Contributors

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Shoulda Got A Gun


Power and Loss of Control

An excellent summation of the Gun Cult...

Everyone is going to have a different answer. I'm no exception. In my opinion, i believe it all boils down to "power-hunger". Whether you agree with me or not, guns give people a false sense of power. Taking guns away means taking power away. Nobody debates car ownership because nobody derives any feeling of power or control or authority when driving. Half the people i know,who own a car, hate driving. Find me one person,who owns a firearm, that hates shooting. A car and a gun are obviously 2 totally different things. Sure both can be used as a weapon. But only 1 of them IS a weapon. 

People like having the feeling of god at their fingertips. People who are avid gunners, are the ones who proudly show off how enthusiastic they are when it comes to gun ownership. How many people do you know, walk around with shirts and hats that advertise General Motors,Daimler-Benz,or Volkswagen? But how many people do you know who wear clothing that says NRA,or has pictures of guns? I see people all the time with tattoos that depict a skeleton gang member holding a gun. 

Guns make people ,who own them,feel powerful and more importantly....in control. That control is what they're fighting to retain.

And they are thinking with their System 1 brain which is largely emotional.

You'll Never Take The White House Again

Starting at about 6:25...




 Wow...

If A Tree Falls...


Friday, June 19, 2015

The Whole Hate Crime Bugaboo

People (and by people, I largely mean conservatives) seem to get so irate about the category of crimes known as hate crimes. Why? I think a big part of it is they can't accept the negative aspects of their own personal ideology (racism, prejudice, bigotry) so they blame the victim. More importantly, they have a profound lack of understanding of how the law works.

There are a variety of categories of what constitutes murder. This is also true of stealing. Yet they don't seem to have a problem with any of these. Each of these laws illustrate how complicated the law can be as it responds to the uniqueness of various criminal acts. Hate crimes is merely another category that offers a more muscular prosecutorial punch. If someone breaks into an NAACP chapter, for example, and writes "Niggers, we will kill you" all over the walls, without hate crime laws, they would be charged with a couple of petty crimes and maybe terroristic threats. With them in place, the punishment is far worse and it should be because we have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior in our culture today.

So, as we learn more of the Charleston shooting and hear more about hate crimes, we are likely to hear adolescent assholes foam at the mouth about hate crimes and how they are all gay and shit. Ask them if they have the same feelings about the hundreds of laws regarding theft:)

Fox News Claims to Be the Victim in Charleston

For years Fox News has taken up the mantle of defending Christianity from the devils on the doorstep. They invented the pretend war on Christmas. They portray the requirement that for-profit corporations pay for birth control is a terrible burden and the most extreme violation of religious freedom. Fox New contributor Mike Huckabee claims gay marriage will lead to the criminalization of Christianity. And on and on.

Two days ago a white supremacist assassinated a black state senator in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the oldest black churches in the country. That day, June 17th, was the 193rd anniversary of a slave revolt planned by the church's founder, Denmark Vesey. Vesey and five slaves were hanged after a secret trial, and 30 other slaves were tried and executed in short order, all in secret.

When Dylann Roof killed those nine African Americans he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He said this as he was shooting six black women, one of whom was 87 years old!

Before the shooting he talked to an acquaintance:
Joey Meek reconnected with Roof a few weeks ago and said that while they got drunk together on vodka, Roof began complaining that "blacks were taking over the world" and that "someone needed to do something about it for the white race." 
This echoes the standard refrain of the Tea Party -- the creation of Fox News -- "taking America back."

Roof was a fan of racist symbols, from the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa to the Confederate flag he proudly displayed on his car.

Now Fox News is selling the lie that Roof's racism-fueled terrorist attack was an attack on Christianity, and an another excuse to call for more guns. Christianity -- and by proxy Fox News -- was under attack in Charleston! Christians are the victims! Woe is us! We're the victim! More guns!

It's not a fluke that this happened in South Carolina, the birthplace of the Civil War. A state that still flies the Confederate flag, the symbol of slave holders. Streets in Charleston are named after Confederate generals, traitors to the United States of America. They still celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, which is held on the birthday of Jefferson Davis in some states.

They say they're just celebrating their heritage. What is that heritage? Enslaving human beings and then executing men like Denmark Vesey for trying to achieve the same freedoms that the American Revolution was fought for.

The Confederate flag stands for slavery and white supremacy. And as long as South Carolina flies that flag, and puts it on its license plates, South Carolina will endorse and promote the same racist hatred that Dylann Roof expressed when he assassinated nine African Americans to inflame the nation with his terroristic goal of inciting a race war.

The Disparity of Response

Thoughts On Charleston

I have several thoughts going through my head right now regarding the shooting in Charleston but the one that sticks out predominantly is that we have, yet again, lost another young man to violent psychosis. Why? How did this keeping happening in our culture?

It's the magic cocktail all over again...male, young, white, mental illness, takes SSRIs, parents divorced, parents nutso, plays violent video games, and easy access to guns. Boom!...literally. Now, we haven't discovered yet whether or not he takes SSRIs but look for that bit of information to come out in about two weeks. That's the way it always works. Here is a piece that details Dylan Roof's background.

Much is being made of the racial angle with conservatives falling all over themselves in a most amusing attempt to redirect the attention away from the fact that this occurred in the South...in a deep red state...the same state where the Civil War began...where a lot of Republicans voters reside. I'm curious to know where Roof's parents are in all of this. He had to learn his white supremacy stuff somewhere, right? I'm betting it was from his dad who gave him a gun less than two months ago.

At this point, the racial thing is secondary to me. We have to figure out why our culture produces people like this. Is it the Columbine Effect? More importantly, how can we engage young men at an earlier age so they don't end up becoming spree shooters? In many ways, this is the same issue that communities with gangs have when they are trying to stop young men from turning to violence. It's also the same issue the world has in preventing young people from joining ISIL.

I'm convinced that had a few key people engaged Dylan Rood earlier in his life and steered him on a more positive path, this shooting never would have happened. This was a failure of mentorship in his life that should serve as a lesson for other mentors out there who might have someone they know like Dylan.

Do something now. Enlist the help of others in your community. Help these young men out!

Well, That Didn't Take Long

As I predicted...

NRA board member blames pastor for Charleston deaths 

What an ugly bunch of fuckers...but, hey, that's that Gun Cult for you!

Thursday, June 18, 2015

It's Not a Hate Crime: It's Terrorism

There's a serious double standard. When Sunni and Shia Muslims kill people in mosques in Iraq we call it terrorism, but when white guys in America shoot a bunch of people in houses of worship we call it a "hate crime."

To wit: last night 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, SC. Roof has now reportedly been captured in North Carolina.

It's just another such incident in a long list of right-wing terrorist attacks:
In 2012, a white supremacist shot and killed six worshipers and wounded four others at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A shooting rampage by a right-wing gunman in 2008 killed two people and wounded seven at a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee. 
The granddaddy of these terrorist attacks was the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when four black girls were killed. For good measure, let's not forget forget the right-wing terrorist bombings of the 1996 Olympics, abortion clinics and gay clubs, or the right-wing terrorist shootings of abortion providers, shall we?

Roof sat with the victims during prayer before opening fire. He said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Then he shot six women and three men, one of them a state senator. The shooter reportedly left one woman alive so that she could bear witness to the crime. Roof's Facebook page shows him wearing a jacket emblazoned with apartheid-era South African and Rhodesian flags.

It is clear that Roof committed these murders as a political statement in order to intimidate the African American community in the United States.

Now, there's a difference between a hate crime and terrorism. A hate crime is when a white guy beats up a black guy for dating a white woman, or a homophobe kills a gay man for hitting on him at a bar. The shooting in Charleston was a premeditated terrorist attack, calibrated to incite fear in all African Americans.

Attacks on churches aren't the only double standard on American right-wing terrorists. Police stations are frequently targets of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Less than a week ago an American gunman attacked Dallas police headquarters in an armored van. James Boulware planted a bunch of pipe bombs around the building. And the cops knew about this guy:
In 2013, Boulware was arrested after attacking a relative at their home and leaving the scene with "several firearms, ammo and body armor." Boulware then allegedly made phone calls in which he threatened to kill family members and attack churches or schools, which prompted the local school district to go into lockdown mode. He was arrested without incident and assault charges against him were eventually dropped.
Yes, the authorities just let him go, and let him buy more guns, an armored van, body armor, materiel for bombs and lots and lots of ammo.

But everyone's already forgotten about this guy, partly because he didn't kill anyone, but mostly because he was a white guy. And every time a white guy goes on a shooting spree everyone just says, "He was obviously unbalanced, maybe schizophrenic, just a deranged wacko with a fetish for guns and bombs."

They make excuses, such as, "Well, he wasn't connected to an organized terrorist group. He was just a lone-wolf nut job who hated the government." Which is usually followed by the sentiment, "They drove him to it!"

And this is the difference: whites are held individually responsible for their crimes (usually with a large dollop of blame attached to society for making them do it), but the entire African-American and Muslim communities are held collectively responsible for any crime committed by one of their own.

Boulware's attack was clearly terrorism, a political statement intended to intimidate the police and retaliate against the justice system which he blamed for his miserable life.

Was Boulware schizophrenic and crazy? Quite possibly. Almost by definition suicide bombers are mentally ill. It doesn't matter. That's why the word "terrorist" is so frequently preceded by "crazed." If they commit terrorist acts, they're terrorists, regardless of their mental health.

Boulware and Roof aren't alone. There are lots of people just as crazy as they are. The Department of Homeland Security reports that right-wing terrorism is a greater threat than Muslim extremism. These guys aren't just lone wolves: they roam this country in packs:
Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.
The right-wing sovereign citizen groups claim the police have no authority over them, and have killed lots of cops to make the point.

These guys have been skulking in the background for decades, spinning conspiracy theories, setting up their militias, killing cops over pizza, evading grazing fees in Nevada, and occasionally blowing up federal buildings in Oklahoma City.

Are they crazy? Sure. Why not. It doesn't matter. Their victims are just as dead.

Fox News and conservative politicians encourage these kooks and feed their paranoia with their crypto-racist, anti-government, hate-filled rhetoric. And then Republicans bow down to the NRA to enable them to buy guns, ammo, body armor and armored vehicles on demand.

These right-wing terrorists will keep on shooting cops and innocent church-going Christian African Americans as long as the right gives them the license to kill.

Charleston Shooting

Another young white man has gone on a shooting spree. This time it was in a black church in the South. Police are investigating it as a hate crime so it seems that this was racially motivated.

Most interestingly (and really not surprising), all the major news networks except Fox are covering this story as a big story. Last night, Fox had a story about Donald Trump. Today they are talking about the trade deal.

Wow.

I suppose the next word out of unicorn fart land will be about how those folks in the church should have armed themselves and this would not have happened.

Looking Forward To The GOP Debates


Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The Clown Car Gets Colorized

Now that the GOP clown car includes Donald Trump, the 2016 presidential campaign has gotten a whole lot more interesting. By "interesting," I mean big fucking trouble for the GOP. Take a look at Trump's campaign announcement.



Based on what he says here, I have to wonder if he is a secret Democratic plant that's going to beat the crap out of GOP candidates.

In so many ways, he is the epitome of conservatives today...arrogant and full of hubris, shameless money worshiper, deep belief in an aristocratic class, angry and hateful. What a great way to illustrate what the GOP stands for to independent voters!

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

It's The Librals' Fault!!

Remember that Dallas police station shoot up?

Dallas police shooter’s father says ‘liberal people’ drove son to ‘breaking point’

Wow...talk about playing the victim...:)


HIllary Not Talking To The Press?

So, the word in unicorn fart land is that Hillary isn't talking to the press and refuses to answer tough questions...





Really? This was yesterday.

So much for objective reality...

Good Words

I am going to do all I can to pierce the collective amnesia that the Republicans are trying to impose on people. We're not supposed to remember that the 12 years preceding Bill Clinton quadrupled the debt of our country? We're not supposed to remember that when he left office we had a balanced budget with a surplus? And if it had been continued would've paid off the national debt? We're not supposed to remember that Barack Obama inherited the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and had to pull us out of the ditch? And did a better job than he gets credit for?

---Hillary Clinton.

This is the objective reality that the GOP fears heading into the election. Keep reminding the voters about it.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Moses A Founding Father?

Apparently so...

Texas approves textbooks with Moses as Founding Father 

It's always something with that wacky board of education in Texas. Of course, the histrionics about this is kinda funny to all the teachers out there. Most end up doing their own thing anyway. Add in the fact that a significant number of students never read their textbook assignments and the mouth foaming is unjustified.


Sunday, June 14, 2015

So, I posted this question on Quora...

...and the best answer I have ever seen was posted. In addition to this being the best answer I have ever seen, it's also one of the finest examples of satire I have ever seen. Here it is in its entirety...

The questions was how exactly are Christians under attack in the United States?

I'll tell you how: 

1. Churches in the USA are regularly burned down by atheists, Muslims, and other anti-Christians, and the secular law enforcement agencies here won't even investigate. That's why you rarely see a church that can be identified as a church in the US. Mostly, Christians meet in hidden locations to avoid detection. 

2. It's almost impossible for Christians to get elected to public office. As soon as word gets out that a candidate is Christian, s/he can kiss that election good-bye. 

3. The Bible has been banned in the United States. You can't get it here legally, and if you're caught with one you'll go to prison. 

4. Christian kids live in fear of their schoolmates discovering they're Christian, because it's bound to lead to teasing, bullying, even getting beaten up. 

5. All broadcasting of Christian views has been censored. Try as you might, you will not find a Christian radio or TV station in the US. They do not exist. 

6. Christian holidays are forbidden. You'll never hear a peep about Christmas or Easter in the US -- people are simply too afraid to openly celebrate these holidays. Which is a shame for people like me because there would be oodles of marketing opportunities around those events, but alas, no. 

7. All Christian symbols are banned. You cannot find Christian jewelry, bumper stickers, t-shirts, or anything like that in the US. 

8. Christians who dare reveal their identity, or who are even suspected of being Christian, are regularly beaten in the streets by angry mobs. And again, the secular law enforcement here does nothing to stop it. 

9. Christians in America are forced to publicly deny their faith, and to perform public actions to prove they are not Christian, such as being forced into a gay marriage. The alternative is life in prison, or execution. 

10. People who are openly Christian here cannot own a business, are harassed at the voting booth so that many do not even attempt to vote, are subjected to special taxes no one else has to pay, and must have a cross stamped on their driver licenses, Social Security cards, and passports. 

In short, America is a brutal and frightening place if you're a Christian. I wouldn't go there if I were you.

The answer has gotten over 3,000 views already with my question over 8,000 views. No wonder...it's completely brilliant and makes conservative Christians look fucking ridiculous.

The only thing that is under attack is the ability of a conservative Christian (see also, fucking hypocrites) to force their opinion on the rest of Christianity. That's what they are really pissed off about.

We are calling them on their bullshit.


Cast The First Stone!

Hey kids, check this out!























It's a Jesus slingshot that's perfect for your evangelical buddy. Help him or her to cast the first stone with this supercool slingshot! 

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Can The Republicans Win In Any Way With King v Burwell?

Chris Trejbal over at Americablog doesn't seem to think so and I agree. If SCOTUS does not uphold the subsidies, they have two choices. If they go the nuclear option, they instantly piss off seven million voters. If they go with the band aid, quick fix option, then the adolescents in their base get pissed off. If SCOTUS upholds again, it would be incredibly demoralizing.

The one thing about his piece that really stood out for me was this quote from the Daily Caller's Neil Siefring.

Republicans shouldn’t disrupt Obamacare’s collapse if the Supreme Court decides the subsidies are unworkable. The blame for this lies squarely with our scholar-leader President Obama and the Democrats. Republicans should not rescue them from their mistakes. Republicans have pointed out for years that Obamacare is unworkable. If the Supreme Court helps prove them correct, Republican leadership in the House should take advantage of the decision to pivot health care back to the states as rapidly as possible and get the federal government out of the health care business at which it has failed so badly. Republicans in the House and Senate should resist the temptation to provide mouth-to-mouth to the bureaucracy the left has constructed. They have done so too often in the past.

Scholar-leader? Prove them correct? Why doesn't Mr. Siefring, like every other conservative out there, admit that he can't fucking stand it when people are smarter and more accomplished than he is? This is a very core problem with conservatives today. They suffer from terrible, terrible adolescent envy.

Fix this problem and most others go away.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Saving Lives

One of the main reasons why I support the president is that he has literally saved lives since he has taken office. The passage of the Affordable Care Act has led to more people having insurance and getting medical care that didn't have it before.

Ergo, lives saved.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Pretty spectacular!

Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Trouble with Girls

There's been a lot of talk about women in science and technology in recent months. Google's Eric Schmidt stuck his foot in it last March. Apple's Tim Cook wants more gender equality, but his company is still 70% male.

But what has attracted the most attention were comments by Tim Hunt, a 72-year-old biochemist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, who made advances in cell division:
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Mr. Hunt said Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”
The reactions to his comments have been swift and harsh. Hunt has resigned as honorary professor at University College London.

He meant the comments as a joke, but continued to defend the sentiment behind them:
“I did mean the part about having trouble with girls,” he said. “I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it’s very disruptive to the science because it’s terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field.”
And he elaborated on his comments that women are prone to cry when criticized.
“It’s terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth,” he said. “Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”
First off, Hunt has blinders on. There is and always has been same-sex romance. Scientists can be gay like everyone else: segregating men and women won't end romantic entanglements in the lab.

Second, I really don't know where the bit about crying comes from. I worked for 25 years in software engineering, and always had women coworkers and/or bosses. My wife worked in electrical engineering for just as long, and had many female coworkers and employees. Neither of us ever saw women crying at work because they were criticized.

I wonder: in Hunt's storied career, did his criticism of a male colleague ever elicit angry shouts, obscenity-laced streams of invective or even fisticuffs? That's a typical male response to criticism. I have seen numerous violent emotional outbursts from men over the years (especially from managers). I cannot believe that Hunt was never involved in his own share of such altercations. 

Isn't an obscene rant just as unprofessional and unscientific as a crying jag?

As a man of a certain age, Hunt would perceive a swearing-filled shouting match as a proper way for scientists to settle their differences. He knows how to win such an argument: just shout back, only louder.

What Hunt is really complaining about is that he can't win an argument by shouting louder when the object of his derision starts crying. Crying disarms him and exposes him for the bully he is.

Now, assuming that Hunt really means what he says, all this loving and crying is his fault. He says that 1) he falls in love, 2) she falls in love, 3) he makes her cry.

Since Hunt is a Nobel Prize winner, I'm going to venture a guess that he ran his lab. That would mean he was the boss. I would also guess the man is rather arrogant, brilliant, self-absorbed and full of himself (he did win the Nobel Prize, so he does have reason). There's an inherent imbalance of power when a renowned boss romances an employee. Because of the potential for abuse, most workplaces strongly discourage such relationships and some even ban them.

Why? The best way to undermine any person's confidence and credibility is to make it appear they obtained their position through sexual favors. By instigating such a relationship with an employee, Hunt is torpedoing that person's career in the most callous way possible.

When Hunt criticizes a lover, the subtext is, "You are stupid. You have this job just because we had sex. My criticism means I don't love you anymore. You're going to lose absolutely everything: my respect, our love and your job. And stop crying, damn it!"

Hunt is little different from the imams and the ayatollahs who want to cloister women in their houses and hide them under chadors. Like them, Hunt blames women for his inability to work without being distracted by their gender. Hunt is the problem, not the women.

Instead of banning women from the labs, brilliant men who can't keep it in their pants should be kept out of management positions. They should work in solitary, monk-like contemplation where they won't be distracted by their inability to concentrate on the science at hand and constantly "falling in love." Which is just the euphemism men like Hunt use for "getting laid."

The real trouble with girls? Men are dicks. In both senses of the word.

No Cop Is Safe


Cool Guy With Gun At Airport

Check out Jim Cooley.

























He's really cooley, I guess, because he likes to carry his AR-15 at the airport. And then he likes to complain about being harassed by the police. Gosh, I can't imagine why...

Perhaps he and victim George Zimmerman should start a club!

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Climate Change Won't Make Plants Grow Faster

One of the tenets of climate change deniers is that as the world warms -- when they admit that it is warming -- plants will grow more quickly. It turns out, not surprisingly, that's a lie:
“There is more to climate change than just temperature,” says Camilo Mora, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Hawaii in Mānoa, who led the work. Drought and limited sunlight will undermine any gain from a warmer atmosphere. By 2100, Mora says, “there could be an 11 percent reduction in the plant growing season worldwide.”
Specifically:
One primary reason is that heating the Arctic will not bring pineapples to Alaska. There is insufficient sunlight year-round at high latitudes to support lush vegetation. In addition, the tropics will lose up to 200 “suitable growing days” a year—days when temperature, soil moisture and sunlight favor growth rather than retard it—because of excessive heat and drought. Overall, “the decreasing number of suitable growing days in the tropics will offset optimistic projections at mid- and high-latitudes,” the study concludes. 
And the idea that increased carbon dioxide levels will make plants grow faster because it's "plant food?" Not true.
Greater levels of CO2 made no difference one way or the other. At higher temperatures plants open their pores, called stomata, to capture the elevated CO2, which boosts photosynthesis, greening the leaves. But plants also tend to close their stomata in warmer temperatures to prevent water loss. Mora says that on balance the two effects cancel out.
Plants don't like extreme heat, and just like people, they die when they get too hot. There's a reason that the hottest places in the world -- deserts -- have so few plants.

The interesting thing is that the study was instigated by climate deniers:
Mora did not expect this result when he began the study, inspired by notes he swapped with a climate denier. In 2013 Mora published a high-profile study in Nature showing that climate change would harm plants and animals in the tropics sooner than it would hurt them in the Arctic. He says he received numerous e-mails and phone calls attacking the results. “In one such phone call I decided to talk to the person,” he explains. “The guy, one of the so-called climate deniers, claimed that climate change would actually be good for the planet.” The argument is known as the greening effect—that warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would increase plant growth. Mora found several serious papers reaching that conclusion.
But Mora, who grew up in Colombia and saw plants struggle under high heat and low rainfall, had a hunch that there was more to the story. He and his graduate students calculated the number of days, from now through 2100, when plants would have favorable temperature, moisture and light to grow. They found that at high latitudes plants in the future could not “profit” from warmth because sunlight is limited much of the year. In the tropics temperatures got too hot for numerous plants and drought rose, adding stress to already overtaxed ecosystems. Broadleaf forests there would take the biggest hit, losing as much as three months of suitable growing days annually. 
Nonetheless, Mora sees an upside to climate deniers:
Mora sees two big lessons from the new analysis. One, “that nothing good can come from messing with the Earth’s climate.” And two, “that engaging climate deniers could be good for scientific productivity.” 
If climate deniers were all just harmless cranks making scientists cross their t's and dot their i's, that would be one thing. But when they're employees and shills for oil and coal companies that spend billions of dollars suppressing and distorting the truth, dictating government policy and sucking up hundreds of billions of our tax dollars through direct and indirect subsidies, it's a whole other can of worms.

Without Comment

Tuesday, June 09, 2015

Monday, June 08, 2015

Young American Taliban

Check out this photo:




















It's from a collection of photos that were found in Nancy Lanza's home after the policed searched during the Sandy Hook investigation. It is not known whether this is Adam or not. Either way, I find this to be profoundly disturbing. What kind of seriously fucked up mentality brings you to a place like this?

Oh, right....the same as this one...



















So, how much longer are we going to put up with this ideology?

Sunday, June 07, 2015

Fantastic Words!

From a recent question on Quora...

I've long suspected that a lot of modern christianity is the result of people who want to be admired and respected like Jesus, but in their hearts they know that they have no intention of living up to Jesus' examples of humility, compassion, sacrifice and tolerance - 

So, the only way they can be "like Jesus" is by pretending, at each and every opportunity, that they're being tortured and vilified for their wonderfulness, by jealous moral inferiors. This is why they react with the righteous anger and the teeth gnashing and the wailing and the hysterics whenever they don't get their way - Every time somebody tells them "No, you can't do that", what they pretend to hear is "I HATE YOU AND I WILL CRUSH YOU AND ALL YOUR KIND INTO NOTHING !" 

Maybe it's best explained with this wonderfully accurate phrase that I once heard used by an arrogant prick, in a story by Mr. Howard Chaykin: "You can't talk to me that way ! Don't you know who I think I am ?!"

That last line from Mr. Chaykin pretty much sums up every conversation I've ever had with a conservative in general, let alone Christian!

Christians Under Attack?




I think there are several reasons why conservatives like to play the victim as detailed here by Bill Maher. The main one is they generate support by fomenting anger, hate and fear. What better way to do it then the garbage Bill points out?

'Tis a bizarre world in which they live. I'm very, very glad I don't go through life constantly feeling persecuted and under attack. Oh well...at least they have guns to fight off the imaginary monsters:)

Saturday, June 06, 2015

The 411 On The Clinton Foundation

The attacks and childish taunting against the Clinton Foundation have gotten pretty silly of late. The right wing bubble has been spinning some pretty ridiculous yarns (see: lies) about the organization so I think it's way past time we examine the objective reality.  A good starting point is the foundation's site itself. Follow any of the links above the top banner and you can see all the work that they do in the world. It's pretty impressive and helpful to a lot of people...which is exactly why conservatives hate it as much as they do. As one begins to dig deeper into the foundation, several things become apparently quickly-all of which torpedo the myths about the organization we have heard so much about from the right wing bubble.

First, this isn't a personal, family organization. It is a large not-for-profit philanthropic entity that solicits contributions, establishes and runs programs and serves as a vast convening vehicle to mobilize other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government and private corporate assets to efficiently solve heretofore unsolvable, major world problems.

Second, Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with many other people, work for the foundation. It's not their personal organization. It's a communal one...something conservatives always have had trouble understanding:) They earn zero income and receive no benefits from the foundation. In fact, they donate much of their own personal money to the foundation along with many Democrats and Republicans as well as putting in many hours to ensure that objectives in helping people are met.

Third, contrary to the lies being told about the Clinton Foundation's lack of transparency, the organization is very open about the source of its contributions. Even though they are not required by law, the still post the contributors to the foundation. This is a great illustration as to exactly what happens when you are more forthcoming with information. They basically make shit up. No wonder she doesn't want to release her private emails.

Fourth, 88% of the monies collected by the Clinton Foundation are spent on programs and direct activities that benefit people in need in this country and around the world. Between the Foundation and its subsidiary organization, the Clinton Global Initiative, more than 400 million people in 180 countries have benefitted from its activities since its inception in 2002 - again: that's 400 million people! It has been committed to meeting a number of major world challenges and has active programs addressing climate change, economic development in some of the world's poorest nations, health, including the deliver of HIV/Aids medications at low cost to victims in the world's impoverished countries, general health and wellness and improving opportunities for women and girls. The Foundation has had a major impact on improving the Haitian economy both before and after its terrible earthquake.

This runs contrary to the mostly false statement that the Clinton Foundation spends very little on actual charity. The foundation is not set up like a regular charity that farms out its aid to other workers. They hire workers in house and pay them a salary. That's why their administrative costs are so high. As is most typical of right wing blog commenters, the wordsmithing and monkey word games are hauled out in the hopes of a "gotcha."

I'm wondering if this is going to backfire at some point, though. The continued attacks on Hillary Clinton will inevitably increase the image of her as a victim.

Friday, June 05, 2015

Walker Raising Taxes?

Scott Walker recently announced a $500 million dollar stadium deal for the Milwaukee Bucks, half of which will be funded by taxpayers. Somewhat perplexing, no? After all, isn't this the same Scott Walker who is "battle tested" and fighting for lower taxes? I guess $250 million dollars of corporate hand outs are OK:)

I guess funding basketball is OK but not education.

No Hiatus

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a report saying that has been no hiatus in global warming after all. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration readjusted thousands of weather data points to account for different measuring techniques through the decades. Their calculations show that since 1998, the rate of warming is about the same as it has been since 1950: about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit a decade.

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

"The reality is that there is no hiatus," said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

One key to claims of a hiatus is the start date: 1998. That year there was a big temperature spike; some of the following years were not as hot, though even hotter years followed in 2005, 2010 and 2014, according to NOAA, NASA and temperature records kept in England and Japan. This year is on pace to break last year's global heat record. The key here is this spike date which is exactly how the church of the climate deniers wordmith and right wing blog comment their way into some sort of an argument.

Remember, the linked report above is peer reviewed science (see: objective reality). The comments sections of a right wing blog is not (see: inferiority complex, envy of success and accomplishment).

Oh, and I had an email request to link this site again for those of you out there who want to torpedo the climate deniers with the detailed science. Click on the intermediate and advanced tabs and use that information in your next conversation. Witness the cognitive dissonance.

Remember, it feels like they are being physically attacked! 

Thursday, June 04, 2015

Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore?

Why Can't America Win Wars Anymore? This question has been asked in many forms for many years (in MinnPost, the Atlantic, Ricochet, The Daily Beast, The LA Times, etc.). So let's look at the wars that we've won, and the wars that we've lost and see what we can learn.

We "won" the Libyan civil war, in that we bombed Qaddafi's military forces and helped the rebels overthrow and kill the dictator. But the place is falling apart now as various Libyan factions bicker with each other and ISIS is moving in to cause havoc.

We "won" the Iraq war, in that we destroyed the Iraqi military, killed lots of civilians, installed a puppet government and killed Saddam Hussein. But that puppet government turned out to be a puppet of Iran, not the United States. Now Iraq is falling apart again as ISIS fighters take over large swaths of Iraqi territory that the Shiite government can't hold because they have been treating the Sunni inhabitants of those areas like animals.

We won the Gulf War straight up: we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, crushed his army, placed a no-fly zone over the entire country and neutered his territorial ambitions for a decade. Some people think we "lost" because we didn't take Saddam out at that time.

But it was Dick Cheney, of all people, who so expertly explained why we had to leave Saddam in power in 1993: if Iraq fell apart, then Iran would gain power and then Syria would start falling apart, and then the whole Middle East would go to hell. It turns out the 1993 Dick Cheney was dead right: all the bad things the 1993 Cheney said would happen did happen when the 2003 Cheney invaded Iraq.

We lost the Vietnam war straight up. Yet for all the screaming about dominoes and the moaning about the blow to our prestige, "losing" in Vietnam has had a far more positive outcome than "winning" in Iraq. Communism has been defeated across the globe: China and Vietnam are now capitalist countries, with communist governments in name only.

The Korean War was a draw: we kept South Korea free, while the Chinese and Russians kept North Korea captive. North Korea is now a rogue state: a tyrannical feudal monarchy run by a deranged despot, with a ruling class that serves at the whim of the Supreme Leader and can be executed for offenses as trivial as falling asleep in a meeting.

We like to think we won WWII straight up. We freed western Europe and North Africa from the Germans. We freed Asia and the Pacific from the Japanese. But eastern Europe fell under Soviet control, and shortly thereafter China and much of Asia fell under communist rule.

To make sure we sustained our wins in South Korea, Germany and Japan we had to embark on a huge program of reconstruction and nation-building. We had to occupy these nations for years, babysit them while they wrote new constitutions, build numerous bases at tremendous expense and station troops there for up to 70 years -- and counting.

We like to think we won WWI straight up: we ejected Germany from the rest of Europe. But Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, and Germany fell into a terrible depression, partly due to an unreasonable treaty forced upon them by the victors, and 20 years later Germany started another war. WWI was supposed to the war to end all wars, and clearly it did not.

We "won" the Civil War in the United States, but to this day there are millions of Americans who celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America and a traitor to this nation. And these are the same people who today claim to be the "real Americans."

What do our victories and losses tell us? We can win wars to eject invaders and free people from slavery. We used moral suasion to convince the citizens of Germany and Japan that the Holocaust and the war crimes committed by the Japanese were wrong, and got them to change their ways. Stationing hundreds of thousands of troops there for decades made it stick.

But we lose wars that we have no moral standing in, or wars that prop up corrupt allies like South Vietnam. And wars never change anyone's minds about the rightness of their cause, or that a "way of life" based on the enslavement of human beings was worth fighting for. Incredibly, I'm talking about the American South, not Nazi Germany.

How does this apply to our current conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria?

We invaded Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. We did that in short order, and therefore "won," but then we decided that we also had to get rid of the Taliban. We've been stuck there for 13 years now. (The Soviets were stuck with the same problem in the 1980s but called it quits when their country fell apart.)

We can't win in Afghanistan for two reasons: one is military, the other cultural. Militarily, Pakistan has been undercutting us from Day One in Afghanistan. For some reason Pakistan believes that an Afghanistan mired in eternal turmoil somehow diminishes the power of India, their sworn enemy. Now Pakistan is besieged by their own Taliban terrorists, who kill children by the hundreds. Both Afghan and Pakistani Talibans are essentially untouchable in their mountain aeries in western Pakistan.

Culturally, we have no traction in Afghanistan: we are perceived as invaders and Crusaders, an image perpetuated by American conservatives who keep making this a war between Islam and Christianity. The Afghan Taliban is not an invading force, they are native Afghan Pashto Muslims who have lived there for centuries. Yes, they're an evil misogynistic pack of scumbags, but it's still their country.

There the Americans are the interlopers, the ones using drones to shoot Hellfire missiles into wedding parties and bombing houses filled with children. Unlike the Germans and the Japanese, the Taliban didn't invade another country. We invaded them to get at a few foreign terrorists who were hiding out there. Our bombardment of an entire country to root out a small number of criminals puts us in a very poor light there.

And by the way. We were the ones who financed the Taliban and forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan. As Jon Stewart noted in "Learning Curves are for Pussies," the CIA says it's the only time doing such a thing worked.

It's the same story in Iraq. We are viewed as foreign invaders there. Some locals want to use us to destroy their enemies, but they don't like us, or trust us, or believe in democracy or the rule of law. If we destroy ISIS in the Sunni areas of Iraq, the Shiite government will send troops into those areas and kill the Sunnis for cooperating with ISIS. It's a lose-lose proposition.

We have even less standing to meddle in Syria, where our mortal enemy the Iranians are allied with our mortal enemy Assad who are fighting against our mortal enemy ISIS, and we're allied with people who used to say we were their mortal enemy, but now they'll only cop to despising us and cursing us for not giving them enough money and guns.

Viewing our successes and failures over the past century, it becomes clear that the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars that we can win militarily. This is because these countries are made of ethnically and religiously diverse populations who have been at each others' throats for centuries, with lapses of atrocities when dictators like Saddam and Assad used their brutal powers to put a temporary stop to the internecine bickering.

To "win" these wars, we would have to replace the governments of these countries with an American-backed puppet government, along the lines of the post-WWII German and Japanese governments. We would have to segregate these countries into several separate provinces along ethnic and religious lines (Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Pashto, Turkmen, Alawite, etc.) , and forcibly repatriate millions of people into the "right" provinces. Doing this fairly is impossible because natural resources such as oil, water and farmland are not evenly distributed. We would have to trust the American government -- which Republicans keep telling us is incapable of doing anything right -- to pick ethnic and religious losers in a foreign country.

And then we'd discover that we already tried that a hundred years ago when the British divvied up the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Look how well that worked out!

We would have to spend a trillion dollars a year and station one or two hundred thousand troops in these countries for the next century in an attempt to force them to see reason. Meanwhile, our fighting men and women would face a constant barrage of IEDs and sniper fire as the local population tried to oust the foreign invaders.

You might think I'm making this all up, but Lindsey Graham's plan for the Middle East is what I outlined above, except he ignores the exorbitant cost and the number of American casualties. The South Carolina senator, Republican presidential candidate and self-proclaimed national security "expert" told NBC's Chuck Todd that we need to invade Syria and Iraq, and that we'll never get out. He has deluded himself into thinking that we can do this on the cheap, getting Turkey and Egypt to do all the heavy lifting, and that the people who have been attacking us for the last 13 and a half years in Afghanistan will simply stop shooting and bombing American soldiers in the Middle East if he's elected president.

This was George W. Bush's plan for Iraq. He pretended he could do it on the cheap, insisting that Iraqi oil would pay for it all. But he spent whatever moral currency America might have had in the Middle East by invading Iraq on false pretenses.

Military might can be used to eject foreign invaders like Germany from France, or Saddam from Kuwait. But it can't make people see reason, treat fellow citizens fairly or adopt a liberal democracy unless that's what they want. And right now, all anyone on any side in the Middle East wants is revenge.

U.S. Corporations Outsourced National Security to Russia

Yesterday I carped about how American companies have been outsourcing manufacturing and tech jobs overseas, and how they've begun firing Americans working in tech jobs and are replacing them with immigrants with H-1B visas.

Russian RD-180 Rocket Engine Being Test-Fired at NASA
It's gets worse. To boost profits and shorten development time, American aerospace companies outsourced the construction of rocket engines for launching U.S. military and intelligence satellites into space. But here's the rub:
After Russia annexed Crimea last year, Congress passed legislation that forced the Pentagon to stop buying Russian rocket engines that have been used since 2000 to help launch American military and intelligence satellites into space.

Now, that simple act of punishment is proving difficult to keep in place.

Only five months after the ban became law, the Pentagon is pressing Congress to ease it.
I'm all for cooperation in space -- the joint missions at the International Space Station with Russia, Japan and Europe are a great way to advance human understanding of the cosmos. But outsourcing the engines for our military rockets is stupidly greedy.

Of course, conservatives are all bent out of shape by this. After vacillating between hardons and hatred and for Vladimir Putin, they are blaming it all on Obama:
“I don’t know what the Pentagon’s position can be, except for them and the Obama administration trying to placate Putin,” Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said. He predicted that the legislative fight would intensify in the months ahead.
But corporate greed and laziness are responsible for this debacle. The Republicans' pals in the defense industry decided to put profit before national security.

The companies that formed United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that has a monopoly on military and intelligence launches, decided to buy rocket engines from a state-owned Russian company called Energomash in the 1990s. They didn't want to continue to build their own engines for the Atlas rockets -- they could make more money by using cheap Russian labor to build engines for our military rockets.

You know how American rocket scientists and engineers are -- they're all worried about safety and stuff, and they live in liberal California where houses cost a million bucks. They're so arrogant, they think they know everything and you have to pay 'em so much. It's much cheaper using Russian engineers who get paid peanuts, drink nothing but vodka and live in barracks in Samara (yeah, I'm just making that last part up).

Fortunately, SpaceX, the upstart company founded by Elon Musk, has now been cleared to compete with ULA for launching these sensitive payloads. And Musk's launch vehicles -- made in America -- are cheaper than ULA's Russian-based rockets.  If Congress doesn't pass a bill to allow ULA to buy Russian rocket engines, ULA will be out of a job and SpaceX will have the monopoly on launches.

Rocket engines aren't the only place we have a technological vulnerability. Our entire computing infrastructure is dependent on semiconductors, computers and networking hardware made in foreign countries, primarily China.

The United States invented semiconductor and networking technology, but to increase profits corporations sent the vast majority of semiconductor manufacturing overseas, mostly to China. Design centers soon followed, and now the United States is totally dependent on Asia for our computing hardware.

There's no way to know whether the state-owned Chinese corporations that build this equipment have installed backdoors in the chips, computers, and network routers our military is buying.

The lesson? Corporations have no loyalty to America. They're in business -- they keep telling us -- only to "increase shareholder value." Can you really trust people with our national security when they tell you straight to your face that the only thing they care about is money?

This is another reason not to be so trusting about free-trade treaties -- not only are we forcing American workers to compete with low-wage workers in countries like Vietnam, but are we opening the door for them to compete on contracts for critical military infrastructure? We don't know -- the treaty's secret!

The Criminalization of Joy and the Legalization of Intimidation

Once you think law enforcement in the South has reached the nadir of stupidity, someone in Georgia, Alabama, Florida or Mississippi turns around and shows that their intelligence and morality can sink even lower into the muck:
[T]hree people are facing charges and the prospect of $500 fines and six-month jail terms after they were accused of cheering during the [Senatobia High School] graduation ceremony, held at Northwest Mississippi Community College on May 21.

“We were instructed to remove anyone that cheered during the ceremony, which was done,” Zabe Davis, the chief of the campus police and a Senatobia High alumnus, said Wednesday. “And then Jay Foster, the superintendent, came and pressed charges against those people.”
As I read this, I immediately suspected that the people charged would be black and the perpetrators of this idiotic waste of taxpayer dollars would be white. As it turns out, Jay Foster, the superintendent, and Zabe Davis, the chief of campus police, are white. And, yes, the accused are African Americans, according to the report from WREG TV, which also indicates that the number of people charged was four rather than three.

Don't the cops in Mississippi have better things to do than put people in jail for expressing happiness?

Meanwhile, in Texas the governor is about to sign a bill that will allow people to carry guns on college campuses. But Texas is behind the times: Mississippi passed a similar law in 2011, and Northwest Mississippi Community College is one of the schools where you can pack heat as long as you got your certified instruction from the NRA.

That makes Mississippi the state where you can go to jail for shouting someone's name, but intimidating people with guns on college campuses is a God-given right, dammit!

It makes you wonder: if someone had shot those people for disturbing the peace in such an undignified fashion, would the cops have taken them in for questioning? Or would they believe it to be a clear-cut case of justifiable homicide?

I guess these proud family members -- instead of shouting the graduate's names -- should have fired their shootin' irons into the air in celebration. Who could possibly object to gunfire? It's a Second Amendment right! Freedom of speech is just the First Amendment, and everyone knows two is greater than one!

This is what white people just don't get about the situation of African Americans in this country. They have to put up with kind of crap every ... single ... day of their ... entire ... lives.

Wednesday, June 03, 2015

Firing Americans and Hiring Foreigners

For decades American manufacturing jobs have been going to places like Mexico, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on. Part of this was facilitated by NAFTA, but most of it is due to the vagaries of international trade, which is generally considered a Good Thing for our economy.

In recent years non-manufacturing jobs have also been fleeing these shores: many call centers and help lines have been outsourced to India (which American customers absolutely detest because they can't understand the accents), much software development has been outsourced to eastern Europe and India. Even legal research and medical image analysis have been outsourced overseas.

I have personal experience with this. In the early 2000s, after the company I worked for was bought by a British multinational, a policy came from on high that all American software contractors be replaced with Indian programmers from a specific contracting company.

But American corporations, like Disney World, aren't satisfied with this solution because some jobs just can't be outsourced to foreign countries. The employees need to be in-country. The solution? Bring in foreigners with H-1B visas and replace American workers with them.
[A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
Yes, Disney (as well as other companies such as Southern California Edison and Fossil) is firing Americans, hiring foreigners for the exact same job and then forcing Americans to train their foreign replacements. For that last ignominy, they get a 10% severance bonus. Nice, huh?

What are H-1B visas?
According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.
These companies are clearly lying to get foreign workers: they're laying off qualified people and replacing them with foreigners using the H-1B program. This isn't about finding qualified workers: it's about firing Americans and hiring foreigners for less money.

And American companies still aren't satisfied. The US Chamber of Commerce wants to double or triple the number of H-1B visas. They say they can't find enough qualified American engineers and programmers: what they really mean is they don't want to pay American-level salaries.

To make it worse, the H-1B program is a nightmare for many of the people who get the visas: they are essentially indentured servants. The Indian "in-sourcing" companies that snatch up many of the H-1B visas create phantom jobs and then try to shop around the employees they bring in on false pretenses. They tell the immigrants to falsify their resumes to get jobs they're not qualified for and then force the employees to pay the fees the companies are supposed to pay to get H-1B recipients into the country.

Now, I'm not some whack-job nativist who thinks that furriners are destroyin' Merica and we gotta take it back! In the 1990s I worked with several people from India and Pakistan who had H-1B visas. They were competent and deserving of the jobs.

But the H-1B program clearly has become a cesspool of corruption and greed. It must be radically reformed. But how?

The H-1B visa holders I worked with were directly hired by the company to work for the company. The corruption in the H-1B program is due to the way American companies treat workers: they don't want long-term employees, they want low-cost slaves they can dismiss at a whim.

So companies like Disney and SoCal Edison hire consulting firms and staffing companies, which are usually based in India, to find disposable employees at the lowest possible cost.

These corrupt middlemen should be eliminated. If a company can't find the employees it needs in the United States, then it should find and hire foreign workers themselves. If these companies need employees that badly, then they should be required to make a long-term personal commitment to them, to ensure that they remain gainfully employed for several years and won't be taking other Americans' jobs.

Right now these companies can bring in foreigners, employee them for a couple of months, and then lay them off. At that point the workers will be competing with Americans for any job, not just the one they were hired for. Companies are even using the H-1B program to fill low-wage jobs, not just tech specialists.

If American companies can't find Americans with the skills to do the jobs, they should be investing in the American education system and training Americans to do the job.

American companies like Disney have huge profit margins and are sitting on huge piles of cash. Instead of whining that they can't find enough programmers and have to get them from India, they should endow scholarships at American colleges and universities in the specialties they need.

Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, was paid $46.5 million dollars last year. That's enough to endow 2,000 scholarships at American public universities.

Instead of trying to get Congress to pass laws to allow them to import more wage slaves from India, or expecting someone else to create employees for them for free, American companies should be investing in the future of this country.

What Conservatives Want

Check out this video from a recent Iowa focus group comprised entirely of Republicans...



Let's see....

They are overwhelmed by the number of candidates

It needs to be winnowed down...no strong candidate seen

Don't care if the candidate attracts more women voters

Don't care if the candidate attract more minority voters

Scott Walker is "battle tested"

College degree doesn't matter

Marco Rubio is hot and the American Dream

Barack Obama has no integrity and has pushed things through

No one knows what Common Core is

Country should be run like a business

Huckabee will stick to the Constitution and Founding Fathers

Iowa pick is too conservative for the country


As I have always said, just let them speak...no spin is needed.



Secession Talk=Crickets

























Like the adolescent who bitches about the roof over their heads, they all end up crying to mom and dad for help.

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

The Republican Brain Part Five: Smart Idiots

The next section of Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Smart Idiots" and it's honestly one of the most depressing sections of the book. It begins with a study of why motivated reasoning, which we talked about last time, occurs in individuals. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, has a classification system based on how people reason with their moral and political values. Imagine a Cartesian plane like this one:






















Now, imagine that the X Axis is a measure of individualism on the right and communitarians on the left. With the Y Axis, imagine egalitarians on the bottom and hierarchicals on the top. Broadly speaking, Kahan discovered that US conservatives are in Quadrant 1 (individual, hierarchical) and US liberals are in Quadrant 3 (communitarian, egalitarian). It's important to note here that individuals are really scattered all over the place and we're just talking about general groups.

Still, this explains so much to me personally. I've always wondered how a group of people who are so obsessed with individual rights are also so authoritarian. Now we know. They believe that a chief organizing principle for society is hierarchies, with the "right" people at the top. With so many US conservatives from the South, this clearly goes back to the Antebellum and all of its mythical structures.

So, how do these classifications apply to the issues of the day? One of Kahan's studies took groups of people and had them imagine helping a friend make a decision about three important topics: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear wasted can be stored safely underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime or worsens it.  The study subjects were then shown fake excerpts from a variety of "experts" on each topic.

The results were very telling. Only 23% of individual-hierarchicals agreed that any of the experts knew what they were talking about while 88% of communitarian-egalitarians accepted the experts as being knowledgeable and trustworthy. Right here is that instant and most adolescent reaction to people who are in authority and knowledgeable of which I always speak. Why? I simply don't get it. Are they that insecure about themselves?

What tends to happen in examinations of these issues is what Mooney calls the "My Expert v Your Expert" battle. Even worse....

When they deny global warming, then, conservatives think the best minds are actually on their side. They think THEY'RE the champions of truth and reality; and they're deeply attached to this view. That is why head-on attempts to persuade them usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed the backfire effect: Those with the most strongly held but clearly incorrect beliefs not only fail to change their minds, but hold their wrong views more tenaciously after being shown contradictory evidence or a refutation.

This is very key information to have when having a discussion with a conservative these days. Remember, they feel like they are under physical attack. If they have very strongly held views, it will be worse due to the backfire effect.

Now, what's interesting about the backfire effect is that applies to conservatives only. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State found that when conservatives were shown more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs and that tax cuts do not increase revenue, they were MORE likely to believe the claim than before. I can personally attest to tax cut-revenue BS sadly being valid. Yet, when liberals were shown evidence in the same study that refuted claims that George W Bush "banned" embryonic stem cell research (he never did), liberals didn't backfire. They weren't more likely to believe the claim and, in fact, wavered more given the new information.

What this tells us quite simply is that liberals are generally more reflective and tend to be more open to new information. Consider the basic definitions of each word in objective reality

liberal: not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted

conservative: not liking or accepting changes or new ideas

I'm always willing to accept valid, unbiased and verifiable data regardless of whether or not it supports my ideology. I am speaking of information that the cold and rational part of the brain can analyze. I haven't seen any such data from conservatives on most of the issues I discuss and quite honestly dismiss nearly all of it as wacky, ideological nonsense. Speaking of which...

The split over whether Iraq had the touted

 "WMD," and whether Saddam and Osama were frat buddies, represented a true turning point in the relationship between our politics and objective reality. In case you missed it: Reality lost badly. Conservatives and Republicans were powerfully and persistently wrong, following a cherished leader into a war based on false premises-and then, according to these studies, finding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.

The "cherished leader" line echoes what I have said previously about President Bush and conservatives. He was their savior...their white knight... yet, on his watch, we suffered the worst attack on our home soil in history, a city fell into the sea, and the economy collapsed. By any metric in objective reality, he was a colossal failure. Much of the anger toward Barack Obama comes from the massive cognitive dissonance occurring within their brains.

At this point, we come to the most depressing part of the chapter and the origin of its title. Mooney posits that there is a "smart idiots" effect when it comes to many of these issues. One would think that the more educated a person is, the easier it is for them to accept objective reality. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because they are extremely intelligent that they can come up with intricate counter arguments and employ confirmation bias to convince themselves that their belief system is solid. Never was this more true than with global warming.

Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the "radiative" properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation would otherwise escape into space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place,  but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we are seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.

This is a great example of objective reality and thankfully one that is more reliable than people, especially the educated ones. Pew polls over the years have shown that Democrats accept this objective reality and Republicans do not. Worse, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely he is to reject the theory of man caused global warming. Astonishing...

Mooney offers further explanation of why this is the case. Even smart conservatives, for example, chiefly consume conservative news sources like Fox News. So, like anyone else, they are being conditioned. The more intelligent they are, the more resistant which does hold some good news for the rest of us in objective reality. We can, at least, attempt to persuade the less intelligent conservatives because the studies and the data show that they are easier to persuade.

What's even more vexing about this is that Kahan's studies sprinkled in other questions that were scientifically based but not very political. Nearly all respondents, despite their cultural background, answered the question with their colder and more rational System 2 brain. In fact, those who scored higher on the non political scientific questions but were individual-hierarchical distrusted climate science in greater numbers. Stunning!!

One big takeaway from all of this is the liberal line of "educate more people" needs to be retired. Becoming more knowledgeable will actually make it worse so the old idea about converting people with more education needs to go away forever. It won't work. They will just get worse.

In wrapping up this first section of the book, "Politics, Facts, and Brains,"  Mooney warns...

Motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues-not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that. 

Add in all of the new media of the last two decades and it truly exacerbates the problem.

The next section of the book is called "The Nature Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty." It looks to be an even deeper explanation of the problem which is sort of a drag. At this point, I'd like to get to some solutions on how to go forward!

Monday, June 01, 2015

A Conservative Paradise

Reports are coming out of Iraq about life under ISIL. And it's a conservative paradise.
The Sunni Muslim terrorists appear to be following the same blueprint as they have in other conquered parts of Anbar Province: seize territory, execute “apostates” and “traitors” in a bloodbath, and then reassure terrified civilians by producing goods and services that surpass those provided by the Shiite Muslim-led government in Baghdad. 
But they're not all bad:
Quietly, quickly, the jihadists also are working to provide fuel for heavy generators, ordered shopkeepers to reopen, and have begun demolishing old checkpoints to make it easier to get around, according to telephone interviews with residents. 
Like Republicans, the ISIL terrorists are strict law and order types:
[They] imposed a long list of rules that can seem endless: no English teaching, no smoking, no unveiled women, no price gouging, no skipping prayers, and so on.
 And they're trying to restore some sense of normalcy as well:
Seven schools are operating, he said, teaching math and science along with religion, but abolishing English, history and any mention of evolution. 
Do the last two remind you of, say, Texas and Louisiana?

Are Republicans riled up about ISIL because the Islamic terrorists a real threat, are they just jealous that ISIL is able to do everything American conservatives can only dream about: shoot anyone they don't like, force women to obey their every whim, rewrite history and ban the teaching of evolution?

Same Number of Liberals As Conservatives

Gallup has been seeing some interesting polling numbers lately. First there was the abortion poll and now they have one that says, for the first time in their polling history, there are just as many people who identify as liberal as there are who identify as conservative.

“The broad trend has been toward a shrinking conservative advantage, although that was temporarily interrupted during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency,” Gallup noted. “Since then, the conservative advantage continued to diminish until it was wiped out this year.” It also seems to be affecting people who identify as Republican: only 53% of respondents said their views were socially conservative, “the lowest in Gallup’s trend”, and correlates with a rise in self-identified socially moderate Republicans (34%).

Hmm...I wonder why:)