Today's Gun Nut

This points up just how specious the "law-abiding citizen" argument is.  Everybody is a law-abiding citizen right up 'til the instant they stop abiding by the law.

A couple with four children were shot and killed in an argument over dog feces on Monday, police in Texas said.

Officers were called to a shooting at the Sable Ridge Apartments in Dallas at about 8 a.m. Monday.

When officers arrived, they found two people, later identified as 32-year-old Michelle Jackson and 31-year-old Jamie Stafford, dead at the scene from apparent gunshot wounds. An infant inside the couple's apartment was not injured.

After talking with witnesses, police began searching for Chung Kim, a resident of the complex identified by residents as a man who lived in the unit below Stafford and Jackson and was seen leaving the complex after the shooting.

US News on NBCNews.com

Today In Lawlessness

hat tip = Democratic Underground

That Dodge Commercial

I got kinda nauseous when I saw this, but I can admit also to being just a tiny bit impressed by its power.



Now, after a coupla days of Facebook Sharing of this "totally awesome (and not-even-a-little-cynically-manipulative-fantasy-fuck) tribute to The Real 'Murica", some dirty Librul at The Atlantic has to shit in the punch bowl over a few stoopid facts.

The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I'm sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I'd rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy's bizarre antics.

But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.

I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.

Taking one short step beyond the race thing (and remembering the last shot in this video), let's think about what a farm actually looks like here in 2013.  And then maybe we can talk about the simple fact that a farm isn't really a farm anymore - it's a factory.  You don't feed 7 Billion humans on a coupla chickens and a few acres of beans and millet and pygmy cucumbers.

One last thing: until the late 40s, Nostalgia was considered a mental disorder.

Just A Dang Minute

From CBS News:

Authorities stormed an underground bunker in southeastern Alabama Monday, freeing a 5-year-old boy and shooting his captor to death after a week of fruitless negotiations that left authorities convinced the child was in imminent danger.

Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, had taken the child off a school bus after fatally shooting the driver Jan. 29 and was holed up with the child for seven days, authorities said.

An FBI Hostage Rescue team launched the rescue attempt after concerns mounted that Dykes was growing more unstable and presented a growing threat to the boy's safety, a U.S. official told CBS News. At some point during the negotiations, authorities had inserted a camera into the bunker and observed that Dykes had begun brandishing a gun and acting increasingly agitated - signs his mental state was deterioriating. Rescuers stormed the bunker from an entrance at its top, set off a diversionary explosive device and ultimately shot Dykes.

But put yourself in the shoes of that kid's parents for a short moment - some asshole Doomsday Prepper has murdered a school bus driver in the process of kidnapping your son; a coupla phones calls are made and, as if by magic, the cops materialize at your door and they say - oh I dunno - they say something that can easily be paraphrased and boiled down to, "We're from the government and we're here to help you".  Is your first inclination to spit on their shoes and tell 'em to get the fuck off your porch?

Tune For The Day

Over-produced, but nuthin' beats Etta.

The Basic Fallacy

Krugman has a quick one about the argumentative attacks that get thrown at "Liberals":

Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.

This mirror-imaging thing has been effective for a long time, and it's the big reason (I think) for why Democrats get beat even when they have better ideas; why they're seen as weak in the face of political opponents who've got nothing but slander going for them.  Unfortunately, The Mud-Slinger usually wins - especially if he's the first to sling that mud.  Gerrymandering has plenty to do with why Dems couldn't get a majority in The House this time even when they got more votes overall, but the main thing is that way too often, the Repubs have put out some bogus crap - either a false positive for themselves or a false negative for the Dems - and let the already-in-place belief that "both sides do it / they're all the same" do the rest.

Once you've set up the framing that requires this Manichean binary simplicity, it gets easier.  And if you have Press Poodles who're willing to help maintain this false balance between false equivalence and false dichotomy, then you have the required 3-legged stool on which to build the perfectly false reality we kinda find ourselves in right now.

Thanks, Obama

From Jenna Marbles:

Podcast

Decode DC - Some very interesting stuff here.

The idea of protecting people's intellectual property is a ridiculously important one.  You have the right to profit from your own work, and this was built in to our Constitution.  But this guy mentions The Mickey Mouse Provision, which extends Copy Right exclusivity for 75 years after the death of the Copy Right owner.  To me, that's exactly what we weren't supposed to do, because it contributes to the creation and perpetuation of Aristocracy - where the only thing some people have to do for a living is to be born to privilege.  That's not what this joint's supposed to be about.

Music (redux)

Today's Quote

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” --Winston Churchill

That quote came to mind as I was listening to the podcast from The Professional Left.