In Memoriam

Luise Rainer, actress and Academy Award winner.

Potpourri for 300, Alex

1. Confession of a former religious-right icon.

   And that strategy was simple: Republican leaders would affirm their anti-abortion commitment to evangelicals, and in turn we’d vote for them — by the tens of millions. Once Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, “we” would reverse Roe, through a constitutional amendment and/or through the appointment of anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court or, if need be, through civil disobedience and even violence, though this was only hinted at at first. In 2016, the dream we had will become a reality unless America wakes up. The Republicans are poised to destroy women’s rights. They have a majority on the Court to back them up.

   Frank Schaeffer, Salon, via AlterNet
    
2. Not that American anti-intellectualism is news, but it's extending to not reading what you slam.

   There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all. After the Chronicle of Higher Education published an item highlighting the dissertations of five young PhD candidates in African-American studies at Northwestern University, Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote that the mere titles of the dissertations were sufficient cause to eliminate all black studies classes. Riley hadn't read the dissertations; they're not even published yet.

   Patricia Williams, The Guardian, via AlterNet
3. Scientific article fraud.

   Last month, Retraction Watch published an article describing a known and partially-related problem: fake peer reviews, in this case involving 50 BioMed Central papers. In the above-described article, Seife referred to this BioMed Central discovery; he was able to examine 6 of these titles and found that all were from Chinese authors, and shared style and subject matter to other “paper mill-written” meta-analyses.

   Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
   
4. Norman Spinrad with some recent economic American history.

   The Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment rates triple those at the peak of the Great Recession, with a stock market crash that famously had wall street mavens jumping out of windows, with no such thing as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and so forth to cushion it at all, was such a catastrophe that it could only result in one kind of revolution or another, meaning a discontinuity, violent or not, democratic or not, a Communist revolution which was a real fear at the time, a Fascist revolution ala the replacement of the Weimar Republic by the Third Reich, or, as fortunately happened, something like the New Deal.

Almost Forgot

• Batocchio (Vagabond Scholar) has up the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2014, posts chosen by various bloggers as their best writing for the year.  Everything listed is a gem.
• Southern Beale on Nashville's police chief and what happened there during the recent protests.

And it's time for a little research on IMDb. I may come up for air later this week.

Happy Holidays

Joys of the season to you, whichever day(s) of celebration you celebrate.

Yesterday I commemorated the last day of Chanukah.  Today I am enjoying the festival of Chinese food and a movie.  Tomorrow is both Boxing Day and the first virtue of Kwanzaa.  Solstice and Yule are in there, too.  Midnight mass was exhilarating ("Hallelujah Chorus" singalong and liturgical dance audience participation); wish you'd been there.  [ETA: And how could I have forgotten Festivus?!]

Isaac Newton, Clara Barton, and Fr. Seamus Genovese, Happy Birthdays to you!

Comparative Outrage 101

What distinguishes this case from this case.  Compare and contrast.  Show your work.

Poisons in the Well

• Antibiotic resistance:  Not just the zombie apocalypse anymore.

  Antibiotic resistance currently accounts for an estimated 50,000 deaths in the US and Europe, which have surveillance to support those numbers. (The CDC puts the number for the US at 23,000.) But the project estimates that the actual current death toll is 700,000 worldwide.
  
  If antibiotic resistance were allowed to grow unchecked — that is, if there were no successful efforts to curb it or no new drugs to combat it (the latter is very plausible) — the number of deaths per year would balloon to 10 million by 2050. For comparison, that is more than the 8.2 million per year who currently die of cancer and 1.5 million who die of diabetes, combined.

  (Maryn McKenna, Wired.)
• "Right-wing" pundit claims rapes are down.  Zandar disagrees:

  So keep in mind reported sexual assaults are down. The ones that aren't reported, well. I can't imagine why efforts to drag a woman who tries to report sexual assault through the mud, calling her a liar, and trying to destroy her utterly would lower the rate of reported sexual assaults. There's no epidemic because it's not being reported, and it's not being reported because those who do are treated worse by America than those who actually assault women on college campuses, ergo, there's no epidemic because the numbers "don't fit the left's narrative".
  
  It's a neat little package of self-loathing we bundle our young women up in, isn't it? If you report assault, you're worse than the person who assaulted you and you're assumed to be lying because of "the statistics" show assault on college campuses are down. If you don't report it, well, then the assault statistics are down, so there's no problem. College campuses are safer than ever!

  I have ceased to believe that anyone on the "right" can discuss an issue without dropping a large lie into the punchbowl.
• Speaking of lies, apparently some on the "right" are trying to equate abortion with birth control.

  The answer here is obvious. Rand Paul wants you to believe that Republicans don’t want to “ban birth control,” just as Joni Ernst wants you to believe that her support of personhood is a private matter that will have no policy ramifications. These are lies. Whether or not the right will own up to its dishonesty, and, as Dreweke points out, reveal the “full breadth of their anti–reproductive health and rights agenda” depends on if the public will keep letting them get away with it.

  [Emphasis added.]  (Katie McDonough, Salon, via AlterNet.)

Just So You Know

I may not have been clear in my scribblings over the last six or so years.  It's possible.  There's a school of thought that says if any misinterpretation of writing is possible, that is the misinterpretation that will be seized upon.  Unearthing examples will be left to the reader.

So.

Let me be blunt:

Torture is wrong.  Torture is unethical and immoral.  Torture is counterproductive.  Torture is evil.

Are we clear on that?  If not, the Internet is huge.

Commentary on the Feinstein report.  (James Wimberly, The Reality-Based Community.)

Wider implications.  (Pecunium, Better Than Salt Money, who has been writing about interrogation from the point of an interrogator for a long time now.)

Roundup of "conservative," "right-wing," and "Republican" responses to the report.  You may notice a certain bent to their reactions.  (Terrance, Republic of T) Additional video for the strong of stomach.  (Three of these videos come with Mature Content warning screens.  Take that seriously.)

Because They Know They are Doing Evil in the Sight of God

Why it's rare to hear apologies for torture.

Excerpt:

In the second half of the 20th Century, Britain's security forces developed what they called the "five techniques": hooding, white noise, a diet of bread and water, sleep deprivation, and being forced to stand in a stress position against a wall for long periods.

We now know that British agents trained officers of Brazil's military dictatorship in these techniques.

The report of Brazil's Truth Commission into the excesses of the dictatorship - published on the same day as the US Senate Intelligence committee's report into the CIA's "detention and interrogation program" - quoted former Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel saying that officers learned from the British secret service. They "practised torture with discretion", he said, while Brazil's "inexperienced staff did it in a more extrovert and open manner".

The British government, like the US until the Obama presidency, has always denied that its techniques, which were still being used in the Northern Ireland conflict in 1971, constituted torture. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled in 1978 that they constituted "inhuman and degrading treatment" rather than torture, though it will soon be asked to reconsider.

Regardless of the label, the brutality of these techniques was widely condemned when details were revealed. The UK's international reputation was tarnished and it lost a good deal of moral authority in its fight against terrorism. [Added emphasis mine.]

ETA: See also Jon Carroll's column. And don't buy into fear.

In Memoriam

• Mary Ann Mobley, actress and former Miss America
• Ken Weatherwax, actor (Pugsley Addams, et al.)
• Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist (and ex of Ayn Rand)

Not Just Waterboarding

New York Times reporting on the Senate report on the CIA interrogation program.

It was worse, more brutal and more concealed from nominal oversight.

Nice to know the US now has the moral authority of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Spanish Inquisition.

In Memoriam

Bunny Briggs, tap dancer.

Totally amazing.

In Memoriam

• P.D. James, mystery novelist.
• Stu Shiffman, fan artist.

Old Strands Still Waving

1. The Talking Dog interviews Jon Eisenberg, member of the legal team representing some of the Guantánamo detainees.
   

   Jon Eisenberg: It does indeed seem that the big victories in Guantánamo Bay litigation, such as in Boumediene (establishing habeas jurisdiction to order release from Guantánamo Bay) and Aamer (establishing habeas jurisdiction over conditions of confinement at Guantánamo Bay), turn out to be little more than theoretical. No detainee has yet managed to secure release or relief from abusive conditions solely because of judicial compulsion. But I do believe the continuing pressure of litigation, along with the ongoing hunger strike, is at least partly responsible for causing the Executive Branch to resume the releases of cleared detainees (which had been suspended for several years), and I know for a fact that Dhiab’s case caused the Department of Defense to suspend several of its more egregious force-feeding practices.

2. Roundup of the peaceful protests against the failure to indict the murderer of Michael Brown.

Breaking News

The murderer is going to get away with it.

(We'll see.  Unrest doesn't usually get this far from downtown, but this situation is ugly.  And this is not Missouri.)

(Whoooooops!  Sirens!  ETA:  Helicopters!)

Update: The morning after.  Thank you, Terrance, Republic of T.

Well, I was wrong.  That's not too far; I could hear faint wisps of chants and of course helicopters because those things are loud.  I had a peek out my window and saw one hovering.  And downtown got trashed again.

Let's see if I can get to church...

Remember --

Walking in the Sand?

The Maine?

When you ran away and I got on my knees and begged--  OK, probably not that one.

Back in August, the House Intelligence Committee (led by Republicans) declassified the report of the investigation into the attack on the consulate at Benghazi, Libya, but didn't make it public.

It has now been made public.

A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

[...]

... Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel. The eighth Benghazi investigation is being carried out by a House Select Committee appointed in May.

Yup. The Party of Fiscal Responsibility (laughing yet?), wasting your money. Because they can. Lampreys.

[ETA: Charles Pierce (Esquire) has a response with appropriate .gif.]

[EFTA:  The actual report, via Kevin Drum via Mark Evanier.]

Oh?

Two paragraphs later, however, the Times dropped any pretense of fair and balanced reporting by presenting the institutional voice of people who have very little interest in journalism, or, for that matter, democracy: “In many ways,” quoth the Times, “Tuesday’s election results clear a path for Mrs. Clinton. The lopsided outcome and conservative tilt makes it less likely she would face an insurgent challenger from the left.”

[...]

Chozick evidently couldn’t be bothered to call anyone identified with “the left.” She did mention an additional “silver lining” for the Clinton campaign: the “diminished … likelihood that former Gov. Martin O’Malley, another Democrat, would emerge as a serious primary challenge to Mrs. Clinton.” But, again, it doesn’t appear that Chozick tried to call O’Malley or his “advisers.” Nor, apparently, did she attempt to contact former Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.), or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), both of whom are contemplating challenges to Clinton from this mysterious region that sits to the west when one is facing north. Mysterious because nowhere did the Times define “the left” or what might excite its opposition to Clinton. Our imaginations are allowed to run wild: Is “the left” a terrorist organization? A part of the outfield? Or is it just not worth mentioning?

John R. MacArthur, Harper's.  On the "'Left'?  What 'Left'?" sidelining of, well, what might be called the progressive tendency or anti-conservatism by major media outlets like the New York Times.  With bonus dig at Paul Krugman.

In Memoriam

• Jimmy Ruffin, singer.
• Mike Nichols, stage and screen director (and way, way back, comedian).

While U Wait

• Media distraction.  (AlterNet)

  The most critical problem American society faces right now is, arguably, inequality, and the plutocracy that benefits from it, and the corruption that puts remedies for it beyond our constitutional reach. Every breathless story about impeachment occupies bandwidth not given to exploring the structural problems that Naomi Klein addresses in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, or the disinformation that Paul Krugman decimates in his columns, or the oligarchy that the Occupy movement was crushed for trying to put on the national agenda.

  It's almost impossible to avoid junk news now.  Even the New York Times does "lifestyle journalism."  (OK, it isn't your lifestyle; when I lived in New York, it wasn't my lifestyle either, and I occasionally bought stuff at Zabar's.  But the reader is supposed to go "Oooooooh," and the advertisers are supposed to pony up.  That's not a newspaper's purpose.)  The fact that I have some vague idea who the Kardashians are is more down to osmosis.  (Because why else would I even know?)
• American violence and its roots.  (Obsidian Wings)

  So as we wait for the Grand Jury report from Ferguson and see police and National Guard forces being rallied "just in case", read some of the accounts in Killed By Police. Notice how many people are killed for "non-compliance", or for holding a knife, or for burglary, or for other crimes that do not normally get the death penalty. Notice how much damn sloppiness we tolerate from police -- who really killed 5-year-old Cadence Harris, after all?
  
  We tolerate these things because we're used to them, because we have a centuries-old tradition of authorities compelling submission by violence. The past isn't dead.

• Moving forward.  (Republic of T)

  The aftermath of Michael Brown’s death, revealed Pentagon program that has distributed paramilitary weapons and equipment worth $4.3 billion since 1992. What if we had infested even a fraction of the $4.3 billion in education, training, and jobs for young people in places like Ferguson?

  22 years. 4.3 billion. Tell me again about how Americans love their children? Because I'm not seeing it.
  

All three of these are Read The Whole Thing.

In Memoriam

Ray Sadecki, pitcher.

[ETA:  Faith and Fear in Flushing's appreciation of Mr. Sadecki.]

Housekeeping Note

Housekeeping has happened.  A few blogs have gone to Archived Blogses, mostly for not having updated in a year; Velma (Roadnotes) passed away shortly after her last entry, so that rather than expecting an update I've moved her link.  This does not apply to Mary Kay; she just hasn't updated since last year (I wonder if she's down here for the Bead Show).  Group News Blog has been showing sporadic signs of Evan Robinson, so I moved it to Time Insensitive.  (Beautiful photos, by the way!)

I'm thinking of switching Daisy and Shakesville, but I haven't decided yet.

Veterans/Armistice Day

War is an intelligence test, and we keep flunking.

Other people saying more eloquent things:

• Group News Blog (Evan Robinson):

  At least be conscious that there are nearly 20 million Americans who signed up to go into harms way for the rest of us. Try to be worthy of that.

• filkerdave:

  On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent.
  
  Thank you to all who served.

  Note the first comment.
  
• Vagabond Scholar (Batocchio) has a Walt Kelly quote and a list of links.
  
• Rolling Around In My Head (Dave Hingsburger):

  I'm glad my poppy is on my hat.
  
  I'm glad that some people will think it's 'gay'.
  
  Because gay people fought and died, gay people still fight and still die, in defence of their country, in defence of the freedom. Gay people fought in the First and Second World Wars. Gay people fought for countries that would jail them for who they were. Gay people fought for the ideal of freedom when freedom was denied to them in their home countries.

• Dr. Grumpy on the Navajo code talkers (warning for torture).
• ETA: Driftglass, making a point about the current war(s) via an excerpt from General Daniel P. Bolger in the New York Times.

Picky, Picky, Picky

There's Veterans' Day linkage I'm going to want to use.  Meanwhile...

Rand Paul thinks (NO!  Really?) that Hillary Clinton will be too old for the Presidency by 2016.  (She would be the age of the sainted Reagan.)  Now, I remember Presidents being old, old men (mostly relative to me, but largely in their 50s and 60s); the fact that President Obama only started getting AARP mailings in his first term (as did Bill Clinton;  John F. Kennedy was not eligible, assuming the existence of AARP back then) just means that he is an old, old man before his time.

Meanwhile, nothing from Rand Paul indicates the existence of a brain inside.  Even a bag of bran would suffice.

(Link from Shakesville.)

Outside Agitation

The Rude One has a suggestion or two:

You tell the story of how government works, not how it fails, not how it harms. How it works. How it helps. How it's supposed to be there for the citizens of the nation.

This is the beginning of the new narrative. It's not saying, "Republicans say these bad things. Here are good things." It's not a call for revolution. It's not saying that some people are evil (although some very much are). It's implying, "Do you want to squash the dreams of these American Americans or do you want them to flourish?" It's asking, "Who are you?" and "Who are we?" That's what voting answers.

It certainly couldn't hurt.

*Ahem*

• Via Mark Evanier, via Avedon Carol, Bruce Bartlett confirms my suspicions.  I would note that the President's more an Eisenhower Republican than, say, a Ted Cruz Republican, but there you are.  (Mr. Bartlett is what David Brooks wants to be when he grows up and develops an actual intellect.)
• Live Journal (remember Live Journal?) positions itself as the unFacebook, although not in so many words; also, the revamped layout for profiles is now the only layout for profiles.  Ick.
• Interesting homily on the Wise and Foolish Virgins parable.

Your Fellow Humans

• In the Creepy and Probably Lying department,"a man who wants to obtain information about 70 licensed strippers in his town so he can 'pray for them'" has been blocked by temporary injunction and he is, of course, squealing:
  

  "He essentially silenced 7 million people in the state of Washington to protect 70 people's so-called right to privacy who dance on a stage naked," he said.

  Now, I'm pretty sure that if he really wanted to pray for them, he could just do that.  God knows precisely whom one is praying for, even if one doesn't know the name.  God actually doesn't need "their full names, addresses, photos and dates of birth." God has a fuller and more detailed database than either the NSA or Google (although they're trying).  I'm also pretty sure that 7 million people in the state of Washington don't feel themselves silenced and could not care less (stalker-and-psychopath population excepted).  I'm not seeing any possible benign purpose here.
• I couldn't find that story at seattlepi.com, but there was a charming photo gallery of musicians who are still performing though they are *gasp* 70 or older, both current and historical pictures, although one of their examples has a throat infection and has had to cancel the Melbourne, Australia performance.
• (Why yes, I was disappointed Tuesday.  Little by little, I'm approaching the mindset that the universe is malign and that withdrawal from society would be the smartest thing I could do.  And I have to wonder what version of the Gospels the people of Fort Lauderdale have read.  But the library has a book on hold for me, so total hermitting will not happen just yet.)
  
  (Yes, this will be crossposted.  Deal.)
• Back 98 years ago, people wanted to know what was happening in the war.  It's not that people don't still want to know.  It's that news sources have airbrushed the war(s) almost to invisibility and the politicians don't make a point of it.
• Oh, and Mikhail Gorbachev says we're on the brink of a new Cold War.  We missed the old one so much...

Exercising the Franchise

I have voted.  You?

Republican Satanic Panic Voter Fraud Hunt Raises Its Ugly Head

Via Zandar Versus The Stupid, an article from Greg Palast at Al-Jazeera America about attempted mass disenfranchisement.

The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.

The three [Georgia, Virginia, and Washington] states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.

A lot of people have the same first, last, and middle name.  In my ninth grade science class there were two Steven Goodmans (same spelling of Steven) who lived in the same (large) neighborhood.  They did not resemble each other, but the teachers had a bit of trouble distinguishing one from the other.  I met a third Steven Goodman in college.  He groaned in his sleep.  Presumably all three have different SSNs, but mistakes have been made when writing numbers.  And they all (at the time) lived in the same state.  110,000,000 voter records in 27 states?  Good luck.

Even 2,000,000 (that's two million; you wouldn't want to scan that data by hand) names are going to have duplicates and triplicates, not from fraud, but from the fact that people have names, not numbers.  And get named after their parents and may live with said parent, y'know, at the same address.  Or have common first names paired with common last names.  Not everyone names the baby after characters in movies and operas, and some people legally change what they're called.  And I seem to remember that an awful lot of people whose only crime, you should excuse the expression, was having the same names as convicted felons were stricken from voter rolls in Florida in 2012.

These are not people "concerned" about "voter fraud" (in fact, what minute fraud has been discovered seems to have been perpetrated by conservatives).  These are people trying to strip the franchise from non-conservatives.

VOTE this Tuesday.  Anyone telling you not to vote is trying to sell something, probably you.

(See my post from 2011 for back story.)

...And the Winner Is...

GIANTS!

That's all, folks.

Mr. Kafka? Mr. Franz Kafka? Mr. Franz Kafka, To the Red Courtesy Phone, Please? Mr. Kafka, to the Red Courtesy Phone.

They need no reason for the seizin'.

Via Comrade Misfit.

In Memoriam

Jack Bruce, bassist, Cream et al.

In the Interest of Getting Rid of All Those Open Tabs So I Can Clear the History...

• Paul Bibeau at Goblinbooks has been on fire this week.
• Review of The Skeptic's Annotated Bible, pointing out some of the contradictions and inconsistencies of the Bible.
• Pat Robertson.
• How repulsive is Pat Robertson?  Yeah.  That repulsive.
• Kansas and marriage equality as well as the struggle for equal rights for LGBTQ folks.
• Hazmat training, Ebola, and the US healthcare "system."

  We have the technology, and we certainly have the money to keep Ebola at bay. What we don't have is communication. What we don't have is a health care system that values preventative care. What we don't have is an equal playing field between nurses and physicians and allied health professionals and patients. What we don't have is a culture of health where we work symbiotically with one another and with the technology that was created specifically to bridge communication gaps, but has in so many ways failed. What we don't have is the social culture of transparency, what we don't have is a stopgap against mounting hysteria and hypochondria, what we don't have is nation of health literate individuals. We don't even have health-literate professionals. Most doctors are specialists and are well versed only in their field. Ask your orthopedist a general question about your health -- see if they can comfortably answer it.

• Geoffrey Holder's last dance.

[Jumping Up and Down] Yes! This! Yes!!!

Greta Christina (at AlterNet) tells it straight.

A lot of factors go into [lower voter turnout among progressives], of course, including roadblocks to voter registration, voter ID laws, insufficient polling places, cutbacks on voting hours and early voting, and other forms of voter suppression. But voter disengagement, citizens' sense that government isn't about them and voting doesn't make a difference, sure doesn't help. And getting more people to the ballot box who can vote is one of the ways we can push back against the overt forms of voter suppression -- thus getting even more people to vote.

But being dismissed as "flyover people" doesn't instill folks with a burning desire to get involved in progressive politics. See 1 and 2 above. If we want more Americans to think of government as Us rather than Them, as the way a society pools its resources and makes decisions about those resources rather than as the evil cackling villains lording it over the plebes, we need to not play into the "plebes" narrative ourselves. Voter suppression and discouraging turnout is a major conservative tactic. Let's not help them.

Daisy Deadhead (Hi, Daisy!) and others have been saying this for ages.  (That's the Tumblr blog; the Blogger blog is in the sidebar.)

Comic Relief

Amid all the bad, scary, despairing news, there is one eternal truth:  stuff is still funny.

Invisible Accomplishments?

And I note this is framed as a PR Thing.

Via Zandar Versus the Stupid (who has other things to say), USAToday reports that the deficit is down.

The Obama administration hailed lower budget deficits as a "return to fiscal normalcy" Wednesday, announcing that the budget deficit ended fiscal year at $483 billion -- the lowest level since 2008.

That's $197 billion less than last year, and $165 billion less than even President Obama forecast in his budget.

"Philosophy is a Walk on a Slippery Rock"

Lance Mannion on a particular fault line in people and the ways defying the "social order" sometimes play out, with attention to some politicians and a Nobel Prize winner.

Not only have we handed over the running of the country to these sociopaths or, more accurately, stood by as if helpless while they took over, we seem to like and admire and celebrate them for it. Worse, we seem to have accepted that their sociopathic view of life is correct, that the point of all human endeavor and the reason for having any kind of society, never mind a civil one, is to make money and pile up treasure, that human beings exist only to work or be used toward that end. We’ve acquiesced to the idea that people are divided between makers and takers, although the terms are inversely applied, the true makers being most of us who feel bound by the laws of social gravity and the takers being the ones who don’t think laws of any kind should or do stop them from taking whatever they want.

"Fourteen Joys and a Will to be Merry..."

(Or, of course, "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.")

One incumbent and fourteen aspirants to the office of Mayor of Oakland.

Mr. Orwell, Please Call Your Office

Via Comrade Misfit, some indications toward the end of privacy.  Any privacy.

From PrivacySOS:

According to an internal power point presentation, the FBI’s Data Aggregation Working Group (DAWG) is working to build a Data Aggregation Reference Architecture (DARA) that will “[d]efine a reference architecture that enables entity resolution and data correlation, and disambiguation across multiple data aggregation investments.” The goal is to “[d]evelop a reference architecture to support a consistent approach to data discovery and entity resolution and data correlation across disparate datasets.”

The FBI calls this process “resolving identities.” At a basic level, it will enable “[t]he process of determining whether two or more references to real-world objects such as people (individuals), places, or things are referring to the same object or to different objects. This concept is sometimes referred to as Entity Correlation, Entity Disambiguation, or Record Linkage, and includes related concepts such as Identity Resolution.” It will also enable the creation of “identity maps”: “Complete enriched entity data that includes the linkage of relationships between people, places, things, and characteristics of data resulting from an entity resolution process.”

See "Layers of Use of Biographic Identity" (it's the fifth header or the sixth slide down).

(The "Mr Costello, Hero" types among us probably don't think any of this is a problem.  They're wrong.)

The Playbook

Some of the things Republicans would like to accomplish.  (Republic of T.)

Thing I Am Noting

Democratic Vice Presidents after Truman who became President when the President died in office:  1.

Democratic Vice Presidents after Truman who became President after the President had served the full term:  0.

Technically, Republican Vice Presidents after Truman who became President after the President had served the full term:  2 (Nixon did not directly succeed Eisenhower, and Ford succeeded Nixon on the latter's resignation, so Ford doesn't count.)

Biden does not seem to want the job (smart man), and even if he did, he is rather notorious for gaffes.

One of the reasons that Hillary Clinton seems to be practically the anointed candidate (and the grueling horse race part isn't until late 2015; I'm sure the grueling fundraising part can wait until June 2015, and I don't want to hear about any of it until then, got that?) is that there don't seem to be a whole lot of loose ambitious Democrats out there.  Maybe Cory Booker.  [ETA:  There is apparently a movement to draft (there are consent issues involved) Elizabeth Warren.  Info via Shakesville.]

There are no Republicans I can support for the Presidency.

That is all.

In Memoriam

• Geoffrey Holder, actor/director/choreographer with one of the most distinctive voices on the planet
• Paul Revere, of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and yes, that really was his name.  (His surname was Dick.)
• Christopher Hogwood, conductor and musical historian.
• Jerrie Mock, first woman to circumnavigate (circumaviate?) the globe.
• George Shuba, who shook Jackie Robinson's hand.

On the Way

In the Kingdom of God, there is respect for all life, all dignity.

Whether the life in question is a fetus, a condemned prisoner, a pauper, a Person Not Of Your Tribe (on whatever axis), or Your Sworn Enemy.

We do not have the Kingdom of God.  We are still trying to get there.  That is why it is called "journey" and not "estimated time of arrival."

A Paradox

Failing upward, so to speak:

Perhaps it's worth thinking of those overlapping agencies as a fiendishly clever Rube Goldberg-style machine organized around the principle that failure is the greatest success of all. After all, in the system as it presently exists, every failure of intelligence is just another indication that more security, more secrecy, more surveillance, more spies, more drones are needed; only when you fail, that is, do you get more money for further expansion.

Article by Tom Engelhardt, the Tom of TomDispatch, for TomDispatch, reprinted at AlterNet.

But First I Need to Swamp Out the Augean Stables...

On the way to church this morning I found myself thinking in terms of political philosophy, which meant that I could actually articulate my problem with capitalism and why I wouldn't ever trust libertarians in power.

You'll be spared that.  You can thank me later.

The playoffs are on; last day games of the season, so catch it properly, on a transistor radio that you have to hide if anyone in authority appears.

Gone Geese

• Robert Reich (AlterNet) on the "recovery:"

  Corporations aren’t expanding production or investing in research and development. Instead, they’re using their money to buy back their shares of stock.

• Tangentially related:  Driftglass quotes Politico and Rod Serling on race and politics.

  ...[T]his country will still be politically divided amount three groups.
  

  • Exhausted Liberals, for whom this is all brutally self-evident and has been since forever.
  • Conservatives, go to bed at to the reassuring, brain-killing hum of Fox News them over and over again that the real racists are those damn Liberals who keep talking about race.
  • And the Centrist/Independents...who hide in the No Labels political sock drawer and reflexively shriek "BothSides!BothSides!BothSides!" anytime anyone starts bringing up the sordid history of modern Conservatism.

  This berserk monster that the Right built and then set loose in order to win elections has been running amok in plain sight for my entire life.

  [Emphasis in original.]
  
• Wisconsin Poll Watcher Militia now claiming it was all a hoax because federal felony charges might be in store for them.  Voter intimidation is illegal.  Who knew?  [Via Xopher Halftongue at Making Light in comments.]
• Via Zandar Versus The Stupid, a Rolling Stone exposé of the Koch brothers.  Rolling Stone has featured some of the best political writing of the decade.  I just got out of the habit because I seldom read music writing.  *sigh*

Not Quite Over Yet

San Francisco faces Pittsburgh and Oakland faces Kansas City in a one game playoff for the Wild Card slot.

And then we can actually start the postseason.  My neighbor is a St. Louis fan.

*Boggle*

Sadly, No! examines a National Review Online article which appears to align with reality.

A National Review article that actually allows someone to note the tragic reality of how women, children, and those with diminished power are targeted by abusers and how their abusers are protected by social institutions are about the way women and children are treated in society and the way that abuser voices are privileged because of their station?

Oh, Let's See...

• This is the 2,400th post.  Conspiracy theorists take note, and then take off.
• Via Comrade Misfit, from Madison.com:

  A self-described militia group claims to be checking names on the 2012 Scott Walker recall petition and plans to confront those found to have outstanding warrants or tax defaults at the polls on Nov. 4.

  (Warning: Madison.com wanted to leave tentacles on this machine. Do not allow them; I did not allow.)  As it happens, they are only targetting Democrats.  So Republicans with tax defaults and outstanding warrants are safe.  This is still voter intimidation, though, and I believe it is illegal, and, frankly, the police should arrest every single one of these bozos.
  
• Jon Carroll views with alarm (and R.I.P.s two of his cats).
• Six reasons to cut out meat from factory farms.  (AlterNet.)
• The Rude Pundit, as a general rule, is Not Safe For Work.  So read these at home:
• Kansas selling sex toys for back taxes (yes, a bit more complicated).
• Murder in a Walmart.  (Somebody told a lot of lies.) Republic of T wants justice and explains why people have less trust in the police and the justice system.
• History lessons in school.  How this country was made.  [ETA:  Somehow I missed Orcinus on this subject:

  The only reason that conservatives want to eliminate students from learning about episodes such as this is that they make clear that the white-bread narrative of valiant white pioneers forging a greater America is a farce. Learning about Sand Creek might make young white Coloradans uncomfortable, just as learning about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II -- another subject likely to be dropped -- does.

  So glad Dave Neiwert is Back.]
• Culpability of Iraq war supporters for the IS situation (I will say, once again, that if the "We want a war right now" people want boots on the ground, it should be their boots.  Mr. McCain, that means you.  Mr. Cheney, likewise, and no, I don't care about your medical condition.  Any more than you care about the troops you put in harm's way.)
• Jesse Curtis asks "Why Can White Evangelists Only See Discrimination Against Ourselves?"

  Try actually talking about God's will being done here on earth as it is in heaven. Yeah, Jesus said it, but White evangelicals will tell you to calm down and realize that the world is going to hell in a handbasket anyway.

Yeah. Hermitting is the best plan.

There's Still Shouting

The Giants are one game from elimination, and naturally, they're playing the Dodgers.  Pittsburgh (!), for the first time since the glory days of Bonds and Bonilla, is about to make the playoffs.  The Angels have clinched, but since they have the most wins (97 wins is tops in both leagues), they will probably flake in the playoffs.  Meanwhile, Detroit and Kansas City are still duking it out in the AL Central.  Everyone else is looking down the wild card matchups, which may be Oakland v. Kansas City (yes, I get the irony there) on the AL side and Pittsburgh against whichever of the contenders wins tonight.

Rosh HaShona is tomorrow (well, tonight), and as soon as the regular season is over, fall can commence.

He Just Figured This Out

Eric Schmidt of Google has discovered that ALEC lies.  Ties have been cut.

ALEC's response:

“It is unfortunate to learn Google has ended its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council as a result of public pressure from left-leaning individuals and organizations who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial.

Freddie Mercury's Stunt Double

• Milwaukee has (division-race-wise) joined the choir invisible, and the possible wild card matchups are intriguing.
• Peter Van Buren (TomDispatch via AlterNet) explains the historical situation of Iraq and why the United States should have refused to have anything whatsoever to do with it.  Which reminded me that the late Steve Gilliard had written about military history and Iraq and extensively quoted gjohnsit of Daily Kos, who wrote:
  

  The first trick to learning from history is not to learn the wrong thing from history. For instance, Bush and the rest of the pro-war, right-wing liked to reference Neville Chamberlain before WWII as reasons to invade Iraq (and now, Iran). The Republicans are right to compare WWII and Iraq, but not for the reasons they think.
  If the Republicans weren't so ignorant about history they would have compared Yugoslavia to Iraq. No, not Yugoslavia in the 1990's. I'm talking about Yugoslavia during WWII.
  
  Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was artifically put together by the victorious allies after WWI, and combined several ethnic groups that had long, hostile relationships. They managed to live together for decades until Hitler decided that he didn't like their current government in April, 1941. Hitler invaded for no other reason than he wanted "regime change". Yugoslavia's army collapsed quickly. However, that was mearly the beginning.
  
  Hitler did not have enough troops available to contain any outbreak of ethnic strife, and Yugoslavia decended into civil war.
  

  In Croatia [in 1941] the indeginous fascist regime set about a policy of "racial purification" that went beyond even Nazi practices. Minority groups such as Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated as were the Serbs: it was declared that one-third of the Serbian population would be deported, one-third converted to Roman Catholicism, and one third liquidated.
  - Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition

  In the end, three times as many people died in Yugoslavia during WWII as died in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 1990's. The trigger was the overthrow of the government without the military force to enforce its will on an ethnically diverse people. Republicans learned the wrong lesson from history. Saddam Hussein wasn't Hitler. Saddam was King Peter II.
  
  Well, not really. But you get the idea.

• Together for 72 years, married this month.  Is your marriage threatened yet?
• See if this sounds familiar:

  We are better, we are more entitled, we are different or at least less interested in the people around us, or the tribes or nations around us, because we’re worthier than they are. Our people are the prettiest, our language is the most musical, our clothes are the most stylish. And these people are barbarians or at the very best civilized but crude. We are deserving of resources just as I, as the individual, am deserving of the raise, or deserving of the job or deserving of the hottest girl at the party because I’m better than the other guys around me.

  It's an article on narcissism, individual and tribal.  (Sarah Gray interviews Jeffrey Kluger for Salon, excerpted in AlterNet.)

In Memoriam

Polly Bergen, actress/singer/activist.

When I was small, she was a panelist on I've Got A Secret, and I could never figure out what she did.  I have to say that between the early '70s and now, I did not remember her at all.  I had no idea she was a feminist.

In Memoriam

• Jackie Cain, singer (Jackie and Roy; Roy died in 2002), who had a particularly fine version of "Lady Madonna" that I used to hear on the station I used to listen to back in the late '60s.
• George Hamilton IV, singer (I'd heard of him before I'd heard of the actor, and confused the two well into my teen years)

Johnny and The Moondogs

• Johnny:  San Diego, the Cubs, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Miami, the Mets, and Philadelphia have joined the previously eliminated National League teams.  Washington has won the division (which means they'll punk out in the playoffs).  Baltimore has won the equivalent division in the American League (yes, that means the Yankees were eliminated, and yes, I'm sad about Derek Jeter) over Toronto and Tampa Bay (Boston, Céspedes notwithstanding, having bitten the dust earlier).  Minnesota, the White Sox, and Seattle also go home early.  Meanwhile, the Wild Card stats are firming up.
• The Moondogs:  Miss America interned for Planned Parenthood.  (Salon, via AlterNet.)  The "conservative" press is shocked!  Shocked!  to discover she worked there for three! months!  The pearl-clutchers would  be even more horrified to learn that plenty of Miss Americas were pro-choice for women.  As it happens, I have a spare strand of pearls, but I will not be loaning it to conservatives; I might not get it back.

Social Studies

• Amanda Marcotte (yes, I know) at AlterNet spotlights seven women misogynists.  
• Samhita Mukhopodhyay (Feministing) wrote, for the Guardian, reprinted at AlterNet, another one of those articles about *gasp* how many people are single and how awful that is, although the middle of the article tries for a more nuanced view.  

  ...the stereotypes about single people are usually inaccurate and don’t take into account dating in today’s complex cultural and financial realities.
  
  Single simply means unmarried – not that anyone counted in singlehood’s ranks is not in a relationship. You could be in a seven-year relationship, going strong and still check the box for “unmarried” and decide never to participate in the institution of marriage, but only the government (and maybe your interfering mom) will think that you’re single. [...] Marriage has long been a mostly-financial transaction anyway: from when marriages were exclusively a deal brokered between a father and his son-in-law to be, to the ghastly cost of modern weddings, there’s always been money involved.

  And then the wrap-up:

  Many single people not in relationships have to navigate being caught between two worlds: one in which everyone gets married and it’s the standard organizing principle of our society; and one in which we can allegedly just “have it all” but can’t even pay our rent and are wondering if he’s ever going to text again.

  Only two? Really?
• Janee Woods (AlterNet) on the difference between discomfort and danger in racial settings.

In Memoriam

• 110 Stories, by John M. Ford.
• Terrance (Republic of T) reposts his essay from the fifth anniversary, eight years ago.

Their Lips Are Moving...

Straws.  Without which one's bricks are rather goopy...

• On the mawwiage (thank you, Impressive Clergyman) front:
  • Still trying. Still ridiculous.

    Allowing gays and lesbians to wed, Stewart said, creates "genderless marriage" and "weakens the social expectation of the child's bonding right," leading to a likely increase in fatherless and motherless children.
    
    Judge Ronald Gould asked Stewart where children's "bonding rights" could be found in the law. The attorney acknowledged he had no legal source, just the messages that states and social institutions send to men and women.
    
    If you really want to send a message, Berzon said, "put up a billboard."

    No, really.
  • This marriage is between a man and a woman.  But folks are...concerned.
  • ETA (Just went up at Republic of T):  Marriage as panacea.  Unless, of course, you're gay.  Or not having children.  Or not possessed of a college degree.  Or or or.
• Zandar calls it:  The Mask Slips Again.  Or alternately, Pennywise the Clown does not dress at home.

  Like I keep saying, Republicans want fewer people to be allowed to vote. This is a solid plank of their platform, to make sure a few people vote as possible. When that happens, they win. When people vote, they don't. Therefore, they must stop people from voting by any way possible.
  
  Especially if those people are black.
  
  This is why when I see people declare there's no difference between the two parties and that voting doesn't matter, I want to slap them. If voting doesn't matter, why are Republicans trying so hard to stop people from doing it?

  [Emphasis in original.]
  

Mathematical Elimination Fever!

Now that September has spent a week in residence, let's check on teams playing out the string or acting as spoilers, because otherwise there would be a lot of links and ranting, even now.

American League:  Boston, Houston, and Texas are out, with Minnesota poised to join them.  National League:  Arizona and Colorado are in Wait Till Next Year territory.  The Cubs will be there by the end of the week.

My team, of course, is mired in a slump.

Useful Term

Hey, they said it.

You Said a Mouthful

• Melissa McEwan on the Republican Party:
  

  Republicans' primary problem with women is, and will always be, this: They think that we're stupid. They think that there's some way they can trick us into not caring or not noticing that their policies are crap.

  This can also be corroborated at Margaret and Helen.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid spots Rand Paul airing his inner fool in Guatemala.

  Remember when the Dixie Chicks were blackballed for suggesting as Americans that George W. Bush's foreign policy on Iraq was wrong? Eleven years later, it's now 100% acceptable for a sitting US senator to go abroad and openly attack the President, with the head of state of a foreign nation in attendance.

  Gee. Ya think?
• Batocchio last week was on fire, and I'm only quoting one paragraph because otherwise I'd end up quoting the entire post, and the one before, and the one before.

  Pushing for gay rights, including marriage and protection from getting fired for one's sexual orientation, isn’t about seeking elevated status, but mere equality. This is a crucial distinction. Yes, the push for gay rights makes social conservatives upset, and yes, it entails a change from decades ago. It is not, however, an assault on their freedom, which has not changed, only a diminishing of their privilege, which they took for granted. Cultural norms have shifted and no longer support what they view(ed) as the natural order. The same thing happened with slavery and women's suffrage and Jim Crow laws – things changed, and frankly, progressed. To quote another old post that can apply to bigotry or cultural narcissism in general, "of course people of faith have a role in the public square, they just shouldn't have a privileged role. They can propose public policies, but they don't automatically get to have their way by citing their religion. They don't automatically get to win."

• Comrade Misfit points up an interesting statistic. Yes, I am thinking about the Michael Brown killing and the police riot in Ferguson. Yes, there is rage. Later.

The People Who Disagree With Edwin Starr

Actually, with the songwriters of "War."  But you know what I mean.

The Slacktivist reminds us of the reasons "some people have earned the right not to be listened to".  (Thank you, Mr. Fallows.)

P.S.  Invariably the people in favor of war will not have to fight it.  I think that disqualifies them right there.

In Memoriam

Richard Attenborough, actor and director.

Tango In The Night

1. I am fine.  Shaken but fine.  (I'm not in Napa County.)
2. As I look at the news from last week, I am reminded that humans (I include myself here) fail consistently in the "Love one another." requirement.  Which is really why we can't have nice things.

In Memoriam

• Don Pardo, announcer.
• B.K.S. Iyengar, teacher and practitioner of yoga

In Memoriam

Lauren Bacall, actress and legend.

In Memoriam

Robin Williams, actor and comic.

"Drop That Fountain Pen, You're Under Arrest."

Video on bank regulation or lack of same, at Naked Capitalism.  Some of which is comprehensible.

Born on this Date

That would be Stan Freberg.

(Mentioned back here.)

In Memoriam

• Steve Post, New York radio personality.
• Manny Roth, club owner. 

And This Cost How Much Again?

Two years of investigating Benghazi have yielded no administration wrongdoing.

Thompson said the report "confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given."

That conflicts with accusations of administration wrongdoing voiced by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), whose House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has held hearings on the Benghazi attack.

My, what a surprise. Not.

Via Driftglass, who noticed that:

While there were the usual flood of wingnut-driven Benghaaazi hair-on-fire "news" stories choking the internet over the weekend, so far as I could find, there was nothing related to this story (other than this SFGate article) when I searched for news about "House Intelligence Committee" or "Mike Thompson".

The story came out on Friday afternoon, incidentally. But still.

Whoops!

I missed my anniversary!

Six years!  Break out the Cold Duck!

And Hair Will Grow on your Palms

Why the arguments against same-sex marriage make no sense anymore.

What coherent justifications for anti-gay policies could possibly exist in a post-Lawrence landscape?

The answer, it turns out, is that there are none—none, at least, that aren’t driven by animus. A review of the failed attempts here is instructive. At various points, conservatives argued that every child deserves a mom and a dad; that gay people simply make inferior parents; that marriage isn’t marriage without penile-vaginal penetration; that legalizing gay marriage would lower birth rates; and, best of all, that somehow, allowing gay people to get married would cause more straight people to have children out of wedlock.

Are you snickering? So were the judges who had the pleasure of hearing these arguments spelled out in court.

Slate, via News From ME.

In Memoriam

• Margot Adler, journalist and writer (also the founder of WBAI's Hour of the Wolf, for which I used to get myself conscious at 5 AM and switch on the radio.  I met her a few times).
• James Shigeta, actor.
• Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase.

Having Learned Nothing from Jaws...

A clip from The Strain, via Spocko's Brain (and no, that was not intentional).

The Ongoing

Power may be in inverse relation to empathy.

Not a surprise.  Feminist Philosophers, via I think one of the links at Wiscon38Fail (it hasn't gotten a proper Fail Name yet, and I do not want to use the "accused"'s name as the Fail Name).

Heads'-Up/Uh-Oh!

Ebola patient on the loose.  This is not a good time to visit West Africa.

Strange Juxtapositions

(Is the Dread Dormammu running HYDRA?  It would explain so much.)

• Vagabond Scholar on the ongoing adversarial relationship of civility and bullshit.

  For example, maybe you sincerely believes that someone calling Dick Cheney a "war criminal" is distasteful, because, uh… he hasn't been formally convicted as such. Or it sounds harsh. Okay, but you should be more outraged by what Cheney actually did, his role in constructing a a torture program and his dishonesty in selling a war of choice. Don't agree with all of that? Fine. But the defining feature of civility trolls, the smarm patrol, the bullshitters, is that they're trying to shut honest discussion down. They don't want to investigate. They don't want accountability (not for their team, anyway). For example, there's a reason torture apologists steadfastly ignore all the accounts and mountains of data proving their claims false. Pick another issue if you like; the same dynamics often play out.

• Paul Krugman discusses why conservatives are upset about California.  (AlterNet's Janet Allon, on Mr. Krugman's column.)
• Remember the psychological profiles of conservatives ten years ago that caused some hoo-hah?  More evidence.

  The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

  (From Mother Jones, via AlterNet.)
  

The Irony Patrol

• Terrorist Plots R Us, or the FBI is Out There.  Via Comrade Misfit.  Entrapment does not make law enforcement look good, y'know; it's a cheesy TV scriptwriter kludge when a proper plot is in  Writers'-Block-Land.
• "George Harrison memorial tree killed by beetles."  Without an "a."

In Memoriam

James Garner, actor.

Sometimes Twitter's Succinctness is the Point

The LOLGOP Twitter account makes an observation.  (Via wouldyoueva on Live Journal, who retweeted a different observation.)

Nauseating

Nauseating.  (I can't even type it.  It's akin to poisoning children.)

This Is the Sort of Slime the Supreme Court Unleashed

To paraphrase Southern Beale:  "Yes, Georgia law enforcement people!  Do tell me how getting-out-the-vote efforts and absentee ballots constitute voter fraud when performed by African-Americans!  I'm all ears."

Via Fred Clark (Slacktivist).

In Memoriam

• Charlie Haden, jazz musician
• Lorin Maazel, conductor and prodigy
• Nadine Gordimer, novelist
• Tommy Ramone, last of The Ramones

The Footie

Apparently, conservatives fear, loathe, and disapprove of soccer. Cerberus (Sadly, No!) takes one down. Profanely, of course.

You see, young people don’t seem to have the same dumbass nativist hangups as the Klan-wannabes who seem to have our country in a death-lock, so thus are less likely to abandon a totally awesome sport the whole world plays simply because it isn’t an American exclusive that feeds into our notions of American Exceptionalism. And that’s bad, because that means they’ll be less likely to support bombing random brown people and self-defeating nonsense justified only by a strange idea that America is “different” and thus not bound by the laws of time and space.

And I'm pretty sure there's some incorrectness in there.

[partial crosspost]  See also link here.

96

96

In Memoriam

• Meshach Taylor, actor
• Frank Cashen, baseball executive
• Frank M. Robinson, author, activist, editor, scholar.

In the Matter of That Supreme Court Decision

Iron Tongue of Midnight said it best.

(The decision, if you missed the news this morning.  The summarized dissent.)

Better make sure you're not employed by Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses or really strict Muslims or ultra-Orthodox Jews.  Or any corporation professing any religious belief.  Lest, you know, you get bitten somewhere you weren't expecting.

On the Value of Kotter, et al.

• One of the mysteries of life is the variety of international readers of this blog.  Not long ago, Indonesians made up a sizable chunk of my readership; currently I'm having an influx of South Africans.  Is it something I said?
• I may have mentioned a while back that I have a thing about teaching, possibly because I believe in education (yes, I'm one of those) and because I mostly was dealt excellent teachers (a few crummy ones, too, whose names are mercifully forgotten) and because I was smart, which is not to say that I liked school, but that is another story altogether.  Because my communication skills are non-existent (what works for me is writing and polishing sentences, which is very difficult in real space and time unless both parties have iPads), I bailed on an educational career, but that doesn't mean that meta doesn't interest me.  Anyway.  Lance Mannion has a thought or two on teachers (his son is graduating from high school) that resonated:

  Every era has its own peculiar insanities. One of ours is a sudden vituperative disrespect for teachers bordering on out and out hatred. All over the country there are concerted efforts to put teachers back in their place as mere employees, and temp workers at that, grateful for whatever pittance the local school board deigns to pay them. Several cohorts of teacher-bashers are behind this, for different but overlapping reasons. […] But they really don’t value talent.
  
  They don’t appear to even know what it is.
  
  What they value is productivity.
  
  That’s another way of saying they value making a maximum amount money at a minimal cost.
  
  Teachers are anything but “productive” in that way.
  
  And it’s clear that these reformers think teachers aren’t productive because they are lazy, not intelligent, without talent, and not incentivized to work harder and become productive by money---that is, by the fear of not having it, not by the real prospect of earning more of it. […]

• 100 years ago, the precipitating event for World War I happened (I thought I'd linked to an article seen in the Smithsonian magazine, but apparently not.  Damn).

*Innocent Look*

• Shenanigans in Mississippi.  (From Republic of T, with lots of links.)  Bonus Nina Simone video and a week of bad conservative behavior in review.  (One of the people accused of conspiring to photograph the wife [who is in a hospice and has dementia] of one of the candidates was found dead [and may have committed suicide].)
• Also from Republic of T:  When is Congress going to focus on employment?  Rather than bashing the unemployed, that is.
• Getting the wrong lessons from Vietnam and the Cold War and applying them to Iraq.  Obsidian Wings' Doctor Science explains how that happened.

Irrelevant and Immaterial

In a bid to garner a soundbite, silly person downvotes soccer.  Nah; no Googlejuice for that.

Projection Much?

They're concerned about "voter fraud" because they practice it.

Monroe faces 13 felony election fraud charges in all, including voting more than once, voting as a disqualified person, registering in more than one place, and providing false information to election officials. He could spend up to 18 months in prison, and pay a $10,000 fine for each charge.

Via Raw Story, while looking at something else.

In Memoriam

• Gerry Goffin, songwriter (solo, with other collaborators, and with Carole King)
• Stephanie Kwolek, inventer (Kevlar)

Fragments of the Mosaic

• Consultant and diplomat who guessed wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Nevertheless, Khalilzad thought Maliki was just the man to make piece with the Sunnis, crack down on Moqtada al-Sadr (whom the American government mistakenly believed to be an Iranian pawn), and stand up to the Iranians. Summoned by Khalilzad, Maliki was abruptly informed that he was to become prime minister. “Are you serious?” said the astonished erstwhile butcher. The British ambassador, William Patey, had been invited to attend the meeting but when he started to object to Maliki’s anointment, Khalilzad promptly kicked him out of the room.

  From Harper's.
• Not even slightly surprising:  "Study finds strong evidence for discriminatory intent behind voter ID laws."

  The Supreme Court's 2007 justification for these laws rests on two pillars.
  
  The first is the notion that voter fraud even occurs at significant levels. Recent research has overwhelmingly debunked this idea: a recent study by political scientists at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin found that "virtually all the major scholarship on voter impersonation fraud – based largely on specific allegations and criminal investigations – has concluded that it is vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an effect on any election." Or, to put it another way, about as many people say they've been abducted by space aliens as say they've committed voter fraud.
  
  The second justification for voter ID laws is that they aren't motivated by discriminatory intent. But this new paper finds a solid link between legislator support for voter ID laws and bias toward Latino voters, as measured in their responses to constituent e-mails.
  
  In short, voter ID laws are simply racially-motivated solutions to a problem that never existed.

  From Washington Post.  [ETA:  via skippy]

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!

Prosecutors allege Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of an effort to illegally coordinate fundraising among conservative groups to help his campaign and those of Republican state senators facing recall elections during 2011 and 2012, according to documents unsealed Thursday.

The Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, picked up by Zandar Versus The Stupid.  There are forces trying to quash the investigation, so this may not mean much.

Speaking of Zombies

• Mercury Rising excerpts a Democracy Now! interview with Raed Jarrar discussing current events in Iraq:

  There has been a lot of focus on ISIS because it makes a good media story. It’s this crazy group. Everyone is an expert now on ISIS and where it came from. And it tells a compelling story for a U.S. intervention: There is an extremist terrorist group that is threatening a legitimate central government that is our friend. That is the narrative now. I think that is important to unpack and deconstruct, because, on the one hand, ISIS is one of many players in this uprising. It’s really naive to believe that one crazy terrorist group can take 50 percent of Iraq’s territory in a week. There are many other players, including—I think the most important players are tribal leaders in all of these provinces, and their armed militias, and former Iraqi officials from the Saddam Hussein government, led by the former vice president, Izzat al-Douri, who runs a group called al-Naqshbandi, a group. There are other smaller players like the Iraqi Islamic Army, the Mujahideen Army, the 1920 Brigades. There are, I would say, at least 12 other players. So it’s more indigenous. The vast majority, I would say, maybe almost everyone who’s fighting, is an Iraqi, unlike what the image that is being drawn by the Iraqi authorities.

• Sing it, Southern Beale:

  We should never, ever have gone into Iraq. Never. End, full stop. What’s happening now in Iraq is exactly what we peaceniks said would happen waaaay back in 2002 when this was being “debated” the first time. Sectarian violence, civil war, Sunni vs Shia, etc. etc. etc. All of that stuff. We were told we were unpatriotic. We were told to support the troops. We were told to shut up and clap louder and put a yellow ribbon on our cars and stick a cork in it and stop talking about how much the war would cost because “deficits don’t matter.” We were right then, and we’re right now.
  
  And to the mainstream news media, who banged the war drums so loudly 12 years ago: stop trotting out everyone who was completely wrong last time to offer “expertise” this time. There are no do-overs in warmongering.
  
  I find it completely unacceptable that we live in a country where Americans will take to the streets to prevent their fellow citizens from having health insurance, but they refuse to acknowledge that this country sent its soldiers to die for oil company profits. Wake the fuck up, people.

• ETA:  James Fallows, The Atlantic:

  Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life—writers, politicians, academics—who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense. None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to. [Added emphasis mine.]

In Memoriam

Tony Gwynn, mainstay of the San Diego Padres.

I Have to Stop Getting Up Mornings...

• In memoriam: Casey Kasem, radio personality and voice-over actor.
• On this day in 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta.  The barons rather forced him.  Conservatives have lamented ever since.
• Tony Blair still believes.

  The first is there was no WMD risk from Saddam and therefore the casus belli was wrong. What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the West, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them.

  Via Zandar Versus The Stupid.  ETA:  Ken Houghton at skippy the bush kangaroo (via Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money) thinks Blair most culpable for Iraq war and cites Love Actually.
• EFTA:  Via thnidu on dreamwidth:  Naval intelligence officer tells how we were lied into the war with no reason by men (mostly) who had not served and whose children were not in the military.

  And so, the objective became … what?
  
  Hearts and minds and freedom and democracy and nation building and magic bunnies who fart sunshine and rainbows.
  
  Unfortunately, it turns out we’re real good at the blowing shit up part, not so good at the magic bunnies part.

• Comrade Misfit:

  So here is the essential truth of this nation in this new millennium: It doesn't matter if you skin color is Irish-pasty, Somali-black or any shade in between. It doesn't matter what your profession is, whether you're a neurosurgeon or you dry cars at a car wash. Doesn't matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. If you aren't one of the politically powerful or if you don't have at least a nine-figure net worth, you're just one of the mouthy [redacted word I don't use] that the oligarchy has to hear nattering in the background. Their only fear is that we'll show up at the polls in numbers enough to defeat a chosen candidate (i.e., Scott Brown, for one).

• "Second screens" at movies (or why I mostly don't go to large chain theaters anymore, even for stadium seating and stereo THX sound).
• A temptation (or, for that matter, a Temptation) is not responsible for people yielding to it.

In Memoriam

Bob Welch, pitcher.

(You're thinking of Bob Welch.  Different guy.)

In Memoriam

Ruby Dee, actress.

She was electric.

61

61

"What is veiled now soon will be shown"

(Jefferson Starship, "Stranger," Modern Times.  Because I heard it twice back in the '80s, thought it was called "Familiar Stranger," and that it was by a different group that sounded like Starship.  "Stranger" doesn't atone for "We Built This City," but it lets me bury that crap beneath crunchy bass.  Crunchy bass rules.)

Right.  Where was I?

• Two Scott Horton (Harper's) pieces on Guantanamo:
• Six Questions to Prof. Mark Denbeaux on the Guantanamo "suicides" in 2006;

  The medical history of one detainee was missing from the NCIS file, but we found it in his medical records. His history contained a description of the cause and manner of his death by the senior medical officer who declared him dead at the clinic. The officer’s report did not mention hanging. It stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation caused by clogged airways. That would be consistent with having rags stuffed down their throats, but not hanging.

• Conversation with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!  (YouTube video; apparently isn't loading today)
• Fund-raising banquets and their discontents.
• Via Southern Beale:
• Autism linked to male hormones.  Uh-oh…
• Prototype Flying Saucer from, um, Earth.
• Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones on the stupidity of racism.  Featuring, oh, history.

  In fact, I question whether there are enough people left in the US who are white by this definition that it could be applied and still keep whiteness a going concern. Perhaps you could bar Jews from whiteness and still have a white majority, since Jews are a small fraction of the population anyway, but if you’re barring Jews and many Greeks and many Southern whites, is there really a white majority left? Exactly who was supposed to raise money sufficient to buy out Steve Jobs and send him on his way?

• In memoriam:
• Don Zimmer, literally in baseball before I was born.
• Chester Nez, last of the original Navajo code talkers.

"Come walk with me through the Unknown."

Busy weekend. Yourself?

• In memoriam:  
• Bob Bailey, integrator of Las Vegas
• Ann B. Davis, actress (never saw The Brady Bunch.  Did see the Bob Cummings Show in syndication.)
• Storme DeLarverie, gay activist  (NYTimes obit)
• Herb Jeffries, The "Bronze Buckaroo" of movies  (NYTimes obit)
• Joan Lorring, actress
• ETA:  Yuri Kochiyama, activist
• Deciding on whether we'll breathe next year.  (from Zandar Versus The Stupid)  Atlantic article quoted.
• Apparently very few of us ever leave high school.  (Article from last year, via a link from a comment at Making Light.)  Cue representations of Archie comics as the modern Inferno in 3…2…1...