Vampires and Dragons Require Both a Stake Through the Heart and Decapitation

We keep casting harsh desert sunlight on Bad Ideas in an effort to sterilize them, and other people take the dried dead things home and water them.

• Cabaret, revived and still relevant.
• Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking for the underdog.  (Via supergee on Dreamwidth)
• Helmut Monotreme at Sadly, No! on the meaning of "waving the bloody shirt" and a conservative columnist's defense of the indefensible.

  I would invite Rod, as diplomatically as I can, to look up the definition of “oppression”. Because “Not getting to make the lives of LGBTQ people as miserable as possible” isn’t it. Backing up the freedom of LGBTQ people to fully participate in society with the force of law isn’t oppression. Daily reminding Rod Dreher that he acts just like he’s so deep in the closet he’s finding Christmas presents, isn’t oppression. It may be mean but but he deserves that and worse for the fetid bilge he regularly spills into the national discourse. And that really is as diplomatically as I can put it.

• The Rude One goes Full Rude on Trey Gowdy and the eight-hundred-page report signifying that water is wet:

  Yet, it seems, according to every piece of evidence, that when it comes to Benghazi, she's been completely exonerated.

  Note: I am not kidding about Full Rude. Language NSFW, particularly if work is in a school or religious setting.
• ETA:  Speaking of that report...

In Memoriam

New York Times obits:

• "Dandy" Dan Daniel, disk jockey, WMCA Good Guy
• Bernie Worrell, funk keyboardist
• Jim Hickman, original Met
• Scotty Moore, guitarist
• Pat Summitt, women's basketball coach
• Mack Rice, songwriter ("Mustang Sally")
• Bill Cunningham, photographer

Los Angeles Times obits:

• Anton Yelchin, actor (Chekov, Star Trek reboot)
• Michael Herr, chronicled the Vietnam War

Note

Yes. I am behind on acknowledging obituaries.

Yes, I have seen the coverage on Brexit and elsewhere stated something rude about Planet of the Apes.  

No, I am not in mourning for either the Sharks or the Warriors; neither of them play sports I care much about.

No, I don't have enough on the Sacramento violence.  Although, remember, "right-wing" people (and their "left-wing" counterparts) like to stir up anger.  Historical precedents!

Yes, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had overcurtailed abortion rights in that state.  Predictably, Texas legislators are whining.

And same-sex marriage has been legal in the entire country for a year and no one has reported gay shotgun weddings.  Where are my pearls?!  (CLUE:  It is a logical fallacy to assume that anything not forbidden is mandatory.)

"There Isn't a Human Being Left in Santa Mira."

Soundtrack is Nina Simone.  Deal.

• Dangers of corporate facial recognition tech (Electronic Frontier Foundation).  

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act would come under threat, as it’s our nation’s strongest law that protects people from facial recognition technology used by private entities. Enacted in 2008, the law was an initiative of the ACLU of Illinois, in response to an episode when a corporation sold off its database of customer biometric information during bankruptcy proceedings.
  
  The Illinois statute requires private entities to get consent from a person before collecting or disclosing their biometric identifiers. Private entities also must destroy collected identifiers within three years, and sooner if they finish using the identifiers for the purpose for which they collected it. The statute extends to “a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.” The term “face geometry” includes facial recognition. Finally, the statute has teeth: injured parties may sue the private entities that violate these privacy rules.

• Survey says (Echidne of the Snakes):

  Isn't that fun? Because those who are keen to take online surveys could differ from those who are not keen in other ways, too, we cannot tell if the 2014 Harris poll says something about the millennial men in the US. All we can tell is that some unknown number of young men in that specific poll answered certain questions, the exact specification of which we are not told, in a certain way.

   Methodology may have been faulty here, and millenial men may not be more sexist than their forebears.
• David Neiwert (Orcinus) on the similarities of homophobic terrorists across the political/religious spectrum.
• Zandar (Zandar Versus The Stupid) on:
• Trump;
• Ryan;
• Rubio;
• Bevin wrecking Medicaid expansion in Kentucky;
• The background checks.
• Guidelines for fan-produced Star Trek films/videos.
• Scalzi on Brexit, now that it is over.
• President on Supreme Court immigration ruling.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars.)  Video with link to transcript.
• You don't need me to tell you that ultimately haters impoverish you and your life, right?  And that immigrants, in many unnoticed and unnoticeable ways, improve life.  (A comment at Obsidian Wings pointed me to the Iron Law of Institutions, which, like the Iron Throne of Westeros, is best understood as something that only makes sense in an inverted kind of power.  Basically, people are wack, and have been so for a long time, and only very rarely do they relinquish power once they get it, and yes, that sounds very much like drug addiction.  Where was I?)  Being anti-immigrant is spiritually akin to mummifying yourself, and unless you've built a convenient pyramid out in the back yard, mummification is a terrible look, toots.

Not a Road I Want to Be On

Trump revokes campaign press credentials of the Washington Post.  (Sarah P, Crooks and Liars)

Well, Jake Tapper asked him to clarify a statement made to Fox News.  (See video.)  (Also, "special gold-plated batphone" will never not be funny.)  That--that's doubt!

Then there's the rest of the article.

Now I am not going to come out and say that Trump is a fascist, but I am also looking at this list and it is pretty clear that he has checked almost every single box, except 11 and 14 (yet).

Today, he took the step of revoking the press credentials from the Washington Post, adding them to the long list of media that cannot cover him at rallies or speeches.

Article list is drawn from.  Article list was compiled from.

Serious.

Bad.

Craziness.

Cogitations and Requests

• On the usefulness of "thoughts and prayers."  ETA:  More.
• WiredSisters (Red Emma) at Noli Irritare Leones on the subject.
• Comrade Misfit (Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I) on a journalist's inaccuracy.  And so far the comments make sense.
• Jim Wright, Stonekettle Station (it's an update).
• Why calling for more love won't work.  (Southern Beale)
• Neocons, hah:

  At least one of Clinton’s advisers realizes what most Americans seem to know instinctually: The neocons are poison. When asked by Politico if Team Clinton would consider bringing on any of the desert-island neocons in an official capacity, the adviser sarcastically responded: “Who is saying, ‘You know what we need to do is pick up the people who got us into the Iraq War! I mean, they’re geniuses!’ They’ve been wrong about everything!”

  The Nation, James Carden, on the fear that neither the Clinton nor the Trump campaigns think much of neocon concerns.
• AlterNet's Janet Allon summarizes Paul Krugman's column on Republicans as the party of grift.
• Jim C. Hines.

General Bradley Turns Over in His Grave

Shooting at nightclub in Florida.

Yanno, if someone (PURELY HYPOTHETICAL!!  NOT ME!!) took assault weaponry and shot up NRA HQ or Congress, there would be calls for gun control so fast one could enter them in the Indy 500.

But of course, both the NRA and Congress have metal detectors and searches.  (Which makes the NRA hypocrites--shouldn't they have people detectors?  After all, guns don't kill people...)

I don't support a total ban; that's like trying to ban drugs.  But short of something like the Compact (which was adopted for much worse weapons than --  oh.  Brief explanation.  "The principle was that anyone wishing to kill an opponent must come within an equal risk death himself. The Compact forbade the use and possession of all weapons capable of striking beyond arm's length."  You don't have to read the Darkover novels. -- guns) or true "smart" guns, firearms in the USA are going to be problematic, and we're going to have weirdos nasty folks shooting people.

No, I don't have a solution, either.

In Memoriam

• Theresa Saldana, actress
• Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey (Detroit Red Wings)

A Tale of Two S. Kings and Other Stories

twistedchick linked to a brief squib at Daily Kos linking to an interview with Stephen King at Rolling Stone.  One of the commenters misread the headline as referring to Shaun King and linked to an openish letter he penned in the NY Daily News.  Both items express contempt for Mr. Trump.  (A third non-S Mr. King denies endorsing Trump.)

Apparently Pat Buchanan is still alive.  (Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine.  Link via Mark Evanier.)

Threading the needle:  Republic of T reports on denouncing racism while supporting racists.  With several videos, statements by Republicans, and

As WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin wrote, the GOP has managed to turn what Republicans once claimed was a bad rap that Republicans are racists into a “accurate, deadly analysis, ” that too many Republicans harbor racist views and/or don’t recognize racism when its right in front of them."

Oh, they recognize it, alright. Just like a duck recognizes another duck. It’s just that when a candidate looks like duck, walks like a duck, and sounds even more like a duck than a duck, Republican can’t bring themselves to call him a duck — because they knew who they were endorsing.

quacking.

That's more than enough about Mr. Trump.  Well, maybe this.  But I wouldn't want to spoil your dinner.

I've Seen All Good Peop -- Hey!!

Sorry; earworm.

• Fisking a parody:  Professor Chaos (The Daily Irritant) dismantles a conservative rewriting of the President's proclamation of Gay Pride Month.  (Link to original [on WND.com] at end of post.)

  Yes, it is the gays causing societal upheaval. It is the gay rights activists, for instance, that cause so many children to be born out of wedlock to teenage girls. [...] It is clearly the fault of the gays that much of rural America is in the grip of Meth and opiate addiction.

• The Rude One on recognizing a historical moment:

  This is just a pause to acknowledge that Clinton's nomination is a big fucking deal. As President Obama said, she is eminently qualified for the job. She was a great senator, and her tenure as Secretary of State actually involved more than Benghazi and her email server, although that's all the fuck you hear about. We have plenty of time to complain about her coziness with Wall Street, with her hawkishness, her coziness with tyrants, and more.

• Workfare reality.  (Via the sidebar at the Daily Irritant, just because.)

  ...[T]his bullshit of forcing people to work for pennies? It's dehumanizing, it's devaluing their labor. It's telling the poor they're worthless, or close to it. If their work had any meaning, the program would calculate the hours differently, make it a closer match between a legal wage and the amount they're going to receive. But when it's the equivalent of $1/hour or less? Then it's pretty obvious the work doesn't mean anything; it's the punishment part that's important.

Ilyushins

Via No More Mister Nice Blog, Pat Cunningham (Applesauce) on demographics and reality, which is a commentary on this article by Jed Kolko at fivethirtyeight.com, which in turn was a rebuttal to an op-ed by Jim Vandehei in the Wall Street Journal, for which you must subscribe or sign in.  Cunningham wrote:

In her own way, Sarah Palin tried to invoke these images during the presidential campaign of eight years [ago] when she told the folks in small towns that they were the “real Americans” — as if residents of big cities were aliens of some sort.

As an alien of some sort who has lived in cities most of my life, I am going to say here that I have heard about the wonderfulnesses of small towns for most of my life (from movies, TV, books, music, and the general sort of propaganda one absorbs as a young person).  The small-town values of friendliness and self-sufficient neighborliness have been extolled well into mythical territory.

I don't believe in small towns.

Probably because other small-town values are conformity/aversion to difference.

It turns out that statistically (see Mr. Kolko's article; he uses statistics and explains his metrics) the average American lives in medium-sized cities.

(In which case, the average American might understand more viscerally why real-estate magnates should not have power.  But I digress.)

So politicians talking to what they think are Normal Americans are Wrong.

(I submitted a mail-in ballot, so I'm covered, but if your state is throwing an election today, please vote.)

In Memoriam

• Peter Shaffer, playwright (Amadeus)
• Helen Chavez, widow
• Victor Korchnoi, chess grandmaster
• Phyllis Curtin, soprano

Link Salad

• Neil deGrasse Tyson in video on education.  (At AlterNet; from Bill Maher's program)
• Benjamin Dangl at AlterNet on the failure of neoliberalism and how long it has taken to be admitted.  (IMF does not really stand for Impossible Missions Force.)
• Professor Chaos (hi!) of The Daily Irritant allows Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas to demonstrate comprehensive foolishness.  CNN video.  Bonus Duck Amuck gifs.
• Jurassicpork on the late Muhammad Ali.
• The state of the City University of New York (Cory Robin, Crooked Timber) is not so good.
• Sarah Guppy, designer of bridges.  But modest (spits).
• ETA because I had forgotten the tab was still open:  Jesse Curtis asks whether Americans can be honest about our history.  And cites some of that history.  And addresses the elephant the candidacy of Donald Trump.

  What's remarkable about this is that whole swaths of the nation's institutions cannot even describe it. They are compelled to resort to euphemism and obfuscation. Politicians and pundits avoid using hard-edged words like racism not because they are inadequate descriptors of the matter at hand, but because, a priori, one simply doesn't describe contemporary America in this vein. To admit that Trump is running a racist campaign is to admit that America is not what we thought it was. It is to admit that progress has not been as easy, facile, or comprehensive as our national myths tell us.

In Memoriam

Muhammad Ali.  With video.

Heavyweight champion, poet, resisted draft (Vietnam), converted to Islam.  Fascinating life.  Lived with Parkinson's disease.

In Memoriam

Dave Swarbrick, Fairport Convention, et al.

"Here We Stand, Hurls a Park, Housebroken and Too, Too, Too."

Yes, it's a mondegreen.  Deal.

• Lance Mannion is on fire lately.
  
  • Essay about the campaign of Bernie Sanders and impossible dreams.

    There’s another lesson for all of us, if we’re to avoid finishing our lives as Don Quixotes. There comes a time when we have to accept that our time has passed and the world doesn’t need us anymore or, any rate, not in the way we used to think it did. We have to come to terms with the ways we failed to be the heroes and heroines of our own lives we dreamed of being. We have to come to terms with the fact that we are going to die and life will go on without us as if we didn’t matter---as if we never existed.
    
    We have to find a way to live with this fact without retreating into fantasy and self-delusion or giving in to bitterness, anger, resentment, and despair.

  • Essay about trying to freeze Hillary Clinton at an early stage and why that's foolish.

    What you can’t argue, with any intellectual honesty, is that none of that experience matters as much as her having once upon a time, years before she was even old enough to vote, she put on her cowgirl outfit and proudly called herself a Goldwater Girl.
    
    But while the Goldwater Girl meme is an attempt to do just that, in fact an attempt to pretend she hasn’t achieved anything or accomplished anything at all since she was in high school, David Brooks thinks the problem with Hillary is that she has too impressive a resume. She’s achieved too much, accomplished too much, racked up too much experience. In fact, she’s too qualified.

  • (Also, he's fundraising.  Send some if you can.)
• The Rude One is examining Donald Trump:
  • An excerpt from an article detailing an attempt to sell a Trump University scam scheme to a Canadian reporter.  (Article linked to is here.)
  • Queries as to what Trump's fans think.

    For instance, do the revelations about the sales practices of Trump University have any effect on your thinking? How much do you need beyond the sworn testimony of salespeople and the marketing guide that said that the elderly and single parents should be targeted because they are vulnerable to a get-rich-quick pitch?

• Why I keep telling people they ought to have or start a union.  (Except for the part about being a fool.  That's more One-True-Wayism than I like.) (Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money.)
• George Takei uses a football metaphor.  (Not a video.  Excerpted.  Facebook posting, and you know what I think of Facebook.  Via attn.com.)

As to what's going on in my head: curry chicken with spinach and maybe a blueberry pancake. It's lunchtime.

Department of Damn, I Miss All the Good Stuff!

Damn, I miss all the good stuff!

But, honestly, I hate crowds and rallies.

Two Memorial Day Links and Something That Won't Happen

• Untold and practically secret history relating to Memorial (Decoration) Day (in my childhood, there were still adults who referred to Decoration Day).  (Sarah Lazare, AlterNet)
• Dr. Grumpy, in his naval historian hat, summarizes the Battle of Jutland (100 years ago) and highlights a hero.  With video.
• Democrat suggests dumping Trump.

  Trump is not merely a Republican dilemma, but an American tragedy. Ideally, conservatives would acknowledge their role in enabling his candidacy, in moving the boundaries of acceptable rhetoric so far from reason that he can lie indiscriminately without fear of correction by journalists anxious for their next story. But more immediately, Republicans must find ways to defend their principles without capitulation to a vulgarian seemingly without principles of any sort. Trump deserves more than defeat by my party. He and his enthusiasts and enablers must be publicly, popularly shamed by all citizens who see him as a political cancer.

Imagine My Surprise

• Candidate Trump exposes the Dirty Secret (it was no secret, but it was definitely dirty) of Republican racism.
• Jesse Curtis:

  To be clear, Trump is not, at this stage, leading a fascist movement. Nor, in my judgment, is he ever likely to. But what is genuinely terrifying about Trump's emergence is that it shows the safeguards we thought our political system had built up are not there at all. Trump is so far beyond the pale, so manifestly unfit to exercise power, that the level of support he garners can be used to measure the health of our political system. The patient is more sick than we realized.

• Tomorrow is both designated and actual Memorial Day; remember those who fell fighting for this country.
• And have some Prince. 

More Straws in the Typhoon

• The problems with the TSA and why the presidential candidates don't discuss them.

  Ironically, the only people not talking about the crisis are presumptive presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That's because neither flies commercial and neither rubs elbows with poor schleps like us.
  
  The problem when everyone except presidential candidates is talking? There's a lot of hokum being served up, regurgitated by instant experts and presented to a tired, impatient nation as a panacea for long security lines.

  Joe Brancatelli, The Business Journals.  [ETA:  See also Southern Beale's post on the subject.]
  
• Last clown standing, or the weakness of Mr. T.  Lance Mannion:

  The political press has been expecting him to make the pivot. They’ve been predicting he’ll make it any time now. They’re not so secretly begging him to make it. They need him to start acting and sounding like a “normal” Republican candidate for President---and keep in mind the political press still believes the GOP is the party of responsible, grown-up moderates and a “normal” Republican is a center-rightists whose only real concern is keeping rich people’s taxes low, as if that’s not such a bad thing---they need him to act and sound “presidential” in order to give them an excuse to cover him as if he is. Sure, they love the clown act because it’s ratings and clickbaiting gold. But they also know it’s offensive, despicable, and disgusting and may cost him the election. I don’t think the press on the whole wants him to win. What they want is for him not to blow it too soon. They want it to be a horserace to the very end. They don’t want him falling down at the first turn. They want to be able to cover the campaign in a way that allows them to treat both him and Hillary as the same. They want to be able to criticize her without it looking trivial and fatuous in comparison to all the things they should be criticizing him for.

• What the media apparently doesn't understand about the email situation.  Crooks and Liars' shelleyp reports.
• ETA:  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  It does also go on to show one meme regarding this issue is true - our children would be safer in a bathroom with a transgender person than they would be with a Republican.

  capper, Crooks and Liars.

Soundtrack.

The Presidential Thing

Hillary presses the flesh in Oakland at early morning meeting with local leaders.

Bernie is coming to Oakland on Monday.

Donald says there's no drought.  (As if he'd know!)

California's primary is June 7.

Speaking of metaphors, Chauncey DeVega fleshes out his wrestling analogy.

Haystacks, Calhoun

There is no theme.  There are only links.  Tabs have to be closed.  It's all the wrong Ring cycle.

• Robert Reich (AlterNet) advises Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders to kiss and make up face some hard realities about their respective campaigns.
• Karoli Kuns (Crooks and Liars) on the Benghazi time-wasting probes and Trey Gowdy.
• Is America sliding into fascism?  (Robert Kagan, Washington Post)

  This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
  
  To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today.
  
  [...]
  
  What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him.

  Read the whole thing. Really.  Although you may want to read this post by Yastreblyansky afterward.
  
• A little lawsuit in Wisconsin.  (capper, Crooks and Liars)
• The self-stinging scorpion strikes again.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars) (Southern Beale is also on the case.)
• Steve M. (No More Mr. Nice Blog, although I first saw the article at Crooks and Liars) on John ("Torture Fan") Yoo's approval of Donald Trump's Supreme Court possibilities.  (Warning:  Not for anyone with a working imagination.)
• Anti-biotic resistant bacteria are here.  Well, in the United States.

  Even more alarming, the MCR-1 gene can transfer resistance to other bacterium through small bits of DNA called plasmids, meaning the gene can pass between species of bacterium as opposed to remaining contained to one species.
  
  “The fear is that this could spread to other bacteria and create the bacterium that would be resistant to everything,” Dr. Beth Bell, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told ABC News.

  (Elizabeth Preza, AlterNet)
• Taking on Megan McArdle's state of denial, in this corner, Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark).
• Pruning Shears:

  The right wing commentariat has responded to all of this by literally ignoring it. [...] He’s unelectable, they say. Boorish, immodest, not a conservative, doesn’t support traditionally conservative principals, and so on. All true, but irrelevant. They’re basically saying they’re mad at the voters, which, who cares? Work that out with your therapist, not your audience.
  
  What’s relevant is what they literally cannot bring themselves to look at how a Republican party that prioritizes their ideals could nominate Donald Trump. I understand why they can’t bear to grapple with it, because the answer is a very unhappy one for them: The party, as represented by its base, does not actually prioritize any of those things. Perhaps it hasn’t for a long time; Donald Trump is just the first to test the hypothesis.

"Willkomen, Bienvenue, Welcome..."

Mathematical Elimination Nomination

Donald Trump has clinched.  Schedule for playoffs not yet set.

Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) and Karoli Kuns (Crooks & Liars) remind us of how short Mr. Trump falls in the presidential department.

In Memoriam

• Mell Lazarus, cartoonist.  (NYTimes obit.)
• Donald W. Duncan, Vietnam anti-war activist and former Green Beret, whose obituary appeared 7 years after his death.  (NYTimes Insider story)

  We decided to pursue the obituary, the seven years notwithstanding. The thinking was, If we would have written about Mr. Duncan immediately after he died — and we would have, had we known — then we should apply the same standard now. His death, in a sense, was still news, and his story still deserved to be told. What’s more, in an odd way, the very obscurity of his death added an unexpected, even poignant, element.

War on (Some) Drugs (and Some People)

• Down With Tyranny! on getting medical marijuana to veterans' hospitals.
• Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone on the way the United States avoids ending the drug war.

In Memoriam

• Jim Ray Hart, SF Giants 3rd baseman
• Alan Young, actor (Mister Ed)

In Memoriam

Morley Safer made the news twice this week:

1. Morley Safer to retire from 60 Minutes on Sunday, May 15.
2. Morley Safer, veteran journalist, dies. 

Thoughts on Them

No, not the movie, although giant ants will show up later.

I was enjoying my morning open-eye with some nutritionally incorrect belly-filler when I ran across Driftglass's post, "Today in Republican Detachment Disorder:  Michael Gerson," which contains a quotation from the said Mr. Gerson:

Conservatives latched on to the GOP as an instrument to express their ideals. Now loyalty to party is causing many to abandon their ideals. Conservatism is not misogyny. Conservatism is not nativism and protectionism. Conservatism is not religious bigotry and conspiracy theories. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual and anti-science.

(Original here.)

As it was for some of Drifty's commenters, so for me:  Oh, really?  Really?  Oh, Mr. Gerson, you need to get out more.  (Ideally, that sentence would have a link to conservatives being misogynist, nativist, protectionist, bigoted, conspiracy-mongering, and pig-ignorant, but Breitbart.com and nationalreview.com get enough traffic.)  Seriously, that's what conservatives are known for.  The people on the left espousing that sort of thing are few, and I can't think of any examples outside of Josef Stalin, who has been dead and discredited even by hard-core Marxists for the last 60+ years.

Technically, I should be a conservative.  I'd prefer not being socked with change first thing in the morning, I like the people in charge to have ethics/morals, I remember a Golden Age (your Golden Age may vary).  There are times when I get the sense that humans have a propensity, nay, a bent, for stupid behavior only curbable by laws (and punishment), other humans, and operant conditioning.

Difference is that I don't think people are incurable.  I suspect they'd prefer to be; change is hard and many people don't have even the desire.  Most of us do not throw our feces at strangers now except on the Internet because we were trained not to do that.  Many of us have not figured that women are people (and that includes a not inconsiderable number of women).  We have developed more sophisticated methods of murder and more sophisticated ways of saving life.  We are nowhere near the Kingdom of God.

So.  My actual beef with the conservative tendency is personal, too, but mostly I am not interested in returning to the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century.  I don't need the hypocrisy, the misogyny, the bigotry, or the twisted anti-Communism (the usual disclaimer:  I grew up with virulent anti-Communism.  It was an American Thing in the '50s and '60s.  I still don't want to live under a Communist regime.  And I'm still down with the idea that, say, the gap between rich and poor does not need to be the size of the Grand Canyon.  Deal.), and conservatives don't really seem to have anything to add to the modern discourse except the word "No."  (But they'll still use modern communication devices.  Go figure.)

I'm willing to let them go off to palisaded enclaves where they can mumble among themselves, but they seem to want to run my life.

No.

Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) calls out Ross Douthat, who wrote an apologia column in the New York Times (link for documentation purposes only) which both she and Yastreblyansky have well and truly horsewhipped in the last several days.  She's had enough, though, and is now expressing her opinion of the scribblings of Mr. Douthat pungently.  One might say Rudely. Warning:  Adult language is used:

In the end, the only thing conservatives have to sell is racism.

Conservatives tried to pretend they were selling firm morals, but since they were lying the truth was eventually revealed.

[...]

Actually, no. Douthat is trying to switch the dialogue away from conservative racism by trolling liberals. Liberals owe bigots nothing and should offer bigots nothing. That is painfully obvious but that would be the end of Douthat's career, which is based on religious, racial, and class bigotry. But mostly racism. So Douthat must find a way to convince liberals to give racists respect and a place at the table of public opinion, instead of telling them to fuck off as they should.

Seriously.  I joke about reactionaries wanting to restore the Bourbons in France, but you have to remember that their idea of Eutopia (spelling deliberate) is a monarchy in which they are nobles and all others are peasantry.  And we have enough high fantasy novels as it is.

(There was other stuff, but this got long.  There should be footnotes [squeaky voice:  "No, not footnotes!"] but most of the assertions are easily checked with Google or older posts here and too many other blogs to mention.  There's iced tea [unsweetened] in the fridge.)

Range

• Clayton Kershaw taking on the mantle of Sandy Koufax.  (Faith and Fear in Flushing.)
• Shifting operating costs to government.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Permaculture:  Not just sustainable gardening.  (naked capitalism.)
• Uncertainty as valuable mindset.  (walk on.)

  It might seem strange to think of uncertainty as a skill to be cultivated, but it is precisely that. Abiding in uncertainty is uncomfortable. It strips us of our easy assumptions and continually confronts us with the possibility that we may be wrong. It is much easier to be certain.

• What bigots can teach us, or what comes between Brooke Shields and her Calvins.  (Yes, that's an obscure old reference to advertising.  Try Google.) (The Rectification of Names.)
• In Memoriam:  Madeleine LeBeau, the last living cast member of Casablanca.

Why do I get the impression that the people screaming about perverts in bathrooms want in fact to be perverts in bathrooms?  (See fourth paragraph.)  (I stopped into Bloomie's this afternoon, and there was a single-stall outhouse restroom next to the ladies' loo.  Although some people will complain about that.)

"Authenticity," *ahem*, Hypocrisy, and Horror

Not necessarily in that order.  Besides, lunch is hinting at me.

• Lance Mannion on what "authenticity" means in Politician Land.

  As I mentioned, the point of “authenticity”, to the extent there is a point beyond giving lazy and bored journalists something easy and amusing to write about, is that an authentic politician is one who shows how well she’s at home in the company of regular folks, that she is to some “authentic” degree herself just like regular folks. Hillary’s reviews on this score are generally poor. The critics regularly find her performances lacking in that kind of authenticity.
  
  But there are millions of women and girls not just in the United States but around the world who believe she’s been authentic in her commitment since she was in college to making their lives better, that she has worked authentically and with passion and success on their behalf, and they love her for it and will vote for her with the enthusiasm the reviewers agree she doesn’t inspire. Millions of men will too. Many of them white working class men. Hard to believe, I know. But it’s true. There are working class white men who love and admire her and going by what the pundits and analysts seem to think working class white men are the most regular folks of all the regular folks.
  
  But that doesn’t make her regular folks. She’s not regular folks. None of them are. They didn’t get where they are and achieve what they’ve achieved by being regular folks. In fact, a good deal of their success is due to their having determined early in life to distinguish themselves from regular folk. They didn’t think of themselves as regular folk. They hoped and worked for a life for themselves better than that.

• "Mandatory for thee but not for me."  The Rude Pundit, being less rude than usual.
• Ralph Nader being strange.  No More Mister Nice Blog with bonus Life of Brian video clip.
• Trump.  (Yastreblyansky, The Rectification of Names)

  On the minimum wage and taxes, he hasn't "moved to the left" either so much as danced around them, changing his positions several times per week, sometimes even per day.
  
  [...]
  
  And then explains everything he's said is only a "suggestion". So it's really just stupidity, and clickbaiting. We really need to get over the idea that there's a parallel between liberal or progressive or whatever on the one hand and conservative on the other. Where the progressive starts with the idea of a problem that needs to be solved, and some people that need some help, and a concept of looking for an appropriate relief through policy, the conservative starts with this sense of aggrieved identity and loss, nostalgia for a time when good people like "us" had power over bad people like "them", and a desire to "take our country back" in which the idea of any particular policy can be no more than a rationalization.

• More from Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) on income inequality, Megan McArdle vs. Noah Smith debating.
• Climate change effect.  (Lawyers, Guns & Money)
• Arranged marriage conference and the rationale for "underage" betrothal.

  So, let’s review. Young people should marry before age 20. Girls should have breasts, but not be 12. So probably like at least 15. The betrothal, which happens before the official legal marriage, is binding. This way parents can betroth children who may not yet be legally able to marry in their state. The matches should be arranged by the fathers, and ideally the teenage boy’s father should pay a “bride price” to the teenage girl’s family. The young people in question are expected to accept the matches their parents arrange for them, period and full stop, and there is no reason to consult them in the process—it is their duty to accept the arrangement.

• And a little more avoidable fail in Kentucky.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)

I had better water my stock and boil scramble an egg