Today's Fuck This Shit

I'm not completely down with everything he said, but Joe LaPointe gets it mostly right in an OpEd at Detroit Free Press.

hat tip = TPM

Today's Keith

I was going to say at least this one got pushed off the front page by the murders at Mother Emmanual, but really it's part and parcel of the same problem.  Which will stay a problem and which will continue to give rise to a variety of manifestations of that problem until we find the courage to look at it straight-on and deal with our shit.

Today's Eternal Sadness

9 dead church-goers in Charleston SC.

Nine people were shot to death by a white man at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, the Charleston Police Department confirmed at a news conference early Thursday.

Calling it "the worst night of my career," Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said the gunman entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a prayer meeting and opened fire. Eight people were found dead at the scene. Two others were transported to a hospital, where one later died.

None of the victims has been named by police. However, State House Minority leader Todd Rutherford said the church's pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, was among those killed, according to the Associated Press.

-and-
Can you say, "tone-deaf, Guv"?

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) also issued a statement, and urged people to pray for the victims and their families.

“While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

I'll now indulge myself in a little speculation while insisting on calling it an attempt to think a little more generally: We don't know what moved this one asshole to do this one incredibly shitty thing, but I'm thinking maybe part of that motivation has something to do with "conservatives" almost constantly setting Americans against one another by promoting policies that require Us-vs-Them choices (ie: "We don't have the money to take care of all those veterans because your Democrat neighbor is giving it all to The Welfare Moochers".  -or-  "Teachers are just a bunch of elitist union thugs with college diplomas, and they're teaching the children of hard-working patriotic Americans to hate Jesus."), and then shrugging it all off when something bad happens because of all that, saying, "Whoa - who coulda knowed?"

And then this:

A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense.

The left-leaning Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves.

According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available.

That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned.

First, I really don't know why this comes as any kinda news to anybody at this point.

But anyway, secondly, the American Civil War didn't end in 1865 - partly because it started a long time before 1861.  We just take breaks once in a while.  The shit is never very far below the surface, and it bubbles up in an amazing variety of ways.

And third - as kind of a recap - I just have to wonder about a certain brand of politics that  advocates violence (in a subtle plausibly deniable way of course) while refusing to limit the principle means of violence, and then pretends to be confused as to the connections that seem so obvious between the two.

Chicken Fried Humor

This is the one guy from that Redneck Tour thing who could bring it without needing any victim other than himself.

Plane Crash --Ron White

Today's Maher

He starts it off right, but then it gets a little side-tracked with the standard malarkey about "bad apples" - there was one bad cop, but what about the 11 other cops who didn't do anything wrong?  Yeah OK, except for the fact that when one of the cops is the problem, you gotta be able to count on the other cops to deal with that problem cop.  Those other 11 cops did everything wrong when they failed to address the real problem in that situation.

So no, Mr Dahmer - I'm sorry, but you don't get any credit for the teenaged boys you didn't murder.

A little less gauzy obfuscation and a lot more harsh reality please.

Up-Chuck Todd

Driftglass and BlueGal take this guy apart on a fairly regular basis, but here's my short take on what I think is the fundamental problem with Chuck and Press The Meat:

He says he knows that sometimes his guests are straight-up pandering; that they don't believe what they're saying; and that "off the record", they admit as much, cuz hey - it's just politics, y'know.  But he "can't" really ask the tough questions because it's a commercial network and if he gets too snarky-barky, he loses access and his big-deal mover-shaker guests won't come back.

So there it is.  Chuck Todd says the business model at NBC requires him to provide a national broadcast platform so crooked politicians can lie to us repeatedly with near-total impunity.  That's his job.  And if he ever questions them too closely, they'll stop coming on his show, which means they wouldn't have the chance to continue telling us all those lies - and that would be - bad(?)

The Professional Left Podcast:

And here's the interview they mentioned (The Moment with Brian Koppelman):

A Tommy Tune

Questions --Tommy Emmanual

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Learning Curves Are For Pussies

hat tip = TPM

Today In Woo

(paraphrasing):

"Teaching one religion to children is called indoctrination.  Teaching all religions to children is call inoculation." --Matt Dillahunty

Here's what bugs me about the religiousness of a certain brand of TheoPolitics in USAmerica Inc right now:

Kids go off to school and they learn about Evolution, which eventually and necessarily requires them to question their religious training, especially if it's been all about Gardens and talking snakes and Jesus walking his pet velociraptor in the park etc.  Well, sometimes that leads to trouble because their parents have been so busy trying to make sure those kids are securely bubble-wrapped in dogma, they're gonna make sure the next school board meeting turns into Night Of The Living Dead.

And yes, you have the right to know what's going on in the classroom, and yes, you have the right to be heard when the curriculum decisions are made.  But let's not get off into the weeds, cuz here's the point: 

Let's say I've taught my kid that the world is a flat disc under a crystal dome, and it's being carried thru the ether on the back of giant turtle.  Then one day the kid comes home from school and he tells me his teacher has come up with this thing called "math" and he says the numbers lead him to believe the world is a sphere.  As a living thinking human possessed of a living thinking brain, do I conclude there must be something wrong with that stupid teacher and you can bet that stupid school's gonna hear from my lawyers?  Or am I honor-bound to consider that maybe there're things I don't know about - things I may find useful - and need to learn?

Science starts with a hypothesis, tests it against what's already been reasonably proven to be true, and then draws a conclusion as to what's now most likely to be true given this new information at this point in time.

Religion starts with an arbitrary conclusion, and then has to manufacture evidence (ie: make shit up) to support it.  The kicker: You don't really think it was simple coincidence that GW Bush made way too many of his disastrous policy decisions based on that model of "thinking" didya?

Ya'll knew all that already - but it bears repeating.

Openly Secular

Iraq-mire

NYT:

WASHINGTON — In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province, Iraq, and to send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.

The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a plan that follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.

The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.

The additional American troops will arrive as early as this summer, a United States official said, and will focus on training Sunni fighters with the Iraqi Army. The official called the coming announcement “an adjustment to try to get the right training to the right folks.”

--and today's Understatement-That-Makes-It-Sound-Like-Ya-Really-Don't-Give-A-Fuck award goes to:

The United States Central Command’s emphasis on retaking Mosul depended critically on efforts to retrain the Iraqi Army, which appear to have gotten off to a slow start. Some Iraqi officials also thought the schedule for taking Mosul was unrealistic, and some bridled when an official from the Central Command told reporters in February that an assault to capture the city was planned for this spring.

A slow start - from 2003.  12 years.  That's not a slow start.  That's not a start of any kind.  That's an ending, and it's called "petrification"; or "putrefaction"; or some other term we use to indicate that it's over.

Iraq has no army, and Iraq has nothing out of which anybody can hope to build an army; because there is no Iraq.  Iraq exists only as the memory of a few arbitrary lines the British drew on a piece of paper 90-some years ago.  It's Done. It's Kaput. It's Finished. It's Dead Dead and Fucking Dead.  Give it up already.

And gee - it's almost as if somebody put the whole thing in motion on purpose; like they figured on it being one big unfixable FUBAR; and they'd leave it for the Dems to waste time and resources trying to tidy up for a while; and when enough Rubes are ready for the Etch-A-Sketch move, they amp up the rhetoric with, "well - it's Obama's problem now - been Obama's problem for a while - he can't just blame it all on Cheney forever - looks like leadership trouble to me - y'know the Bush Doctrine is good policy, but Obama's incompetence blah blah blah..."

This is a very standard play. 

• Fuck something up
• Point at it and say, "Hey look - it's all fucked up"
• "I have a plan..."

But let's be sure not to talk about any of that.  And let's definitely not concentrate on how our mighty military will once again be showing us their Selflessly Courageous Awesomeness by going back to some desert shithole to fight and to bleed an to die so Halliburton and Royal Dutch Shell and Northrup Grumman can add a coupla nickels to their Quarterly Earnings Reports, and then turn around and use a good buncha those hard-earned Blood Dollars to create an even more reliable generation of Coin-Operated Politicians.

Let's just keep blabbin' about what a wonderment it is that there can be so many voters in the big squishy middle who can't quite make up their minds about all this.

Fuck me silly, Bubba - I just can't stand this shit sometimes.

The Golden Arrow

A classic from 2007:

Special note 1: starting at about 02:15, she makes the point that among the 100 biggest economies in the world, 51 of 'em are Corporations - 8 years ago in 2007.  

Things have "improved" since then, with the number of Corporations in those top 100 spots dwindling to 37 (as of about 2012 or 14).  So, OK, but take a look at how the smart money has been playing its hand of late, and you might notice that the power those companies can wield in terms of controlling interests in governments has increased (by orders of magnitude me thinks) - so the actual number of dollars in those "economies" isn't as significant as the fact that they've been very busily ensuring themselves of a reliable military capability (eg).

And how do they do that?  Well, in terms that are admittedly kinda simplistic, they don't have to own the whole government when they can own several of the key people who run the government.

Out of these 10 randomly selected folks: John McCain, Bruce Rauner, Lindsey Graham, John Boehner, Dianne Feinstein, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Tom Cotton and Jack Lew - which ones do you think would go against the opinions of the people who spent the money to put them in their positions of power in the first place?

Special note 2: Externalizing The Costs - about 08:15 - is where she addresses the bullshit notions of Supply Side Economics.

Anyway, what really and truly bugs me is the fact that we're still not talking about sustainability as a guiding principle.  I can see some efforts here and there, but it looks more like a fashion thing than it does a real shift in how we do things.

Change is scary, but the like the man said, it's either change or die.  So yeah.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire Magazine:

It doesn't matter how many people climb into the Republican clown car or how close Bernie Sanders is polling in Iowa. The deep-seated rot that has been injected quite deliberately into our elections is the story from which all others flow. The primary and fundamental debate must be between those who profit from the corruption, those who simply accept it and opt out, and those people who want to reverse the slow suicide of democratic government. God help us all if the latter group doesn't win.

At the risk of being just the tiniest bit too fucking obvious, the results of an election literally mean nothing if the process itself is crooked.

In whatever despotic shithole you can name - Saddams' Iraq or Pol Pot's Kampuchea or Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, et cetera ad nauseam - the election returns are always lopsided wins for the strong-arming dickhead du jour.

Cutting to the chase here - if I can manufacture a landslide, I can manufacture a horse race.  

So I have to ask myself, in a country where ⅔ of the voters are clearly in favor of 3 or 4 or 5 top issues, and when it's also fairly clear that generally the candidate of one party agrees with them and the candidate from the other party doesn't - how do we keep getting these down-to-the-wire-by-a-nose "victories"?

Seems more than a little curious to me.

Perspective

Via HuffPo:

Interesting that "war" isn't being fought quite the same these days.  Where it used to be all about sticks and rocks and guns and bombs and hyper-active teenagers blowin' shit up, now we use lawyers and trade agreements and Techie Hacker Interns and 30-something MBAs to keep the cost down.  Although one thing seems never to change - there's always a very aggressive media effort to make us think we're all gettin' a helluva deal.

But Conquest by Corporation does no less violence to the populace, it's just that the  infrastructure is left more or less intact - it's much more cost-effective that way - and it looks a lot better on TV.  I hear "Trade Agreement" now, and I'm thinking "White-Collar Neutron Bomb".

Of course, the resulting immiseration effect is almost exactly the same because you can't do greater violence to somebody than to push them down into the abject poverty that has always grown out of the kind of Run-Away Darwinian Capitalism being put in place by Coin-Operated Politicians.  And that last sentence should be more like "being put back in place..." because the world is starting to look a whole lot like the world of the 18th century - you remember, way way back when we decided not to play that fucked up game here; when we promised ourselves to work hard at being the exception to it.

So, trying not to go Full Cynical, and to maintain some glimmer of hope - even if it's only a hope for people I won't live long enough to know - my standard admonition still holds:  A wide variety of assholes have been out to conquer the world for 20,000 generations.  But somehow, the world remains undefeated.

Too Obvious?

Watch this:

...and try not to think of this:

But always always always try to remember that nobody's trying to save the planet.  The planet doesn't need saving any more than it "needs" people - or any other life form for that matter.

What we're trying to do is to keep the joint from becoming uninhabitable for our own bad selves.

The decisions we make about work and family determine how our kids will live.  

The "bigger" decisions we make about the economy and about politicians and governments and about the biosphere and how we all co-exist in (and with) the natural world - those decisions are all about how our kids will die.

Gotta start making some smarter choices.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Towards The Meritocracy

I have nothing against some good and healthy Intergenerational Wealth Transfer - it's an important tool in building strong communities.  And it's worked wonders for everybody who's been born into White Middle Class America because of course, our system is the perfect mechanism for separating the people who're smart and rich from the people who're lazy and stupid.

To paraphrase: Capitalism has not failed us; you have failed Capitalism.

But "good and healthy" is not what we're doing with the No-Taxes-For-Rich-People-Ever policy drift, and it should be really obvious that it's not what we're doing, now that we've been trying to do it that way for 35 years (rapidly accelerating for the last 15), and we've ended up having to spend billions of precious few tax dollars to subsidize millions of Americans who can't quite make it working their asses off at Wal-Mart just because we refuse to elect politicians who have the balls to tell Alice Walton she'll have to figure how to eke out a living on something less than the interest she "earns" on her personal fortune of more than THIRTY-FUCKING-BILLION-DOLLARS.

Tax the fuck outa the estates of the UberRich and we won't get any more Legacy-Fuck-Pukes like George W Bush as "president". 

Call it the Paris Hilton Prevention Act, and make sure it never sunsets.