Random Toons

You Are Not So Smart

Another one I stumbled across yesterday:

The Narrative Bias --David McRaney

You Are Not So Smart is a blog I started to explore self delusion. Like lots of people, I used to forward sensational news stories without skepticism and think I was a smarty pants just because I did a little internet research. Little did I know about confirmation bias and self-enhancing fallacies, and once I did, I felt very, very stupid. I still feel that way, but now I can make you feel that way too.

Here is how the blog started: One week, I saw both the Derren Brown person swap and the Invisible Gorilla videos on YouTube, and they blew my mind. Also, at that time, I was marathoning Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! on DVD. I felt like there was a common thread in all of that, something about how flawed perception and reasoning goes unnoticed because we are all so unwittingly overconfident. It reminded me of the experiments that seemed to stir up the most conversation in class when I was taking lots of college psychology courses, and it all just clicked. That would make a cool blog.

Today's Quote

"The great irony is that the only way to be a Conservative Christian is to be a Raving Liberal." --John Fugelsang

Today's PSAs

A few from Right Wing Watch (via SoundCloud):






And an ad for ConStar



hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Toon

Just a reminder - "both sides do it" is a good way to keep us from making the kinds of changes we need to make.

Echoes

“...you know, I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes — and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers — and they stomped the floor.” --George Wallace, reflecting on how he won in 1962 after losing in the previous cycle

Via AlterNet - they have an excerpt from a new book by Ian Haney-Lopez - "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class."(Oxford University Press, 2014).

The story of dog whistle politics begins with George Wallace. But it does not start with Wallace as he stood that inauguration day. Rather, the story focuses on who Wallace was before, and on whom he quickly became.

Before that January day, Wallace had not been a rabid segregationist; indeed, by Southern standards, Wallace had been a racial moderate. He had sat on the board of trustees of a prominent black educational enterprise, the Tuskegee Institute. He had refused to join the walkout of Southern delegates from the 1948 Democratic convention when they protested the adoption of a civil rights platform. As a trial court judge, he earned a reputation for treating blacks civilly — a breach of racial etiquette so notable that decades later J.L. Chestnut, one of the very few black lawyers in Alabama at the time, would marvel that in 1958 “George Wallace was the first judge to call me ‘Mr.’ in a courtroom.” The custom had been instead to condescendingly refer to all blacks by their first name, whatever their age or station. When Wallace initially ran for governor in 1958, the NAACP endorsed him; his opponent had the blessing of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the fevered atmosphere of the South, roiled by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forbidding school segregation, the moderate Wallace lost in his first campaign for governor. Years later, the victor would reconstruct the campaign, distilling a simple lesson: the “primary reason I beat [Wallace] was because he was considered soft on the race question at the time. That’s the primary reason.” This lesson was not lost on Wallace, and in turn, would reshape American politics for the next half-century. On the night he lost the 1958 election, Wallace sat in a car with his cronies, smoking a cigar, rehashing the loss, and putting off his concession speech. Finally steeling himself, Wallace eased opened the car door to go inside and break the news to his glum supporters. He wasn’t just going to accept defeat, though, he was going to learn from it. As he snuffed out his cigar and stepped into the evening, he turned back: “Well, boys,” he vowed, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

So instead of staying true to his own principles, and understanding that his constituency needed leadership to help move them forward with integration, and to learn some new things about how to treat people with respect and humanity, Wallace only learns how to win elections by appealing to the baser instincts of the tribe.

And the kicker - in case you were wondering why "those dumbass southern rednecks" get to run things? First, try to remember the south has no kinda corner on the market when it comes to rednecks; cuz second, in the week following the episode of Wallace trying to defy Washington:

More than 100,000 telegrams and letters flooded the office of the Alabama governor. More than half of them were from outside of the South. Did they condemn him? Five out of every 100 did. The other 95 percent praised his brave stand in the schoolhouse doorway.

So, more than 50,000 telegrams - many from Illinois and Massachusetts and Colorado and Oregon - came in to Montgomery saying "Yay, George" and "Way to go, Mr Wallace" and "We're with you".  These things do not go unnoticed by the people who help politicians talk us into handing them power.

Here's the Kindle link at Amazon:

If It's Love You're Lookin' For

A few from Concrete Blonde

Joey




Scene Of The Perfect Crime




Mexican Moon

Persuasion

All O' Dis "New" Stuff

I spent some time feelin' a little sheepish if not outright stupid for buying the occasional Leon Redbone record or whatever; I guess it's OK that I saved 'em after all(?)

I don't even know what to call this.
Neo Roots?
American Mid-Folk/Pre-Swing Revival?
Middle Class White Kid Musical Masturbation?

Maybe I should just try to relax and enjoy some solid execution of some really fun tunes.

Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three (via NPR Tiny Desk Concerts)



hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Pokey's bio

Today's Quote

...and also Today's Wingnut; and also Today's Too Self-Absorbed To Be Self-Aware; as well as a good followup on What About Bob:

I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, “For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran. Joe, you be my witness.” I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would ever write about such sensitive matters.

That's a quick little excerpt from the memoirs written by the obviously irony-challenged Bob Gates.

hat tips = Balloon Juice and Dave Weigel

The New Guy

From God's Perspective --Bo Burnham



Burnham started out just putting up homemade vids on YouTube, and because he's pretty damn good, he managed to cut thru the clutter, and here he is.

BTW - this is a clip from a 1-hour show called "What".  He uploaded the whole thing to make it available on YouTube for free - that's the story I got anyway.

(hat tip = #1 son)

Some of his stuff on Amazon:

Today's Pix

We Don't Soldier So Good

The world's tax dollars hard at work.

Today's Tune

Waiting --Calum Graham

Today's Uber Patriot

From The Columbus Dispatch, via Charlie Pierce:

An Indiana National Guardsman was arrested outside Columbus on New Year’s Day after a state trooper found nearly 50 bombs and the blueprints for a Navy SEAL training facility inside his car, the Madison County prosecutor said yesterday.

Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, also had a remote-control device to detonate the bombs, Madison County Prosecutor Stephen Pronai said. Boguslawski’s civilian job is as a groundskeeper at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana. Prosecutors could not say definitively yesterday whether the blueprints in his car were for the facility where he worked.
Boguslawski also had a bulletproof vest in his car, Pronai said.

“He said something to the trooper about making a bomb vest,” Pronai said.
Lt. Col. Cathy Van Bree, a spokeswoman for the Indiana National Guard, said Boguslawski is a specialist in the guard who does intelligence analysis and has top-secret clearance.

Pronai said Boguslawski, who is from Moores Hill, Ind., appeared to be heading to Indiana when a state trooper clocked him going 85 mph in a 70 mph zone on I-70. When the trooper came back to the car to give Boguslawski a ticket, he saw the handle of a gun between his legs.

The trooper ordered Boguslawski out of the car and called for backup. Investigators found three more guns in the car — all loaded — and 48 bombs. They also found material to make more explosives.

Pronai said most of the bombs were small. He said investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have searched Boguslawski’s house, and that local and federal investigators are trying to determine whether Boguslawski planned to attack the military facility. They are also combing through a computer, cameras and GPS found in his car.

Boguslawski is charged in Madison County with one count of manufacturing explosives, a second-degree felony. A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for Friday. He is being held at Tri-County Jail in Mechanicsburg in lieu of a $1 million bond.

Somebody please enlighten me as to how this dipwad from the American MidWest is in any discernible way materially different from any randomly selected Taliban/Al Qaeda dipwad from anywhere in South Asia or the Middle East.

And BTW - when Uncle Charlie talks, we should listen:

The argument really isn't about guns, per se. The argument is about a well-financed, and profitable in return, marketing strategy by weapons manufacturers and their sublets in Congress, and the media bubble that they all inhabit, through which people are fed a constant diet of indigestible paranoid crud about the government and the people in it. This isn't all coming directly from some crackpot on a shortwave in upper Michigan. It's the barely concealed subtext of everything that Wayne LaPierre has said in public in his entire career. It's what's behind the winks from Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods, who brags in her book-like product about giving a gun for Christmas as an act of "civil disobedience." There is a culture being created, and there are reckless, opportunistic people who are turning a buck on it, and not everybody marinating in that culture is necessarily the most well-balanced jar on the shelf. This isn't about guns. It is about weaponry. It is about why someone would arm themselves so luxuriously, and how they came to believe it was necessary. I think we've been awfully damned lucky so far.