...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.