Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

The words do not have to be perfect.

This fight is for everything.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Be a traveling stable for those who can’t find room at the inn.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

When we show up, we win.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

No Justins, No Peace

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

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Archives for November 2013

More Nukes Now

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A group of climate scientists, including former NASA scientist James Hansen, are calling for more nuclear power to address climate change:

Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power

We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently. Innovation and economies of scale can make new power plants even cheaper than existing plants. Regardless of these advantages, nuclear needs to be encouraged based on its societal benefits.

All the nuclear technology near my house is 40+ years old, of the same vintage (not the same design) as the Fukushima reactors. In general, utility operators aren’t building new nuclear plants, so I don’t see how adding more nuclear capacity could happen without a major government initiative, and that would be socialism.

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Open Thread: “Poverty Is Mainstream”

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gop foodstamps blame the victims auth

(Tony Auth via GoComics.com)

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Mark Rank, in the NYTimes:

… Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of the population that directly encounters poverty is exceedingly high. My research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).

Even more astounding, if we add in related conditions like welfare use, near-poverty and unemployment, four out of five Americans will encounter one or more of these events.

In addition, half of all American children will at some point during their childhood reside in a household that uses food stamps for a period of time.

Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when…

The typical pattern is for an individual to experience poverty for a year or two, get above the poverty line for an extended period of time, and then perhaps encounter another spell at some later point. Events like losing a job, having work hours cut back, experiencing a family split or developing a serious medical problem all have the potential to throw households into poverty.

Just as poverty is widely dispersed with respect to time, it is also widely dispersed with respect to place. Only approximately 10 percent of those in poverty live in extremely poor urban neighborhoods. Households in poverty can be found throughout a variety of urban and suburban landscapes, as well as in small towns and communities across rural America. This dispersion of poverty has been increasing over the past 20 years, particularly within suburban areas…

We currently expend among the fewest resources within the industrialized countries in terms of pulling families out of poverty and protecting them from falling into it. And the United States is one of the few developed nations that does not provide universal health care, affordable child care, or reasonably priced low-income housing. As a result, our poverty rate is approximately twice the European average.

Whether we examine childhood poverty, poverty among working-age adults, poverty within single-parent families or overall rates of poverty, the story is much the same — the United States has exceedingly high levels of impoverishment. The many who find themselves in poverty are often shocked at how little assistance the government actually provides to help them through tough times…

The solutions to poverty are to be found in what is important for the health of any family — having a job that pays a decent wage, having the support of good health and child care and having access to a first-rate education. Yet these policies will become a reality only when we begin to truly understand that poverty is an issue of us, rather than an issue of them.

Stigmatizing poverty as a personal failure is hardly an American invention, but refining and reinforcing the “self-made man in the land of opportunity” trope has been a major success for the One Percenters. Accusing someone of having been poor is like accusing a pre-Kinsley American of sexual deviancy — even if they were unimpeachably a victim (a child forced into pornography, or the use of food stamps) it’s a slur against one’s character.

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Late Night Open Thread

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Another Sunday, another distressingly bad performance by the Stillers. It really is kind of awe inspiring how quick and steep their decline has been. My mother, brother and I were talking and they both think there is nothing worth saving from Tomlin on down. I tried to argue and come up with something positive and blurted out Bell and Jones and Brown and started to say Suisham before I realized that not only is it pathetic that you are looking at the field goal kicker as a highpoint but that he missed two easy ones last week that cost us the game.

All I know is that if Haley is not run out of town after this season I may just give up.

Also, Brooklyn 99 is the worst show I have ever seen ever. I lasted 3 minutes.

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Bears repeating

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Here is me a long time ago, talking about George dubya and his immigration escapade.

[L]ord, what a tough spot for Republicans. At its heart the GOP has two basic camps [note: oversimplification for the sake of argument] – business conservatives who bankroll the party and the social conservatives/theocons who staff it. In that light one could say the towering achievement of Bush’s term as POTUS was that he defied the centrifugal forces of majority power and held the GOP’s unlikely coalition together as firmly and as long as he did. If so, his towering failure will undoubtedly be his adamant support of this immigration bill.

I have tried for days to think of something that could wedge the social cons apart from the business cons than immigration but I just can’t do it. The Chamber of Commerce loves our current system because one can pay illegals practically nothing and they will thank you for it. In their view any fix to the current system has to keep bringing in large numbers of people with poor language skills (can’t have them reading those OSHA flyers on the wall) and a weak bargaining position, e.g. guest workers. Otherwise Americans had better get ready to start paying more for hotel beds, restaurant meals and packed meats.

The key problem is that the thing that the business cons need more than anything is exactly what the social cons desperately want to end.

The last six years have forced me to admit that I got one thing very wrong. Treating brown folks like humans pissed off the base plenty, but losing the presidency twice to a black guy has driven them to an incoherent frothing rage. Business cons do not love ego service and low taxes so much that they’ll strap on a suicide vest for it.

At the same time you can hardly expect Chambers of Commerce to run to the arms of a party that strokes their delicate fee-fees with not quite so desperate an enthusiasm. We have thus moved to the inevitable phase two, where local CoC’s piss away an election cycle or two on futile primaries against the worst offenders. The tea party already made up half of GOP primary voters before the shutdown. Having scared off a few more layers of moderate voter I am sure these milquetoasts will win handily lecturing the frothy horde to tuck their shirts in (or wear one) and eat the damn broccoli.

Speaking of which, I bet that a long line of Wall Street friends begged Peter King to run for President and help bring the crazies to heel.

No one is about to put King in the top tier of GOP 2016 hopefuls. As a single House member from liberal New York, he’d be handicapped in the race for money and exposure against the Chris Christies or Pauls of the GOP. His vocal support for stricter gun control laws would be tough to explain to conservative primary voters, as would his criticism of tea party lawmakers who “equate Obamacare with military action,” as he put it, because they both involve government spending.

And his keen focus on national security when poll after poll indicates the country has turned inward after a dozen years of war isn’t the kind of message likely to fire up the Republican faithful.

But for King, that message is the point. His main motivation is unmistakable: pushing back against what he sees as a “dangerous” strain of isolationism that’s gaining strength in the GOP. Trips to early states like New Hampshire make him not just a “Republican congressman” in the media but also a “potential 2016 candidate” — giving him a bigger megaphone to drive his message.

Settle down you wogs, and eat your damn broccoli. After all this time someone will finally test whether you can win a national election without any volunteers.

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Open Thread: Low-Hanging Fruit(cakes)

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Bill E Pilgrim says:
November 3, 2013 at 8:21 pm (Edit)

@gogol’s wife: It’s even funnier because it turns out his statement about wishing he could duel her was lifted verbatim from a John Wayne movie.

In other GOP idiocy, Dubya’s Skeletor Michael Chertoff, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, is shocked and offended that we groundlings dare to tattle about — even mock! — Our Betters:

…[I]t is striking that two recent news stories illustrate a less-debated threat to privacy that we as a society are inflicting on ourselves. Last week, a passenger on an Acela train decided to tweet in real time his summary of an overheard phone conversation by Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA (and my current business partner). The same day, a photo was published of Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler at a summer party where he was surrounded by underage youths who apparently were drinking…

The ubiquitousness of recording devices ­— coupled with the ability everyone has to broadcast indiscriminately through Twitter, YouTube and other online platforms — means that virtually every act or utterance outside one’s own home (or, in Gansler’s case, inside a private home) is subject to being massively publicized. And because these outlets bypass any editorial review, there is no assurance that what is disseminated has context or news value…

There has been exaggerated talk about whether the government intelligence community could create a police state. But the true horror of the East German Stasi or the Maoist Red Guard was the encouragement of informants — private citizens reporting on other private citizens and even family members. No police agency could be omniscient. The oppressiveness of those police states came from the fear every citizen had that another citizen would disclose deviations from the party line…

Yes, Homeland Security’s own former “See something, say something” czar wants us non-intelligence-community citzens to sit down, shut up, and pretend we don’t see the authorized informants at work. You’d think that even if he’d never read any history, he’d at least have watched Downton Abbey!

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Long Read: “The Psychology of Online Comments”

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All sorts of chewy fact-bits here. Maria Konnikova, in the New Yorker:

Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. “Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story,” wrote the online-content director Suzanne LaBarre, citing a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as evidence. While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse. Cicero, for one, openly called Mark Antony a “public prostitute,” concluding, “but let us say no more of your profligacy and debauchery.” What, then, has changed with the advent of online comments?

Anonymity, for one thing. According to a September Pew poll, a quarter of Internet users have posted comments anonymously. As the age of a user decreases, his reluctance to link a real name with an online remark increases; forty per cent of people in the eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old demographic have posted anonymously. One of the most common critiques of online comments cites a disconnect between the commenter’s identity and what he is saying, a phenomenon that the psychologist John Suler memorably termed the “online disinhibition effect.” … When Arthur Santana, a communications professor at the University of Houston, analyzed nine hundred randomly chosen user comments on articles about immigration, half from newspapers that allowed anonymous postings, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle, and half from ones that didn’t, including USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, he discovered that anonymity made a perceptible difference: a full fifty-three per cent of anonymous commenters were uncivil, as opposed to twenty-nine per cent of registered, non-anonymous commenters. Anonymity, Santana concluded, encouraged incivility.

On the other hand, anonymity has also been shown to encourage participation; by promoting a greater sense of community identity, users don’t have to worry about standing out individually… In a study that examined student learning, the psychologists Ina Blau and Avner Caspi found that, while face-to-face interactions tended to provide greater satisfaction, in anonymous settings participation and risk-taking flourished.

Anonymous forums can also be remarkably self-regulating: we tend to discount anonymous or pseudonymous comments to a much larger degree than commentary from other, more easily identifiable sources…

Two sidebars about the local commentor-sphere. Sometime this morning, according to Sitemeter, Balloon Juice broke 100,000,000 “visits”. According to someone who knows much more about this than I do, “Google thinks that about a million visits came from about 150K unique people. So if that ratio of visits to visitors holds up, which is just a guess, 15 milllion visitors will have made 100 million visits to B-J when the sitemeter ticks over. I doubt it scales exactly like that but certainly the number of unique visitors is well into the millions…” So… congratulations? (Further metadata, BJ currently averages 40k visits every day — somewhat fewer between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon — barring breaking news.)

Second, many thanks to Matt McIrvin for introducing me to the “Law of Jante“, a concept I have often talked about but didn’t know existed as a trope in its Scandinavian homeland. Jante’s Shield: You are not to think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us. The Eleventh Law, or Penal Code of Jante: Maybe you don’t think I know a few things about you?

Truly, there is a spirit linking all small, semi-closed communities… even the virtural ones!

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Canadiana

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rob_ford_at_taste_of_the_danforth.jpg.size.xxlarge.promo
Rob Ford, Toronto’s possibly crack smoking mayor, went on his weekly radio show and offered up one of the stranger apologies I’ve ever heard from a politician.

The Danforth – that was pure stupidity. I shouldn’t have got hammered down at The Danforth. If you’re gonna have a couple drinks, you stay at home, and that’s it. You don’t make a public spectacle of yourself. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again…and..and..I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. But to sit here and say I’m going to lose 100 pounds and be a brand new person in six months or a year, I’m not going to mislead people.

The picture above is Ford at the Taste of the Danforth festival where he got hammered this summer.  He also says that the Toronto PD should release the alleged crack smoking video, though he denied being a crack addict. He’s also not going to resign.

In other news from the great white north, I think Harper’s politician hair might be a terminal condition.

web-harper-1102

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