Can't Resist Being Greedy Around Election time

Looks like Mitch McConnell had some fun at a recent Koch Brothers retreat.



They just tend to get so greedy, don't they?

Statistics that Lie and Statistics that Don't

The Washington Post is running an opinion piece by Joel Shults, a retired university police chief, who tries to minimize the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson with "facts." Here's an example of one of his "facts:"

No gun doesn’t mean no threat. FBI murder statistics consistently show that more people are beaten to death with hands and feet each year than are killed by assault rifles. In Missouri, nearly a third of the 386 murders that occurred in 2011 were committed without firearms. A person’s size doesn’t mean that they are aggressive, but one’s stature is clearly a factor in a fight.

The highlighted sentence is a carefully crafted statistical lie, intended to make you think that beatings kill more people than guns. This is a common tactic with gun people: cite some number and imply that it applies to all guns. If you go to the very page of murder statistics that he references, you get the following numbers (removing all years but 2012 for brevity and computing percentages; other years have similar percentages):

The percentage of homicide victims by all types of gunshot in 2012 by firearms was 69%. The percentage of victims killed by all beatings (include pushing) was 5.3%. That is, firearms killed 13 times more people than beatings.

Why obscure these facts by claiming that more people died from beatings than assault rifles? Assault rifles aren't even called out as a category in the statistics, so the numbers cited don't even support Shults's claim (13.76% of the firearms used had no type stated, and could have been assault weapons, for example).

But there are other statistics that are more relevant to this story that Shults does not mention. 

Ferguson has more than double the number of police warrants issued per capita than the next closest city in Missouri, more than 1,500 per 1,000 people in the town. That's more than five to 10 times the rate in most of Missouri. That means that the cops stop every resident in Ferguson one and a half times a year. Except we all know it isn't every resident, it's the young black male ones.

The mess in Ferguson started because this cop was hassling two black kids walking in the street. This constant harassment is what black men and boys have to put up with every day of their lives.

CNN has a side-by-side comparison of both sides' version of the events that led to Michael Brown's death. In the kids' version, the cop swore at them for walking in the street, almost ran them down with his car, slammed his car door into them, pulled his gun on them, then shot Michael Brown.

In the cop's version, Brown punched him, so the cop pulled his gun, then Brown tried to take the gun, so the cop shot him to prevent Brown getting the gun.

I think both sides are lying about what precipitated the shooting. The cop was needlessly hassling the kids, and the kids were stupidly sassy. It looks like the cop caused the whole thing by being a dick about two kids who didn't get out of his way fast enough. But we'll never find out for sure.

In any case, Shults's point about beating deaths is completely irrelevant in this context: the cop wasn't afraid of a beating. He claims he was afraid that Brown would take his gun. The very weapon that is supposed to "protect" him was the thing he was most afraid would kill him.

The warrant statistics make it clear that Ferguson's cops are targeting the black community with intimidation and force. The cop in question, Darren Wilson, started out on the police force of Jennings, a nearby town, which also had a majority white police force with very similar history of conflict with the majority black population:

Yet Officer Wilson’s formative experiences in policing came in a department that wrestled historically with issues of racial tension, mismanagement and turmoil. During Officer Wilson’s brief tenure, another officer was fired for a wrongful shooting, and a lieutenant was accused of stealing federal funds. In 2011, in the wake of federal and state investigations into the misuse of grant money, the department closed, and the city entered into a contract to be policed by the county. The department was found to have used grant money to pay overtime for D.W.I. checkpoints that never took place. 

That is, Wilson learned the ropes from a bunch of corrupt and racist cops who all got fired when the department got shut down by the city council.

Across the country police departments justify the sort of harassment the cops in Ferguson practice by saying that it keeps crime down: "broken windows" policing targets economically deprived neighborhoods, where the slightest infraction gets you arrested and thrown in jail. In cities like New York stop-and-frisk policies explicitly target black and Hispanic youth for drugs searches, even though whites use drugs at almost the same rate (blacks were 11% and whites were 9% in 2013).

But even that small 2% difference could easily be explained by other statistics: people with college educations use drugs at half the rate as high-school dropouts. Blacks in general are poorer, have less education, partly because they live in bad neighborhoods with crummier schools and have a much higher drop-out rate.

What the crowds in Ferguson are protesting is incessant police harassment of blacks that masquerades as "broken windows policing." The cops respond by saying they're just going where the crime is.

But if you buy that argument, then you should also buy the argument that the IRS should only audit rich white people who contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns because that's who's committing all the tax evasion and influence peddling.

The Batshit Ideology Claims Another Victim

I woke up this morning to this story and to say that I am outraged and thoroughly disgusted would be the understatement of the fucking millennium.

A 9-year-old girl at a shooting range outside Las Vegas accidentally killed an instructor on Monday morning when she lost control of the Uzi he was showing her how to use.

Here is the video...



A NINE YEAR OLD? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!??

What was Charles Vacca thinking? What were her parents thinking? Well, they were thinking this...



The image above is from Mr. Vacca's Facebook page. Juxtaposing this with the Chris Kyle shooting, can we now recognize that these people are a danger to themselves and others?

Because of this FUCKING BATSHIT ideology, this little girl is going to have to live the rest of her life with this horror on her conscience. The responsibility for this incident lies completely with the Gun Cult. Fuck you, assholes!!! Your adolescent fever dreams are presently causing the dystopic future you are worried about.

Do you know what would be really great? Just leave. Get the fuck out of our country and go live in Somalia where there are plenty of guns and no government.

Because that's exactly where you fucking belong.

For All Of You Comcast Fans...

The 242 Dilemma

A recent question on Quora echoed what I have been writing about here for quite some time. How exactly do Republicans overcome the "242" dilemma? The solid blue states add up to 242 which means the Democrats are always 28 EVs away from winning the presidential election. What that means for 2016 is that even without a Hillary Clinton campaign, all the Democrats have to do is set up camp in Florida and Ohio and win ONE of them. They could send surrogates to Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico. and New Hampshire and erode the numbers for the GOP further.

For the past six presidential elections, the Democrats have won 370, 379, 266, 251, 365, and 332 votes. That's an average of 327 EVs. The Republicans have won 168, 159, 271, 286, 173, 206. That's an average of 210 electoral votes for the GOP. What lesson should conservatives learn from this math?

Time to change. You are a dying party.

Good Words

Quite a few to choose from Jonathan Kay's recent piece

There is a fine line between responsible gun-rights advocacy and America’s GOP-enabled Yosemite Sam gun-cult carnival — and I feel comfortable drawing that line around the diaper section of my local big-box store.

...for these Canadians, guns are tools, not objects of psycho-sexual religious veneration. There is no Canadian equivalent of Charlton Heston, who declared at the NRA’s 2000 annual meeting that “Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms … When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty.” 

To a Canadian shooter, a gun is something used to kill gophers. To his American equivalent of the Heston school, it’s a sort of giant wand for killing Voldemort.

No shit.

Hey Criminals! Here's a Gun!!

Kill someone in Georgia lately? Molest a child there as well? Well, rest easy, friend. You can get your right back to own a gun! 

William Alvin Bishop paid for his crime – aggravated child molestation – with nine years in prison. But when he got out, he still wasn’t free. Because he is on Georgia’s sex offender registry, Bishop must notify his local sheriff of any change of address, which then is posted online with his photograph. He cannot live or work within 1,000 feet of a school, a church, a day-care center – any place where, in the expansive language of the state’s sex offender law, “minors congregate.”

He may, however, own a gun. 

Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles restored Bishop’s constitutional right to bear arms in 2012 despite the serious nature of his crime and his documented threat of additional violence. He is among a growing number of violent offenders who have received pardons that restore gun rights in recent years – and one of the seven from the sex offender registry.

Ground stood!

Thank goodness that Bishop's right to own a gun was preserved because you never know when he might need it against the federal government.

One Of Our Parties Is Insane

The American Right

Good Words

I think it is far past time I put some quotes up here from conservatives...

"Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose." - George Will 

"A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'." - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy." - Benjamin Disraeli 

"Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future." - Benjamin Disraeli

Blogging Comes Back To Haunt HIm

Check this out.

Ah, the sweet sound of a butterfly emerging from his bubble...I mean cocoon...sorry...

It's not like MN-01 was really in play anyway but I found this story amusing on a number of levels. First, there was this...

“On behalf of all red-blooded American men: THANK YOU SENATOR McCAIN, SARAH’S HOT!” he wrote.

How old is Jim Hagedorn? Because he sounds like he's (ahem) an adolescent.

There's also this...

In a 2002 “masterpiece analysis,”...

In a 2008 “masterpiece analysis,”...

Gee, this sounds awfully familiar. The egos on these people..I suppose that's what comes with massive insecurity and the stereotypical inferiority complex.

And I'm SURE that his remarks on gays, women, and American Indians were COMPLETELY satirical...

The American Taliban

Angry Old White People!

A Cold-Hearted Bastard

The press has been having a field day with the president golfing after delivering remarks on the execution of journalist James Foley by the ISIL. Doesn't he have any feelings!!???!! I suppose if I were advising the president I would have suggested some quiet time with his family...perhaps reading a book.

Yet his golfing and laughing with friends, not giving in to their demands for cash as EU nations do, and continuing to bomb the crap out of ISIL positions in northern Iraq completely decimates the idea that he is weak. In fact, he looks pretty much like he is a cold-hearted bastard.

What sort of a message does that send to ISIL?

Is Russia's Takeover of Ukraine About to Fail?

If there was ever any doubt that the people behind the insurgency in Ukraine were Russians who took their marching orders from Vladimir Putin, those doubts have now been put to rest.

The New York Times reports that as the rebellion in the Donetsk "People's Republic" has been slowly collapsing, Putin has pulled the Russians who were leading the insurgency out of the country. These leaders weren't Ukrainians of Russian descent, or Ukrainians who spoke Russian as their first language, but actual Russian citizens and members of the Russian military and FSB (the successor to the KGB).

Why yank the Russians commanders? Perhaps to lend more credibility to the "Ukrainianness" of the insurrection. But more to the point, if the Ukrainian government were to capture the Russian commanders when the insurgency is defeated, they might have some very embarrassing things to tell the world about Mr. Putin's and the Russian government's involvement in the war. This may be a hopeful sign: it may mean that Russia is abandoning the rebels.

They have replaced these Russians with Ukrainians who have less-than-stellar qualifications, including the new deputy defense minister, Fyodor Berezin, who before the rebellion was a science fiction author and purchaser of janitorial supplies for a university.

The Russians who have stepped down include Igor Strelkov (actually, Igor Girkin, the man who initially claimed credit for downing the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine), a Russian citizen and FSB colonel who was behind the takeover of Crimea; Aleksandr Borodai, a Russian citizen, who resigned as the Donetsk prime minister; Valery Bolotov, a Russian citizen, who resigned as the Luhansk prime minister; and Igor Bezler, a citizen of Crimea who was a member of the Russian army. The lone remaining Russian in the command structure is Vladimir Antyufeyev, a reputed spy who was apparently left behind to keep an eye on the Ukrainians.

And they need close watching:

Separatist fighters have taken to carousing drunkenly at night and wearing civilian clothes. This month, three of them crashed a car into the curb outside the Ramada hotel. On Saturday, two separatists again crashed at the same spot, rolling their vehicle and scattering broken glass and bullets on the street. On Tuesday, a drunken rebel, improbably, again crashed at that location, severely injuring four civilians.

As bystanders watched horrified, the drunken gunman, who was not wounded, drew a pistol and proceeded to kick one of the injured civilians, berating him for causing the accident.

As for Mr. Berezin, he seems to think he's living in a science fiction novel:

“Reality became scarier than science fiction,” he said in an interview over iced tea at the Havana Banana bar, a favorite rebel haunt. “I live in my books now. I fell right into the middle of my books.”

This brought to mind another man who thinks we're living in a science fiction novel written by a Russian: Paul Ryan.

In 2009, in a multi-part video series posted to Facebook, Paul Ryan said that “what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand [who emigrated from the Soviet Union and worked as a Hollywood screen writer] did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”

Incredibly, Ryan said this right after the financial meltdown in which immoral and unethical Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers nearly destroyed the world economy. But in a world where finance laws were crafted by Ayn Rand sycophants, most of the worst offenders have escaped prosecution.

I don't know which vision of the future is more depressing: Berezin's Parallel Cataclysm, in which the Soviet Union took over the world in an alternate dimension, or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which unbridled selfishness and greed are portrayed as the apotheosis of human achievement.

I just wish these guys could actually go to these alternate dimensions, and stop trying to screw up this one with their crazy notions.

Modern Offices

Modern Office with Christina Hendricks from Funny Or Die

Killing Four Birds with One Stone?

Algae Systems' Pilot Plant

A Nevada company thinks that it may be able to reduce the country's carbon footprint, create a new source of fertilizer that doesn't rely on fossil fuels, purify waste water from municipal sewer systems and make the United States a moral and economic leader in the fight against climate change:

[Algae Systems] has a pilot plant in Alabama that, it says, can turn a profit making diesel fuel from algae by simultaneously performing three other tasks: making clean water from municipal sewage (which it uses to fertilize the algae), using the carbon-heavy residue as fertilizer and generating valuable credits for advanced biofuels.

How does it work?

At its heart is a “hydrothermal liquefaction” system that heats the algae and other solids in the sewage to more than 550 degrees Fahrenheit, at 3,000 pounds per square inch, turning out a liquid that resembles crude oil from a well.

There's nothing magical or new about this: this is exactly how the crude oil and natural gas were formed that we're drilling out of the ground. Scientists have been piloting processes like this for years.

But there is a sticking point. The energy required to form crude oil naturally was "free:" it came from the sun and geological processes over millions of years. Whether Algae System's process can fulfill its promise depends on where they get the energy to raise the temperature and pressure.

If the process uses power generated by wind and solar, the liquid fuel produced would be carbon neutral. It could not only run vehicles, but also electrical generators that can feed electricity into the grid during the night and when the wind isn't blowing. Burning this oil wouldn't contribute to climate change, unlike the oil and natural gas drilled from the ground whose carbon was sequestered millions of years ago.

Photovoltaic power is getting cheap really fast, and there are many opportunities for installations. The rooftop of one Ikea store in Bloomington, Minnesota, generates a megawatt of electricity. There are thousands of Ikeas, Walmarts, Targets, Kohls and other stores that have big flat roofs that soak up lots of sun, all in cities that use lots of electricity. Cheap solar panels have the potential to generate a lot of electricity during peak times: the hottest part of the day, when everyone cranks up the AC.

If this pans out, wherever we have cities on large bodies of water we can generate crude oil. That's good all the way around: the majority of Americans live near some coast. Shipping oil long distances on rails or in pipelines is energy intensive and dangerous.

Geology has made states like Texas, Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana and North Dakota economic winners by happenstance of oil deposits. With this algae technology geography may have a similar influence: all the states on the ocean or the Great Lakes -- remember the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie that poisoned Toledo's water this summer -- have the potential to become energy independent.

Better yet, if American companies develop and license this technology to other countries we can not only improve our balance of trade, we can undercut regimes like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, whose vast oil wealth exerts a corrupting influence on their own internal politics as well as the rest of the world.

Complex and Unique

With the recent passing of new guns laws in the state of Massachusetts, I find myself in a reflective mood. The first question that comes to mind is would these laws be applicable to the rest of the country? Let's take a look.

The new law stiffens penalties for some gun-based crimes, creates a Web-based portal within the state Executive Office of Public Safety to allow for real-time background checks in private gun sales and calls for the creation of a firearms trafficking unit within the state police.

It also gives local police chiefs the right to go to court to try to deny firearms identification cards needed to buy rifles or shotguns to people they feel are unsuitable to have access to the weapons.

Another part of the law mandates Massachusetts join the National Instant Background Check System, which requires the state to transmit information about substance abuse or mental health commitments to a federal database that police can use to review firearms applications.

Certainly these are all good refinements and will likely prevent some gun violence. But Massachusetts ranks 33rd out of 50 states (and the District of Columbia) in gun murders per rate of 100,000 people according to the US Census taken in 2010 (1.8). In looking at the list, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Missouri, Maryland, and South Carolina have far worse murder rates and are clearly in need of a change.

Of course, the nature of that change and what it should entail is where the debates always begin. The problems in those states can likely be linked to the urban centers of each of them and not the rural areas. I know for a fact that the town in which I was born (Columbia, MO) has really gone down hill in terms of crime in the last decade. St Louis is pretty awful as well.

Thinking about all of this has led me to a conclusion on how we can best address the issue of gun violence in our country. Obviously, there are some basic things that can be done at a federal level and I have discussed them before. Real time background checks for private gun sales via a Web based portal is a great idea. The federal government should pick up the tab for this and offer it for free to each state.

Yet, the majority of the changes should happen at the state level. Is it really fair to ask Vermont or North Dakota to adhere to any new federal regulations when their gun violence rate is so low? More importantly, what are they doing that their rate is so low? Just a lack of people? If that's the case, why is Oregon, Minnesota and Iowa so low? My home state has more people than South Carolina. Why is Vermont so low and neighboring Delaware so high?

Local crime varies from state to state and must be taken into account. That's why it has always frustrated me when gun rights people point to Illinois and shriek, "See? They have tough gun laws but still have a high rate of violence." The violence in Chicago has no correlation with gun legislation. It has to do with the complexities of the area.

What these numbers show is that there is no easy or quick fix. Each state has to be examined for its own, unique complexity. Any new changes to existing gun laws have to speak to this uniqueness and complexity.

Symbiotic Violence

The violence in Israel and Gaza seems senseless, but there is a cruel logic to it. For years the right wing leaders of Israel have put the screws to Gaza, instituting a blockade that has turned the city of nearly two million into a ghetto that almost resembles a concentration camp.

Israel's leaders claim this is necessary to prevent Hamas from smuggling in missiles and materiel that they use to attack Israel. Yet Hamas smuggled in thousands of missiles anyway. This harsh punishment of the general population for the actions of a small number of Hamas terrorists increases support for Hamas among Palestinians, because they feel that at least Hamas is doing something to fight Israeli oppression.

Hamas's missile barrages against Israel in turn increase support for the right-wing leaders who put the blockade on Gaza that incited the missile attacks in the first place.

Hamas and the Israeli right wing are thus locked in a symbiotic embrace of violence. The two sides gain power by egging each other on and hurting the innocent people in the middle. Every time moderate Palestinians make a conciliatory gesture, the right-wing Israeli housing minister annexes more land in the West Bank or clamps down on Gaza. Every time Israel makes some overture to peace, Hamas lobs more missiles at civilians in Tel Aviv or kidnaps an Israeli teenager or soldier.

Every Hamas attack requires some form of Israeli retribution, which begets another Hamas revenge attack, which incites more Israeli vengeance. Because the Palestinians and Israelis immediately allow violence to derail the peace process, there is no peace process: any kook can sabotage with a single act of terrorism or oppression.

And now we're seeing this same sort of mindset in the United States. In Ferguson, Missouri, the police force is 6% black while the town is 63% black. Eighty-six percent of traffic stops are made on blacks, and 92% of arrests are made on blacks. Similar statistics hold throughout the country, especially arrests for possession of marijuana and other trivial crimes.

Statistics like this make many blacks in the United States feel like they are prisoners in their own cities, ruled by white police forces that regularly use intimidation, brutality and guns to keep blacks in line.

I believe, though, that most white cops try mightily to prevent racism from coloring their judgment. And I know that most blacks in Ferguson are peaceful -- though righteously angry at the treatment blacks regularly receive at the hands of law enforcement.

But a few bad cops and a few black rabble rousers play off each other to make the situation in Ferguson deteriorate into the same sort of mess. It's starting to look a whole lot like Israel and Gaza.

Ferguson, MO

Many police departments now have serious military equipment, including ATVs, ballistic armor, machine guns; they employ military tactics, including SWAT teams that burst into homes and apartments without knocking, as if they were assaulting Osama bin Laden's compound. The streets of Ferguson are almost indistinguishable from the streets of Gaza.

Gaza

Now Governor Jay Nixon has called out the National Guard in Ferguson. The same National Guard that has been deployed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is this country coming to?

Because we have the National Guard, there is no need to militarize our police forces.  Turning cops into soldiers is a grave error: as a matter of policy, the military can shoot first and ask questions later. Police forces that adopt that mindset are simply murderers.

This is the legacy of our national overreaction to 9/11. Americans have been hamstrung by fear, allowing themselves to abandon all dignity in airports, letting the NSA to run roughshod over our privacy, wasting hundreds billions of dollars on security and weapons that only increase our sense of fear and allow police to visit indignity and violence on the less fortunate in society.

We can't forget what happened on 9/11, but we have to break that horrible day's grasp on our souls. We can't keep saying "9/11" every time someone wants to take another one of our freedoms away.