Au Revoir Simone - A Violent Yet Flammable World
Saturday, January 21, 2017
He's Gandalf And Magneto
Sir Ian McKellen's sign is EVERYTHING#WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/XS3hQ14Mir
— #womensmarch (@shxrlocked) January 21, 2017
Now We Know How Civilizations Crumble
You hear stories about the kings of old who are so insecure and petty that they do the wackiest shit. Always sound a bit made up, a bit legendary. I guess not.
WH has set up crowd size pics in briefing room pic.twitter.com/gIDIuhdcdD
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 21, 2017
All Year Long
It isn't that hard to keep people organized and energized for politics all the time, to make it seem important and to make them think that they can contribute in some small way. And, no, clicktivism doesn't count. Victory (Obama) brings complacency generally, but the people with all the money and influence are rarely interested in that kind of organizing. And even grassroots require leadership and, yes, money.
If not getting out on the streets, then what? There were a lot of quirky quixotic efforts during the Bush years. They mostly faded away or got absorbed into the borg.
Political parties are membership organizations. They should ask something of their members other than "CONTRIBUTE OR DIE!!!!"
If not getting out on the streets, then what? There were a lot of quirky quixotic efforts during the Bush years. They mostly faded away or got absorbed into the borg.
Political parties are membership organizations. They should ask something of their members other than "CONTRIBUTE OR DIE!!!!"
March
Good for all who are out. I don't know how effective protest marches are. I also don't know how effective signing online petitions, spending hundreds of millions on television, writing sternly-worded oped pieces for a nice salary, or writing anguished blog posts and tweets are.
Something about people gathering in public is exotic or foreign to people in this country. I think, in part, because we lack public spaces in our daily lives.
Anyway, it's one way to stand up and say "we're here." It doesn't have to change any minds. What does?
Something about people gathering in public is exotic or foreign to people in this country. I think, in part, because we lack public spaces in our daily lives.
Anyway, it's one way to stand up and say "we're here." It doesn't have to change any minds. What does?
Sorry About Your Missing Bits, Bruh
When people say stuff like this seriously I imagine they just mean "my noisy public farts don't get the public acclaim they used to. I blame women. Also I am a sad old man."
Friday, January 20, 2017
Don't Smash Windows
Violent protest especially directed at random things nearby is wrong. Don't smash random windows. On the other hand, small scale property damage isn't that big of a deal either. Not defending it, just saying that it's of minimal importance compared to violence against people.
The Horrors To Come
As I've said, the scariest part of this administration won't be the standard conservative horrors that we all expect (though we are right to expect them), it'll be the unraveling of the presidency itself. Our system, like many (most, really), puts too much power into the executive, and, despite all of our talk of "checks and balances," ultimately depends on the man (team) in charge showing some restraint and some respect for real if evolving norms. Goodbye to all that...
Make America Late Again
I know this is one of my obsessions none of you care about, but, you know, they call it the American Dream. It's a metaphor, people!
Attorneys for Triple Five, the developer of American Dream Meadowlands, told the state Appellate Court in September that immediate dismissal of a lawsuit against the project must be made so as not to impede a complex financial sequence that must culminate on Nov. 4. The court dismissed the case the next day.
Yet more than nine weeks later, the project site looks as deserted as it has since before Christmas – and as it has many times over the past decade. The bond issuance plan – which has expanded to a planned $1.15 billion offering - was approved by the state for the first time in fall 2013.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Honesty
I wouldn't really align myself with the bulk of this piece (sorry, not in the mood to do a line by line discussion, I am a lazy blogger after all), but I thought this was a good point.
Well, perhaps not the first sentence, but otherwise I agree with the basic point. One thing about the primary, during which too often Bernie versus Hillary obscured Bernieism versus Hillaryism (that is, the basic ideological positioning of the two as opposed to the specifics of the people who were representing them), is that a lot of people did reveal themselves to be, at heart, Chait Democrats (I think this was true much more of prominent Hillary supporters/surrogates, than was true of of the campaign or Hillary herself). That's fine. People can be Chait Democrats. And people can disagree with Chait Democrats. But the point is that there are disagreements which are, as the above says, papered over with claims of solidarity and practicality and electability. Team D (or Team Liberal or Team Left of Center or whatever) actually don't agree about policy goals. It isn't simply that one segment thinks they are going as Lefty as they can get away with. They're going about as Lefty as they want to go. More lefty Democrats have a pretty good case that their crazy ideas aren't just crazy, but perhaps popular and necessary,too. The campaign highlighted that and also sharpened divisions. That's good and bad, I guess. Fight away.
I have always respected Jonathan Chait. That may come as a surprise, but he possesses a quality that is rare among liberal pundits. Most will lie to you about the politics of their hearts. They will tell you that they’re all for the left’s ambitions, or at least for a United States more like the benevolent states of Europe. They will assure you that when the time is right, they’ll throw their weight behind the moral cause of socialism; it’s just that it isn’t practical right now. It’s just that you’ve got to be reasonable, compromise, capitulate to the demands of the Democratic Party without protest, or else we’ll never get anywhere. Chait does not do this. He believes that the mild welfare state championed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is not merely an acceptable form of government, but very nearly an ideal one. When he scolds the left for their hostility toward business, or lectures college students over their inadequate reverence for liberal free speech norms, or endorses the Iraq War and later cops only to an inadequate consideration of its logistical prospects, Chait is telling you precisely what he thinks. I’ve often, almost always, taken issue with his conclusions. But I have never gotten the sense that Chait is operating in bad faith. He’s a liberal capitalist, a technocrat, what any sane assessment of the political spectrum would rate a conservative centrist, and he does not pretend otherwise.
Well, perhaps not the first sentence, but otherwise I agree with the basic point. One thing about the primary, during which too often Bernie versus Hillary obscured Bernieism versus Hillaryism (that is, the basic ideological positioning of the two as opposed to the specifics of the people who were representing them), is that a lot of people did reveal themselves to be, at heart, Chait Democrats (I think this was true much more of prominent Hillary supporters/surrogates, than was true of of the campaign or Hillary herself). That's fine. People can be Chait Democrats. And people can disagree with Chait Democrats. But the point is that there are disagreements which are, as the above says, papered over with claims of solidarity and practicality and electability. Team D (or Team Liberal or Team Left of Center or whatever) actually don't agree about policy goals. It isn't simply that one segment thinks they are going as Lefty as they can get away with. They're going about as Lefty as they want to go. More lefty Democrats have a pretty good case that their crazy ideas aren't just crazy, but perhaps popular and necessary,too. The campaign highlighted that and also sharpened divisions. That's good and bad, I guess. Fight away.
Republicans Will Not Save Us
Oh, sure, they might pile on a confirmation vote or two just to maintain their "independent" cred. But I doubt even that's going to happen, and it sure as hell isn't going to be Little Marco who will take anything but the occasional rhetorical stand.
Mini Book Review
Trying to rid mor good books this year. I'm a bad reviewer, and not much interested in slamming books I don't like, but I might as well mention the ones I do like. It won a Pulitzer, too, so I guess that means something. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is long but worth reading.
Who Won The Twitterz
Jeebus save me from coverage like this.
You know, the thing about Trump becoming an incoming president with an approval rating in the 30s is that whatever he's doing isn't winning. I mean, sure, he might win at destroying everything good about the country and the world in the process, but he isn't winning the fucking PR battle. He isn't winning with his +1 Vorpal Twitter powers.
You know, the thing about Trump becoming an incoming president with an approval rating in the 30s is that whatever he's doing isn't winning. I mean, sure, he might win at destroying everything good about the country and the world in the process, but he isn't winning the fucking PR battle. He isn't winning with his +1 Vorpal Twitter powers.
Obama and The Press
Speaking very generally for a couple of paragraphs blog post, I think the Obama administration had decent press coverage. Campaign 2008 was kind of shitshow - LEAVE JOHN MCCAIN ALLOOOOOOONE - but campaign 2012 was surprisingly "balanced." The rise of non-fake-"view from nowhere" media, which certainly isn't always liberal and definitely isn't advocacy journalism but in which reporters are a bit more free to inject a perspective that doesn't require shutting off their brains has been good. Obama's actually had his own "sycophants" in the press, which while not always good is a necessary balance to the weight of sycophancy that comes with any Republican administration. There was that Tea party nonsense early on, of course, which everyone should be ashamed about, but aren't (the coverage of it, I mean).
But, campaign 2016 was a shitshow and all signs point to the shitshow continuing. Of course there are good journalists doing good journalism - given the mountain of conflicts and corruption it isn't as if there's a shortage of work to be done here - but there's the news and there's the talking about the news, the way what's "important" gets distilled and inserted into the ears of people who just catch a few minutes on TV or the radio here and there. And that's probably going to be as bad as we have ever seen, despite Trump being the most unpopular incoming president we have polls for. Get ready for the new normal in which 37% approval is "popular."
But, campaign 2016 was a shitshow and all signs point to the shitshow continuing. Of course there are good journalists doing good journalism - given the mountain of conflicts and corruption it isn't as if there's a shortage of work to be done here - but there's the news and there's the talking about the news, the way what's "important" gets distilled and inserted into the ears of people who just catch a few minutes on TV or the radio here and there. And that's probably going to be as bad as we have ever seen, despite Trump being the most unpopular incoming president we have polls for. Get ready for the new normal in which 37% approval is "popular."
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Let Me Google That For You, Rick
I'm sure the people who offered him the job didn't know, either.
Good thing it isn't all that important.
But, hey, not like our crack reporting staff knew either.
...and another:
WASHINGTON — When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.
In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.
Good thing it isn't all that important.
But, hey, not like our crack reporting staff knew either.
Guys, Rick Perry was Gov of a state that produces lots of oil - not that crazy to think he could be head of Dept of Energy
— amy walter (@amyewalter) December 13, 2016
...and another:
I don't really care, but Perry was governor of the largest energy-producing state in the country for 14 years. https://t.co/cYeD0qIVD8 https://t.co/Qzjr6AmkZs
— Nathan Gonzales (@nathanlgonzales) January 19, 2017
Win-Win
Something I keep coming back to is how we should be able to pay the corruption tax and get overpriced nice things, that we can pay off existing "stakeholders" and get the result we want.
Instead we pay the corruption tax, bribe the existing stakeholders, and get nothing in return.
Instead we pay the corruption tax, bribe the existing stakeholders, and get nothing in return.
Afternoon Thread
Make America sleepy again.
You can check out all the construction activity at the America Dream site here.
You can check out all the construction activity at the America Dream site here.
Nothing to See Here
Move along.
The industries that were powerful enough to prevent meaningful climate change action would have been powerful enough to get adequate "compensation" for doing something to not destroy civilization. They just wanted to roll coal to piss off liberals.
Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.
The industries that were powerful enough to prevent meaningful climate change action would have been powerful enough to get adequate "compensation" for doing something to not destroy civilization. They just wanted to roll coal to piss off liberals.
While We're On My Favorite Subject
That "we're" talking about these issues just shows they can't solve the actual issues.
Such research might say something interesting about us, but will have little value in making a "better" self-driving car. Let a thousand thinkpieces bloom! I'll be on the bus.
Who would HAL choose to kill?
BOSTON (AP) — Imagine you're behind the wheel when your brakes fail. As you speed toward a crowded crosswalk, you're confronted with an impossible choice: veer right and mow down a large group of elderly people, or veer left into a woman pushing a stroller.
Now imagine you're riding in the back of a self-driving car. How would it decide?
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are asking people worldwide how they think a robot car should handle such life-or-death decisions. Their goal is not just for better algorithms and ethical tenets to guide autonomous vehicles, but to understand what it will take for society to accept the vehicles and use them.
Such research might say something interesting about us, but will have little value in making a "better" self-driving car. Let a thousand thinkpieces bloom! I'll be on the bus.
Who would HAL choose to kill?
All You Need
And more inklings about how they'll try (and still fail) to solve self-driving car issues.
It isn't entirely clear what this means, but I look forward to legislation requiring that all roadworks, with precise measurements, be submitted in advance. Anyway, point being is that the only chance this works (it still won't) is a lot of external infrastructure and changes to how things are done. And who will pay for all of that?
Autonomous vehicles, the patent warns, “may not have information about reversible lanes when approaching a portion of a roadway that has reversible lane”, leading to a worst-case scenario of them driving headfirst into oncoming traffic.
More generally, the inability to plan for reversible lanes means cars and trucks can’t optimise their routes by getting into the correct lane well in advance, something that could otherwise prove to be one of the benefits of self-driving cars.
Amazon’s solution to the problem could have much larger ramifications than simply dealing with highway traffic in large cities. The patent proposes a centralised roadway management system that can communicate with multiple self-driving cars to exchange information and coordinate vehicle movement at a large scale.
It isn't entirely clear what this means, but I look forward to legislation requiring that all roadworks, with precise measurements, be submitted in advance. Anyway, point being is that the only chance this works (it still won't) is a lot of external infrastructure and changes to how things are done. And who will pay for all of that?
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
For Your Consideration
On the way out the door.
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration, and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous.
Nutpicking
La Resistance will have protests. People will spend most of their time nutpicking the protests. As always happens.
Conservative Health Care Plan
Liberal Trump fanfic scenarios aside, the conservative plan for health care is "if you can't pay for it, you suffer and then die." This could be modified slightly to setting up a system by which your income is garnished for the rest of your life to pay for your treatment (not so different than what we have now, except with more pressure to actually treat people), or with a system that forces you to buy shitty health care insurance that you can't afford and which won't cover treatment anyway (ACA does this to some, though with health care that isn't entirely shitty and which might actually cover you).
That's how it is, and anyone who pretends otherwise is stupid or lying. I suppose there's some slight chance they'll blackmail Democrats into supporting some plan which is only 90% as bad as this sounds, so that Republicans don't get blamed for it, but otherwise that's the only template for "replacement."
That's how it is, and anyone who pretends otherwise is stupid or lying. I suppose there's some slight chance they'll blackmail Democrats into supporting some plan which is only 90% as bad as this sounds, so that Republicans don't get blamed for it, but otherwise that's the only template for "replacement."
Fee Fees
Rumors are a couple of Trump nominees don't like people being mean to them and want to retreat to their safe spaces under their mountain lairs of gold.
What did they expect?
What did they expect?
Monday, January 16, 2017
Miserable Failure
One frustrating thing during the Bush presidency was that this horrible person remained popular for so long. Yes it was post-9/11 and rally around the flag, but still. The second frustrating thing about the Bush presidency was that even when he was unpopular the press talked about him like he was popular, until he went so low that they couldn't so they started writing comeback story fan fiction.
Trump's already quite unpopular, and I'm pretty sure he'll stay that way. The press will, however, keep writing about how he's winning the news cycle or whatever due to his BOOYAH tweets. This is not opinion, this is ANALYSIS, and it is true no matter what the polls say.
Trump's already quite unpopular, and I'm pretty sure he'll stay that way. The press will, however, keep writing about how he's winning the news cycle or whatever due to his BOOYAH tweets. This is not opinion, this is ANALYSIS, and it is true no matter what the polls say.
Extraordinarily Profound Thought For The Day
Even when people fundamentally agree about things, they can differ wildly about how to prioritize those things.
Troll The World
Don't worry, I'm not one of those "maybe Trump won't be so bad" types. My estimation of how bad things will be probably exceeds that of most people, which is why I'm subsisting on a diet of ketamine and bath salts. Still the one way to shut most of his critics up for awhile (not that I think he cares to, really, he just wants to be loved and worshiped for being just the way he is) would be to actually ram through a better health care plan.
No it won't happen.
No it won't happen.
Why Martin Luther King Jr. Would Have Been An Atriot
I'm sure many of us heard the lovely tales about the glories of nonviolent resistance movements in our various Myths Of America American History classes. It seems that idea gets increasingly morphed from a largely utilitarian one - nonviolence can work - to a moral one, which says that victims of state oppression and violence have no right to fight back, that the oppressors are the only justified users of force. They're bad, but fighting back is worse. Unless, I suppose, the US State Department declares that you are "moderate rebels" in which case anything goes.
The title is a sardonic joke, of course, as everyone rushes to claim MLK as their own. Pretty sure there's an automated program which sends the "Why MLK Was a Conservative" column to the Washington Post every year.
Anyway, I've been a bit remiss in my life about reading more black writers of all genres and going a bit deeper into black history. A good enough time as any to start remedying that.
The title is a sardonic joke, of course, as everyone rushes to claim MLK as their own. Pretty sure there's an automated program which sends the "Why MLK Was a Conservative" column to the Washington Post every year.
Anyway, I've been a bit remiss in my life about reading more black writers of all genres and going a bit deeper into black history. A good enough time as any to start remedying that.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Drug Test Them All
White House staff used to be drug tested. Got some attention in the Clinton years because of all of those druggy hippies he hired. Anyway, just drug test anyone who does regular work in the White House. Fair!
(No I don't really think people should be drug tested).
(No I don't really think people should be drug tested).
Random Thought For A Sunday
Nothing new, but as I read the numerous arguments about "gentrification" (a word that like so many others tends to mean whatever people want it to mean at that moment), I just keep coming back what is to me the primary issue, at least in my urban hellhole (though not unique to it): the problem isn't that rich people moving in drives up property values, the problem is that rich people moving in magically causes better better public service provision (quality police, fixed streets and sidewalks, school quality, etc) which causes property values to rise. Provide public services equally across the city and the neighborhood by neighborhood gentrification really isn't such of an issue...
Changing Perspectives
Short blog post means big generalizations, but...
Post-impeachment, post-Bush selection, post-9/11 was a weird time in American politics (I suppose a specific weird time, it's always a weird time). One thing people forget about the impeachment era was that it was basically The Left (sometimes actually The Left like The Nation magazine writers and sometimes people who found themselves being branded The Left because of this) who defended Bill Clinton in the whole Monica Madness era (and before). Mainstream media (hi New York Times!), columnists, cable news personalities, all the respectable prominent "centrist" Democrats, were falling all over themselves to condemn that nasty Bill Clinton and his nasty penis, and Ken Starr was treated as the second coming of Jesus in respectable DC circles. It was a weird time in which the crazy left were actually the biggest defenders of the Democratic party, much bigger defenders of it than the Democratic party itself. It was a time when you wouldn't have been surprised if you woke up one morning and half the party hadn't decided to switch teams and become Republicans. "I was a Democrat before Bill Clinton did nasty things with that woman, but now I don't think rich people should pay taxes anymore..."
And then the selection, and then Iraq, and then Bush's re-election, and the whole Social Security privatization nonsense... It was always the "crazy left" that was trying to make the Democratic party just, you know, be Democrats, and everybody else basically being like "Why can't a Democrat be more like a Republican." Being against the war or against Social Security privatization (the Dems finally woke up on that one, but it took a lot of yelling) wasn't exactly calling for full communism, and plenty of people who thought they were just standard squishy Democrats suddenly found themselves being lumped together with radicals.
So I found myself on the crazy left. I'm genuinely more "lefty" than I was 15 years ago, but even now I'm not exactly calling for full communism. I generally think that usually the best use of my efforts are to pull the party leftward (not that I think I have the superpowers required to do this), not just because I'm more lefty, but because the forces pulling them to the right continue to be powerful and well-funded. Also, if the "crazy" position is a minimum wage of $25 an hour, then $15 an hour doesn't look so crazy anymore (for example). If the best we can ever do is a compromise, then it's best not to start the negotiations with the compromise position.
People get mad about criticizing Democrats these days in a way they never did before. People like Obama and associate "the crazy left" with Bernie, blaming him (and therefore the crazy left) for Clinton's election problems. Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever horrors the Trump administration is going to unleash, the important thing is for the Democrats to draw distinctions, and not just hope for team R to step on enough rakes. "Not as evil as the other guys" just doesn't win elections, even when the other guys are really fucking evil.
Post-impeachment, post-Bush selection, post-9/11 was a weird time in American politics (I suppose a specific weird time, it's always a weird time). One thing people forget about the impeachment era was that it was basically The Left (sometimes actually The Left like The Nation magazine writers and sometimes people who found themselves being branded The Left because of this) who defended Bill Clinton in the whole Monica Madness era (and before). Mainstream media (hi New York Times!), columnists, cable news personalities, all the respectable prominent "centrist" Democrats, were falling all over themselves to condemn that nasty Bill Clinton and his nasty penis, and Ken Starr was treated as the second coming of Jesus in respectable DC circles. It was a weird time in which the crazy left were actually the biggest defenders of the Democratic party, much bigger defenders of it than the Democratic party itself. It was a time when you wouldn't have been surprised if you woke up one morning and half the party hadn't decided to switch teams and become Republicans. "I was a Democrat before Bill Clinton did nasty things with that woman, but now I don't think rich people should pay taxes anymore..."
And then the selection, and then Iraq, and then Bush's re-election, and the whole Social Security privatization nonsense... It was always the "crazy left" that was trying to make the Democratic party just, you know, be Democrats, and everybody else basically being like "Why can't a Democrat be more like a Republican." Being against the war or against Social Security privatization (the Dems finally woke up on that one, but it took a lot of yelling) wasn't exactly calling for full communism, and plenty of people who thought they were just standard squishy Democrats suddenly found themselves being lumped together with radicals.
So I found myself on the crazy left. I'm genuinely more "lefty" than I was 15 years ago, but even now I'm not exactly calling for full communism. I generally think that usually the best use of my efforts are to pull the party leftward (not that I think I have the superpowers required to do this), not just because I'm more lefty, but because the forces pulling them to the right continue to be powerful and well-funded. Also, if the "crazy" position is a minimum wage of $25 an hour, then $15 an hour doesn't look so crazy anymore (for example). If the best we can ever do is a compromise, then it's best not to start the negotiations with the compromise position.
People get mad about criticizing Democrats these days in a way they never did before. People like Obama and associate "the crazy left" with Bernie, blaming him (and therefore the crazy left) for Clinton's election problems. Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever horrors the Trump administration is going to unleash, the important thing is for the Democrats to draw distinctions, and not just hope for team R to step on enough rakes. "Not as evil as the other guys" just doesn't win elections, even when the other guys are really fucking evil.
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