What if I told you plants are farming us? What if they give us food and oxygen just so we grow and then become fertilizer for them when we die?
Oct 29, 2016
Oh, By The Fucking Way
The day before yesterday was Teddy Roosevelt's birthday - he would've been 158 years old. Yay, TR.
Now, how do you suppose we managed to celebrate the Father of Public Lands; the guy who invented the National Park?
We acquitted and released the Bundy Gang, sending a swell message to the rest of Y'all Qaeda (thanks, tengrain) and every fucking yahoo with a gun, a bad attitude and a 7th grader's understanding of the US Constitution that it's open season on the BLM and pretty much all the other institutions having grown out of a deep abiding respect for the land and for the commitment that your rights don't include doing whatever the law can't force you not to do because you're gullible enough to swallow every little piece of shit that floats by on the intertoobz.
One more thing - Nullification has a distinct aroma, and it seems to be strongly wafting in from points west. You thought the 90s were pretty fucked up? Hang loose and just watch what comes next.
Cosmic Muffin have mercy.
Now, how do you suppose we managed to celebrate the Father of Public Lands; the guy who invented the National Park?
We acquitted and released the Bundy Gang, sending a swell message to the rest of Y'all Qaeda (thanks, tengrain) and every fucking yahoo with a gun, a bad attitude and a 7th grader's understanding of the US Constitution that it's open season on the BLM and pretty much all the other institutions having grown out of a deep abiding respect for the land and for the commitment that your rights don't include doing whatever the law can't force you not to do because you're gullible enough to swallow every little piece of shit that floats by on the intertoobz.
One more thing - Nullification has a distinct aroma, and it seems to be strongly wafting in from points west. You thought the 90s were pretty fucked up? Hang loose and just watch what comes next.
Cosmic Muffin have mercy.
Oct 28, 2016
Today's Podcast
...and an empty bag of fucks that Barack Obama left behind.
Starting at about 39:40 - Stimulus and Keynesian Spending will happen (soon, more or less) because the bankers and the investor class need it, therefor demand it. The Bond Market will drive it. Maybe that's partly what those Wall Street speeches were about(?)
And Barack Obama hitting the trail to campaign for down-ballot candidates like a fucking boss.
You can't change anybody else's heart - you change policy - you enact laws that change people's behavior - and over time, those hearts will change themselves.
Starting at about 39:40 - Stimulus and Keynesian Spending will happen (soon, more or less) because the bankers and the investor class need it, therefor demand it. The Bond Market will drive it. Maybe that's partly what those Wall Street speeches were about(?)
And Barack Obama hitting the trail to campaign for down-ballot candidates like a fucking boss.
You can't change anybody else's heart - you change policy - you enact laws that change people's behavior - and over time, those hearts will change themselves.
Nowhere To Hide
Everything gets pushed down the priorities list because it's Election Season - and of course, it's always Election Season any more.
The fact that we can't quite figure out what's the right thing to do here is one of the things that's getting people killed, as it hastens the demise of our little experiment in self-government.
We can't just walk away from the need for energy - even the shitty fossil fuels kind of energy right now - but if the Acquisition Cost for that energy includes poisoning the water and the air and the food - which means sick and dying people, which means fewer customers to buy the shit you're trying to sell - then what the fuck is the point?
We can't take the Human Cost out of it, and the proof of that should be obvious - without humans, there are no customers, and since every business is Customer-Centric, every business proposition without humans is unworkable. Cuz it's long been solidly established that even tho' you love to fantasize about it once in a while, it's rude to kill the customers.
Make a deal with the companies, and with the directors and managers who benefit from the pipeline. A deal that includes a requirement for every decision-maker and every decision-influencer to show up (with their wives and kids) onsite every month and chug 32 ounces of water taken directly from the wells their operations might impact.
We should prob'ly include politicians in that one as well.
You wanna be the guy calling the shots? Fine - you get to live or die (literally if need be) with the outcome.
Mike has spoken. So let it be written; so let it be done.
Pussy Riot (NSFW)
Tolokonnikova said she recorded the song in February with the US musician, guitarist and producer Dave Sitek, whom she described as “one of the biggest feminists I’ve ever met”. The video was shot in Los Angeles.
Tolokonnikova said Sitek was inspired by her phrase: “Does your vagina have a brand?”. “So it made total sense to write a song which celebrates [the] vagina with him,” she said.
“This song could be considered an answer to Trump. But I believe the idea of powerful female sexuality is much bigger than any populist megalomaniac man … Vagina is bigger than Trump.”
The Russian punk band’s latest video Straight Outta Vagina, released on Tuesday, features Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova wearing white clerical robes and trademark balaclava, plus a chorus line of men and women sitting in toilet cubicles and standing at urinals. There is also an inflatable duck.
In typically provocative style, the video includes the lyrics: “If your vagina lands in prison, then the whole world’s going to listen.” And: “Don’t play stupid, don’t play dumb, vagina’s where you’re really from.”
Slice-N-Dice
Getting a majority of the votes doesn't necessarily mean you get a majority representation.
WaPo:
Anyway it seems the marketing geniuses have taken over the political process just like everything else.
A recent analysis by political scientists John Sides and Eric McGhee suggests that Democrats are poised to win a majority of votes in U.S. House contests but walk away with a minority of seats — again. As I wrote last week, a big factor in this odd disparity is the way some Republican state legislatures have gerrymandered congressional districts in a way that gives them far more House seats than their popular vote totals would suggest.
For a refresher on how gerrymandering happens, recall that the Constitution mandates that every 10 years, seats in the U.S. House are doled out to states according to state populations, as determined by the decennial census. In 2010, for instance, it worked out that a state got one house seat for roughly every 710,000 inhabitants. States have to assign each of their House seats to a congressional district. This requires drawing a map that splits a state up into a number of geographic regions, each with a population of about 710,000.
In most states, this process is done by the state legislature with the approval of the governor. So you see where the potential for shenanigans starts to creep in: If the statehouse and governor's mansion are controlled by the same political party, there's not much to stop them from drawing congressional districts in a way that maximizes that party's representation in the U.S. Congress.But first - is there a better name for a Political Scientist than "Sides"?
Anyway it seems the marketing geniuses have taken over the political process just like everything else.
Oct 27, 2016
Charlie Looks Inside
Charlie Pierce (the whole banana):
Thursday's required reading on the subject of Rats: How They Won't Fuck Themselves comes from Bloomberg News, courtesy of Josh Green and Sasha Issenberg, who were allowed inside the guts of the Trump campaign—"Only the best e.coli. Great e.coli!"—to see what's actually going on with it beyond rallies and baseball caps. What they found should scare the hell out of two groups that otherwise have little contact with each other—people who care about the health of our democracy, and Republicans.
As to the former, the big noisy takeaway is an admission from "a senior campaign official" that the primary goal of the actual Trump campaign is to suppress the votes of people who have demonstrated a deep immunity to the appeal of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago.
"We have three major voter suppression operations under way," says a senior official. They're aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump's invocation at the debate of Clinton's WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are "super predators" is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
OK, so this is nasty and distasteful and dangerous, and it's a wonder that John Lewis doesn't just show up for work some morning with an ax in his hand and murder in his eye. But it can't really be surprising. Suppressing minority voters—rather than, say, earning their support with something beyond "What have you got to lose?"—is now as conventional a piece of Republican electoral strategy as tax cuts and fetus-fondling are.
This is true at all levels, from the local polling place all the way up to the Supreme Court, and has been for quite some time. Hell, it was how William Rehnquist got his start in Republican politics and he went on to a sweet career, if I recall correctly. So having a senior official come clean on it is a nice detail to have, and it will make a lot of noise and, if American democracy continues its historic run of luck, the revelation will piss off enough people at whom the strategy is aimed to bury it under a landslide. I'm not betting heavy either way on that one.Meanwhile, our buddies at Oath Keepers wish to remind their members to do the Voter Intimidation shit in a totally non-intimidating way.
The Libel Bully
The ABA is a group that's almost exclusively lawyers - high-profile and high-compensation people - but they were worried Trump would sue them if they criticized him in print.
And Eiron did a spit take.
Vox:
And Eiron did a spit take.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the American Bar Association refused to publish a report that it had commissioned on Donald Trump’s tendency to file meritless lawsuits. The punchline? ABA's in-house lawyers were afraid Trump might file a meritless lawsuit over the contents of the report.
An ABA spokesperson now denies that the organization quashed the report. (It was not an official ABA inquiry but a thorough article by the LA-based solo practitioner Susan E. Seager, a longtime media lawyer, written for a publication of the media lawyer subgroup of the ABA.) The spokesperson insists that the ABA's editorial and legal staff simply offered its professional opinion on changes that ought to be made to reduce its supposed partisan tenor, ad hominem tone, and — yes — its profile as a target for a suit. Withdrawing the piece rather than negotiating over changes was the authors' call, the ABA says.
Seager, however, says it was clear that the editorial instructions were nonnegotiable, and David Bodney, the immediate past chair of the ABA's media law subgroup, backs her up. He tells Vox in an email: "In my experience, the ABA's attempt to dilute Ms. Seager's article was extraordinary, if not unprecedented, and demonstrates the importance of lawyers standing up against actions taken under the guise of our libel laws that would chill freedom of expression."
What follows is Seager’s fully footnoted original article, including the vivid language and headline the ABA brass vetoed. —Christopher Shea, Editor of The Big Idea
Today's Tweet
Trump’s rigged election conspiracies are the product of years of conservative "voter fraud" fear-mongering and it threatens our democracy: pic.twitter.com/LeZqtJXvUR— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 26, 2016
Oct 26, 2016
Color Me Unsurprised
The Daily Beast:
It's hard to keep your money out of the hands of the bad guys, but when you're basically making your living slagging the bad guys, you need to make a better effort not to help fund them with your investment dollars.
Cuz, y'know - uh - Green Party(?)
IT'S THE FUCKING GREEN PARTY, Jill.
Green Party Presidential Nominee Jill Stein has largely based her campaign on her uncompromising positions on the environment, opposition to big banks and Wall Street, defense contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry. But an analysis of her financial disclosures, which she was required to file as a presidential candidate, show that she is heavily invested in the very industries that she maligns the most and as a result of her investments, she has built significant wealth.--and--
...Stein has invested $995,011 to $2.2 million in funds such as the Vanguard 500 fund that maintain significant stakes in Exxon and other energy companies like Chevron, Duke Energy, Conoco Phillips, and Toho Gas, a Japanese company that engages in the sale of natural gas, tar, and coke, a fuel made from coal.--and--
Stein has invested roughly $1.2 to $2.65 million in funds like the TIAA-CREF Equity Index that have big stakes in the financial services industry. Holdings in these funds include big banks like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank as major parts of their investment portfolios. Five of the funds that Stein invests in maintain large positions in Wells Fargo Bank, which has come under fire recently amid charges that its employees being pressured to force clients to open up fraudulent new accounts.--and--
In one of the handful of direct stock investments Stein holds, she listed between $50,001 and $100,000 in the pharmaceutical giant Merck, which paid a record fine for over-billing Medicaid. She has also invested $1,130,010 to $2,400,000 in funds that maintain significant stakes in Pfizer, Novartis, Johnson and Johnson, and Allergan.And it just kinda goes on from there, including Big Tobacco and Defense Giants like Raytheon.
It's hard to keep your money out of the hands of the bad guys, but when you're basically making your living slagging the bad guys, you need to make a better effort not to help fund them with your investment dollars.
Cuz, y'know - uh - Green Party(?)
IT'S THE FUCKING GREEN PARTY, Jill.
Myth Busting
The point to remember is that you help people by helping them, which sounds like the big "Duh", but it can be really hard to figure that one out.
What should be the easy part is understanding that you're not helping anybody if you kick 'em when they're down. (aka: First, do no harm)
VICE:
Chances are, if you have been affected by drug addiction or just watched enough reality TV, you've heard something about the concept of "codependency." It's the idea that partners and relatives of addicted people basically have a disease just like their loved ones—leading them to "enable" the problem by preventing addicts from "hitting bottom." After gaining currency in the 1980s, the concept is now infiltrating America's latest national conversation about heroin addiction.
The only problem is that it is inaccurate, unscientific, and harmful.
Even so, the classic text on the subject—the 1986 self-help book Codependent No More—remains on the Amazon best seller list for addictions. A new reality show focused on intervening in so-called codependent relationships premiered this year. And this crazy election season has seen seemingly endless talk of how Hillary Clinton "enabled" her husband Bill's alleged sexual addiction. (Trump's wives somehow get a pass.)
The good news is that the addictions field is slowly coming around to the idea that treatment should be based on evidence, not anecdote. Even so, care for families and the rhetoric around it remains stubbornly trapped in the past.Evidence, not Anecdote.
Catchy.
Maybe somebody could propose it as a replacement for the national motto.
A Very Short Play
Women: No Transgender has ever attacked anyone in a public bathroom. It's just not something we're worried about.
GOP: That makes no difference! We must keep women and girls safe from the sexual predators no matter what!
Women: We do need to do something about the disturbingly high incidence of rape on college campuses.
GOP: Have you tried not dressing like a slut?
FADE OUT
hat tip = Vicki W-E on Facebook
GOP: That makes no difference! We must keep women and girls safe from the sexual predators no matter what!
Women: We do need to do something about the disturbingly high incidence of rape on college campuses.
GOP: Have you tried not dressing like a slut?
FADE OUT
hat tip = Vicki W-E on Facebook
Meanwhile, Back In The World
Charlie Pierce:
More accurately, migration. The herds follow the food, and the food follows the water. As more places become less human-friendly, those humans have to go someplace else.
Unfortunately, we're showing ourselves to be unwilling to do much to prevent the circumstances that drive people away from their traditional homelands, which seems to be leading us to believe the only thing we can do is to react to a shitty situation by turning USAmerica Inc into a giant Gun Club where the object is simply to keep everybody else out.
As the presidential campaign staggers to its conclusion, I think we can fairly sum up the positions of the respective political parties on the climate crisis in the following way.
Republican: It might be real. It might not be. It might be the Chinese. Middle Ages. Grant-sucking lab rats. But, if it is real, it isn't worth doing anything about because sooooo much money.
Democratic: It's real. It's happening. You hate science. Here are some solution-like proposals that prove that we know it's real and that it's happening and that we love science with a love undying. And you hate science.Repubs may have hit on the one big thing about everything that'll count over the next 25 years - immigration.
More accurately, migration. The herds follow the food, and the food follows the water. As more places become less human-friendly, those humans have to go someplace else.
Unfortunately, we're showing ourselves to be unwilling to do much to prevent the circumstances that drive people away from their traditional homelands, which seems to be leading us to believe the only thing we can do is to react to a shitty situation by turning USAmerica Inc into a giant Gun Club where the object is simply to keep everybody else out.
Eventually though - what's the fuckin' point? We won't be defending anything worth saving.
Today's Tweet
No one at the rally realized my shirt said AGAINST tr*mp... congrats, y'all played yourselves ✌🏽️✌🏽️✌🏽️ pic.twitter.com/qZ3x1ER8j0— Annie (@AnnieCardelle) October 21, 2016
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