Can We Chill A Little?

From The Migration Policy Institute:

The reality is this: The United States has resettled 784,000 refugees since September 11, 2001. In those 14 years, exactly three resettled refugees have been arrested for planning terrorist activities—and it is worth noting two were not planning an attack in the United States and the plans of the third were barely credible.

As the more than 4 million refugees who have spilled out of Syria overwhelm neighboring countries and roil Europe, many Americans have been asking what more the United States can and should do to help cope with this crisis. Fewer than 2,000 Syrians have been resettled in this country since the Assad regime’s crackdown on peaceful protests ignited a savage civil war in 2011.

The most common arguments against resettling more Syrian refugees, made by some Republican presidential candidates and members of Congress, is that the resettlement program could be a path for infiltration into the United States by ISIS or other terrorists. But the refugee resettlement program is the least likely avenue for a terrorist to choose. Refugees who are selected for resettlement to the United States go through a painstaking, many-layered review before they are accepted. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, and national intelligence agencies independently check refugees’ biometric data against security databases. The whole process typically takes 18-24 months, with high hurdles for security clearance.

So lemme see - 3 bad guys outa 784,000 is ... uhmm ... less than .0004%

We're gonna let some short-fingered vulgarian like Trump get our panties in a bunch over something that's about as likely to happen as dying in a shark attack at the YMCA in Topeka?

Y'know, that .0004% figure seems to pop up with some regularity.  I'm thinking that's the same number we get when we look empirically at "Voter Fraud"(?)  Hmmm.  I'm not ready to say there's a real pattern, but there seems to be something - a kind of threshold ; or more like a Bullshit Benchmark; an upper limit that indicates that this is so unlikely to happen, it's safe for us to jump all over it and then take credit for "preventing it".

And here's how I see that working now, btw (this keeps Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and certain god-knobbers in bidness, and bidness is fucking great): 

• First, you "warn" the rubes about the stoopidest shit you can think of - radicalized librul UFO pilots are plotting to swoop down on our homes while we're at church and spike our favorite frozen breakfast entrees with MDMA and fluoride so we'll be dull-witted when Obama's secret Muslim Citizen's Patrols break down our doors to confiscate our guns and rape our house pets.
• Wait for a bit, while being diligent and watchful - reporting "further details as we learn them".
• When it's run its course - and you know this because your marketeers and their army of unpaid recently graduated "interns" tell you the donations tied directly to that particular impending disaster start to drop off - you make a splashy presentation about how your good-and-loyal-real-American listeners have once again thwarted the evil genius du jour, and you're just so darned proud (but humbled) to have the privilege of leading and I hafta stop this now before I make myself puke.

And there ya have it.  The less likely something is to actually happen, the more we can expect to be loudly and wildly "warned" about it by people who have nothing more in mind than looking for their next shot at fleecing the rubes.

Try not to be the rube.

Today's Idle Speculation

I remember quite a bit from all that sales training I went thru for all those years, and the big one is that Communications is:

• 10% words
• 20% Tone & Inflection
• 70% Body Language

None of that makes me no kinda special or expert or nuthin', but when something like this pops up right in front of me, I can't help but notice.

(update)

I'll let Eddie Izzard 'splain it all to youse.

Today's Quote

The Prez:

“We are not well served when, in response to a terrorist attack, we descend into fear and panic. We don’t make good decisions if it’s based on hysteria or an exaggeration of risks.

“When individuals say we should have a religious test and that only Christians, proven Christians should be admitted, that’s offensive.

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL [ISIS] than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate.

“ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there’s war between Islam and the west, and when you see individuals in positions of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the Isil narrative. It’s counter-productive. And it needs to stop.

“And I would add, these are the same folks who suggested they’re so tough that just ‘talk to Putin’ or staring down ISIL [will work] … but they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion. At first they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Where's that guy been for the last 7 years? 

Today's Podcast

OUR NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE

Authors Baratunde Thurston (How To Be Black), Raquel Cepeda (Bird Of Paradise: How I Became Latina) and Tanner Colby (Some Of My Best Friends Are Black) host a lively multiracial, interracial conversation about the ways we can’t talk, don’t talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly do talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post-yet-still-very-racial America. This show is "About Race."

New Concept

New to me anyway - Coercive Engineered Migration: The use of internal upheaval in one country to force the populations to move to another country in an attempt to destabilize that other country's economy and/or government.

This is Russia Today, so grains of salt are in order.  That said, differing perspectives are generally a plus when trying to figure out just what the fuck is actually going on here.

hat tip = Facebook pal DR

Ever Mindful Of Poe's Law

I can't wait to hear some knucklehead try to make the argument that we can't allow refugees into USAmerica Inc because it's too easy for them to get guns and start killing us.

Some guys have their heads so far up their asses they can't even see their own shit anymore - and no matter what anybody like me is apt to make up outa nuthin', it'll sound like something one of these mushbrains would say.

Poe's Law (in case ya fergot) is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers for sincere expressions of the parodied views. 

--update

And then up jumped the devil, via Think Progress:

A Texas state legislator wants the U.S. to stop allowing Syrian refugees into the country. His reasoning: They might be able to buy guns in his state.

Rep. Tony Dale (R) made this argument in a television interview on Monday and in letters to Texas’ U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz (R) and U.S. Reps. Michael McCaul and John Carter (R).

“While the Paris attackers used suicide vests and grenades,” Dale wrote, “it is clear that firearms also killed a large number of innocent victims. Can you imagine a scenario were [sic] a refugees [sic] is admitted to the United States, is provided with federal cash payments and other assistance, obtains a drivers license and purchases a weapon and executes an attack?” He urged the lawmakers to “do whatever you can to stop the [Syrian refugee] program.”

Paraphrasing

Mr John Fugelsang (every atheist's favorite catholic - well, maybe after Stephen Colbert, but he's right up there too):

"The people who blamed 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, remind you to blame ISIS on the refugees fleeing from ISIS."

--and--

The people whose stupid war gave us ISIS would like to berate you now for not supporting more stupid wars.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) November 18, 2015

What He Said

This is how I want Obama to do everything.  And maybe it's just me, but it seems like it's only been in the last several months that he's stepping up and calling the opposition out on their bullshit responses to everything he does or says.

Talking about what needs to be done about ISIS in light of the Paris thing:

What I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow in the abstract make America look tough. Or make me look tough.

And maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed and I see a 25 year old kid who is paralyzed or who has lost his limbs and some of those are people I've ordered into battle.

And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may. We’ll do what’s required to keep the American people safe. And I think it’s entirely appropriate in a democracy to have a serious debate about these issues. If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do, present a specific plan. If they think that somehow their advisers are better than the chairman of my Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the folks who are actually on the ground, I want to meet them. And we can have that debate.

But what I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership, or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with, that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people. And to protect people in the region who are getting killed. And to protect our allies in people like France. I’m too busy for that.

And of course the nutballs went straight into Deliberately Misunderstanding mode anyway.

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning”’ --POTUS

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) November 16, 2015

BTW - We've spent a good 35 years bitching about shortened attention spans, and shrinking sound bites, and news that has a life cycle of about 48 hours - how worried should I be about the 140-character Tweet becoming the dominant debate vehicle?  

Speak Of The Devil

Google Is Our Friend

Bug brains on "the right" tried to make it a big deal when Obama decided it was time for Mt McKinley to revert to its original name - Denali.  They said it was just another typical dictater-y thing that politicians in far-away federal Washington were alla-time tryin' to pull on the real Americans out here in the blah blah fucking blah.

Guess what. 

So apparently, Obama was trying to get outa the way so the people who live in the state where the fucking thing exists can make up their own minds about it.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me to check it out - which is something I usually do - and maybe a lotta people who know how to think real thoughts knew this all along.  

Maybe I've kinda hit Wingnut Overload(?)  Dunno.

But maybe we really have reached that illusive if not mythical point of Peak Wingnut, and there's just not much capacity for such nonsense anymore.

A guy can hope.