The Logic Problem

This has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere:

Alice, Bob, and Chris are taken to the police station for questioning. Detectives know that one of them is the thief and that only one of them tells the truth.

Alice says, "I am not the thief."

Bob says, "Alice is the thief."

Chris says, "I am not the thief."

Who is the thief?

And there's all kinds of good reasoning going on as people weigh in and suss it all out; and I'm OK at such things, but I'm really not very adept at the Game Theory thing (or whatever I'd have to be good at to get through this kinda stuff), so I just have to take an awful lot of people's word for things, y'know?

And that's OK as long as you've learned a thing or two, and are at least marginally skilled at figuring out whose word you can probably take on a given subject, and who you should doubt - which is kinda the point, but that's more about the politics than logic, and now I'm heading off into the weeds again which should give you an idea what a cluttered jumble my brain can make of this shit, but that's not really the point, but it might be, but anyway...

So here's one logic string:

If Alice is the thief - 

1. What she says is a lie... we have one liar

2. What Bob says is truth... we have the one saying truth.

3. I am not the thief... as we need a second liar, Chris saying he's not the thief is a lie, hence he's the thief... but we started assuming Alice was the thief. So, since we don't have two thieves, we discard it.

If Bob is the thief -

1. What Alicia says is truth... we have our one saying truth

2. What Bob says is truth as we started assuming Bob is the thief... this would be the second saying the truth. We know we can't have two persons saying the truth. Then Bob is NOT the thief.

If Chris is the thief -

1. What Alice says is truth... we have our one saying truth.

2. What Bob says is a lie... as Alice is NOT the thief. We have our first liar.

3. What Chris says is a lie... as he is indeed the thief..... We have our second liar.

So, if Chris were the thief, we have exactly two liars and one person saying the truth, as the problem states.

Therefore, Chris is the thief.

I had to read through it 3 or 4 times before I started to get it, and that brought me to what I think is a bit better understanding of the anti-intellectual shit that essentially gives us a political atmosphere where this is what makes sense to too many people:

*Way too complicated - let's do this instead:
1) Elect Donald Trump
2) Waterboard all three
3) Put them in prison camps where they become slave labor
4) Seize their wealth and redistribute it to political appointees
5) Declare lots of a national holidays to extol the virtues of freedom and enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit

6) AMERICA!

No muss, no fuss, no need for all that tiresome thinking.

*this was not actually posted - this is just what too many Pro-Trump comments sound like to me

The Trick

hat tip = Twitter pal Monkeyfister

Today's PolToon

Today's Tweet

#TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner

(He was right; here they COME.) pic.twitter.com/ojW3B3dJuJ

— Pin Head (@PiercedSkull) September 2, 2016

This Shit Is Bullshit

I've been listening in on this one for a while, and I think I've got my bearings now.

In short - this is more or less about a ConservaDem who needs to go the fuck away.  I don't want anyone to hurt him; I'm not wishing he'd get Ass Cancer and die after enduring long, bloody, painful attempts to save his miserable worthless hide; I just want him to be unemployed for a good long time.  I want him to live in a shitty basement for about 10 years while he works an occasional odd shift at The Dollar Store and has to eat what he can find in the dumpsters behind the local liposuction clinic.

Sen Joe Manchin D-WV

Seriously - fuck that guy.

In case you haven't heard, Joe Manchin's daughter (Heather Bresch) is the asshole CEO who has blown up the price on Epi-Pen.

Bill Moyers:

According to reports, Bresch got her first job at Mylan working in the factory basement, when her well-connected dad asked the company’s then-CEO, Milan Puskar, for a favor. Later, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that West Virginia University, which had received a $20 million donation from Puskar and whose president was a Manchin and Bresch family friend, had awarded her an MBA although she had not completed the required coursework.

The school president and other administrators were forced to resign, but Bresch survived the controversy and has done very well indeed in the pharmaceutical business, rising through the ranks and at the same time learning how to adroitly manipulate government and its regulations — lessons for which life in a successful political family with its network of friends and colleagues prepared her well.

I guess what grates on my soul in the worst way possible is this: 

The drug is not the issue, the Epi-Pen itself is the issue. Epinephrine is pretty cheap and available as a generic - but the delivery method is the key. The Epi-Pen is amazing, and it's ridiculously effective and easy to use, and it's saved more than a few lives; and it's a great little peace-of-mind thing - and it's patented, which is the key to the whole banana.  

So Mylan expects a full and vigorous effort to enforce its patent rights under US Federal Law - at tax-payer expense of course - but they get to shift the jobs overseas; they get to dodge a shitload of the taxes by hiding out in The Netherlands, and they can jack the price by 500%, etc etc etc. And that little parlay is what pumps enough profit into Mylan's coffers to "justify" paying Ms Bresch almost $19 Million last year.

It's fucking immoral - and that's before we take a look at the campaign contributions bullshit that helps perpetuate it, because it's part of a fucked up System of Interlocking Interests that makes it profitable to hold people hostage while the people who take those hostages are doing it legally, and so, are completely out of the reach of "justice".

That's gotta change.

Like I said, I'm really not wishing for harm to come to any of them, but a well-placed runaway cement truck wouldn't exactly hurt my feelings.

Fight The Power

Today's Pix

Virginia 5th

Go to govtrack.us 

Type in your address in the search box.

Figure out where you are. Get your ass out there and scare up some action.

 

Today's Doc Maddow

Listen and learn - she has a doctorate in this shit, so there's something she can teach us.

And now that you've learned a little something about The Know Nothings, it gets really hard not to hear it when it pops up (starting at about 4:35 when Wolf is asking Trump about harassment).

Today's Other Tweet

"We're gonna track 'em..."
Yeah that seems like a great idea... #TrumpAZ pic.twitter.com/vHwH59BXGr

— Brad Pritchett (@bradpritchett) September 1, 2016

Among Trump's Christian Right followers, I wonder if there's any inkling of "the mark of the beast" that filters through.

Cuz let's not try to fool ourselves - if we're going to be able to tell "the good ones from the bad ones", then everybody has to get a tag.

PS) this is very Slippery Slope-y, but sometimes those slopes are real and sometimes those real slopes are very slippery.

OMFuckingG

We CANNOT let this lowdown shit-speckled pile of moldy skunk weed become our president.

Can't wait to hear the post-game.

Today's Tweet

pic.twitter.com/grhlEZVJfL

— tarik (@LekniziTarik) March 6, 2016

Yo, conservatives - horses know enough to share their stuff.  Why don't you?  When're you guys gonna stop being dumber 'n a horse?

And This Is Your Brain

...on a podcast

via You Are Not So Smart

Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist who lectures at Cardiff University and writes about brain stuff over at his blog, Brain Flapping hosted by The Guardian.

• What's new with motion sickness?
• Why does it feel so bad to break up?
• What about Dunning-Kruger?
• Is it paranoia that drives Anti-Intellectualism?

Ms Conway

From Policy Mic:

On Tuesday, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump unearthed remarks Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's new campaign manager, made in January 2013 suggesting that rape is women's fault. If they weren't so weak, Conway suggested, they'd be able to fight off their attackers.

"If we were physiologically — not mentally, emotionally, professionally — equal to men, if we were physiologically as strong as men, rape would not exist," Conway said on the PBS show To the Contrary at the time.

"You would be able to defend yourself and fight him off."

I wonder if all the men who've been raped know it wasn't possible for them to have been raped.

On The Wall

For the 1,255 miles of the US-Mexico border that's made up of the Rio Grande, where exactly will Mr Trump's wall stand?

The border more or less runs right down the middle of the river - and you literally can't build the thing in the water.

So do you build it on the Mexico side?  Since Mexico doesn't want anything to do with our silly wall, it seems kinda doubtful they'll allow that.

But if we build it on the US side, then don't we kinda lose access to the river itself?

There's an awful lot of that riverfront that's private land.  Do you plan to condemn 100 or 500 or 1000 miles of private property thru Eminent Domain and then forcibly take possession of the land if necessary?

Maybe that's why the Trumpkinites have restarted the talk about a "Virtual Wall" or "Technological Wall" or a "Digital Wall".  Except that every time surrogates try to ameliorate anything, Trump comes back and either re-doubles down or flipflops and denies he ever said anything like that you must be crazy or you're dishonest and disgusting and I'd really like one of my guys to punch you right in the head no not really but maybe yeah kinda.

And in the meantime, we all just get to wait for whatever Trump has to say so this rolling clusterfuck can keep its death-grip on the news cycle.

He's got us all trained to sit here panting and wagging our furry tails like good little Press Poodles.

PoliticusUSA:

To the surprise of no one outside of those who voted for Trump in the Republican primary, the border wall was a lie. In fact, Republican members of Congress have been suggesting since Trump announced his plan to “build the wall” that they didn’t support it, and would not pass the appropriations needed to construct a wall.

Like cousin Trae said - here's hoping he dies in a tragic hairspray accident. And soon.

Ow

Run that burn under a cold tap, Rodney.  Then delete your account, quit your TV job, and go back to school.

Charity

From Vox:

In 1997, after a distinguished career in military service that culminated with stints as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Colin Powell launched a charity. Named America’s Promise, it’s built around the theme of Five Promises to America’s children. And while I’ve never heard it praised as a particularly cost-effective way to help humanity by effective altruists, it was surely a reasonably good cause for a famous and politically popular man to dedicate himself to.

Needless to say, however, Powell continued to be involved in American political life. His sky-high poll numbers ensured he’d be buzzed about as a possible presidential or vice presidential nominee, either as a moderate Republican or as an independent. Realistically, that wasn’t in the cards, and Powell was smart enough to know it. But his support for George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign lent him valuable credibility, and his recruitment to serve as Bush’s first secretary of state was considered an important political and substantive coup by Bush.

So what about the charity? Well, Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, took it over. And it kept raking in donations from corporate America. Ken Lay, the chair of Enron, was a big donor. He also backed a literacy-related charity that was founded by the then-president’s mother. The US Department of State, at the time Powell was secretary, went to bat for Enron in a dispute the company was having with the Indian government.

Did Lay or any other Enron official attempt to use their connections with Alma Powell (or Barbara Bush, for that matter) to help secure access to State Department personnel in order to voice these concerns? Did any other donors to America’s Promise? I have no idea, because to the best of my knowledge nobody in the media ever launched an extensive investigation into these matters. That’s the value of the presumption of innocence, something Hillary Clinton has never been able to enjoy during her time in the national spotlight.

I think this is a pretty fair viewpoint, even though the guy is straining pretty hard to take it right up to the edge of Tu Quoque without tipping over into it completely. 

I think this shit happens too much, and I think it's harder and harder to rationalize away disturbing thoughts of how corrupt it seems to be.

Like the author says, the tendency to believe the worst about most politicians, and Hillary in particular, has been in place for a long time.  But that just makes me wonder if The Clinton Foundation thing is a good example of the famous Too-Cute-By-Half that seems to characterize the Clinton gang.

Some Brain Puking:

People want something from Hillary's State Dept.
They call and ask.
They either get what they want or they don't (it looks sketchy, but nobody's made any direct Quid Pro Quo connections).
Anyway, the call goes thru to somebody on Hillary's staff, and after an appropriate length of time, the caller is contacted by The Foundation, there's a low-key soft-sell pitch, and before they know it, they're writing out a nice fat check.
So the Lithuanian Labor Minister gets a little help from the US Dept of State for his niece's visa problem, and 7 or 8 months later, Uganda gets some water filters with the money the grateful Minister donated to The Clinton Foundation.
Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

So instead of Pay To Play (which is illegal), they've reversed it to Play Then Pay (which isn't; not really anyway) - and if anybody makes a big squawk, well, "just look at all the great things we've done with the money" - which they have, and which makes it harder to flat-out reject the "How Things Work In The Real World" narrative.

Today's Tweet

The fact that Anthony Weiner is still alive should put to rest any notion that the Clintons actually have people killed.

— YOUNG MT (@MXTracy66) August 29, 2016

There is practically no way any "politician" could ever be more aptly named than Anthony Weiner.

On Paul Le Page

I'm not saying I know for sure, but I don't think I'm willing to take Google Translate's word for it.

I typed in this: "LePage"
And got this: "unashamed and hateful asshole."

Today's Tweet

Blaming Obama for "dividing" the country is a little like... #kaepernick #ISupportKaepernickBecause Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/nFp4z6H8QU

— Progressives4Hillary (@Hillary_45) August 29, 2016

Today's GIF