Here's Your Hat, 2016, What's Your Hurry?

Yes, I have noticed that I am posting a lot of obituaries and not much about politics.

I have resolved to correct that.  New Year's Rez:  More snark and satire on politics, some of which will write itself; baseball, because a sport that recapitulates the Odyssey is worth occasional aggravation and can be forgiven its pace; and whatever I feel like.  More essays with reference links and less linkspam (mind you, I do linkspam because the folks I'm linking to say what I'm thinking better, and sometimes I am juxtaposing points of view.  But.  I used to do thinkpieces; it's time I started thinking again).  And I may start using the obits as jumping-off points for discursions.  Maybe.

(Three weeks until we have to start dodging authoritarians.)

Happy New Year!

In Memoriam

 Debbie Reynolds, actress/dancer (and mother of Carrie Fisher)

In Memoriam

• Vera Rubin, astronomer ("dark matter")
• Carrie Fisher, actress/author/screenwriter  (she had a massive heart attack on a plane and died after 3 days in the ICU)
• ETA:  Richard Adams, author (Watership Down et al.) Via   in comments

In Memoriam

• Zsa Zsa Gabor, celebrity and actress
• China Machado, model

Garry Trudeau!

Doonesbury!

Mike drop!

What Is to Be Remembered

• An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, and opportunities lost.

  Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
  [...]
  He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.

• AlterNet's Ilana Novick summarizes Robert Reich's suspicions of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
• Via Body Impolitic:  Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black."  Warning:  It is long and thorough.  A taste:

  Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

  Read it. That is all.
• Zandar on the Kentucky Noseless.

  They're finding out now that the bulk of people on Obamacare were always poor white folk from the hills anyway, and that they're going to be the first people with their heads on the block when the axe comes thundering down. But guess what? I have little sympathy for people who thought they were gladly condemning others to lose their health care in order to benefit themselves. They voted for Trump because he was going to "fire" those people and make white America great again. Trump sold them the dream and they bought the coming nightmare hook line and sinker.
  
  "Trump will take Obamacare from those people who don't deserve it, but never from me and my family."
  
  That'll be on the gravestone of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
  
  It should be on the gravestones of a lot of Kentuckians over the next four years too.

  Yes, they've spited their faces,and now they all look like Voldemort. /sarcasm mine.
• Why was I humming "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the way back from the clinic?

In Memoriam

• E. R. Braithwaite, who wrote To Sir, With Love, on which the movie was based.
• Alan Thicke, actor

Threat Level *****BOGGLE*****

Why not?  He's at least as qualified as the rest of the President-elect's nominees for cabinet positions.

The Satirists and Surrealists salute you, Mr. Canseco.

"Wouldn't Hurt a Fly." "Of Course Not, Mrs. Bates."

• They're gunning for Medicare and Social Security and lying about it.  (Zandar Versus the Stupid)

  Republicans aren't stupid enough to cut Social Security, are they? After all, the average Trump voter is on the older end of the scale of the American electorate and the oldest Boomers will be 72 starting next year, with millions retiring over the next four years of the Trump administration. The famous Tip O'Neill political adage that "Social Security is the third rail of American politics, you touch it and die" still has to apply in the Trump era, right?
  
  Funny story about Republicans, to "save" things they like to burn them down.

• Syphilis is returning, and it's drug-resistant.  (ars technica.com, via Andrew Ducker (andrewducker on Lj and Dreamwidth), who scatters many links every day.)

  Researchers studying syphilis have been aware of a growing problem with macrolide resistance, says Stamm. “At first, the macrolide treatment failures were in US patients, but then there were reports of macrolide treatment failures in patients in several other countries.” Macrolide resistance is now a “global public health problem,” she says.
  
  But researchers haven’t known how widespread this resistance is, because a lot of research has been done on strains of syphilis that were obtained from humans (sometimes a long time ago) and then kept in labs, passed down in generations of lab animals. The information from these strains is useful, but it doesn’t tell us much about what strains might be prevalent in the real world or how they might have evolved differently from the strains in lab animals.
  
  [...]
  
  They found that modern syphilis infections fall into two main strains, called Nichols and Street Strain 14 (SS14), that appear to have split from each other sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s. Syphilis research has largely focused on the Nichols strain, but SS14 was actually more common in their samples. “We didn’t expect to see something so widespread,” says Arora. “We expected regional clusters, maybe, but instead we see something that apparently has crossed frontiers and boundaries.”
  
  [...]
  
  Isolates of both strains show up with resistance to azithromycin, but resistance is far more prevalent in SS14. A quarter of the Nichols samples had the genetic pattern that leads to macrolide resistance, but 90 percent of the SS14 samples had it. Together, this evidence suggests that SS14 is a relatively new strain of syphilis that’s far more widespread than we thought and far more resistant to macrolides than we thought.

• The return of The Rude Pundit.  It's rude of course.  Adults at leisure only, 18 and under not admitted.

Rampant! Voter! Fraud! and Other Stories

• Yes!  Rampant voter fraud!  My smelling salts!  My pearls!  My fainting -- wait, 4?

  We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud — which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn't have cast — during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud — the filing of fraudulent information. Those aren't votes cast — and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.
  
  Here's what we found: [examples]
  
  [...]
  
  There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.

  That's four actual cases and three maybes. Somebody is using an eggbeater on that teapot, trying to create a tempest.
  
• Remember when we used to joke "It's a Russian plot" about seemingly-conspiratorial weirdness? It seems it's not a joke anymore.  Furthermore: 
  • Southern Beale,

    While this is the current headline, let me be blunt: this is not news. I wrote about this over the summer, here. I’m just a dumb housewife in Tennessee but even I can read a damn newspaper. When you read that the Russians hacked everyone, but only the DNC’s emails got sent to WikiLeaks, it’s pretty obvious that they were trying to help one team, and it sure wasn’t Hillary’s. As I wrote then:
    

    […] it’s far more worrisome that Putin is trying to help get Donald Trump elected than that Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to help elect Hillary Clinton.

    But did we have that conversation? Noooo. We had to get all emo over Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That was super-fun.

    There's more.
  • Zandar

    The White House wanted to make sure everyone was on board with this, but Mitch McConnell said no, as he has for eight years. More importantly this [has] seriously thrown the legitimacy of Trump's win into doubt and Republicans like McConnell would have rather won with Russian help than a fair election.  Remember that.

    and
  • Driftglass

    Our country has been hit by a massive sneak attack by a hostile foreign power: a sneak attack whose very existence was covered up by leaders of the Republican Party.
    
    [...]
    
    The word you are looking for is "treason".

• Joining Anthony Weiner's therapy group: Jefferson Parish's president (Louisiana Republican) Mike Yenni.

  Fox 8’s Lee Zurik asked Yenni what his intent was in exchanging erotic texts with a teen.
  
  “I can’t…I really can’t answer it,” said Yenni. “I mean, it was just…it was a stupid action. It was a stupid action to even get into this form of text messaging. It was something…something that I can’t explain why I did it.”

  via skippy.
• Not the song or the musical group:  New theory about the Bermuda Triangle, with ominous music.

In Memoriam

Appaarently I forgot to post this here Thursday:

• John Glenn.  
• Greg Lake, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (later Emerson, Lake and Powell) and King Crimson

Sorry.

On Background with Splotches

• The Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire; links to articles about it in one place (at least for now, later may require search terms).  No, I wasn't there.  List of confirmed victims.  Map apps will still have the intact building in 3D and street view until the next pass/visit/upload (Mapquest, back in the day, showed pre-9/11 aerial views of WTC for a couple of weeks -- I used to check) happens--Google Maps last scanned that area in 2014.  

Meanwhile, the forces of evil around are assuming their triumph, and we shall call them Fascists because the Devil really hates being called by Its name.

• Hypocrisy and health care.  (Daily Irritant)
• They don't mean you well, that's for sure.  (Indomitable)
• Remember "Kinder, Küche, Kirche?"  Guess who wants to bring it back? (from Echidne of the Snakes)

  I'm not sure if this post makes the point I want to make: The right-wing in this country wants to socialize decisions about conception, about pregnancy and even about giving birth, but once a child is born, everything should be privatized: Almost all responsibility is saddled on the shoulders of the mothers, while the wider conservative society, in general, refuses to budge one inch from its traditional gendered expectations about the role of mothers.

  [Emphases in original]
  
• "Full employment" vs. "inclusive growth" and economic implications thereof. (naked capitalism)
• Unions and Fascist undermining and destruction.  (Booman Tribune)
• The war on libraries. (Wonkette)
• Rising tide of "fake" news and believers thereof.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)

• One of the many reasons that Megan McArdle is a terrible person is that she thinks she can-and, god help us, should-school Ta-Nehisi Coates on race.

  (The Hunting of the Snark)
  
• Robert Reich calls out Trump.  (AlterNet)
• Jerks vandalize football player's home.  (Crooks and Liars, first seen at sfgate.com)

"Flying Fox from the Yard"

• The Daily Banter's Justin Rosario discusses national voter ID.

  It will be nigh impossible to convince Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession that corporations and the 1% are the good guys. They watched corporate greed destroy the lives of millions and watched the rich get even richer from the destruction. Republicans will also be unable to convince them that they should vote Republican because Jesus hates abortion and brown people but loves guns. The usual wedge issues will have lost their potency. Republicans know this.
  
  The only move left to them has been rigging the election through extreme gerrymandering and massive voter suppression. Now that they control the entire government, the next step is to implement Voter ID laws on a federal level, forcing even Democratically controlled states to adopt a law that will reduce the number of eligible voters by millions.

  That to me smacks a little of conspiracy theory (also, someone who thinks Baby Boomers are "reliably conservative" has not met nearly enough of them).
• Variations on the term "crony capitalism."

  The real thing the doctrinaire conservatives get upset about in these contexts certainly has nothing to do with any meanings of the word "crony" in any case. It's the questioning of the miraculous rightness of the Invisible Hand, or less metaphysically the idea that any democratically constituted authority should question the judgment of the "rationally selfish" bourgeois through whose individual decisions the Hand is believed to operate. It's the bourgeois religion, according to which whatever the bourgeois wants is right, however destructive it may seem over the short run.

In Memoriam

• Van Williams, actor (The Green Hornet)
• Margaret Whitton, actress (Major League, et seq.)
• Andrew Sachs, actor (Fawlty Towers)

Smooth Operetta

51 days, folks.  Fifty-one days.

• The Tooth Fairy called.  That last tooth crumbled.  Please leave $1,000 under the pillow.  

  Camerota explained that the false claim that President Obama suggested people go out and commit voter fraud was drummed up on Fox Business Network, with deceptively edited video.

  I understand that there are intelligent, non-foaming Trump supporters out there, but apparently none of them ever cross the path of anyone in any media.
• Driftglass, taking it further:

  The doctored video is there, the doctored transcript is there, and the original transcript is there, and what is abundantly clear is that Fox News' Stuart Varney knowingly perpetrated a massive fraud on his viewers and that if he worked at a reputable news outfit and not Roger Ailes' Wingnut Whorehouse and Vomitorium he would have been shitcanned immediately.

• Why the Republicans want to destroy Social Security/Medicare (and Obamacare), as explained by Lance Mannion.

  Of course there’s nothing at all religious in it except for the self-righteous zeal with which they impose it on the body politic. It’s rank hypocrisy. An excuse to do whatever they want to make and pocket gobs of money they didn’t earn all on their own through their individual enterprise and hard work. It’s canned language they can use to explain away their naked greed and justify their social Darwinism. They’ve done a good job of proselytizing. There’s been no shortage of willing converts. The political media seems to teem with them. There are hardly enough loaves and fishes to feed them. How this all developed is the subject of Kevin Kruse’s indispensable One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, but to sum up quickly here, it was a response to the New Deal, an attempt to counter Franklin Roosevelt’s casting the New Deal in a Christian light.
  
  Ever since, the Republican party has been devoted to preaching their revised version of the gospel in which Jesus commands the storing up of treasures on earth and the parable of the sheep and the goats is inverted, as if he said “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me and my capricious, vindictive, sky-demon father.”
  
  A Christian nation is one in which the hungry starve, the sick go uncared for, and strangers are turned away, all for their own blessed good.
  
  End of sermon.

  There are links in original.
  
• Via skippy, Chattanooga's experience with municipal gigabit-per-second fiber internet network.