In Memoriam

Robert Barnard, mystery writer.

Malign or Banana Peels Revisited

I might believe the part about mixing codeine, alcohol, and iodine, but the gasoline is over the top.

Two Things

1. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are contending for the National League Wild Card.  (St. Louis gets the Central Division title.)
2. Tampa Bay and Cleveland are tied for the AL Wild Card.  Texas might still sneak!

I Missed Bruce Springsteen's Birthday

So have some human interest stuff (that is, interesting if you study humans.  Less so if you are a human.    Mildly offensive to fans of the restoration of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs):

• Comrade Misfit notes that Senator Feinstein, who used to be against oversight of the NSA, is now in favor of some, and makes some suggestions toward reform, with a warning:

  The intelligence community is also ignoring history by their repeated assurances that they can be trusted not to abuse their powers. History teaches us that power corrupts, period. Power, both large and small, can be counted on to be abused by the person holding the power. The only way to stop such corruption is to have watchdogs, both inside and outside the government.
  
  The "outside the government" watchdogs are supposed to be our free press. They have fallen down woefully on the job.

• Via Zandar:  the governor of Kentucky champions Obamacare.  (Extensive quote from the New York Times, in case you've used up the 10 articles.)  [ETA:   And maybe someone should talk to neighboring Tennessee...]
• Interesting article at Walk On, referring to an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Yes, they both need to be read.  Also, see this video of James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley in 1965.

In Memoriam

Michael Ward, survivor of the Move (or MOVE) bombing in Philadelphia (alluded to here).

The Season Winds Down

Well, we're still waiting on the Wild Card results, but the division champions are mostly established:  Boston, Detroit, Oakland (AL); Atlanta, Los Angeles (NL).  St. Louis and Pittsburgh will be in the playoffs one way or another, and Cincinnati is one of the four wild card teams. (Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Pittsburgh at the moment, with Texas probably still hoping to sneak in.)

I wonder how much Divisional Championship sweatshirts are going for this year.

"Noh" Theater

With all of this going on it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that what Ted Cruz’s theater is all about is denying people access to affordable private, for-profit health insurance. [Emphasis added]

Southern Beale cuts to the chase.

It's Jello-Smearing Time

Driftglass has a simple post:  "Bill Cosby Explains What goes on in the conservative brain when you say 'Obamacare'."

With video audio.

Loose Items

• The True History of Libertarianism in America (NSFWCORP via AlterNet)  I have, I hope, made it crystal-clear that I am not a libertarian.  Right?
• The Dodgers have clinched the NL Western Division title.  The Red Sox are assured a playoff berth, and will probably clinch AL Eastern Division today or tomorrow.  The Orioles and Arizona have moved into the eliminated column.  Tampa Bay, Texas, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati are holding on in Wild Card standings.  The suspense...
• One of the reasons I love Echidne of the Snakes:

  Third, this is absolutely hilarious, given that conservatives reallyreally want to insert probes (transvaginal ultrasound) in women's vaginas as a precondition for getting an abortion, and those probes are not medically required. Women are not supposed to mind that but they *are* supposed to mind a large puppet ogling their birth canals.

Missing the 19th Century

...which may have been too modern for them...

• GOP in dwindling demographic niche and why outreach hasn't been working for them.

  Instead of asking “Why don’t more blacks, Latinos, women, etc., join us?”, Republicans should ask “How are we failing to address the concerns of blacks, Latinos, women, etc., so that more of them will want to join us?” That’s a question that Republicans can’t ask, because answering would mean changing their tone and their policies. Republicans can’t do that without having the very same rage they encouraged in their base turned against them.

  Republic of T, of course.
• Someone who tweeted foolish things about women's suffrage and individual freedom being incompatible, probably because assuming "women" not equal to "individual." There are times when I can understand the desire of some women to have as little to do with men as humanly possible.  Noli Irritare Leones.  (With all this misogyny, shouldn't monasteries be thriving?)
• [ETA] Someone ignorant who believes women should homeschool children and not waste time working.  This is one of the reasons I couldn't care less about his stance on drugs.

Catching Up

I've been distracted.

• In the American League:  The Yankees (hee!), the Blue Jays, the Twins, the White Sox, the Angels, the Mariners, and Houston (I'm still not used to that) are looking at an early winter, although there are still Wild Card possibilities.
• In the National League:  Phillies, Mets, Dolphins Marlins, Brewers, Cubs, Padres, Giants, and Rockies are out of contention.  They also have Wild Card possibilities.

(I don't see how making baseball more like hockey improves the sport, but I'm a fuddy duddy and you need to get off my lawn.)

PS  It's Talk Like A Pirate Day, matey.  Shiver your own timbers.

The Antagonists

Why we're in trouble:

• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast on the enmity between (large numbers of) Republicans and (an awful lot of) Americans.
• Yves Smith at naked capitalism features a brief video segment on the failure of Occupy to become a mass political movement.
• Also from Yves Smith:  Banks are above rules.  In certain matters, anyway.
• ETA:  Dave Neiwert at Orcinus on "secessionist" movements and some more America-hating.  A taste, because he's not kidding:

  This is the reaction we've come to know and expect from people on the hardnosed edges of the American right: At the end of the day, they don't really believe in democracy. They don't believe in putting up with other citizens who believe differently, who pray differently, who dress and wear their hair and their clothes differently and eat differently and most of all who think differently from them.
  They like the idea of America as a big all-white nation. They don't like the idea of America as a democracy.
  
  Their antipathy to democracy always creeps out, even in their conspiracy theories (how many times have we heard the far-right refrain, "This is a republic, not a democracy!"), but more importantly in their actions and their political strategies, embodied most recently in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ongoing efforts at voter suppression by conservative Republicans.
  
  And when they realize they are not going to get their way, their solution is not to accept the verdict of democracy. Their solution is to drop out.

It turns out, by the way, that I know someone who voted for Romney. (We all got rather too enthusiastically anti-conservative.)  Oh, well.

Moral Hazard, My Aspidistra

Subsidy-glomming reps want to cut food stamps.  Via Republic of T.

The absolutely hilarious part is that some of the biggest recipients of farm subsidies voted to cut food stamps and voted to keep giving subsidies to rich farmers — like themselves. Fourteen Republicans — with a total net worth of $124.5 million, including $7.2 million in farm subsidies — not only voted take food from the mouths of millions of the poor, the working poor, the unemployed, children, the elderly, and the disabled, but voted to continue putting money in their own pockets.
[...]
And these people want to preach to the rest of us about morality?

"I Was Struck by Lightning, Walking Down the Street"

Leave your body at the door.

• One of the ripples from the Snowden revelations:  Brazil steering away from U.S.-centred Internet.

  While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians' Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping.
  
  The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular software applications and services and endanger the Internet's open, interconnected structure.

• How your brain works, or doesn't.

  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

It's a dead man's party.

Revival

I keep putting off posting that Orcinus is back.

• On Russia's gay-bashing.
• On reasons to support Orcinus' work.
• Fundraising.
• On disagreeing about Ron Paul.
• On "patriot" communities.
• Why Mr. Neiwert is reviving Orcinus.

Straight-up exposure of the fascist octopus attempts at respectability.

Atque Vale

Jurassicpork on Boston's farewell to Mariano Rivera.

Is That Tiger On Holiday?

The relationship of unions and racial equality.  (Not that this is a perfect relationship.)  With graphs.

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

110 Stories

"110 Stories," by John M. Ford.

Note to self

God always has enough.

(L'shana tova for those who celebrate.)

In Memoriam

Frederik Pohl.

His last and penultimate post.

I used to run into him frequently twenty or so years back.  He will be greatly missed.

Leak at Fukushima

You can ignore the truth but the truth won’t ignore you.

--Iori Mochizuki

Yes, I Went There

Via skippy:  5 complaints of the "Christian" Right, and who is really getting hurt.  (Warning:  Amanda Marcotte)

Y'know, I've never been able to sit through Elmer Gantry.

Also, this is a review of the movie about One Direction in which the obvious comparison does not appear, probably because One Direction:  This Is Us would look even worse.  (I was not impressed by One Direction.  One, the abbreviation is one-dimensional.  Two, I get the appeal of young male singers who prance on stage, but does none of them play an instrument?  Three, get off my lawn.)


"It's been a hard day's night..."

In Memoriam

• Lotfi Mansouri, S. F. Opera director
• Seamus Heaney, poet
• Sathima Bea Benjamin, jazz singer/activist
• Red Burns, "Godmother of Silicon Alley"

Wishing Now I'd Requested Overnight Delivery of That Shipment of Words

The projected gutting of the New York Public Library, as reported by Lambert Strether at naked capitalism.  Specifically, the main branch at 42nd and 5th.

...the real fight here is for public purpose, as opposed to the civic vandalism of rentiers[.]...

Putting in an Order for a Shipment of Words...

...to the outlet at Poughkeepsie.

• Cornel West (via Raw Story) on materialism and virtue (video), because I have been mumbling for years about how commodifying everything including things and values that should not be commodified is destructive to "society" and "values."  Except I've not quite got the words right.  I have figured that insisting that "everything has a price" leads to libertarianism as opposed to liberty, and I have noticed "civic virtue"seems to be a forgotten quality (and besides, both Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer are running for office in New York City, so what is civic virtue anyway?), and anyone can see that the politicians bleating the loudest about "values" don't seem to have any.
  
  In other words, Dr. West, it's not only civil rights leaders. Also, Volpone is satire.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech:

  Like Du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. There has never been any other such moment in American history. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that this these people have a point. His biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don't know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion.

  Of course that was only one part of the speech. I will point out that W.E.B. Du Bois was not the first person to make the suggestion and Barack Obama will not be the last; the "black people are the agents of their own doom" meme pops up periodically because it's visible, superficial, and easy even if one knows the underlying causes.

Pass the Salt, Please

• Via skippy, the Texas Department of Transportation, faced with roads damaged by truck volume due to the oil boom, are planning to convert some of those roads to gravel and lower the speed limit.  No, really.

  “This is a safety issue,” Underwood said. “It’s not ‘our roads are bad and we’re not going to keep them up.’ It’s ‘our roads are bad and we’re trying to protect the driving public.’”

  Other states have weight limits and speed limits and enforcement.  But their roads are bad and they're not going to keep them up.
• Walk On presents a video of John Lewis speaking at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and discusses how right wingers claim a moral authority that they do not in fact possess.

  All of these outlets [listed in previous paragraph; Fox news, et al.] are opposed to the civil rights movement, opposed to what King stood for, opposed to one of the only living moral giants of American history, John Lewis.

• ETA:  Terrance Heath meditates on the journey between 1963 and the present.  With statistics.

In the Annals of the Real World Trumping Satire, It Is Impossible to be More Absurd Than Reality

Or why The Onion has been misfiring lately.  Apparently only the details are fiction.

Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks, writes:

As for me personally, I am getting scared to make fun of this stuff. The craziest nonsense I write is starting to come true.

I think I made the same point a few years ago and so did Aristophanes, probably.

In Memoriam

•  Albert Murray, scholar
• Marian McPartland, jazz pianist and radio host
• Sid Bernstein, impresario (I was one of those who had a ticket to the first Shea concert, though not Carnegie Hall)

*Headdesk* Department

• In the Odd How That Works section, a Texas megachurch previously in the antivax camp is urging the congregation to immunize (or stay quarantined) after a measles outbreak (all 11 cases in the county) is traced to them.  

  Pearsons did her best on Sunday to try to put a biblical spin on why the church had flip-flopped on its vaccination stance.
  
  “There are a lot of people that think the Bible — we talk about walking by faith — it leaves out things such as, I don’t know, people just get strange,” she said. “But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law.”
  
  “Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to disinfect, told them there was something contagious,” Pearsons continued. “And the interesting thing of it, it wasn’t a medical doctor per se who took care of those things, it was the priesthood. It was the ministers, it was those who knew how to take the promises of God as well as the commandments of God to take care of things like disinfection and so forth.”

  Give viruses and bacteria a shelter and they will turn on you. 
• Things that make me glad that conspirators of this sort aren't very bright:  Police foil far-rightists' plan.

From Raw Story.