Part And Parcel

You're a woman who did a coupla shots with me at the bar, and you flirted with me and you  were dressed in a sexy-time way - which forced me to rape you.

You're a random brown person who committed a minor civil offense and then you disrespected my authority as a police officer - which forced me to kill you.

You're a herdsman living in Afghanistan; you're a Muslim, and you got sold to the CIA in 2002 for about $1000 because your goats got into your neighbor's garden one day in 1995 and you never really fessed up, and he'd held a grudge against you that whole time; but we'll disregard everything after the part about you being an Afghani Muslim - which forced me to torture you.

You're just a regular somebody who can't see his way clear to buy into a religion that requires blind unreasoning obedience to a lord - which forces that lord to condemn you to torment and suffering for a thousand eternities.

You've got nobody to blame but yourself.  You had it comin'.  You shouldn't have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  You sent yourself to hell.

It's more than a little weird that the people who're constantly demanding that everybody take personal responsibility for everything that goes on in own their lives are the same people who can't quite think their way thru to the point where they have to own their responsibility for having raped or murdered or tortured somebody.

If I can get you to believe absurdities, I can get you to commit atrocities.

The Lites (fixed)

Where's The Plan, Stan?

The More Things Change

I was all for NAFTA back in the day because I was all for Bill Clinton, because Clinton was my kinda Republican, and he was doin' it right for the right reasons, and blah bah blah.

I was a fuckin' idiot for it.



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Ya think Crime-nibus was bad?  Ya think Defense Authorization was bad?  Ya think any of it was good?  Hold on to your hats.

Now maybe I'm just being paranoid (I hope so, actually), but because we've heard for the last few years about how the number of American manufacturing jobs has been going up (aka: Happy Talk; aka: Smoke Up Yer Skirt; aka: Bullshit), plus the fact that we're gearing up for this Trans-Pacific Partnership thingie; I think there's room to speculate on some possible connections.

Obama can strong-arm Wall Street a little by telling them he'll stop defending them against the obvious fact popular sentiment that they're all crooks, ie: "you guys have to make a good show of it by putting up some jobs in key places and key sectors; then we can invite the inference that NAFTA wasn't all that bad, and we can link the not-so-bad canard to TPP; we can leave certain sections of the tax codes unenforced; and then once TPP is approved, you can hit the tax-goodies-buffet again by writing off all the costs of those USA jobs, and get another break when you outsource those jobs to Vietnam.  It's a pretty good deal, and all you need to do is funnel enough Campaign 'Donations' in to the right races so we can make it look close and interesting so the Press Poodles can keep talking about it in breathless tones of anticipation and drama, which makes for some very good Advertising Revenue, which makes for a nice kickback scheme for more nice fat campaign contributions; all of which we must perpetuate so we can go on pretending we live in a democracy".  And that ain't all - not by half.

BTW - the Bureau of Labor Statistics (beginning Feb 2015) will start parsing out Jobs-For-Asians numbers and Jobs-For-Latinos numbers in its monthly report.  I wonder if there's any potential for shenanigans in that(?)

I really do hope I'm wrong here, but I'll be adding a goodly amount of Olestra to my diet just so I'm greased up and ready for the reaming we're about to get.

Like the man said - Pessimism is the best default position because you're always either proved right or pleasantly surprised.

Skeptical Poe

Guns Kill People

Saying otherwise is just dishonest - or straight up deliberately ignorant.



Two things really got to me:  First was Gus's mom being totally unable to reconcile her thoughts to the title of my post.  She insists on carrying the guilt with her forever because (imo) she can't help but blame herself for "improper handling of a firearm".  If only she had pointed the muzzle to the ground; if only she'd made sure Gus had stayed on the horse; if only etc etc etc

Second is Gus's dad saying he's fearful of government involvement in product liability issues because (paraphrasing) "they'll make the gun so safe it won't work".

A string of cynical calculations plus the fear and the careerism on the parts of company employees made it inevitable for these "accidents" to happen, and certainly Mrs Barber shoulda been more careful, but it was a gun that killed Gus.

Un-Togetherness

Yanking the enforcement teeth out of Dodd-Frank: "...Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swap Entities..."  That's part of what the Crime-nibus bill is about.

Senator Warren:



Another part?  It allows rich people (and don't forget corporations are people, my friend) to buy even bigger pieces of Coin-Operated Politicians. 

And all of that shit happening in the Wall-Street-n-Washington-Circle-Jerk is very much part and parcel with this:

...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Riots, uprisings, revolts and full-blown revolutions happen when it becomes clear that in spite of hearing the voice of the populace, a government chooses to ignore it.

It seems just too weird (even for me) to think about it, but we may actually be a lot closer than we think we are to the point where The Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Knuckle-Dragging TeaBaggers have to stop just flapping their gums about bi-partisanship and start figuring out how to make common cause.

I wonder what happens next, cuz I get one of my truly lousy feelings that there are some very powerful forces working very hard to keep us separated from one another, and I'm not convinced that a Gandhi or a Mandela is even possible now.

Today's Winner

This one (Democratic Underground) wins the intertoobz for today:

Bitch In Charge

Pardons

I spent a lot of time in the 70s feeling more than a little worried and frustrated because  Ford issued a blanket pardon for Tricky Dick Nixon.

And now that Obama might be doing the same for The Shrubster and his VP (Snidely Whips-n-Chainsey) et al, it struck me as an ah-fuck-not-this-shit-again kinda moment.

But Ol' Doc Maddow has some purty decent 'splainin' goin' on.  This is the only good clip I can find that's also easy to embed here in my little blog:



Find more at Rachel's show archives at MSNBC.com.

Charlie Gets It

It starts with what seems like an unrelated event in Georgia, but Charlie knows there's no such thing as unrelated event.

Mr Charles Pierce at Esquire:

Somewhere in itself, and not very far from the surface, either, this country has gone mad with fear and rage. As a result, it is finding sustenance in the acts of official violence, and doing so in more different ways than the republic has seen since we had lynching, union busting, and Red Scares at the same time, back when the 19th century was turning into the 20th. Anyone who can't see the political and sociological tissue connecting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the revelations of a decade's worth of CIA brutality, and the execution of Robert Holsey isn't looking hard enough. In the country's untrammelled fear and rage, it is exercising the only function of self-government it can recall as its mad brain turns to red fire -- to encourage the exercise of the state's power to wound and kill all the right people. In this madness, race and class are mere diagnostic categories. In this madness, the politics of right and left, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals, of red and blue, are pathetically inadequate to assess the situation. In this madness, the choices are not made within the easy and obvious contexts . This is a choice between barbarism and not, between savagery and not. This is a choice between the national soul and the national Id. This is a choice of whether to take inchoate and weaponized vengeance against the living representations of the monsters in our paranoid dreams. That's the last vestige of self-government that we have allowed ourselves. The right to demand that the institutions of government kill what we fear. By any means necessary, as someone once said. 

Today's Pix

About That Torture Thing

Our politicians and Press Poodles and everybody else showing off a talent for farting thru their mouths have all been telling us for quite a while that they don't want those rotten terrorists at Gitmo to be brought into this country because they'll stink up the joint - or some such nonsense.

Here's the thing.  I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them.  If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.

Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.

We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.  

BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).

So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.

And the kicker - we knew it was wrong.  All of us.  We knew it.  It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves.  We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.

Can we stop pretending now?

Leave It To Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Today, with the release of the executive summary of the congressional investigation into the American torture program, we have lost forever the right to moral leadership that we claimed at Nuremberg, and at the tribunals that investigated the actions of the Japanese in the Pacific. Those proceedings were based in two fundamental beliefs: a) that there are some activities that are beyond the law, even in wartime, and b) that the people responsible for those activities, even the worst of them, deserve a fair trial, and a trial that is open to the world, not only because the world needed to see the savagery of which humans are capable, but also because the trial would demonstrate to the world that there is a better way to resolve the issues raised by the native savagery of which people and nations are capable than the masturbatory exercise of blind vengeance. Justice Robert Jackson, in his eloquent summation for the prosecution in the trial of the Nazi warlords, saw all of this with coruscating clarity.

Dunno about losing it "forever".  I guess we can only hope the republic lasts long enough to get some of it back.

Whoa - George

In the next post down from here, I go all I-Told-Ya-So, but here's a bit of a pre-quel to it that's kinda interesting (in a feel-a-little-embarrassed-for-him-but-not-really-the-prick-should-be-in-fucking-prison kinda way).  Anybody else notice this guy's really lost his game?



Le Shrub was always about as sharp as a bagful 'o wet yarn, but he knew how to deflect and pivot a shitload better'n that.  Dang.

Squandered

What His Shrub-i-ness said back then was bullshit.




Some knew it was bullshit back then - and they said so out loud - and they were either ignored or fucked over because they said it out loud.

Olbermann knew how to put it in terms of having to deal with our shit before we get to move on to anything else.




And he said it a lot.



(Search YouTube = Olbermann Torture)


"But they would not listen. 
They're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will."

Purple

If we want Congress to work the way it's supposed to work, then we have to figure out how to unfuck all the "safe" voting districts that the parties have Gerrymandered to the point of being inherited feifdoms.

With Apologies To Mr Wrigley

In the course of my everyday herky-jerky travels thru my corner of paradise, I've been thru some variations of my own existence, not the least of which has to do with my flavor(s) of politics.

I won't recount the details right now because I'm not convinced it's of any interest to anybody, and if I try to write it all down we'll be here all fuckin' day, and we all have some shit that needs to get done.  Besides, it has little to do with anything real -  'specially as regards something as unreal as whatever the fuck it is that passes for politics here in USAmerica, Inc.

Anyway, after all this time, I'm kinda back to a starting point.  

I think I understand now that if you listen, you learn. But also too, that no matter who it is you're listening to - DumFux News, Limbaugh, NPR, MSNBC, the big 3 networks, or your crazy Uncle Billy - if you never disagree with any of it, then you can count on any or all of these 3 things:

• you're not really listening 
• you're not doing your own thinking
• you're totally unnecessary to the process.

Get necessary, dammit.

It Got Me Thinkin'

Which is always a little dangerous, but anyway - here's a little bit of a thing:



'Conservatives' are always yammerin' about how they want Gubmint to run more like a Bidness.

My contention is that's pretty much exactly what we've been seeing for 20 or more years, and here's why I think it:  Congress Critters are privy to lots and lots of information that's either not known to the rest of us, or that they get to know about way before we get to know  about it; AND, they get to make rules and regulations that can easily tilt the money chute a little (or a lot) in the general direction of their own bank accounts and portfolios.  So while we have managed to put certain safeguards in place to make it harder for them to give themselves raises in their salaries, we've done practically nothing to keep them from creating a very slick and lucrative money-laundering apparatus that funnels shitloads of cash into their pockets, even if it does happen behind a thick veil of toxic fog.

Meanwhile, Corporate Bosses get to do this in a slightly more open way - but it's still pretty fucked up.  CEOs and Directors and Senior Execs get paid a lot, but the way they make the real money is by putting policy decisions in place that benefit them greatly at the expense (often) of everybody else.

Ask a simple question: why are so many companies spending so much (~$2.4 TRILLION) buying their own stock?

Then ask: what's the Comp Plan look like for those Bosses?  

I'm betting dollars to dingleberries that those guys are gonna make more than a few bucks over and above their salaries if the company stock performs well, and what better way to boost the value of a share of your stock than to make it look like it's a hot property because "somebody's snapping it up like crazy"?

And when you're in bed with the politicians who conveniently vote against close enforcement of the rules you've already gotten them to weaken, then collusion and cronyism and outright bribery become the orders of the day, and simply the usual and customary way of doing business.

It gets really complex and convoluted, and I'm not pretending to know what all is wrong or what all needs to be done.  But I think it points back to the need for Separation-Of-Powers solutions; we have to rebuild the firewalls - the ones that keep Businesses and Governments and individuals from becoming too big and too powerful.

Cuz always remember - a business is not a democracy.

Snarky Jab Du Jour

Just A Tho't

"A mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan



hat tip = Facebook friend VWE

So, Earth is all we've got.  It's home and there's literally nowhere else to go.

And then there's a guy like Charles Koch (just an example), who seems to be going to great lengths to fuck up the joint, making life in our little corner of the universe less and less likely to continue.

If some nutball ammosexual suddenly got all tree-hugger-y and walked up to Ol' Chuckles and poked 5 or 6 holes in Mr Koch's torso with a Glock .40, do ya think the shooter's lawyer'd have a chance to get him off by claiming it was justifiable under the Stand Your Ground statutes?

Just wonderin'.



(No - seriously, you knuckleheads - don't be out there pullin' shit, OK?)

Almost In Passing

I've been trying to think my way through all this Mike Brown / Eric Garner stuff; crashing around in my head looking for some boiled-down guiding principle to apply that might help me sort it out.

And then: The law must be a shield, not a sword.

For a good 2,000 - 10,000 generations, The Law was used and abused as a way to rationalize Might-Makes-Right.  As long as I had some reasonable expectation of being able to take you in a fist fight, I could jack your shit; and fuck you if you don't like it cuz fuck you, that's why. All the big guys did it cuz that's just what a big guy could do.  And it worked - Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Britain, etc etc etc - you get the idea.

Unfortunately, saying it that way makes it sound like we'd have to look way far back to find good examples, and that makes me think we're feeling a little too comfortable about ignoring the need to examine our motives and our reasoning, and our willingness to shrug it all off like a buncha fuckin' Eloi.

But gosh, it seems we don't have to look back very far to find some examples of people doing some pretty fucked up things because they had the juice to make the law do whatever they wanted it to do in order to pad their bank accounts or act out their domination fantasies or whatever their issues were at the time.

--slavery in America was lawful; and so was Jim Crow after that.

-- the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was mostly lawful under German law, and according to most written international law in effect at the time.

-- apartheid in South Africa was established by law.

-- Saddam Hussein claimed at his trial in Baghdad in 2006 that his order mandating the execution of 148 persons in response to an attempted assassination of him was lawful.

-- the Israeli military justified their heavy use of cluster bombs during the 2006 war by stating that “[a]ll the weapons and munitions used by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards” (Shadid 2006, A01).

-- the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq was lawful according to American interpretation of law.

The law has to be a shield.  It has to be there to protect us from overbearing, over-reaching, evermore ambitious and power-craving despots.  When the law instead protects the police (eg) from being held to the same standards of justice as apply to everybody else, then the law has become a sword against the people, and it will be changed by the people one way or another.  It has to be changed because it's become a contradiction.  And while contradictions exist, they can't prevail.
(all you 'conserva-tarians' might recognize that one from the Sacred Texts of Our Lady Ayn of Rand)

For my own self, I kinda like The American Exceptionalism way, and I'll keep trying to do it that way.  But if it has to be changed the old-fashioned way, then I'll be sadly watching from the bench, unsurprised.

I just really hope we can get back to being that exception.

I Hope Not

These 2 movies are not bad.  Some decent values statements, and some really good Movie Moments.

I only wish I could shake the creepy feeling that they're really just 2-hour ads for companies with piles of money so ridiculously gigundous that they can produce feature-length infomercials, and get us to pay twelve bucks a head for the privilege of absorbing their Corporate Branding Messages.

Today's Olbermann

Since he got back on the air, it seems like ESPN has been doing its best to hide him from us by bouncing his show time all over the damned place.

As of last night: ESPN2 at 5pm, and repeating once or twice a day at odd hours on other of the ESPN channels - like I said, ya gotta hunt for it.

Anyway, the guy can be a little bombastic and a bit precious on occasion, but there's no better truth-teller anywhere on TV.

Friday Music

Arms Of A Woman --Amos Lee





Gimme One Reason --Tracy Chapman





I Will --Beatles





For No One (cover) --Emmylou Harris





And So Begins The Task --Stephen Stills





Laughing --David Crosby

In Case You Missed It (updated)

...or in case you've forgotten what real journalism actually looks like:

BY ROLLING STONE | December 5, 2014

To Our Readers:
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone's editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie's credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie's account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn't confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. 

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

Will Dana
Managing Editor

It's something of a big deal because when you get it wrong you have to own it, and you have to stand up, and you have to say you got it wrong.  Which is something that happens once in a while, but which is something that seems never to happen in a certain segment of "the media" where they get it wrong a lot and never say so.  

But this development does nothing to lessen the rather dire state of affairs on- and off-campus. We have a problem here and we're not gonna get any nearer to finding the solutions we need unless everybody's willing to stand up and speak the truth as they see it - even when the truth is that they kinda blew the report by not properly vetting the fucking source - which just gives all the wrong people all the perfect excuses to do exactly what RS seems suddenly to be doing, which is to blame the fucking victim.

FUCK ME FUCKLESS WHAT THE FUCK!?!  ISN'T THAT PARTA THE FUCKING PROBLEM IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE!?!

Ahem - sorry - channeling Charlie Skinner there for a minute.

The thing that does change right now tho' is that all the usual Smarmroaches will probably come scurrying out to start chanting "Death to The Demon Liberal Media", and the rubes can go back to feeling smugly comfortable sitting and waiting for the Daddy State to tell them what to misunderstand about the next episode of All My Phony Outrage.

hat tip = Facebook friend HH

NPR Awakes

I don't do NPR much anymore because they've been beaten into submission, and they almost always skew to the Both-Sides malarkey.  But when they get one right, I wanna be here to say they got one right.

Part Of An Oldie

Tim Wise talking about Racial Profiling and the idiocy of some of our law enforcement policies.  

To wit:
Brown Males are 3 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the cops, even tho' White Males are 4 ½ times more likely to be in possession of contraband on those fairly rare occasions when they do get stopped and searched. (this bit starts at about 7:45)

And The Beat Goes On

Rolling Stone has a bit on 11 instances of Cops Killing Brown People:

Brown and Garner were two people living a thousand miles apart, at very different points in their lives. But they share one tragic fact in common: They were both black men executed in broad daylight by cops. And unless the U.S. Justice Department nails their killers on federal civil rights charges, neither of their families will get even the cold comfort of a day in court.

Sadly, there's nothing new about this pattern of lethal racial profiling. For far too long, African-Americans in this country have had to worry about whether police will kill their loved ones on the slightest pretext without facing any meaningful punishment. Racist violence is a deep-rooted part of this country's history, and it's going to take substantial nationwide reform of the policing and court systems to change this awful reality. Here are 11 of the most heartbreaking examples of black men, women and children killed by police in the last 15 years. Their stories are different in many ways, but none of them deserved to die the way they did – and we could fill many more pages with others like them.

1. Amadou Diallo (1999)
2. Patrick Dorismond (2000)
3. Ousmane Zongo (2003)
4. Timothy Stansbury (2004)
5. Sean Bell (2006)
6. Oscar Grant (2009)
7. Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010)
8. Ramarley Graham (2012)
9. Tamon Robinson (2012)
10. Rekia Boyd (2012)
11. Kimani Gray (2013)

'Conservatives' spend a buncha time and lung capacity carping about Da Gubmint being overbearing and repressive, but not when it comes to killing brown people - then it's nothing but "cops making a noble effort to do a very dangerous job".

Almost as an aside, in all but a couple of these cases, the cops testified to being afraid the 'suspect' had a gun.  So, also too, 'conservatives', maybe you could rethink some of your bullshit rhetoric about the absolute-ness of the 2nd Amendment.  

After all, if it's OK for you guys to have any gun you want, and it's OK for you to do whatever you want with your guns (including defending yourselves from a violent and repressive Gubmint), then you should be praising brown people for doing exactly the same for themselves, and you should be condemning whoever shoots them down.  Unless of course y'all actually are the racist assholes your arguments and actions usually reveal you to be.

Today's Pix

Some Questions

From WaPo via Little Green Footballs:

Larry McQuilliams had “let me die” written in marker across his chest when he fired more than 100 rounds in downtown Austin early Friday morning.

McQuilliams, who Austin Police officials called a “homegrown American extremist” with ties to a Christian identity hate group, was shot dead on Friday by a police officer outside the department’s headquarters.

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters on Monday that officers who searched the gunman’s home found a map with 34 targets, including two churches. McQuilliams had fired bullets into Austin police headquarters, a federal courthouse and the Mexican consulate in downtown Austin on Friday. He also tried to set the Mexican consulate building on fire.

--and--

Among other things investigators need to determine: How McQuilliams got his weapons. He had been arrested in 1998 for driving under the influence and in 1992 for aggravated robbery, Acevedo said. He also served time in prison for a bank robbery.

Phineas Priesthood affiliates were tied to a string of 1996 bank robberies and bombings in the state of Washington.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Post that the Phineas Priesthood is a “concept” that originated with “Vigilantes of Christendom,” which came out in 1990. The group takes its name from a story about the biblical figure of Phineas in the book of Numbers.

1) Isn't this exactly what the FBI and ATF and DoD and about a dozen other agencies have been trying to warn us about, while "conservatives" are always saying it's just Obama's anti-white-man propaganda?

2) When can we expect the NRA to chime in with, "we just need to enforce existing law" (when it comes to keeping guns away from convicted felons), while re-asserting the bullshit about how there's no need for background checks?

3) Shouldn't somebody out there on the Far Right be saying something shitty about Chief Acevedo?  (this one may take some time because they have to make some small effort to expressed it in terms couched ever so deeply in coded racist language so as to give themselves a little plausible deniability)

4) This happened Monday, and maybe I just missed it, but how come "the librul media" wasn't all over it?  Unless of course, "The Liberal Bias of Mainstream Media" is one big fucking lie.

Today's Homemade Music

The Children's Illustrated Book Of Music --Janapriya Levine



hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Toon

And a comment from Keith:

Wanting And Getting Ain't The Same

We get a solid confluence of Religion and Rightwing Politics because there's a buttload of people out there who just flat-out gotta have answers that are simple and authoritative and permanent.

Their religious traditions condition them to receive Revealed Truth, and so they look for that process to play out with everything else.  They need that Father Figure to tell them what's what.

One of the best examples I can think of right now is the whole mess about Climate Change. How many times have you heard some Chucklehead say if Global Warming was a cause  for tropical storms like Rita and Katrina to be worse than they shoulda been way down there in Nawlins in the summertime, how can it then also be causing problems like Polar Vortex and killer snowstorms in Buffalo in the wintertime?  They're looking for that definitive immutable answer that explains everything for them; and once attained, never requires them to learn anything new.

Just like that crap about Mike Brown - it has to be a definitive pronouncement (which is usually pretty arbitrary), and not generally a logical conclusion following thought and deliberative consideration.

The Daddy State rules - but only until you start to understand that for every question which is gnarly and complicated and weird, there's an answer which is simple and elegant and fucking wrong.

Jim Webb

The guy says he's only "exploring" whether or not to run for Prez in 2016, and he seems to be a truly decent human being, but...

First, never let the facts get in the way of a good slogan.

But second, we really don't need another candidate who just sounds good.  

Add a little bullshit - a little - and the roses grow better.  But if all you start with is bullshit, then try not to act too surprised when we see you as just another Bullshit Marketeering Creation spouting cutesy little bromides.  (Hey - if you think that crap is good Tweet material, then you don't get to bitch at me about fucking up my metaphor)

Anyway, I'm not the one running for office.  

We deserve better - try harder.

Where's The Outrage?

From Deseret News, via HuffPo:

A Utah high school student nearly launched a shooting rampage but a classmate saw his loaded gun and prevented a tragedy on Monday, according to police.

The student who saw the gun told a school resource officer who apprehended the allegedly armed teenager, thwarting a potential shooting at Fremont High School in Plain City, Utah, according to Fox Salt Lake City. The school was evacuated.

The 16-year-old suspect was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention facility, according to Desert News.

He allegedly admitted to police that he wanted to shoot a girl with whom he'd had a relationship and then open fire on others, according to the New York Daily News.

"We do not think that there were any additional students who were armed," Weber County Sheriff's Lt. Lane Findlay told KUTV. "It appears to be a lone student."

The teen, who has not been identified because he is a minor, faces charges of possession of a weapon with intent to assault, possession of a firearm in a restricted area and possession of a firearm by a minor.

But wait just a durn minute - the kid with the gun hadn't done anything but exercise his god-given right to keep and bear arms. Why is the "hero student who stopped a potential shooting incident" getting away with this blatant and unwarranted imposition of Nanny State tyranny?

How did anybody know for sure - before anything happened - that the kid with the gun was intending to do anything other than making sure he could defend himself and his schoolmates against somebody else?

Where's the NRA when you really need 'em?

Happy Zappadan

Tonite (Bummernacht) marks the end of the 21st year since our dearly demented Brother Frank split the scene.  And tomorrow begins Zapandan 2014.  Blessed be the Sheiks and the Weasels and the Pygmy Ponies, and all the rest.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another. --Frank Zappa

Cosmik Debris:

Today's Modern Policing

Hard to imagine why 'conservatives' haven't been totally maniacal about this shit - complete with brain foam erupting from their ears and every pore and follicle of their skull covers.  

Why has this not registered even the tiniest little blip on the Gubmint Conspiracy radar?

WaPo piece by Gene Robinson:

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police — defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.

The true number of fatal police shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like Brown, were unarmed.

By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police shootings average about a dozen a year.

If you pay any attention to the stories of Sherlock Holmes or Colombo or House or Scooby-fucking-Doo, then you know mysteries get solved when the hero sleuth manages to put one bit of info together with a coupla other bits of info, and suddenly everything starts to make sense.

Here in USAmerica Inc, it almost seems like somebody wants to keep us from putting certain bits of info together.

And in case this one slipped past ya - the NSA (eg) demands we shit-can our civil rights and allow them to put together all manner of bits of info.  

So anyway, how is it that in a system of Self-Government, regular people are always having to push rocks up the hill while a shrinking number of very privileged snoots are always hanging out at the top telling us we should just be grateful for the banana peels they're tossing our way?

It's a wonderment.

A Crowning Achievement

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Here's what I'd like to think: When you've twisted and warped your entire world into an elegant and obvious parody of yourself, it has to be over for you.  

That's what I'd like to think.

Go Places, Do Things

I have to wonder tho' - by thinking there's some place else we can go, we can continue the rationalization that it's OK for us not to take good care of this place.

Undercurrent

So, 5 guys - the receiver corps - who play for the St Louis Rams did the Hands-Up-Don't-Shoot thing when they came out of the tunnel during introductions yesterday.



Which BTW just continues a long proud tradition of Americans standing up for what's right, and being unafraid to speak the truth.



I remember thinking back then that it wasn't cool for Carlos and Smith to do that, but I was fortunate enough to have people in my life to present an alternative viewpoint - to teach me that ya gotta take your shots whenever the chance comes along.  Powerful people are 'in charge' and they need everybody to stay in line, and if staying in line makes permanent losers out of a significant bunch of Americans who're supposed to be getting exactly the same chance as everybody else, then somebody has to have the balls to step outa that line; somebody has to throw a little sand in the gears; somebody has to take one small moment to remind us that all anybody really wants is for this country to try a little harder to live up to its promises.

Anyway, then the Rams hung 52 on the Dog-Ass Raiders.  

And Dallas lost.

And my Donkeys beat KC to stay on top in the AFC West.

Pretty good Sunday.

A Cop's Eye View

I copied this whole post at Democratic Underground.  The author says he asked his nephew about Darren Wilson killing Mike Brown. Take it or leave it according to your own bent.

Not only is he a 29 year cop, he is the third highest ranking officer in the county that he works in. I asked him about this. Being the Republican that he is, I expected him to jump to Darin Wilson's defense. He had this to say.

He would not say it was a racial thing because he doesn't know. He did say he read all of the reports and the grand jury testimony.

1- He said at very least Wilson is completely incompetent. That you never get out of the car by yourself if you know there is going to be a physical confrontation with an unarmed person. Especially if you were in Wilson's words, "afraid" of the guy.

2- He said Wilson should have let Brown go, followed him as far as he could in the car as he called for back up. If he had to, arrest him later.

3- He had no business firing once Brown was down on the ground. He fired four shots too many even if you believe his story.

4- It is unheard of to leave the guy laying in the street for four and a half hours.

5- If all of this was in accordance to Wilson's training, an idiot trained him.

6- Brown's family will get a huge settlement from Ferguson because if this goes to civil trail it will cost them many millions more.

What my nephew thinks happened is that Wilson got into an argument with the guy, got out of his car to whip his ass. Quickly realized he bit off more than he could chew, so he shot the guy.

Take it for what it's worth.