and they pity you - time to turn around and head back to the barn.

Today's Cold Shot

T-Day Pix

Turkey Day

Low-stress and drama-free:



And remember - no such thing as a tasty turkey; that's why god gave us cranberry sauce, gravy and wine.

Yikes

So - should we be afraid for ourselves?   Or is it that we should be afraid of ourselves?

Isn't that pretty much what it comes down to though?  Politicians in general (and Repubs mostly in particular) are eager to peddle the panic.  They know how to play on our fears to keep us divided, and to use that division to get what their big money donors are paying them to get.  

But over time, we become conditioned to the fear, which starts to drive a trend towards ideological purity, which always gets us out to the logical extreme in one big fuckin' hurry.  ie: Everybody's a traitor to the cause except you and me, and I'm beginning to have my doubts about you.

We can have some fun pointing and laughing, but this shit gets real if we don't smarten up and stand in its way before it has a chance to reach critical mass.

And BTW - in case it's not obvious enough, lemme state the obvious for you - smart guys working for John Kasich put this together using Trump's nutty-tude to make Kasich look like something other than the radical god-knobbing authoritarian freak that he actually is.  It's not like Kasich doesn't think very much along the same lines as Trump does, it's just that Kasich doesn't say that shit out loud.

And of course, that's kinda the problem - Trump gets a boatload of support for being "Anti-PC".  But here's the word on that one, guys.  It's Politically Incorrect to say certain things because they're shitty things to say. And since words comprise the expression of thought, PC becomes not much more than a general attempt to get you to stop thinking shitty thoughts about people.  

Putting it another way - if you can learn not to talk stoopid, it'll help you learn how not to be stoopid, and then we can stop calling you stoopid, and then you can stop bitchin' about how everybody's always callin' ya stoopid.  Deal?  

And BTW also too - Since the "voting" in Ohio appears to be nearly as honest and forthright as it was in Noriega's Panama, I'll go out on a limb and say this: Assuming Kasich's still in this thing next March - and even if he's polling behind by 20+ points - he'll somehow manage to eke out a landslide upset.   Just sayin' - again.  

I guess my main problem now is deciding how to defend myself from accusations of peddling a little fear my-own-bad-self.

What We Already Knew

So there's this new study out of Yale, published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that says Climate Change Denial is all about a Cash-For-Comments system used to manufacture an "opposing view".  

And what that allows is for the political operators to separate voters along imaginary ideological fault lines, which makes it easier to keep us bitching at each other rather than voting to send the Coin-Operated Politicians back home so they can open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to have - which would be a much closer career match for their skill sets while still meaning most of them would be vastly over-employed.

Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.

Like I said - that's not something we didn't know.  But I'll take it as a positive sign anyway, because while it's not likely to convince the hard core rubes, it's one more bullet point that rebuts the Both-Sides crap and might be useful convincing the Hipster-ish I'm-Too-Cool-To-Vote crowd to get up off their suspended-adolescence butts and realize they've got skin in this game whether they like it (or whether they even realize it) or not.

hat tip = truthout

Another Winner

From Balloon Juice:

Betteridge's Law tells us to answer 'no' to any headline (or chyron or crawl) that editors and/or producers end with a question mark.

But a commenter on that post at Balloon Juice said it best, and so he has the winning intertoobz thingie (Amateur Division) for today:

"Donald Trump transzendiert die Wahrheit, wie Scheiße Sauberkeit transzendiert"

It's worth the trip over to Google Translate, BTW.

Today's Winner

Charlie Pierce is good clear voice in a very dull crowd, and wins Best Blog Post today.

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what the Penguins would have sung, had they recorded "Derp Angel."

We were roaming Iowa watching live politics all weekend, so we only caught a smidgen of a crumb of the Sunday Showz. Which is to say, we only caught a little, but we caught enough to hand the House Cup over to CBS, where John Dickerson continues to adjust the casters on the chair once occupied by former Angevin minstrel Bob Schieffer. After a pretty good bipartisan dose of the old boogedy-boogedy, Dickerson brought out the panel, and we heard this from Ruth Marcus, scourge of teenaged potty-mouths everywhere.

"This was a very ugly week for Republicans in terms of their response on refugees and I think it was something that was exacerbated by the failure of President Obama to explain to people that we weren't crazy to be nervous but to understand their nervousness and to explain it away."​

Holy Third Way No Labels! If that isn't the perfect distillation of the vaporlock caused by Beltway conventional wisdom, I don't know what is. (It's even worse than the hairball Fournier coughed up on the same subject, over at the Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker.) Apparently, it either has escaped Ruth's notice, or she thinks it's impolite to mention, that the Republican party is completely out of its mind, and that its current front-runner, the Libidinous Visitor, is one step away from invading Ethiopia. How in Broder's name is the president in anyway responsible for the xenophobic rantings of a party gone mad? I know the president has mad Kenyan telepathic skillz, but what precisely would Ruth have him say? "Only worry a little, Americans. We are extremely unlikely to be overrun by exploding Syrian toddlers"? Jesus, these people…

Here's a tip, gang. Short of "I resign," there is nothing the president can say that will stop the Republicans from mongering fear and mongering war and just plain making stuff up. The people who believe this indigestible fried crud are going to believe it no matter what this president says or does. The level of anti-Islamic panic is going to remain the same because it is an election year, and because the Republican field is now led by a guy wrapping himself in out and out fascism, and doing it for laughs. And that's the double truth, Ruth.

Music

I proclaim this to be Dylan Day.  No particular reason.  Just cuz.

Shelter From The Storm --Bob

Buckets Of Rain (cover) --Wendy Bucklew

Things Have Changed --Bob

I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (cover) --Nora Jones

To Ramona (cover) --The Flying Burrito Brothers

Most Of The Time --Bob

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (cover) --Shawn Colvin

Some Pix

Let's Throw A Study Into It

Nobody west of about Cairo knows more than this guy - Juan Cole:

1. Terrorism or hirabah is forbidden in Islamic law, which groups it with brigandage, highway robbery and extortion rackets– any illicit use of fear and coercion in public spaces for money or power. The principle of forbidding the spreading of terror in the land is based on the Qur’an (Surah al-Ma’ida 5:33–34). Prominent [pdf] Muslim legal scholar Sherman Jackson writes, “The Spanish Maliki jurist Ibn `Abd al-Barr (d. 464/ 1070)) defines the agent of hiraba as ‘Anyone who disturbs free passage in the streets and renders them unsafe to travel, striving to spread corruption in the land by taking money, killing people or violating what God has made it unlawful to violate is guilty of hirabah . . .”

2. Terrorism is above all murder. Murder is strictly forbidden in the Qur’an. 5:53 says, “… whoso kills a soul, unless it be for murder or for wreaking corruption in the land, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind; and he who saves a life, it shall be as if he had given life to all mankind,” Qur’an 6:151 says, “and do not kill a soul that God has made sacrosanct, save lawfully.” (i.e. murder is forbidden but the death penalty imposed by the state for a crime is permitted).

The list has 10 items on it, and they all seem pretty clear.

But there's this weird thing going on right now.  The debate over what is or isn't Islam - or Christianity or any other religion - is starting to sound a lot like one giant logical fallacy of "No True Scotsman", with a dash of "False Equivalence".

ISIL is to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity.

Real Christians don't fire bomb Planned Parenthood Clinics, the same as Real Muslims don't hijack airplanes and crash them into American office buildings.

In the end, we're back arguing degrees of fucked-up-edness concerning the other guy's religion.  We're only saying this or that religious nonsense is less bad than this or that other religious nonsense.  --Update: It's all nonsense, and btw, it's not the same as having to choose the lesser of two evils.  Politics gets evil enough all by itself - we don't need the extra layers of bullshit that (really) only religion can bring.

Mostly, we gotta stop pretending that anybody's religion makes for good government.

Government is about law, and law is about what you can prove, out in the open, where everybody can see it.

Let's get the debate back where it belongs.

Getting It Right

I really dig this kinda shit even tho' it usually gives me something of a headache.

Mary Norris, aka The Comma Queen:

Watch this on The Scene.

My mnemonic is:

He = Who

Him = Whom

Key phrase: Err on the side of 'who' - it's better to be casual than it is to be super wrong.