Super Bowl Weekend Thread of Openness

by

by Ugh

Yes I'm rooting for the Patriots. For some reason I like to see records pushed as high as they can go.  Thus, Brady wining a 6th ring in his 8th Super Bowl appeals to me.  As does Federer continuing to win grand slams (do we really have to wait until Wimbledon to see him again though? Feh!).  Will be interesting to see if Lebron ends up as the NBA's all time leaders in points scored.  

I burnt myself out on reading and have discovered that Netflix has all 11 seasons of Cheers available. Watched the first 4 episodes of season 1 – it was a good show right from the start. Still need to watch Stranger Things 2.  Any recommendations for series/programming on Netflix either original or from elsewhere? 

It would be quite something if P!nk sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl from her knees.  

Happy Open Thread and Groundhog Day!

412 thoughts on “Super Bowl Weekend Thread of Openness”

  1. For some reason I like to see records pushed as high as they can go.
    Me too.
    It would be quite something if P!nk sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl from her knees.
    The incidence of terminal apoplexy in this country would go sky high. And with all the right people, too!

  2. Any recommendations for series/programming on Netflix either original or from elsewhere?
    we’ve recently been through: The Good Place, Master Of None, Black Mirror, Alias Grace, American Vandal, Lady Dynamite, Great British Baking Show.

  4. The latest Black Mirror has couple of harrowing episodes. No self-driving vehicles, but the technology is inexorable in its unintended consequences.
    Not a big fan of “Stranger Things”. Kind of reminds me of The Walking Dead, by which I mean the human characters, even in their dreadful circumstances, have their quotidian moments of soap operaish interactions, but you can feel the script writers getting antsy after too much of that and saying “OK, cue the zombies and the face chewing!”
    Watched a zombie flick last night that brings some new angles to the genre.
    “The Girl With All The Gifts”
    Glenn Close gets eaten like a bunny.

  5. One of Netflix’s irritating aspects is that, unlike other streaming services, you can’t peruse its content without an active account. 🙁

  6. I expect to give the Super Bowl a miss. I used to be something of a football fan — to the point that my wife would refer to herself during the fall as a “football widow.” But I decided that, given the growing evidence that the sport generates significant brain damage among players, I just couldn’t in good conscience keep watching.
    Yes, I know that one less TV viewer won’t make a noticeable difference in the sport’s finances. Which is all that would cut down on the number of kids playing and damaging their brains for life. But sometimes you just gotta make a gesture, even recognizing its futility,.

  7. Count – loved the book of The Girl with all The Gifts. Been meaning to watch the movie, although maybe after the book’s sequel comes out in paperback (The Boy on the Bridge), which it may have by now.

  8. Misaeng is the best Korean drama I’ve seen on Netflix. Some think it was slow (which seems only reasonable to mention); I found it riveting.

  9. i read the book, and was a bit wary of the movie for “The Girl with all The Gifts”. but it was better than i expected it to be.

  10. I expect to give the Super Bowl a miss.
    i would, but our neighborhood has a SB party every year, and it’s literally the only time i’ll see most of the people on my block.

  12. Any bets on whether there will be a Korean mini-series in the 2030s, dramatizing US Civil War 2?
    It will probably start with the Manhattan Massacre, in which Secret Service agents shot and killed a half-dozen of the demonstrators protesting the firing of Bob Mueller in front of Trump Tower. Highlights will include the FBI versus Secret Service gunfight on the Mall, the autopsy of He, Trump’s bloated body after Melania poisons his cheeseburger, and the treason trials of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Sean Hannity — Devin Nunes having already been granted asylum in Russia.
    Whether either Korea still has video production facilities in the 2030s is open to question, of course.
    –TP

  13. Biggest laugher in the Nunes memo: the line at the top referring to him as “The Honorable Denis Nunes”.**
    ** Yes, I know that is technically the title for a member of the House of Representatives. But in this case? Laughable.

  14. a buddy of mine is putting off getting a haircut until next week because he has no interest in the superbowl and doesn’t want to get caught out in all of the sportsing barbershop small talk. he knows enough to say, for example, “yeah, f’ing gronk!”, but he just doesn’t feel like that’s enough to get him through a 20 minute haircut.
    he also hates the super bowl because he’s a foreman/manager at a fish wholesaler in Boston and all the guys in his crew “get the flu” the day after.
    my wife and i went out to dinner in NOLA one super bowl sunday night. it was the four of us, and about ten wait staff. it was, like, a waiter per plate. fantastic.
    we used to go to good friend’s fo the superbowl now and then, the family are all amazing cooks and bob the dad made a great martini. bob’s gone now, along with good friends and super bowl regulars sis and spike, so that semi-tradition has fallen by the wayside.
    those are all my super bowl stories.
    my wife and i do the netflix and chill thing a lot lately. it’s cold and dark, work’s a brutal grind lately, we’re old and unambitious.
    we liked parenthood, longmire, and the good place. my wife liked orange is the new black and anna grace, i like peaky blinders.

  15. It will probably start with the Manhattan Massacre, in which Secret Service agents shot and killed a half-dozen of the demonstrators protesting the firing of Bob Mueller in front of Trump Tower.
    This evokes all too vividly the memory of Kent State (where someone close to me taught for many years). It’s depressing as hell.

  16. Less depressing — my one Super Bowl story — my family and I went to Disney World once on Super Bowl Sunday. It wasn’t planned that way, it just happened that we were in Orlando for other reasons and took the opportunity.
    Least waiting in line I’ve ever seen there!
    *****
    I live in Brady country. Don’t get me started.

  17. We’ll stay home, eat leftover minestrone (I made a huge batch, and it was really good), have the SBowl on unless it gets one-sided (switching to something else at halftime), and root in a half-assed manner for the Eagles, etc. (She’s from Philly, and I’m tired of Belicheck and Brady, but neither of us cares that much.) Just another day here at Squirrelhaven.
    There’s a very old joke about a man who constantly played one note on the violin, over and over, day after day. His long-suffering wife eventually said: “Dear, I’ve noticed that when other people play the violin, they move their fingers around and sometimes play different strings, so they get different notes.” “Ah,” he replied. “They’re looking for the place. I’ve found it.”
    That’s my wife and I. We’ve found it.
    I’ll refrain from Netflix recommendations because we don’t have it and I don’t know what it has to offer. I’m currently watching (having recorded) Mosaic, Waco, and – with some hesitation – The Alienist. If asked for a series everyone should watch my wife would probably start with “The Americans,” which was much better than it ought to have been.

  18. Don’t bother with Altered Carbon.
    The books had some interesting ideas, fifteen years ago. The adaptation goes nowhere with them, which is a shame.

  19. My boys, 8 and 6, love the Superbowl because it’s the one time each year they get to eat as many tortilla chips as they can. They’ve been asking when it is since September.
    Wife used to make a point of going to the gym the afternoon of the Superbowl – not a soul there.
    he also hates the super bowl because he’s a foreman/manager at a fish wholesaler in Boston and all the guys in his crew “get the flu” the day after.
    One of the better ideas I’ve heard over the past couple years is to move the Superbowl to Saturday night. Would probably boost TV ratings and worker productivity on Monday, win-win!

  21. If you have Amazon, then the (awfully titled) The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel is both very good, and very funny indeed.
    Rachel Brosnahan is a revelation, and Tony Shalhoub a delight.

  23. Became a binge watcher of The Americans not long ago after ignoring it for five years.
    Just finished the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel too. Yes, Shalhoub was great.
    What got me about it was the script was written in the wise cracking, show-bizzy, hard boiled cadences of the era in which it takes place, but with extravagant cursing thrown in.
    If we went back and remade all of the movies, TV shows, and plays from that era and let the characters talk the way they really did, except around the kids, the Donald O’Conner “Make em Laugh” dance scene in “Singing In the Rain” would have been titled “Make The F*ckers Laugh”.
    The pillow talk in “Pillow Talk” would have outed Rock Hudson and we would find out Doris Day had her own secrets.
    I hope no one plans to do that.

  24. This evokes all too vividly the memory of Kent State
    My wife was there. You will pry her (D) registration from her cold, dead hands.
    we would find out Doris Day had her own secrets.
    “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” – Oscar Levant
    Also, maybe I will check out Amazon.
    That’s my wife and I. We’ve found it.
    Amen.

  25. Stadiums: Built with subsidies to billionaires from taxpayers for millionaires to play in.
    “When the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles meet Sunday for the Super Bowl, they’ll play inside the newly completed U.S. Bank Stadium near downtown Minneapolis. The $1.1 billion stadium was built with almost $500 million from state and local taxpayers, with the city paying an additional $7.5 million each year for operations and maintenance.”
    The Super Bowl, Brought To You By Taxpayers: The National Football League is propped up by a wide range of public subsidies.

  27. Stadiums: Built with subsidies to billionaires from taxpayers for millionaires to play in.
    Yep. On this one we can agree.

  28. Governments paying for stadiums, like governments offering cash or other “incentives” for businesses to set up there, are bad. Now if they are just building general use infrastructure, that might be another story. But company-specific stuff should be right out.

  31. The federal gov’t really should step in somehow and stop this orgy of state tax giveaways to corporations/businesses that don’t need it. Maybe take away highway funding or something.

  33. Oh Janie, I so loved that. I always wait for:

    And the sons of Pulman porters
    and the sons of engineers
    ride their fathers’ magic carpet
    made of steel

    The song moves me in a very strange and deep way, and I don’t know if I can explain this, but there is an idea of America, a sort of spiritual essence of it, to do with Huckleberry Finn, and the City of New Orleans, and the Mississippi delta shining like a National guitar, and blue highways, from the redwood forests to the Gulf stream waters, that persists and binds certain people to it, all round the world, in defiance of current reality and historical reality. It’s a kind of idealised, platonic image of something that certainly no longer exists, and maybe never existed, but exerts the strongest, strangest pull nonetheless. I think it explains some of the bitter disappointment that people sometimes feel when brought face to face with the reality.
    Forgive me if I’m rambling incomprehensibly, I’m in that kind of mood.

  34. Oh beautiful for spacious skies….
    GftNC — music will do that to you.
    I can certainly related to that kind of mood. It’s a grief, but also a spur, that that shining place never did really exist. Although for me it’s the land itself that somehow holds the dream, even when we abuse that as much as we abuse everything else
    Your ramble reminds me of how I felt as a young adult during the Vietnam era. I looked back on my own “good old days” — the time maybe ten years previously, when I was in my early teens — as “the hopeful years,” which had later turned dark (as I saw it; being still too young, naive, innocent, whatever, to internalize all the darkness that had gone before).
    And — that whole sense of hopefulness from those earlier years had been shaped by music, as though we could sing our way to a better world. How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky… (Never mind a woman.)
    As a goofy-ass fourteen-year-old, I sat in some class or other with a boy I had once had a massive crush on, and we wrote dozens of verses to “I’m getting married in the morning” — only it was “We’re sitting in tomorrow morning…” We took it too lightly, being young, sheltered, white, northern, privileged (even as working class kids). JFK was dead, but so far that seemed to be a one-off tragedy. Then came 1968.

  35. A help would be to disallow the use of municipal bonds to fund stadiums, etc.
    There was a provision do to that in one of the tax reform bills but it was not in the final legislation.

  36. Thanks Janie, for taking my ramblings seriously enough to actually engage with them! But since I’m in so deep already, I should also say that it’s not just generated by music, this feeling, but by a number of art forms which somehow depict not a shining place, but somehow an immense, beautiful, place with a kind of innocence about it (I think), and you’re right it’s an awful lot to do with the land (and the towns – oh the names!). Obviously this is a ridiculously romanticised vision, and clearly in sharing this nutty theory I’m not hoping to be thought deep or interesting – my only aim at this stage is somehow not to look like a complete idiot.

  37. This is excellent news! This would be meaningful resistance indeed – the anti-science atmosphere growing in American public life has been particularly terrifying for the future. Next stop the schools!

  38. This is excellent news!
    Don’t assume, just because they’re scientists, they will agree with your point of view. Some of the most heated arguments on things like climate change are among scientists.

  39. I’m not assuming anything of the kind, CharlesWT. What I am assuming is that they’ll be interested in evidence, and follow where it takes them. Furthermore, I don’t believe that there’s much fundamental disagreement about climate change among the overwhelming majority of scientists. YMMV – certainly that of most rightwing Rpublicans does.

  40. More on this:
    Ugh: For some reason I like to see records pushed as high as they can go.
    Me: Me too.
    I like to see things done really well, all the more now that I’ve long grown out of thinking I might do things really well myself someday. (Not that I ever thought that about sports in the first place.)
    Some of my younger generation acquaintances don’t like it when I suggest that geniuses are born as much as they’re made; apparently you’re not supposed to say that these days. But I don’t think you get to be Michael Jordan or Larry Bird or Tom Brady by work alone. Nor, I would be the first to admit, do you get to be who they became through inborn talents alone. (Though I believe that the capacity for focus and hard work may itself be partly inborn…so it’s a tangled question.)
    Consider Secretariat’s body mechanics and heart, or Michael Phelps’s physique.
    Then consider Brady and Belichick, aka the luck of circumstances.
    Would Tom Brady even have been in the running as (as they keep blathering in the Boston press) the “GOAT” if he hadn’t had the good luck to be paired with Belichick? Somehow I feel like it matters more in football than it does in basketball, the only sport to which I’ve paid more than cursory attention. Any real football fans out there care to venture an opinion?

  41. Belichick creates the opportunity for Brady, he is more impressive. Brady delivers. I don’t believe in GOAT but Brady has had the greatest CAREER of any qb ever. That’s due to all three of them Kraft, Belichick and Brady.

  43. GFtNC, that definitely is good news! I dream of the day when we see dozens of STEM types who are running and winning as Republicans. But . . . baby steps.

  45. Open thread, right?
    GftNC was, at some point, taking issue with my equating Republicans with Nazis. Uncivil, of course.
    But then the Nazis came to my town. And all manner of “the big lie” is going on every day. And now a Nazi is running in the GOP. (GftNC’s parents had an important fight in their lives, but a different fight from my parents’ WWII fight.)
    We can’t be civil to Nazis. Never. Not before the War. Not during the War. And only after the war if they were only somehow victims or children.
    I’m attentively watching the drama Babylon Berlin on Netflix. We really have to be dramatically working for all of that to not to happen here. Because it’s serious and real. And happening.
    Republicans are Nazis now. Early, but true to form.

  46. Republicans are Nazis now. Early, but true to form.
    It’s worth remembering which is the set and which is the subset. You can perhaps make a case that (all) Nazis are Republicans now. But the converse definitely does not follow.

  48. I think it’s Matt Yglesias’ idea to shift Presidents Day to the first Monday in February. Would still be between Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays. Obviously a lot of folks don’t get all the Federal holidays off, but it would reduce the calling in sick.

  49. You can perhaps make a case that (all) Nazis are Republicans now
    Really, that should be enough to give any sane person pause.

  50. Would still be between Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays.
    Huh? Lincoln’s is 2/12, Washington’s is 2/22, the first Monday cannot possibly fall between them.
    Plus, we already have T-day, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Martin Luther King Day one on top of the other in the previous couple of months. I would rather not see another holiday moved even closer to that set.

  52. You can perhaps make a case that (all) Nazis are Republicans now. But the converse definitely does not follow.
    You might want to consider whether your loyalty is worth it now, wj. Devin Nunes is a California Na.. (oops) I mean, Republican.
    wj, I know you’re not a Nazi. You and I agree on so many things. But time to disavow the R label.

  53. wj still labels as a Republican, ugh likes the Pats, Russell plays drums, I pick my nose on occasion. We all have our flaws. The thing that worries me about wj having the R label is that at some point, they are going to take him out and string him up for failure to toe the line. He’ll be missed…

  54. To “Traditional Republicans”, in the Teddy Roosevelt mold, I say “BULLY!”.
    The recent ones can be saturation bombed with the rest of the Nazis.

  56. The recent ones can be saturation bombed with the rest of the Nazis.
    Yeah. And folks like wj need to make that easier by stepping away.
    Love ya’ wj.

  57. At the rate things are going, they may well go beyond slinging RINO labels around. If so, it will not end well . . . for them. (Unlike those chickenhawks, I at least have a clue how to fight. And I fight dirty. 😁)
    I continue to hope that things can be turned around. I admit, that looks increasingly unlikely. But until I see something that looks like a viable second party (i.e. not just some individual’s ego vehicle), trying looks like the best shot the country has.

  58. But until I see something that looks like a viable second party (i.e. not just some individual’s ego vehicle), trying looks like the best shot the country has.
    Good luck to you, with all sincerety.

  61. A well played game by both sides…being out on the far left coast, I had no great rooting interest, but watching the Death Star crash was OK.

  62. Meanwhile,
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/think-california-politics-is-on-the-far-left-fringe-just-wait-for-the-next-elections/2018/02/04/80e679c2-05e5-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html
    The California Republican Party has gone so far right that it probably won’t matter. But the real risk is the Democrats elsewhere will ignore that detail, and assume that going left is a winning strategy everywhere. Thus blowing their chances in a lot of places that were actually winable.

  64. Still, sometimes there are glimmers that keep hope alive. This from the previous link:

    Assembly member Chad Mayes, who was ousted as Republican leader last year after he supported a Democratic environmental initiative, has started a moderate GOP movement called “New Way California.” The group is running ads on the Internet celebrating immigration and diversity, and confusing a GOP caucus that has yet to determine how much to associate itself with Trump.
    “We are in a death spiral,” said Mayes, an evangelical Christian who represents a mixed urban-rural district east of Los Angeles. “If you look at the way voter registration trends are going, we are, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a speech 10 years ago, dying at the box office. And that is still the truth. The question is: What do we do about it?”

    Will he accomplish something? No idea. But that’s what hope is all about, isn’t it?

  66. Don’t assume, just because they’re scientists, they will agree with your point of view. Some of the most heated arguments on things like climate change are among scientists.
    The point is not that everyone should agree with me (well, they should, but one can expect only so much). It’s that when they disagree they should have arguments based on fact and reason, so that debate and sensible compromise are possible.
    “I think short-term climate sensitivity is somewhat lower than 3 degrees per CO2 doubling because…” or “I prefer a carbon tax to cap-and-trade because…” are things we can discuss. “Anthropogenic Global Warming is a hoax because freedom” is not.

  67. But that’s what hope is all about, isn’t it?
    What’s that saying? Hope is not a plan? When you pull the lever for a GOP candidate, you evidence your support for an institution that is the handmaiden of big business (has been since the Civil War), opposes unions, opposes the New Deal state, is deeply committed to US imperial dominance (cf. Wm McKinley), and believes human cause climate change is essentially a hoax. Mix in a little (mor more) racism as all those southern Dems fled their party to join the so-called “reasonable Republicans”, and what do you have?
    Not what you want, I would wager.

  68. When you pull the lever for a GOP candidate, you evidence your support for an institution that is the handmaiden of big business (has been since the Civil War), opposes unions, opposes the New Deal state, is deeply committed to US imperial dominance (cf. Wm McKinley), and believes human cause climate change is essentially a hoax.
    Depends on the candidate.
    For example, I think I’ve mentioned that my state Assemblywoman is a Republican. Yet she doesn’t oppose unions per se (although she, like I, has some reservations about the behavior of some public sector unions). She holds views on climate change, and the environment in general, that I suspect you would have no problem endorsing yourself. I had no problem voting for her, and expect to do so again this year.
    Certainly it’s been a while since I voted for a Republican candidate for Congress. Partly because, as noted, the Republican Party has gone so far off the deep end that we tend to end up with 2 Democrats in the general election. But at the moment, I’d have to be pretty convinced that a GOP candidate would stand up to the scum currently setting the Republican agenda in Congress. Which would probably mean some kind of track record in the state legislature by way of demonstration.
    Of course, the time I mostly pull the lever for a Republican is in the primaries. Where I am trying to help move the needle back towards the kind of sanity that I remember from the past. Because of the way our primaries work here, I could vote for a Democrat. But I think that would just leave the field, uncontested, to the nut cases.

  69. I’ve lived in MA for almost exactly 35 years. During that time, the governor has been (D) about half the time, and (R) about half the time. (R)’s have a slight edge, maybe one or two years.
    There is a small but real (R) presence in both the MA House and Senate.
    The people’s republic still stands.
    I understand the reluctance to pull the lever for even qualified folks at the national level, because voting there at this point is pretty much solid party line, at least on the most important issues.
    At the local and state level I don’t think the party label matters quite so much.

  70. Depends on the candidate.
    Insofar as your “sane” person would caucus with the GOP, absolutely not. Caucusing with the opposition is not unheard of…cf. WA ST Senate before the last election.
    At the local and state level I don’t think the party label matters quite so much.
    Don’t know much about local MASS politics, Russell, but we are recently getting beyond divided state government here where the GOP and a couple of Dem renegades held the State Senate and gummed everything up. In this state, the differences are stark.

  72. we are recently getting beyond divided state government here
    I can only speak for my own experience. At the local level, every place is different.
    Folks should vote as they see fit. Good luck!
    Nothing to worry about, of course.
    We had, sort-of, the opportunity to be pro-active about all of this stuff. We declined. By “we” here, I basically mean the human race, but most especially the privileged first-world folks who enjoy the benefits of cheap energy and the comforts and conveniences it brings.
    Now, stuff is just going to happen, and we’re going to have to deal with it as it comes up.
    We debate about advanced topics in paleo-dendrology and plasma physics, like we have any freaking idea what we’re talking about, but the physical world doesn’t give a crap about our opinions.
    I hope it works out. It will, one way or another, it’s all just physics, but “working out” in physical terms just means finding equilibrium.
    Humans are not great at the “consider the long-term” thing.

  73. Well, for most people, “long term” isn’t even as long as their (remaining) lifetime. Witness the (lack of) retirement planning done, even by people who really do have incomes which would allow them to. Instead, “long term” seems to be on the order of 5-10 years max.
    25 years apparently is just longer than they can wrap their heads around. I wonder if that stems from prior times, when people couldn’t reasonably expect to live all that long anyway. No need to think about anything beyond your remaining life expectancy.

  74. GftNC’s parents had an important fight in their lives, but a different fight from my parents’ WWII fight.
    You can have more than one kind of fight in your lives, and my parents did. My father’s entire, large extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins (bar two) were wiped out in Europe. My mother watched South African neighbours across the road throw a celebration party when Paris fell. The Nazis and white South African supporters of apartheid are exactly kith and kin; I can recognise a Nazi when I see one, and I see (like you) the way things are tending in America. But I am afraid I still believe that calling things by their true names is important, and not all (or maybe even most) Republicans are Nazis. As wj says, all American Nazis might be Republicans, but not all Republicans are Nazis. People who vote R might be paving the way for Nazis, they might be blindly sleepwalking into a Nazi-type situation, but most of them are not Nazis. When we stop telling the truth, we open the door to lies, big and small.

  76. And then there is the opportunity, as the permafrost melts, for it to burn. Thus getting more carbon into the atmosphere. Wheeeee!!!

  77. He, Trump is more like il Duce than like der Fuehrer. This may have some relevance to the Republicans-as-Nazis meme.
    –TP

  78. 25 years apparently is just longer than they can wrap their heads around.
    I think there have been, at various times and places in human history, cultures and traditions that had, at a basic level, a concern for not messing the place up. For leaving it, at least, no worse than how they found it, for following generations.
    I don’t have the history and sociology chops to unpack the whys and whens of that, it’s just a shame we don’t seem to be able to muster it up at the moment.
    Regarding Americans in particular, I think we tend toward being (a) naive because we haven’t been around that long, or (b) spoiled because for most of our history we’ve had new turf to take and use. Or both.
    We don’t, IMO, have a lot of depth.
    Enthusiasm, yes. Energy, yes. Imagination, yes. Experience with limits or constraints, not so much. Recognizing and gracefully accepting any position other than pre-eminence in the world, in any sphere or domain, hardly at all.
    We are not a mature people. We are not seasoned. Either in historical terms, or in terms of national character.
    It works against us, sometimes.
    My opinion, obviously.

  79. Apropos of nothing in particular other than what has become our daily political weather, I’ll offer my opinion that, if Trump goes down, it will be because he simply cannot STFU.
    If he ever had a claim to innocence in the fog of dire clownish weirdness and cupidity woven by his entourage, he’s probably pissed it away at this point.
    Just by blabbing away and spouting inane boasts and threats like the two-bit schoolyard bully that he is.
    Ethos anthropos daimon – Heraclitus

  80. re: the long term view: WRS.
    IIRC, there’s a Buddhist temple in Japan (near Kyoto?) on a very steep hillside, that makes use of huge timbers of a particular variety of tree for support. They replace one every generation? century?, and have the replacements growing so that they’ll be “in the pipeline” when needed.
    The trees need over 50 years to grow to the correct size.
    In the USA, that temple would have been converted to condos long ago, gotten run down and burned in an insurance scam, then sold to a billionaire, about three times over by now.

  82. Just accidentally deleted, although maybe the NSA intervened, nevertheless, everyone should be relieved, a stem winder of a rant on the Nazi Republicans and the subject of global warming.
    Shorter version:
    In the first place, since 1932, every improvement in American society and governance pushed through by liberals has been labeled “Communist” “Socialist”, “un- and/or anti-American” and traitorous by the conservative/fascist movement, now in its full ascendancy in America. Every public figure not in lockstep with the fascist right wing line and plenty not so public have been labeled, harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, and shot …. Truman, their very own Eisenhower, all things Kennedy (despite their scion Joe’s alignment with Joe McCarthy), Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Carter, McGovern, Clintons, Obama … as anathema and the OTHER to all things American, so yes, now it’s time for 80 years going forward from this point that the Nazi Jew-burning, rancidly racist … with the help of right wing racist Southern Democrats … Putin loving, election-stealing, Russian-duped entire edifice of the conservative republican party movement to be labeled and run from the public square with savagery.
    Don’t like it? Fuck you, Nazi snowflakes. And fuck your brownshirted children.
    Global warming. The majority of climate change scientists, now gagged and prevented from doing anything, their data now bookburned and disappeared, don’t have to be right. If they are 100% wrong we’re out some money, and the world continues, this despite the flaming commie liberals in the US military now very quietly shoring up military installations around the world against the ravages of manmade global warming.
    On the other side, those who claim the science to be a complete hoax and a liberal big-gummint commie plot to control and change the hallowed American way of life, must be 100% right in the long run. Even to be partly, and let’s face it, deliberately, malignly mistaken in their ravings about the hoaxiness of the science and the need to ameliorate the consequences will be a catastrophe for all and the rest of the world will have its vengeance.
    Because, if conservatives are only partly wrong in their ravings,, at some point in the future, the rest of us, the rest of the world will gather in front of Lamar Smith’s and James Imhofe’s and Rush Limbaugh’s and mp’s Mar-a-Lago lairs with military weaponry and machetes and burn you and yours to the ground, just to heat up the atmosphere to the point where all conservatives cook.
    Conservatives have made Pascal’s Wager on this subject. If they are wrong, they are wrong eternally.
    Like Rod Dreher’s frothings, I’d day “read the whole thing”, but I deleted it.

  85. Something just broke. I’ve never seen anything like that in a financial “instrument”.
    I’m pretty sure it’s Janet Yellen’s fault for abandoning her post like that…

  87. Long Now comes out of the same crowd that used to publish Whole Earth, then CoEvolution Quarterly.
    That was basically my favorite magazine and general source of information, ever. I subscribed for years, until Brand et al drove it into the ground.
    To make up for not refunding the remaining value of my subscription, they gave me a subscription to Utne Reader.
    Feh.
    Those guys have some great ideas, but outside of techno-hippie and eco-anarchist circles I’m not sure they’re making too many inroads into the zeitgeist.
    I always kind of liked Amory Lovins better, he’s much less Cali-NewAgey-woo-woo and more pragmatic. IMO.

  88. The AGW deniers are missing out on a huge opportunity to buy up that prime oceanfront real estate.
    But perhaps, precious snowflakes that they are, they just couldn’t take being called part of a “coastal elite”.

  89. Some friends and I were arrested, but let off with a tongue-lashing, in my small college town for constructing and releasing candle-powered hot air balloons, plans for which were featured in the Whole Earth catalog.
    This, somewhere at the beginning of the last third of the last century, when America was young and its entrepreneurial spirit for fun and no profit was flourishing.
    We used huge clear plastic bags and cardboard fashioned into braces to hold the lit candles. As with Elon Musk’s space ventures, it took us several week’s of launches in the backyard of the house we lived in to perfect the technology.
    The prevailing winds kept pushing the balloons into a big tree in the neighbor’s yard, this was at night, where they would burn without lighting the tree on fire, thank goodness.
    So we shifted the launch pad a bit and soon we were sending these beautiful, ghostly, glowing jellyfish-like flying machines nightly up and out over the small mid-western town, in fact, right in the direction of the police department and the Court House, as it turns out.
    They flew a good mile or so as we ran down the streets keeping track of them, like any conscientious NASA ground crew.
    So one night we were about to launch, and a police strike force of basically the entire County’s constabulary emerged from … EVERYWHERE, the yards around us, rooftops, the shrubbery, I think one cop came out of the ground, and took us into custody as we were launching the largest craft yet.
    They staked us out.
    Off to jail. Held for half a day, given a hearing, and we heard one hell of a angry DA, the Fire Department Chief, and a glaring Judge rake us over the coals, but it being a college town in 1971, we were sent home under our own recognizance.
    I guess they figured this paled in comparison to the fraternity jocks piling all the furniture in their house on the quad and torching it afire.
    I still have a sepia-toned postcard my best friend at the time, now dead .. he eventually became a very well known acoustic guitar luthier … took of one of the launches. The five or six of us look like the hippie version of the Iwo Jima World War II monument in D.C., in a scrum hoisting our beauteous fire-hazards aloft into the breeze.

  90. I’m pretty sure it’s Janet Yellen’s fault for abandoning her post like that…
    Except that (amazingly enough) her successor is actually someone very similar to her in outlook, etc.
    My guess would be that it’s just karma. Trump claimed that the stock market being up was something he should get credit for. So now it’s crashing . . . and he owns it. (Yeah, President’s don’t really control the economy. But since he claimed it….)

  93. From the Count’s link:
    That’s because Trump has won the heart of the Republican base.
    That’s your problem, right there.

  94. The stock market being the conjunction of “greed” and “fear”, I don’t think that any high official can talk the market UP, but they sure as hell can trigger a temporary crash.
    A short-seller that has advance warning of Trump’s twit emissions could make a pile of money, but it seems unlikely that *anyone* (including Trump) has advance warning.

  95. The AGW deniers are missing out on a huge opportunity to buy up that prime oceanfront real estate.
    Would that be a sunk cost or a wasting asset?

  96. You can be sure that weeks or months from now mp Cabinet members and political appointees will be revealed as major profiteers on the short side of this collapse because America is now pure evil Corruption Inc.
    You telling me the Goldman Sachs crowd in this administration didn’t get a heads up from their former colleagues.
    I spose next you’ll be telling me that vermin Tillerson doesn’t refer to Exxon as his country and Russia as his Country’s client state.
    But, yeah, Hillary had that little $100,000 commodities account.
    Something financial is up. We don’t yet know what.
    Every stock market collapse in American history, for the past 120 years, has occurred under republican vermin auspucies.
    Why is that, fuckers? Hanh?

  99. i like the guy who won’t pay his taxes because of goose poop,
    either you want government to leave you alone, or you want government to potty train every canada goose that crosses your property line.
    pick one.

  100. Come on, Russell, this is really simple. He (they, actually) want government to do things for them. They do not want government to expect anything from them.
    In short, something for nothing — just dressed up with a bow labeled (inaccurately) “libertarian”, or (even more inaccurately) “conservative”.

  101. “Some friends and I were arrested, but let off with a tongue-lashing, in my small college town for constructing and releasing candle-powered hot air balloons, plans for which were featured in the Whole Earth catalog.”
    This is the Count I love.

  102. He, Trump is more like il Duce than like der Fuehrer. This may have some relevance to the Republicans-as-Nazis meme.
    Indeed. But Benito was also a stinking intellectual.
    The main parallel I see to Germany is that the conservatives try to make use of the US Nazi equivalents like von Papen and von Schleicher did at the end of the Weimar republic. Then it turned out to be a miscalculation. We have yet to see what will happen in the US.
    The main difference I see is that the Nazis (unlike the fascist regimes in other countries) increased social mobility and were serious about having a form of welfare state (however perverted in practice). US conservatives are vehemntly opposed to both.
    And the Nazis tried crackpot ‘science’ for a short amount of time, then dropped it when it failed to produce tangible results (some of the crackpots ended up in jail/camps for wasting government resources). This kind of pragmatism is anathema to the US Right that would rather embrace Lyssenko and his methods. Fittingly, the Koch family was in bed with Stalin (all the good deals with Hitler already taken by other famous US clans).

  103. And the Nazis tried crackpot ‘science’ for a short amount of time, then dropped it when it failed to produce tangible results.
    Unfortunately, they didn’t drop all of it.
    “The Nazis’ extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics – but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler’s race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists”
    Hitler’s debt to America
    Eugenics and the Nazis — the California connection
    Hitler’s bible: an analysis of the relationship between American and German eugenics in pre-war Nazi Germany.

  104. It’s been years since I bothered to watch a rocket launch, but I think I’ll check in on the Falcon Heavy’s first attempt today (the window is Tuesday, Feb 6, 1:30-4:00 PM EST). Elon Musk is being uncharacteristically cautious about this one.

  107. He (they, actually) want government to do things for them. They do not want government to expect anything from them.
    But the FSM forbid that the government should do anything for anyone else. Like the poor, or the brown. Not those moochers, unh-uh.

  108. By the way, I don’t agree with the two republicans I cited above at 9:04 pm that elections are the way to save America, anymore than I would agree with the script writers of the “The Walking Dead” that the way to resolve the zombie crisis is to allow all beings who can still walk — the zombie hordes and the minority surviving human beings — to vote on who should run the country.

  110. It would be hard to fit the slogans on bumper stickers.
    “Legless Former Mom Dragging Herself on the Ground with Entrails Hanging Out for President!”

  111. Yes, and if Duckworth ran for President against mp the latter would label her war combat record and injuries “fake news”, and he’d say he knows things no one else knows, which he will divulge in a couple of days, Tuesday, maybe Wednesday at the latest.
    Killer Mulvaney would coincidentally shutter the agency whose function it is to mandate ramps and other safety features for the disabled, while accepting bribes from elevator manufacturers whose product features elevator-button pads to high to reach for those confined to wheelchairs and a piped-in cackling laugh track loop, and escalators and people movers at airports which he can control from a dashboard at his desk. Anyone with a limp or the elderly step on one of the contraptions, he’d push a button making the steps feature disappear, and making a greased slip and slide on the escalators and causing the people movers come to a jolting full stop, pitching the victims forward on to their faces.
    mp would commission a committee led by KellyAnne Dryhump to look into this unfortunate circumstance and she would lock the door to all elevator, escalator and people mover engineers and repair experts, instead opting to staff the committee with the sales staff of “Sam’s Gag Store for Sadists” and “Patty’s Pratfall Planning For Losers Emporium”.
    He’d release a memo which designated the last thirty feet of distance entering all workplaces as “crawl space” for the bootstrapless with accompanying cattle prods.
    See what happens when we have an election.

  113. the president’s lawyers don’t want him to talk to mueller because he lies so much that they’re afraid he’ll perjure himself. perhaps inadvertently, perhaps unnecessarily. just because he can’t help himself.
    that’s what they’re leading with. it’s the best face they can find to put on the situation.
    every day brings a new daily wtf. one of these days i’m gonna shake my head so much i’m gonna hurt myself.

  114. xiv is a highly technical instrument, which goes down and up as market volatility goes up and down. It’s not a share in anything. Market volatility explodes in a crash, that’s all.

  117. XIV is a note. You put in a buy order for 100 of them or a sell order for a 100 of them, so yeah, it’s not a share, as in a share of stock.
    Basically a short bet against volatility.
    All pieces of paper. All electronic blips.
    That highly technical instrument completely broke and was liquidated as of this morning. It’s been trading continuously for seven years or so and has weathered larger spikes, larger explosions (though not all in one day) in the VIX, the underlying volatility index that the XIV was designed to basically and very complicatedly short.
    Merely remarking on the prevalence of financial “instruments” that go pfft in the night, and by the way, the pftt didn’t happen during regular trading hours where anyone less than God can get at it and trade it.
    It’s like owning violin, an instrument, and waking up in the morning to find it has vaporized. There was no expiration date, like an option.
    Of course, those who owned it weeks ago at 142 dollars per note after having purchased it at its latest technical breakout just below 50 after mp’s election were swanning around feigning intelligence.

  120. my feeling about stuff like this is as follows.
    there is a useful place for financial markets. estimate risk, direct capital to useful purposes.
    making money that way involves actual work. you have to do the due diligence to understand the businesses you invest in, pay attention to how they are being managed, pay attention to how they perform over time.
    stuff like VIX seem like a kind of second (or third, or fourth) order instrument. based on the dynamics of the primary equity markets, i.e., the investment of capital directly into businesses that provide tangible goods and services.
    They have some role in terms of providing hedges for more substantial investments, but they don’t actually directly cause capital to be directed to a productive enterprise.
    it seems, to me, the naive investor that I truly am, that the actual productive value of stuff like VIX is, at most, limited.
    it seems like kind of a side bet.
    if people want to make a lot of money investing in equity markets, or directing other people’s investments in equity markets, i’m fine with that. but i wish they would commit themselves to the hard work of actually analyzing and understanding the best and most productive places to direct capital, instead of screwing around with trying to game, at multiple levels of indirection, how other people are doing so.
    I don’t mind handing my money over to people to make productive use of it, because that’s not my field and I don’t have the chops for it and there is honest good work to be done finding good places for people’s money to go.
    But I’m sick and tired of the dog-track bullshit. It’s not productive, and it puts people’s livelihoods at risk.
    If you want to gamble, go to Vegas. And do it with your own money.

  121. A word on the term “volatility” as applied to stock market movements.
    Like so much else theseadays, it’s bullshit.
    When the market goes down 1500 points, it’s termed by market participants and the utterly useless so-called business journalists, like Maria Bartiromo, Jim Cramer and every other talking head, volatility, as in “a long period of calm was interrupted this week by an outbreak of volatility.”
    As if the market caught the Ebola virus.
    However, when the market rises thousands of points, the same idjits say merely, because rising markets are considered by market participants to be their birthright, “The market went up, or rose, or soared X number of points today. Three cheers for rising Ebola.”
    No one says the market was volatile on the upside today. No one says “the market has ebola on the upside”.
    Look, either up AND down movements are both considered legitimate volatility, or how bout this? Shut up!
    Like house inflation. “Why, Frank and I made hundreds of thousands on the sale of our house today.”
    You mean inflation, right?
    No, no, we “made” that money.
    How about a rising minimum wage?
    No, THAT’s inflation!
    Like the value of your house? What’s it called when the value of your house goes down?
    Deflation, on account of someone, not us, screwing up. We certainly didn’t do anything to deserve deflation, otherwise known as volatility.
    But you did something to deserve inflation?
    Yeah, we be smart.
    What’s it called when someone else’s wages deflate?
    Shitoutaluck for those losers.
    I’m not playing anymore, smartaleck.

  122. From that famously business-hostile source, Forbes magazine:

    the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), let it be known that he and his committee had much better things to do than a 2019 budget resolution.

    Why would he want to waste time doing Congress’ Constitutionally mandated job?
    OK, there is the detail that, in doing a budget, they would have to do some actual scoring and projections on the impact of the tax cuts. That could be awkward in the run up to the midterm elections.

  128. The Falcon Heavy launch was about as perfect as these things get. Payload in orbit where/when it was supposed to. The two reusable boosters that were supposed to land in Florida touched down within about two seconds of each other right on their targets — looked like a special effect. The other reusable booster stuck its own landing on the big barge out in the Atlantic.

  130. The Count beat me to it: there are now at least two nations in the world where insufficient applause for the Dear Leader is “treason”.
    Listen up, non-Democrats: if you ever again vote for anybody who does not robustly and forthrightly condemn Corporal Bone Spur, you are — to coin a phrase — deplorable.
    I don’t care if it’s in a school board election or in a primary for garbage commissioner. Vote for anybody who is too mealy-mouthed to say the words “Trump is a disgrace and an asshole” and you can stop pretending that you have “principles”.
    –TP

  131. I went out on my balcony to watch the Falcon Heavy. Even with the naked eye 50 miles away from the launch site, it looked bigger and more impressive than a “normal” launch.
    I agree with Michael Cain, the video of boosters landing is so perfect it looks like an animated rendering.

  132. Just found this lovely quote (in an Economist blog post on the US Marines posted in Darwin, North Australia). From the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

    “If someone is trying to undermine the United States, politically, diplomatically and from a security perspective, the first target would be our network of allies and partners.”

    General Dunford was referring to China, of course. But gosh, what American politician does that sound like?

  133. Republicans have come up with a new color-coded system to identity stock market fluctuations/volatility:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/02/06/fox-host-says-trump-should-take-credit-good-stock-market-not-bad/219283
    https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/02/05/sean-hannity-blames-obama-historic-market-crash/219279
    Yesterday was nigger day in the market — Black Monday.
    Today’s upward volatility in the market is white supremacist animal spirits at work.

  136. The most expensive shipment of a motor vehicle ever.
    I noticed that the spokespeople in the live feed made reference to the car orbiting the sun for “hundreds of millions of years”. Since the car is fully exposed once the fairing was jettisoned, I’m wondering how much material erosion happens after a few million years of exposure to the solar wind. Take the gloss off the paint? Or grind it the whole thing to dust?

  137. https://www.livescience.com/61680-will-spacex-roadster-survive-in-space.html
    I’d like it if Musk opened the front door of his house to let out the cat some months from now and his roadster was sitting at the curb stripped and wheel-less, graffitied nose to tail with Martian hieroglyphics, and a Martian parking ticket on the cracked windshield.
    Or maybe it if came crashing through his bedroom roof one night with a note left on the front seat: “Keep your junk to yourself.”

  139. The source I was watching jumped the gun — the core first-stage booster crashed rather than landing on the target barge. Well, it was a much bigger challenge. Started quite a bit higher and faster than the outside pair. Musk has said that if they salvage any of the video feeds from the crashed booster, they’ll put those up.

  141. But what will the uniform look like? Every tinpot dictator (or dictator wannabe) gets a uniform. Heavy on gold braid and lots of self-awarded medals. They’re typically really tacky, putting the design right in Trump’s wheelhouse.

  143. Nobody knows nuttin
    The single most astounding display of boneheadedness I have witnessed in my lifetime was Alan Greenspan expressing his amazement that people, in pursuit of big piles of beautiful green money, might act foolishly.
    What planet was he born on.
    Things like VIX exist because there is always somebody who will sell the cow for a handful of magic beans.
    Not fascist at all.
    Pity the nation governed by a fool.
    Marty once called me out here on ObWi, claiming that I “wanted” to see Trump driven from office.
    I actually don’t want that. I think the ouster of President Trump will potentially be calamitous for the nation. I don’t “want it”, I think it is likely to the point of being inevitable. And I think, however harmful it might be, it will be a good thing if it happens.
    I think that even if it causes the break up of the nation, it will be a good thing. Because a nation that is happy to be governed by someone like Trump is just not a nation worth having.
    Trump is an utterly crap POTUS, because he is an utterly crap person. He has no regard for the office he holds, for its constraints and responsibilities, and for the obligations it places on him. To such an extreme degree that he is likely to, sooner or later, have his ass handed to him. And if that’s what happens, it will be his own doing.
    If he’s tossed out, it will be calamitous. If he stays, it will be calamitous. If he gets tossed out, it will be, completely and entirely, on him.
    If you are looking for someone to blame for all of that, look to the people who voted for him.
    There are millions and millions of people who look at Trump and say “Well done!”. He is their hero. That is the problem. They are the problem.
    What I want or what I don’t want is not the point. There is nothing whatsoever commendable or worthwhile in the man, and so he will most likely either go, or he will do enormous damage to the nation.
    That’s the point.

  144. Marty once called me out here on ObWi, claiming that I “wanted” to see Trump driven from office.
    I actually don’t want that.
    I suspect that the only folks who actually want President Trump driven from office (other than by being voted out on 2020) are those who long for a theocracy under President Pence. Which doesn’t seem likely to be anybody here.

  145. I have read that the British called off a plan to assassinate Hitler at the last hour because his incompetence was seen as more likely to shorten than prolong the war while a successor might combine the same fanaticism with more military competence.

  146. A bit late, and I’ll probably be accused of disrespecting the office of the President, but I wish for the SOTU speech, all the Dems had brought newspapers and started reading them when the speech began…

  147. POTUS Douchebag can have his parade only if he declares victory in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. etc. and those are the troops that are participating.

  150. i want to see Trump held accountable. there are are a few mechanisms that can make that happen.
    i want his supporters held accountable, too. though i don’t know how that can happen doesn’t mean i don’t want it.

  154. One more example about the misuse of the term “volatility”:
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-markets-big-bet-on-calm-turns-ugly-as-volatility-returns-1517959044
    “Calm” and “Placid” mean markets are rising, their birthright.
    The word “Volatility” means markets are falling. Somebody’s selling.
    Wall Street will do anything to avoid the word “Sell”. Thus: we are experiencing “volatility”.
    We are experiencing “Ebola” We are experiencing “Mayonnaise”. We are experiencing “Turbulent Defenestration”.
    Anything but “selling”.
    Americans pride themselves on being plainspoken folk.
    So when you buy your next new car and you drive it off the lot and some wag comes up to you and says, “Ya know, just driving that thing off the lot dropped the reselling price by a few thousand bucks.”, an American will say “Well, perhaps I am experiencing some price mayonnnaise.”
    Because we tell it like it is.

  155. “How did Cheddar Man feel about crackers?”
    He advised tearing down their statuary.
    “White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the president met with Mr. Rosenstein “to discuss some of the differences” between the Democratic memo and the Republican document it addresses, which was released last week. She said the White House was “in the middle” of a legal and national-security review of the Democratic memo expected to take “several days,” after which the president would be briefed.
    White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told reporters earlier Tuesday that Mr. Trump hadn’t yet read the Democratic document. “He has it. It’s pretty lengthy,” Mr. Kelly said of the 10-page memo. “We’ll get some people down to brief him on it.”
    mp, clutching his crayons, asked if the memo had a coloring section, like the Bible does.
    Kelly said no, Mr. Precedent, but in it Adam Schiff volunteered to lay on his back on a float in this year’s May Day military parade and lick the underside of your testicles.
    mp: That’s my boy. OK, release the memo.

  157. Nigel Farage is an arsehole of the most consummate type. We’re so happy to be rid of him much more of the time since he achieved his wished-for result in the Brexit vote, just sorry that it means he gets to spread his poisonous fuckwittery round your way (where it can of course continue to do more damage). The fact that Fox News considers him any kind of authority on the UK would be hilarious, if only it wasn’t so pathetic/dangerous.

  159. The right to First Amendment free speech:
    https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/university-of-chicago-prof-defends-decision-to-invite-bannon-to-campus/
    Other notables, who “early on” deserved a hearing:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1IayQ9MAl4
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk_cVpN_vHs
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSYuF6TI1dI
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7q880Sbobk
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBT78Q0rbSo
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZwaSOFMFIg
    As it happens, I agree with the Professor. But haven’t we already given reasonable constitutional platforms, in the form of a fucking White House Chief of Staff post and editor of Breitbart News, to Steverino’s views on all matters.
    Is there some “fresh” angle regarding his thinking he is going to reveal at the University of Chicago? Some conversion, perhaps to Tibetan Buddhism or John and Yoko’s War Is Over/Give Peace A Chance movement?
    Nah.
    So, I think in this case rotting cabbages in the hands of the audience at University of Chicago qualify as speech too.
    They should also respectfully and quietly carry on their persons loaded guns into the venue, and the NRA agrees with me, to give equal billing to the Second Amendment, as should have happened when Hitler showed up for his second book signing at the Jesus Not For Jews bookstore some time in the late 1920s.

  160. The American Optometry Institute has extended an invitation for Pol Pot to elaborate on his views regarding astigmatism and eyeglass couture.

  162. wj: I suspect that the only folks who actually want President Trump driven from office (other than by being voted out on 2020) are those who long for a theocracy under President Pence.
    wj,
    Thanks for pointing out the full horror of the GOP’s shamelessness.
    I’ll tell you what, though: as a dyed-in-the-wool yellow-dog Democrat, I am prepared to vote for a Republican for president — a Republican who runs as an out and proud atheist, that is.
    Meantime, while hell remains unfrozen, ITMFA. I would be happy to watch Republican senators and congressmen stand up and clap patriotically at a Christianist SOTU speech. Speaking as a Democrat, I mean.
    –TP

  163. Someone shouting “YOU LIE!” at Trump during the SOTU would have been within the bounds of bipartisan comity.
    And yet, completely redundant.

  165. Cuck murderer Sarah Death Panel wins:
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/2/7/1739557/-Our-incredibly-stupid-Congress-budget-edition
    They only defunded the Panels, mind you.
    They funded Death with a blank check and gave it a Cabinet position.
    Soon, Medicaid patients will have their medical care terminated if they don’t suitably polish republican knobs.
    https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/02/07/nra-spokesperson-dana-loesch-threatens-burn-copy-new-york-times-latest-inflammatory-video/219300
    I smell burning republican.

  166. Does having the last name “Johnson” refer to some commonly-held genetic stupidity in that clan or is it merely a synonym for that thing they lead with*:
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-messages-show-fbi-employees-preparing-obama-briefing-on-russia-2018-02-07?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    *obviously a shaky theory of mine, given Donald Johnson’s model presence on this Earth (leave it alone, sapient ;)), so there must be some other etiology for what ails that end of the Johnson family.

  167. “Adam’s new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, is both a detailed analysis of how Trump reframed political rhetoric during the 2016 campaign and a guide to how all of us can communicate more effectively and persuasively.”
    Dilbert’s Scott Adams Explains How He Knew Trump Would ‘Win Bigly’: The cartoonist-turned-political-prognisticator talks about “master persuaders” and winning arguments in a “world where facts don’t matter.”

  168. I always found the Dilbert cartoons to be insightful and hilarious, mocking as they did standard management and corporate norms.
    That he is a full on glibertarian loon is, well, rather a disappointment. Maybe he can get into a 12 step program.
    He needs help.

  169. adams thought trump would win because he recognized what he saw as his ability to mesmerize the gullible and work a room.
    adams is into mesmerism as a hobby. he uses it to pick up chicks.
    “win bigly in a world where facts don’t matter” sums it up nicely.

  170. not only do facts not matter, but Trump has a unique ability to mesmerize the press. and it hasn’t abated an iota, yet.
    even though everybody knows that he’s a disaster (even those in the biz of milking “conservative” rubes), nobody will look away.
    that doesn’t bode well for anyone who ends up running against him.

  172. “Facts don’t matter. Every trained persuader knows that.”
    Every sales rep in creation knows this. I mean, there ARE facts, but they aren’t enough, because most facts, of you inspect them a little too closely have water damage in the basement, thus the three-martini lunch and Tony Robbins’ and Joel Osteen’s and Jim Cramer’s frozen smiles and net worths and poor Joice Heth*, the latter while both dead and alive.
    I’ve eaten the biggest hamburger in America, because all of them are. I go to four out of five dentists. The fifth one isn’t an American. The fifth one gets run out of town on Yelp where every opinion is fact.
    The glittering beauty of America is the depth of our bullshit. Our bullshit is exceptional. Without it, America would be a shithole. We skate on great frozen lakes of liquid bullshit polished by the stories we tell each other, zambonies working back and forth mesmerizingly thru the night making the bullshit frictionless.
    Adams is enthralled by this. Adams reminds me of this character from Alien, played by Paul Reiser. Bringing the alien spore back to Earth is of deep corporate interest, but most of all, it will help the Reiser character pick up chicks.
    Adams has made a great living making fun of bullshit in business and government. Amateur bullshit, that is. Clintonesque bullshit, which is really not the pure American sort because it lacks the enthusiastic, mesmerizing presentation.
    Now Adams has spotted a professional.
    For the Reiser character and now Adams apparently, that the Alien will eat everyone once transported to a lab outside Bethesda is merely a business school p.r. conundrum, to be addressed by laying down a thick layer of pure American bullshit.
    I mean, Steve Mnuchin relates to this, as does his chick.
    Adams adds: ‘Clinton fans define Trump as Hitler, he reasoned, “and obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator.”
    To which the question becomes, “When is it OK to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator?”
    The history of bullshit proves the only approved right time is AFTER the genocide.
    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joice_Heth

  173. Every sales rep in creation knows this.
    and soon they will know even more!
    https://boingboing.net/2018/02/07/literal-sociopathy.html

    Techpowerup has published a redacted presentation from an unnamed AI company to an unnamed big-budget multiplayer video-game publisher, setting out a suite of surveillance capitalism tools combined with machine-learning to manipulate players to make them as addicted as possible and drain them of as much money as possible.
    The slide deck sets out a suite of persuasion techniques to lure new players to the game by purchasing deep dossiers on their situation, views and social activities, then advertising in highly targeted ways using predictions made by an AI model trained on giant data-sets bought from data-brokers. It details highly invasive techniques involving cellphone location tracking, covert mapping of homes using wifi signal strength, and always-on microphones that analyze incidental noise to deliver realtime intelligence about your activities and pain-points, from menstruation to crying babies to depression.

  174. Major League Baseball this morning announced they will accede to White House demands for the militarization of the game.
    Other professional sports are expected to follow baseball’s lead.
    The traditional nine inning games will be scrapped and replaced by a three-hour parade of military armaments on the field accompanied by flyovers of cruise missiles, anti-terrorist drones and a fleet of nuclear-tipped blimps in the shape of mp’s fat republican ass.
    There will no kneeling, not even for the outfielders to tie their shoes. In fact, there will be no sitting either for the fans, no seats, standing only.
    Martial music will keep a steady drumbeat for the
    synchronized proceedings. Military marching bands will form themselves into the shapes of nuclear mushroom clouds as they tootle out “Beat Me Daddy And Forget the Eight To the Bar”.
    All is not lost for the sport itself, however, as the traditional seventh stretch during which America the Beautiful is now played will be converted into a 15-minute respite in which fans who have dared to sit or kneel are “invited” down onto the filed to play a short simulated inning of baseball.
    However, instead of regulation baseballs, the offending fans will suit up and stand in against 100 mph major league fastballs, but the projectile will instead be hand grenades with the pin pulled. No base on balls permitted.
    Ground crews will use a meat wagon to clear the field of unwanted debris and then the military processions will continue to a spectacular finale in which Justin Timberlake is shot point blank by an anti-aircraft weapon to general approval.

  177. There will no kneeling
    Count, you can’t be serious! Surely there can be kneeling if the Great Leader puts in an appearance! And genuflecting, too!

  179. Regarding my name, there are a fair number of not terribly bright relatively famous people who share it. I have trouble thinking of a counterexample. Probably the Johnson noise guy wasn’t a total moron.

  180. I don’t actually care much about russiagate. And most of Trump’s actual policies and “successes”, such as they are, happen to be boilerplate horrible Republican notions. One or two are bipartisan horrible notions, like the idea that we should keep fighting in Syria like we have the right to be wherever we want. No doubt our endless string of glorious successes in the Middle East justify ignoring our lack of any legal right to be there. And then the Jerusalem decision was applauded by some brain dead Democrats. “Bipartisan” these days often means an idea so horrible it has support from horrible people in both parties.
    But there is one issue where Trump is uniquely worrisome and that’s the nuclear issue, because there the fact that he is a mentally unstable narcissist is a bad thing. (In other areas it probably makes it harder for him to get bad policies pushed through. A sane Republican could get much more harm accomplished.) North Korea in particular, but more generally. And it has a nice constitutional fix, if we ever decided we needed to go back to a system where Congress is the branch of government that has the power to declare wars and end the world on a whim. There is some document that covers this somewhere. It’s not especially good that several hundred people have that power, but it beats the current set of circumstances.
    https://theintercept.com/2018/02/08/donald-trump-nuclear-war/

  181. There’s a pecking order when kneeling before mp to perform lip service.
    No one is permitted to get lower than Pence. Not even KellyAnne. Hannity must stand during the servicing but he’s neck deep in a shithole so his mouth is at the correct level.
    In other news, anti-regulation and pro-mp big money like Leon Cooperman and Carl Icahn beg for regulators to step in. Unlike when regulators charged them with insider trading.
    https://finance.yahoo.com/m/991a32d0-5e20-3ad3-b3ff-f0e9953603a9/investor-cooperman%3A-%27crazy%27.html
    They no like no stinkin volatility.

  182. One or two are bipartisan horrible notions, …
    Both sides can certainly agree on spending a lot more money, if not what to spend it on.

  183. They no like no stinkin volatility.
    I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
    Are you listening?
    Tulips.

  185. I actually think we should ignore Trump’s bait and switch and with him the whole so-called Alt-right etc. movement as much as possible.
    They feed on our outrage like It feeds on fear.
    cf. also UK (Farage and UKIP) and Germany (AfD and PEGIDA)
    When it comes to FP the Dems are unfortunately not much better but I’ll give them points for style.

  186. Russell: I am long Tulips….have I misjudged?
    D.J.: there are a fair number of not terribly bright relatively famous people who share it.
    Don’t despair….
    Samuel Johnson
    Lyndon Johnson (I know, I know…but dumb he was not.)
    J.J. Johnson
    Lots of athletes named Johnson, how’s your jump shot?

  187. I am long Tulips….have I misjudged?
    As long as you love flowers, no problem. But if you’re in as part of a “bigger idiot” investment strategy? That might not be quite so brilliant. There are certainly lots of idiots around. But the tend to herd behavior, and so might stampede as an inopportune moment.

  189. I’m sure it’s a mistake to see Trump as some sort of masterful political tactician. Trump would do what he does whether it worked or not. He’s simply had the good fortune to live in an age when being boorish, dishonest, narcissistic, ignorant and incapable of considered analysis can get you elected, so long as you’re tall and have enough (inherited) money behind you.

  190. He’s simply had the good fortune to live in an age when being boorish, dishonest, narcissistic, ignorant and incapable of considered analysis can get you elected, so long as you’re tall and have enough (inherited) money behind you.
    Yes.
    And the reason we live in that age is that many of the “decent” people we know accept this and support it.

  191. novakant: I actually think we should ignore Trump’s bait and switch and with him the whole so-called Alt-right etc. movement as much as possible.
    Donald Johnson: I don’t actually care much about russiagate.
    When True Liberals say stuff like this, I start to worry.
    He, Trump is a menace. Holier-than-thou lesser-evil-is-still-evil-ists talk as if they don’t get that. Those of us who hope to save the US as a constitutional self-governing democracy whose worst, most deplorable elements would happily kowtow to a petro-kleptocrat’s short-fingered puppet had better not count on True Liberals as allies in that fight.
    Is that too harsh? Tough noogies. Root out the racists and the plutocrats and then we can discuss what a moral foreign policy or a benign neglect of racist ethno-nationalists should look like. Until then, forgive me: I have no more respect for True Liberals than I have for the we-hate-Trump-but-love-his-judges-and tax-cuts Evangelicals. Heaven (Christianist, Marxist, or Chomskyite) can wait.
    –TP

  193. When True Liberals say stuff like this, I start to worry.
    TP, I’m with you. Except that they don’t call themselves “True Liberals”. They’re independent thinkers. They bear no labels, because they’re originals.
    I do care about the fact that Trump is Putin’s pawn, and is an ignorant slime. I respected the collective knowledge and expertise of the formerly staffed State Department. Of course, I admire people like Samantha Power, who is so vilified by the folks you’ve mentioned – who apparently equate her with Stephen Miller – same/same, you know?
    I have had to Pie Filter those people you mentioned. “Lalalalala – I can’t hear you” – it’s much safer for me so as not to get on the wrong side of anyone.

  194. I won’t bother you with my hatred of this market terminology: The market is now OFFICIALLY in a CORRECTION.
    Even a crash is “correct”. The “official” said so.
    If the market suffers from even more correct upward volatility tomorrow of 500 points, the talking heads will say “the market is now officially out of correction territory”.
    Gaaaa, shut up!

  195. I don’t actually care much about russiagate.
    with respect, more fool you.
    I wish the dead zombie filth in the White House would have the simple common decency…
    i was just relieved to find that the boyfriend wasn’t trump.

  196. Of course the boy friend wasn’t Trump. Trump doesn’t do friends.
    I suppose he might do “mistress” — except that implies more commitment on his part than seems usual for him.

  199. “The latest is California Congressmuck Duncan Hunter. Hunter is being investigated along with his parents and a female lobbyist he is suspected to be “romantically involved” with. “Romantically involved” is the Republican word for “boinking on the side.”
    The indispensable Juanita Jean.
    His parents are having sex with the lobbyist too?

  200. Why are Navy Seals not hunting down and killing Alex Jones, terrorist mastermind?
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/02/09/alex-jones-blamed-finsbury-park-attack-muslims-it-was-actually-inspired-one-his-regular-guests/219319
    Is the problem that Hope Hicks is dating Jones, too, or are those who give orders to Navy Seals just politically correct pansy anti-American republican snowflakes?
    Conservative principles spread through the government and the country like Xyklon-B vented into a Jewish children’s gang shower.

  201. Why are Navy Seals not hunting down and killing Alex Jones
    When I am king, Alex Jones will be sentenced to a life-long carnival dunk-the-clown gig.
    As the clown, not the guy who hands you three balls for a dollar.

  203. “with respect, more fool you.”
    That’s fine. My theory is that in America ( and probably most places) the truly terrible crimes committed by people in office, the ones that should earn life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, are never treated as crimes, but as at best policy disputes. We move on. We take pride in that. The criminals are treated as statesmen or get hired as consultants on TV and everybody consorts with everyone else. Kissinger is everybody’s pal and right now the old war criminal is telling Trump that nuking North Korea is tempting. It is the middling level stuff that people treat as the coming of the apocalypse. There is absolutely nothing in Russiagate that most Americans wouldn’t yawn about if we did it to some other country and that is assuming it would even make the news. I would yawn myself. There are a zillion worse things we have done.

  204. My theory …
    Trump might have gotten less blowback if, instead of calling a country a shithole, he had just bombed it.

  205. There is absolutely nothing in Russiagate that most Americans wouldn’t yawn about if we did it to some other country
    is what Russia did acceptable or not?
    simple question.

  206. “is what Russia did acceptable or not?”
    Since Russia did ‘a bunch of stuff’, you’ll have to be more specific.
    Hacking (attempted? successful?) into voter registration systems?
    Hacking into email systems?
    Employing troll-armies of Twit-sters?
    Sending money to “not part of the campaign, but up to their neck in politics” orgs like the NRA?
    Offering dirt on opponents?
    Plus a bunch more. Russia is large. It contains multitudes (of crooked operators).

  207. Donald: There is absolutely nothing in Russiagate that most Americans wouldn’t yawn about if we did it to some other country
    My problem is not with the foreign ratfuckers but with their domestic collaborators. Mark Kleiman makes my point more eloquently.
    That Kissinger is a war criminal is not news to me: I have cousins in Greece who personally suffered for their opposition to the junta Kissinger was cozy with. It wasn’t Kissinger himself who tortured them, it was his Greek collaborators.
    And not for nothing, but Putin and Kissinger probably like each other more than either one of them likes democracy. Democracy can, in fact, support crimes and treat them as mere policy disputes. The Putins, Kissingers, and Trumps of this world do not like policy disputes. But I doubt that’s their actual objection to democracy.
    –TP

  208. “is what Russia did acceptable or not?”
    Since Russia did ‘a bunch of stuff’, you’ll have to be more specific.
    Hacking (attempted? successful?) into voter registration systems?
    No, not acceptable.
    Hacking into email systems?
    No, not acceptable.
    Employing troll-armies of Twit-sters?
    OK. I don’t like it. But free speech includes the inability to save fools from themselves.
    Sending money to “not part of the campaign, but up to their neck in politics” orgs like the NRA?
    I think I’d go with OK for outsiders to do it. Not OK for the recipients not to say it was happening.
    Offering dirt on opponents?
    OK to offer, provided it wasn’t obtained illegally (see above).
    Just my opinion. YMMV

  209. That’s fine. My theory is that in America ( and probably most places) the truly terrible crimes committed by people in office
    I think you underestimate the capacity for malfeasance in the private sector, but in general I don’t really disagree with you.
    I think the reason I’m less disturbed by it is that I don’t really have an expectation that states will be particularly virtuous. And people who find themselves, or place themselves, in the position of speaking or acting in the name of the state quite often find themselves speaking and acting in ways that would be unacceptable for a private person.
    For some of them, Kissinger likely among them, that’s the good part.
    All of that said, Russia is a kleptocratic authoritarian mess, and an ambitious one to boot, to a degree that we have not yet achieved. Mostly. And thankfully.
    They are, basically, a mafia masquerading as a polity.
    Having them interfere in our public life is not, and will not, be without consequences. For everyone, pretty much everywhere. In ways that are actually, I suspect, quite close to your own heart.
    It’s not an issue of secondary importance. Whatever you think of the US.

  210. I was actually picking up on cleek’s point above: we can’t take our eyes off Trump and are thereby falling for his cheap but very effective trick that got him where he is now – so it might be time to re-examine our strategy.
    But do carry on with your deeply moral fervor, I’m sure if we call him a fascist long enough, he will just go away.
    As for FP my views are well known and won’t find many friends here (well, things have changed since hilzoy ran the place) so there is no need to endlessly rehash this.
    But it is a sad fact that some here seem incapable of imagining what it is like to live at the sharp end of US FP or to consider the possibility that US FP might actually be a morally wrong.
    This narcissism and defensiveness is completely alien to me, probably because I’m a rootless cosmopolitan.

  211. My theory is that in America ( and probably most places) the truly terrible crimes committed by people in office
    While we haven’t had World War 3, after WW2, Korea and Vietnam, we probably had any number of people walking around who had done things that would curl your hair.
    Maybe our problem is that we no longer have the ability to send people off to kill and be killed. Carter Page and Stephen Miller would have probably been fragged, Alex Jones would never have made officer, but would probably have been taken out behind the latrine and made to eat crap either before or after his front teeth were knocked out. Maybe we ought to get off-planet colonization going so we can send them there to screw up.

  212. it is a sad fact that some here seem incapable of imagining what it is like to live at the sharp end of US FP or to consider the possibility that US FP might actually be a morally wrong.
    I doubt this. Some of us may even have tried to do something about it.
    How about you?

  213. I think the reason I’m less disturbed by it is that I don’t really have an expectation that states will be particularly virtuous.
    I don’t think that “states” have moral agency. They may be built on various moral imperatives, and when they are those principles should guide those acting on the state’s behalf. Obviously, humans fall short. We fall short intellectually – trying to determine what will make things better. We fall short personally, because humans are known to be flawed.
    As voters in a democracy, our job is to try to weigh policies, and to find people to implement them who are intelligent and aren’t corrupt.
    It seems that allowing the stupidest, most blatantly corrupt, evil and unprepared person to win the election, assisted by a dictator whose values don’t coincide at all with any of the core values of the United States (even if they are aspirational, and not always realized), is despicable. People who shrug with indifference to this situation (a situation that includes rejection of refugees, climate denial, refusal to aid disaster victims, looting public resources at the expense of the poor, bellicose statements and planned multibillion dollar parades, and blatant corruption and racism) are beneath contempt. Keep cheering yourselves on, moral purists! Sometimes I hope there is a God.

  215. So having peeked behind the pie wall, it seems that some folks think that a first strike against North Korea is a bridge too far.
    Of course, I agree.
    And it is quite likely to happen, and to kill untold numbers of people. A lot of people (for numbers counters – maybe it’s you? Or maybe, if things go small, maybe just your kid?).
    We’ve been keeping nukes at bay for a long while. Hope we keep the nuke avoidance thing going. Trump was a problematic answer. Maybe we’ll live to discuss the fallout!

  216. it seems that some folks think that a first strike against North Korea is a bridge too far.
    Of course, I agree.
    And it is quite likely to happen
    I think rather that it is likely to be ordered. Probably because Trump decides that a war would be a useful distraction from, or even an antidote to, something threatening out of Mueller’s investigation.
    But I think that there is a good chance that the military will, absent a convenient attack from North Korea, push back. Maybe just stall (something that the whole executive branch has gotten good at during this administration), while they ask Congress for a Declaration of War. But something other than just opening fire.
    An erosion, of civilian control of the military in one sense. But a reassertion of the Constitutional requirements regarding military action on the other.

  217. I was going to spare you folks my blatherings for a bit of time, but this, from a professional, is just too good to remain unshared:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/even-the-brilliant-martin-amis-cant-stop-talking-about-trump?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
    Also this:
    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/
    wj has filled us in on the rancid nature of the cult murderer republican party in California, which is, for now, in the minority. The story in Texas is about the radical cult murderer republican party in the majority in that state and how they are now feeding on their own.
    Either way, the problem is not whether these filth are in the minority or the majority. That’s like arguing that zombies in temporary stasis, snapping idly at the air as they stagger aimlessly in the wilderness, are somehow less dangerous than masses of them coming over the wall.
    The problem for the country is that republicans are alive.
    This not an endorsement of vegetarian Democratic zombies.
    Off to read.

  218. But it is a sad fact that some here seem incapable of imagining what it is like to live at the sharp end of US FP or to consider the possibility that US FP might actually be a morally wrong.
    there are many instances where US FP is morally wrong. there are many more where it is neutral or even a positive good.
    what that has to do with Russia is beyond me.
    “Jimmy can’t be punished for pissing in Jerry’s corn flakes because Jerry is mean to Alice” is morally wrong and a logical fallacy.

  219. I don’t want to get into a polite disagreement with sapient since our disagreements tend not to stay polite. But I will say this — on foreign policy US nastiness is bipartisan, with Republicans on average worse. Trump brings the extra factor of his own mental instability to the mix.
    So imho the leading issue should be that we give way too much power to Presidents to start wars. On this issue there are some Republicans who agree. Probably not enough. Over at the American Conservative torture apologist Yoo was quoted as saying that Congress has the power of the purse to stop wars but that isn’t good enough. It might stop abominations like Yemen, in theory, but it wouldn’t prevent a President from starting a war with some country that could actually shoot back and might not be willing to wait for Congress.

  220. So imho the leading issue should be that we give way too much power to Presidents to start wars.
    Tim Kaine has been the leader in Congress on this issue.

  221. On Cleek’s question—
    It depends on what they actually did. The social media stuff is incredibly trivial. I have this sneaking suspicion that we might broadcast things or say things intended to influence other countries from time to time.
    On the emails, it is illegal to hack, I think, so if people can be caught, prosecute them. I imagine every intelligence agency does such things. Again, if we could release embarrassing info about a foreign politician we didn’t like, I suspect we would do it, probably behind some intermediaries so we wouldn’t get caught. We openly supported Yeltsin in the 90’s and he was catastrophic for Russians.
    Where I would start taking it seriously would be if actual votes were changed by Russian tampering. We need paper ballots counted in public. If the Russians could hack voting machines, anyone could.
    Whether various Trumpists broke the law is for Mueller to figure out and then the courts. We already know Flynn colluded with a foreign power trying to undermine the Obama administration’s policies. He was colluding with Netanyahu, attempting to persuade the Russians to support Israel in a UN vote. Russia turned him down.
    And Trump seems to be colluding with the Saudi regime to continue causing chaos and destruction in the Mideast, bombing Russia’s ally Syria and seeming to want a war with Iran down the road, another Russian ally and of course supporting the Saudis in Yemen ostensibly because Iran s supporting in some way the Houthis.
    How many FBI guys would you need to investigate links between US politicians, foreign governments, and our forever wars?

  222. I have this sneaking suspicion that we might broadcast things or say things intended to influence other countries from time to time.
    and there it is again. once, just once, try it without the equivalence.

  224. This conversation brings to mind Viet Thanh Nguyen’s factoid in his invaluable meditation on the Vietnam War “Nothing Ever Dies”. He quotes photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:
    “Everyone should know one simple statistic: the Washington D.C. memorial to the American war dead is 150 yards long; if a similar monument were built with the same density of names of the Vietnamese who died in it, [it] would be nine miles long.”
    That’s not counting the Cambodian, French, and Laotian dead. Not even the Hmong who loyally fought along side us.
    I’m sure medals and promotions have been handed out in private ceremonies to a few Americans for their “service” in the Yemen catastrophe.
    What about the one million Yemeni heroes dying and debilitated by cholera?
    When I’m tempted to criticize * Donald Johnson for his “pox on both houses” point of view, I think about these things.
    Carry on.
    *This is the most important news yet in the mp/Russia mega-scandal:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rachel-brand-stepping-down
    She’d rather work as a greeter at a Walmart than stick around for what is coming.

  225. Donald: Where I would start taking it seriously would be if actual votes were changed by Russian tampering.
    I think you mean “ballots”, not “votes”. When you or I or Vlad try to persuade people, by fair argument or by disingenuous propaganda, what are we doing but trying to change their “votes”?
    I repeat: “meddling” in a country’s election requires collaborators in the targeted country before it can succeed. My problem is with Putin’s American collaborators, only a handful of who are actually named Trump.
    –TP

  226. I think it would be great if Congressional authorization was required before we commit to military action. Unfortunately, Congress seems less than interested in asserting their prerogatives there. They seem perfectly happy for the POTUS to do it.
    I’m sure all nations do their best to influence the internal politics of other nations in the furtherance of their own interests. I think it’s less common for close advisors of people running for national office to encourage, invite, or even participate in that interference from other nations.
    It’s true, the US blows up a lot of people, and helps other nations blow up a lot of people. Hard to argue the point, and I won’t. We all live here, we’re all culpable for that, and are responsible for whether that power is used in justifiable ways or not.
    These three issues are independent of each other. It’s less than clarifying to conflate or equate them.

  228. “It’s less than clarifying to conflate or equate them.”
    I am not equating them. Blowing up people is more important and receives less attention. I believe the kids today call that “privilege”. We have superpower privilege. Even on the self interested level, it is weird to me that people don’t see putting constraints on Presidential warmaking power as a top priority.
    And it isn’t just Korea. We could also blunder into war with Russia in Syria because our respective proxies are trying to kill each other and both of us have forces there. Israel and Syria and Hezbollah and Iran seem on the verge of something today and we were bombing Syrian forces just a few days ago.
    And even on the self interested level, it is much more important to place limits on Presidential nuking power, particularly with someone like Trump in power. It’s weird to me that

  230. Blowing up people is more important and receives less attention.
    I think this is right on. I have no disagreement with you.
    Back in the 80’s friends of mine were very active in Catholic Worker circles around NYC. Including protests and non-violent direct action against our policies of the time in central and south america. their actions earned them low-level harrassment from the feds and a night or two in jail. Some of the other folks involved earned quite long stints in jail.
    Maybe their actions helped to modify our policies there. Maybe the policies themselves were simply too freaking brutal to have sustained support. I don’t know. Over time the policies moderated, mostly. It took a long time, years.
    I can vote and contribute $$$ to support people who would like this nation to have a less aggressive foreign policy. I’m not in a position to go to jail. I could be in a poition to do so, but it would require detaching myself from other obligations I have, financial, familial, and otherwise.
    So I don’t know what to *do about things like what you discuss*, above and beyond what I currently do.
    what price can I pay? what price can you pay? it can cost a lot to try to turn a ship the size of US foreign policy.
    We also live in a nation where quite a lot of people either are fine with US FP, or just don’t think about it all that much because they have too much other stuff on their plate.
    So, your voice and perhaps mine are not the only voice.
    I am going to go out on a limb and say that, if there was a magic wand that we could wave that would transform US foreign policy into one that involved less of the blowing people up part, most folks here would be happy to wave it.
    no such wand exists.
    so I appreciate your sense of outrage, and I appreciate your willingness to raise the issues that you do raise. But I don’t understand why you assume nobody else here gives a crap about this stuff, and I don’t understand what response you expect from the rest of us.
    yemen is being crushed like a bug by the saudis, with our help. and the saudis are freaking kleptocratic tyrants who reap personal fortunes beyond imagination by exploiting their nation’s mineral patrimony.
    they are our BFF. that’s FUBAR, in about 1,000 ways.
    I’m at a loss how to change that.

  232. *I, for one, am willing to write a strongly worded comment on this blog.”
    I am willing to strongly support those parts of hsh’s comment I agree with by commenting “what hsh said”.
    Though, only if the count doesn’t disagree strongly enough to threaten death, then I agree with the count.
    I also like articles on FB that decry violence.

  234. But I don’t understand why you assume nobody else here gives a crap about this stuff, and I don’t understand what response you expect from the rest of us.
    Don’t want to pile on, but what Russell said. The Saudis and indeed, the whole Middle East, is wrapped up with our need for cheap oil, which brings its own dynamic. Yemen was preceeded by Biafra, you can read Kurt Vonnegut’s essay here, which made a big impression on me when I was a kid. A relatively recent JSTOR article on it is here
    http://www.jstor.org/stable/40206616?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
    Biafra, like Yemen, had the bad fortune to go up against a country that has control of oil taps. The Yemeni have the problem of losing the ability to control what happens inside their borders and now ‘host’ (for various shades of the term) Al Queda, which is the 21st century equivalent of cooties. Dealing with the Yemeni appropriately would require that we are able to treat SA as a normal country AND look at AQ logically, which is never going to happen as long as we have the need for fossil fuels and we have governments in the ascendancy that want to use anti-Muslim rhetoric to shore up their base. It would also require us to treat the Middle East as a normal region, which is not possible because of Israel and the aforementioned oil. It’s like the final round of a jenga game, some bright spark might be able to figure out a way to pull out one more block, but replacing the blocks is not part of the rules, and even if you did start doing that, you would have just as much a chance of knocking the whole pile over that no one is going to do it.

  235. Dealing with the Yemeni appropriately would require that we are able to treat SA as a normal country AND look at AQ logically, which is never going to happen< as long as we have the need for fossil fuels and we have governments in the ascendancy that want to use anti-Muslim rhetoric to shore up their base.
    But here’s the thing, lj. Currently (and for some time now) we are a net exporter of fossil fuels. So while we remember needing Saudi oil, we actually aren’t dependent on them any more. Just need to adjust our perceptions to the modern world. Admittedly that can be a challenge . . . and not just with respect to oil.

  238. That’s true wj, but because of our postwar history with the OPEC in general and the Saudis in particular, it is difficult to imagine us changing. And our status as an exporter of fuel is wrapped up in the web of state links. We think of oil as fungible, but it isn’t really, the oil we export is a better fit for some foreign refineries while the oil we import is a better fit for our refineries. Add to that the influence of Big Oil, and it is not simply a question of adjusting our perceptions, it is that there is an active interest in keeping our perceptions unchanged.
    While I knew vaguely of the import/export market, your comment pushed me to do a bit of googling. These two articles, from the magazine that our president likes use to spank prostitutes with, were interesting.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/09/30/why-the-u-s-exports-oil/#2bf5cd343b07
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/05/where-the-u-s-exports-oil-and-petroleum-products/#3d2ebb53f269

  239. “But I don’t understand why you assume nobody else here gives a crap about this stuff, and I don’t understand what response you expect from the rest of us.”
    On the personal level, people pick their issues. There are a lot of important ones. I don’t even think Yemen is at the top.
    But I don’t buy this response. People everywhere on the liberal side of the fence spend enormous amounts of time castigating Trump on Russiagate. If I have time I will look up the FAIR study comparing MSNBC coverage of Russiagate vs Yemen. The ratio is ridiculous, obscene. You get more coverage of Russiagate in one day— probably without exaggeration in one hour— than you get of Yemen in one year.
    I have heard people in real life bring up Russian bombing in Syria or Putin interfering whatever the current media bad guy happens to be. Not once does anyone ever mention that we are complicit in crimes against humanity in Yemen. These aren’t bad people I know in real life. This is what our political culture is like. This is what we are told is important and it does not include what we do to others unless it fits a convenient political narrative.
    And it goes beyond this. I have about one minute and then I have to go, but one could do a very long extended rant about the utter lack of interest in who we murder or help to murder as shown in the amount of coverage given and in what our politicians are allowed to do on these issues.

  240. People everywhere on the liberal side of the fence spend enormous amounts of time castigating Trump on Russiagate. … You get more coverage of Russiagate in one day— probably without exaggeration in one hour— than you get of Yemen in one year.
    liberals complaining on the internet and the people who write news stories are not the same people.

  241. liberals complaining on the internet and the people who write news stories are not the same people.
    True.
    …but one could do a very long extended rant about the utter lack of interest in who we murder or help to murder as shown in the amount of coverage given and in what our politicians are allowed to do on these issues.
    Also true.
    What to do about it is another question, but it’s a valid observation, to be sure.

  242. I care deeply about Russiagate. I care that I retain some ability to influence what happens in my country, even if with regard to foreign policy that influence is small.
    I have zero say in what the Saudis do. I have very little say in the alliances that the US has held for decades. (It was pretty clear to me when Obama was in office that his relationship with both Israel and the Saudis was tense, but that he made concessions to both of them so that the Iran deal could happen – of course, navigating between those horrible choices is something never addressed by Donald.)
    My vote has made a difference at times on issues such as healthcare, immigration policy, public safety net programs, environmental policy, education, civil rights, and many other things. On all of those issues, there is no question that one party has been (even at their worst) much more proactive in benefiting my fellow human beings (and animals) than the other party.
    If, even considering all of this, the foreign policy decisions of Republicans were better than those of Democrats, there might be some merit in Donald’s position of constant complaining about the “priorities” of Democrats. But the foreign policy decisions of Republicans has long been more belligerent than that of Democrats – they were even worse than Democrats about the “Democrats’ War” in Vietnam.
    People like me tend to ignore issues they feel helpless to control in favor of things that they can do something about. In fact, put me right there with those people who care more about “our democracy” (translated as “our ability to affect anything”) being destroyed by Putin than about most other issues out there. It’s bad enough that we can’t save Yemen. I’d like to at least be able to save my next door neighbor.

  243. It may also be worth noting that there are government-caused disasters all around the world. Quite often, those governments are ones that we have supported in one way or another — not least because we have relations with most governments, and have provided support (military, economic, or humanitarian) to most of them.
    Everybody necessarily cherry-picks which issues they will talk about and attempt to act on. Donald happens to have picked Yemen; sapient has picked Russian interference in the last election. Still others will be concerned about climate change (which seems likely to end up killing rather more people than the entire population of Yemen).
    Who picks which one appears to me to depend on a combination of factors including how much they feel they can do about the particular problem and, especially, which one they happen to be aware of. There doesn’t seem to be much to be gained by castigating others for picking a different cause than the one which is exercising me. Talk about it to make them aware that it is happening? Sure. But being outraged that they don’t make the same selection of causes that I make? Not helpful at all.

  244. More later,maybe, but I think what one finds on TV and in the press pretty well reflects what most people talk about when they do talk about politics. On center-left blogs you find people mostly sticking to center-left positions. On far left blogs (and at dissident right blogs like the American Conservative) you find much much more about the ugliness of US foreign policy.
    Russell asked what I want him to do. So since he asked, I will start with inner thoughts.
    1. Everytime someone says the Russians attacked “Our Democracy” in hushed reverent tones, roll your eyes and ask several questions–
    A) If this is worth so much extended outrage, what about our far more violent attacks on others? Freaking social media ads and embarrassing emails stolen and released don’t even come close.
    B) And what about “our democracy”? The one where we all feel helpless to stop the fact that both parties to varying degrees support stupid, brutal policies overseas? If you feel helpless to stop something you think is mass murder, then maybe that is more important than the freaking facebook ads. Maybe that aspect of “our democracy” is worth discussing in private, on the internet, and in letters to the editor and to our representatives than what the Russians did or did not do. Maybe the fact that we are complicit in the literal starving to death of children ought to play a bit of a bigger role in our narcissistic fucking stupid worthless piece of shit political system.
    You can start to think that in the privacy of your thoughts and then go from there. You can talk about it to your friends. They will think you are a bit of an obsessive, because you will be talking about stuff that is only rarely mentioned in the press. There are debates in Congress, some of the people there (including Al Franken, btw, which is one reason I was sad to see him go) take the right positions, but there is clearly also a bit of Kabuki theater to it. They allow the debates and even that took some doing, and it changes nothing and that was almost certainly part of the plan.
    But until it becomes part of our political culture, the open discussion of how we murder people overseas under both parties, it isn’t going to change. There is no reason why it would if there are reasons for supporting the Saudis or the Israelis or for goodness knows what reasons people think we need to keep supporting rebels in Syria. And Trump, or rather his adult supervisors, obviously think it is a great idea to keep our war in Syria going. Syria, the place where the stupid press pretended we didn’t intervene and where Obama was constantly criticized by mainstream liberals and conservatives for not intervening, where we spent billions of dollars on weapons intervening.
    At my church we have an annual fundraiser for various groups and I put Yemen (specifically CARE) on the list. Someone I knew, a very well educated and smart guy, said he wasn’t sure how much good it would do since the Saudis were obstructing so much aid. I said that yeah, we were helping them with their stupid war. This was news to him. And he sounded a bit skeptical and rightly so. If we were really doing that, wouldn’t it be front page highly controversial stuff, constantly talked about, complicity with something that has come close to genocide?
    And you can still vote Democratic. I do. No point in voting third party unless it actually led to the rise of an effective third party, and so far there is no such animal.
    And you can also think that Trump or his associates or both should go to jail for whatever crimes they are found to have committed. Like Al Capone did, for tax evasion.

  245. If this is worth so much extended outrage, what about our far more violent attacks on others?
    What other democracies** have we attacked (violently or otherwise) in say the last 10 years? And how? Just curious.
    ** I’m willing to stipulate that we have attempted to influence non-democratic governments in various ways. But the closest thing to a democracy that we have attacked (that I am aware of) is Iran. And, so far, that hasn’t gotten particularly violent — although proxies, e.g. in Syria, have been attacked.

  246. Quick clarification, sort of implicit before, but since I am being very dismissive of the russiagate scandal I probably should be conciliatory on something. So I concede most of what sapient says. You should support Democrats over Republicans for most of the reasons sapient gives.

  248. Everytime someone says the Russians attacked “Our Democracy” in hushed reverent tones, roll your eyes and ask several questions–
    I know people have pointed this out to you before, Donald, but you do seem to keep forgetting that it’s not what the Russians did that most of us are so exercised about, it’s what various Americans may have done in colluding with them to subvert your democracy. Treason, to quote your President, why not?
    Apart from that, I agree with much of what sapient says at 12.00, and all of what wj says immediately after.

  249. I for one wish to express my admiration for Donald’s focus on the wrongness of our foreign policy. Consider the lack of attention it seems to attract these days, yet here we are still in the midst of a war that has been more or less going on for, what, nearly 15 years?
    Highly unusual if you ask me.
    But….Somebody’s got to bring it if things are going to change. That’s kinda’ sorta’ how change happens.
    So I say, bring it, Donald!
    We’ll have national health care before we (as a nation) ever get around to seriously re-examining our assumptions with respect to our foreign policy.

  250. Bosnia, Kosovo. Rwanda, Darfur. El Salvador, Nicaragua. Myanmar. Syria. Yemen.
    A long and depressing list of fratricidal atrocities. Is there a single, consistent “foreign policy” the US should have or could have adopted toward all of them?
    –TP

  251. I have to say, I kind of agree with almost everyone on this thread recently. Very little of what people have written necessarily contradicts what anyone else has written.

  252. yet here we are still in the midst of a war that has been more or less going on for, what, nearly 15 years?
    Does it occur to anyone else that, if you don’t want us involved in unending wars, the best thing you could do is reactivate the draft? If everybody’s family is at risk, suddenly a lot more attention gets paid.
    As an aside, it is still the case that all 18 year old males are required to register for the draft. Maybe we could expand that to include the gals, too….
    If nothing else, being subject to a real chance of getting drafted and shot at might motivate younger adults to get out and vote. It did seem to have that effect on my generation.

  253. If everybody’s family is at risk, suddenly a lot more attention gets paid
    But everyone’s family is not at risk. What do Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Dan Quayle have in common? None of them fought in Vietnam.

  255. “At risk” is not the same as “certain to get drafted into the military.” But it’s still a step closer to having to worry about wars we get into than the current situation.

  257. The votes of people like Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Dan Quayle is what I meant.

  258. wj,
    you may have forgotten to remember that many of us standing in line to take the draft physical could not yet vote, so i am a bit uncertain what effect VN had on younger (male, i dare say) adults in that era as regards their official civic participation.

  260. since oil was mentioned, maybe we should also consider arms exports:
    https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/R44716.pdf
    I get the “so what can we do about it” question, but it shouldn’t lead us to indifference or cynicism.
    Not so long ago it was considered perfectly acceptable to be racist, sexist homophobic etc. – things have changed in this regard (though there is currently some pushback) and that’s great.
    So why is it still considered perfectly acceptable to advocate, excuse or condone war as a form of conflict resolution?

  261. So why is it still considered perfectly acceptable to advocate, excuse or condone war as a form of conflict resolution?
    it’s human nature.

  262. So why is it still considered perfectly acceptable to advocate, excuse or condone war as a form of conflict resolution?
    Because sometimes you have to fight movements run by sociopaths. Sad, but true.

  263. you may have forgotten to remember that many of us standing in line to take the draft physical could not yet vote, so i am a bit uncertain what effect VN had on younger (male, i dare say) adults in that era as regards their official civic participation
    I remember. I also remember that, as a result of that, there was a lot of agitation resulting in the voting age being lowered, so that those who were “old enough to die” were also “old enough to vote.” And, as soon as we could (and that was before the war was over), a lot of us did.

  264. wj,
    That Amendment was ratified by the states with alacrity in 1971. But see this chart. What’s going on there from 1970-1974? Why, to hear you, the line is sloping the wrong way!
    I’d wager that ending the draft has some explanatory power with regards to that!
    All the best!
    bobbyp, taker and passer of the draft physical, pulled #128 in the ’71 lottery (whew! 1-125 got the call).

  265. it’s human nature.
    i’m relying on memory here, but i seem to recall respected commenters here, even some good librul ones asserting that racism was “human nature”.
    And not all that long ago.
    But I don’t think any of them would condone, excuse, or support it on that basis.

  266. Because sometimes you have to fight movements run by sociopaths. Sad, but true.
    So we should take up arms against the Trump Administration and the GOP?
    Might be a bit early.

  267. Guess who abolished the draft, and passed the 25th Amenment? The hated generation – parents of those who were serving. Robert McNamara’s generation. It’s all very complicated, because that generation actually had reason to be paranoid about crazy sociopaths taking over the world. The really smart ones rejected the most extreme McCarthyism, but didn’t dismiss the threat of Soviet autocracy.
    They were wrong about a lot of things, but by the time of Vietnam, they had much less of an excuse. As Vietnam went on, their excuse became thinner. After Vietnam, there was a new ballgame. A lot of folks (including Reagan) played in the past. Iraq I? It was justifie. Yugoslavia was a new moment. Afghanistan was a different war. Iraq II was based on a lie.
    Obama’s “war on terror” was a responsible effort to address the past. It was also an answer to a real problem – terrorism from radical Islamist groups. Obviously, they were successful in fighting that, and now domestic terrorism is much more of a threat.
    There are threats to which military action is the answer. So anyone who’s not a confirmed pacifist has to get into the weeds of policy and figure out what’s what. “Bombs are bad!” I can sign on to that until we decide someone deserves to be bombed.
    I don’t think that traitors in our country are immune from our considering a violent answer to them. We’re not there yet, and even if we were, we’re not prepared. I’m going to vote in 2018. I’m going to hope that my work (voting, working for immigrant/refugee rights, working for candidates) isn’t thwarted by Putin (or his Republican lackeys, or the Koch brothers, the Mercers, Jared Kusher’s partners, etc.).
    What makes me angry, and makes me lose my s&*! here, is that it’s so obvious that we could be making progress instead of taking so many steps backwards, if Hillary Clinton were President, and if people had voted D in Congress. Would Yemen be solved? No (but maybe it would be better). Would DACA folks be deported? Most definitely not. We would be working harder to accept refugees? Yes. Would we be talking about privatizing the crowning jewels of our federal government? I don’t think so.
    So, sorry. Although I’m not going to be rude, I feel really rude.

  268. Yeah, I got a call for a physical in 1966 (pre lottery). My draft board district suffered from an excess of kids going to college, so 1 year of student deferment was all you could get. Fortuately, my ROTC detachment was willing to pull some strings for me. But I could definitely have slogging thru the jungle myself.

  269. Might be a bit early.
    One (1) year early.
    Sorry, folks for the keyboard and cognition problems in my earlier rant. The cat on my lap as well.

  270. I managed to bypass the jungle by enlisting for four years when I was drafted. But, horror of horrors, I ended up in Iceland instead. 🙂

  272. I waited until late ’73 and enlisted. Took 5 months to pass the psych screen and then they let me in, and everyone else they could entice to sign up. No more jungle deployments by then, I even managed to avoid Germany, field work in the forest.
    Ft Leonardwood, Gordon, Hood, Huachuca. Didn’t even have to get north of the Mason Dixon line, so I avoided the real enemy.
    More Arlo Guthrie, less George Patton. Although I met George Patton jr. Nice guy.

  274. Interesting discussion. I was trying to figure out what to say in reply to Donald. I’m still not sure, but when he says “But I don’t buy this response.” I’m not really sure what he thinks we are selling. I’m certainly not trying to sell him or anyone else that what is happening in Yemen is something I want him to buy. I guess I am trying to sell him on the fact that Yemen is underreported because of the mix of circumstances that are hard to impossible to separate and address and simply moving them to the front page of the NYTimes does not mean that they will be addressed in a way that improves things.
    Also, the comparison of stories about X vs Y is one that is used in Manufacturing Consent where Chomsky compares the articles on Cambodia with the number of articles on East Timor, arguing that the atrocities in Cambodia were covered more extensively than those in East Timor, and had there been no media bias, they would have been covered equally. But there is a flaw in that, in that Indonesia controlled the coverage of East Timor to a much greater extent than Cambodia was able to control reportage, we had more of a presence in Cambodia and the genocide in Cambodia _was_ worse than the genocide in East Timor. So the increase in column inches is probably more attributable to the differing situations. Certainly, the fact that Indonesia was an anti communist ally led us to do pretty much the same thing we are doing in Yemen, does not mean that the genocide in Cambodia was somehow overreported. It seems more like a combination of a presence in the country and reporting to reduce our agency in what happened in Cambodia led to the difference. You see the same thing with the Holocaust, with the focus on those nasty Germans and a failure to acknowledge how not only the US and Great Britain both looked the other way while it was going on, there was complicity with what was happening.
    And while there were/are lots of people lying in wait to pounce on Chomsky, and did so concerning Cambodia, it was not something he covered or contiues to cover himself with glory on. So the scientific experiment of comparing column inches seems to be problematic in this case.
    So when you are argue that there are more column inches about Russiagate or Trump’s waistline than Yemen, I’m first wondering how we would get to an environment where there would be more stories about Yemen than whatever the Trump crisis de jour was and then wondering if that makes sense as the primary metric.
    If I had to say what is occupying my thoughts at the moment, it is
    -Minamata disease: some colleagues I work with have found that mercury poisoning is occurring not only in South America with gold prospecting (which intersects with another interest, endangered languages), but is occurring in Thailand
    https://www.hurights.or.jp/archives/focus/section2/2012/06/map-ta-phut-thailands-minamata.html
    and Canada
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Minamata_disease
    and been going there to work with the victims. This aligns with my interest (sadly academic rather than going out in the field) with endangered languages.
    -Trying to figure out #metoo. Questions I have are how much of what I feel is generational, how much is male privilege and how little of what I think may actually correct, with the auxillary point, how much should I get a pass because of generational issues. I have a suspicion that a lot of #metoo is tied up with Anglo-American puritanical notions of sex and its role in our lives, but trying to sort that out, much less make a post about it, seems impossible
    -Korea. North Korea seems like the rejoinder to any argument about disarming the military. The term ‘meatshield’ is one that seems spot on, in so far as we have troops stationed in South Korea not to stop an attack, but to be overrun so as to guarantee a response. And while Trump and Pence’s posturing has created the conditions for rapproachment, I’m not sure it’s meaningful. What happens after the Olympics is key
    -healthcare. another place where I find I have skin in the game. Bizarrely enough, since it seems like there is an anglo-american desire to create a health system that screws the maximum number of people in order to the outcomes to help the 1%, I’m wondering if there is some link to #metoo. The recent Daily Mail article about increases in the rates of prostate cancer as being indicative of gender bias
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/05/men-dying-prostate-cancer-reason-gender-bias-daily-mail
    -Japanese constitutional revision Given that Japan has gone the furthest in advocating the rejection of war as a policy tool, the push by Abe to redefine Article 9, and the voices cheering him on
    https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21730646-its-pacifist-wording-hindrance-global-peacekeeping-time-japans-prime-minister
    make me think that this is something important
    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/14/national/politics-diplomacy/opposition-revising-constitution-grows-55-kyodo-survey/#.WoIG05P1VTY
    I don’t begrudge if people aren’t intently aware of any of these things, and I’m not sure if making them aware of it actually helps anything unless they are interested and want to find out more.

  275. i’m relying on memory here, but i seem to recall respected commenters here, even some good librul ones asserting that racism was “human nature”.
    i don’t recall.
    people kill each other. that’s literally the core of human history.
    it’s not going to be an easy one to get past.

  276. This is the only place I visit on the internet where I’m not considered a librul; forget being considered a “good” one … but I was one of those who said “tribalism” was human nature with racism being one example of that.
    I was clear to say this was not an excuse; just like being horny isn’t an excuse for sexual assault.
    Much of the seven deadly sins are about packing away our lizard id brains and finding our better angels. Tribalism is just another example.

  277. I had intended to comment earlier, but PdM’s comment above provides a nice intro to what I was going to write.
    Racism, war, sexism, tribalism, maybe even nationalism should get its own mention in these modern times despite arguably being another more recent form of tribalism, and, hell, just greedy exploitation, are all things I highly doubt humanity will ever rid itself of – short of humanity ridding itself of itself.
    But they have to be fought against constantly, because there will always be people fighting for them (and because those things suck). You will never win. You will gain ground, and you will lose ground. Maybe over time you can gain a lot of ground on some of them in some places, but you will still have to fight to hold that ground.
    I’m not much for framing things in terms of good v. evil, but that’s kind of what it is. And evil has entropy on its side, because there are so many more ways to be evil than to be good. So good has to be fought for forever, even though it will never win an ultimate victory over evil.
    Endless struggle is as good as it gets, but it’s better than letting everything go completely to sh1t.

  279. Racism, war, sexism, tribalism, maybe even nationalism should get its own mention in these modern times despite arguably being another more recent form of tribalism, and, hell, just greedy exploitation, are all things I highly doubt humanity will ever rid itself of – short of humanity ridding itself of itself.
    Quite possibly. But what we can do is continue to redefine “tribe” to be ever larger groups. Time was when “tribe” was strictly a not-very-extended family. Later, it was up to something comprising a few hundred people, many of them barely related. These days (for most people) it’s up to being a nation made up of millions of unrelated people. Or, for the less modern, at least a race within a nation — again millions of unrelated people.**
    Does that make nationalism or racism something to be embraced? Of course not. But it does show that we have made progress. And suggests that further progress is not impossible.
    ** And note that some people have even moved cross-species: their “tribe” consists of them and their pet. 😉

  280. But it does show that we have made progress. And suggests that further progress is not impossible.
    Progress in the context of racism and nationalism may simply mean bigger wars.

  283. From cleek’s link:

    Some Americans would feel less polarized and alienated from their fellow citizens if they recognized that some of the people fighting on “the other side” of a polarizing issue actually hold values and beliefs that are strikingly similar to their own.

    I’ve seen and participated in a number of arguments here, most memorably on gun control and taxation, during which arguments on the generalities would have you believe there was no common ground between two given people. But once they got into the specifics of what sort of policies they would like to see, it became apparent that they wanted very similar things.
    I don’t know that it’s the basis for a Unified Political Theory, but it’s an extant phenomenon.

  284. 1. Everytime someone says the Russians attacked “Our Democracy” in hushed reverent tones, roll your eyes and ask several questions–
    A) If this is worth so much extended outrage, what about our far more violent attacks on others? Freaking social media ads and embarrassing emails stolen and released don’t even come close.
    what Russia did with Facebook against us is wrong. maybe nobody died directly as a result.
    but, other groups are using Facebook to help carry out actual genocide.
    it’s the same tool and the same use of that tool as what Russia did against the US election, just with different target audiences and a different message.

  285. “In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.”
    Surprise: Voters Aren’t More Polarized than Ever, Only Pols and Media Are: Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina says it’s media and political elites who live in ideological bubbles, not regular Americans.

  286. Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization.
    Mostly true for (2) and (3).
    Probably not for (1).

  287. For that matter, there seems to be a fair amount of agreement on abortion. Yes, people have different sound-bytes on their position (“pro-choice” or “pro-life”). But once you get down to the details, their actual positions tend to be not all that far apart in most cases.

  288. part of the problem is that there is a large industry based on selling division; and keeping all sides separate is fundamental to the businesses.

  289. Fiorina aside, it has been my experience that politicians do not instigate, push, and then lead issue parades. The issues and their constituencies come to them, and they try to jump to the head of the parade.
    But once you get down to the details, their actual positions tend to be not all that far apart in most cases.
    Your average person most likely holds a mosh pit of positions that a partisan would find incomprehensible and utterly contradictory. Taken in isolation, said positions tend toward the extreme.
    But when you blend it all together in political parties comprised of various interests, well, then you get apples and oranges.

  290. Near total agreement: The system of private property and “free enterprise”. (hence the paucity of left wing kooks like yours truly).
    Not so total: Government regulation and intervention in the event of market failure (cf health care-when is some too much?).
    Near total agreement: The USA should remain the world’s pre-eminent power, and the ability to project that power is essential to the national interest and the maintenance of the world order.
    Not so total: Big existential wars OK. Little ones….not so much. Some wars are better than others. Support and/or opposition contingent on party affiliation.
    Near total agreement: Favor racial equality and racial justice for all.
    Not so total: Public policies to ensure it actually becomes manifests in actual reality.
    Near total agreement: The uncontrolled spewing of carbon into the atmosphere could well result in environmental calamity.
    Not so total: Who pays and how?
    Near total agreement: The Roe framework is a reasonable compromise on abortion.
    Not so total: When abortion is equated to murder, the discussion has or all intents and purposes ceased.
    Near total agreement: We need less single family zoning in residential neighborhoods in urban areas.
    Not so total: Over my dead body (figure of speech). Blood in the streets.

  291. one last one….
    Near total agreement: Immigrants built this great country.
    Not so total: Why can’t they just come here, pick the lettuce, clean the toilets, and then go home?

  292. Why can’t they just come here, pick the lettuce, clean the toilets, and then go home?
    Because we abolished the Bracero program (in 1964, but some of us remember) — over exactly the kind of hysteria over them taking jobs that prevails today.
    It is, perhaps, noteworthy that, then as now, the people who carry on most about “immigrants taking jobs” are virtually never inclined to take those agricultural and other lowly jobs themselves.

  293. Near total agreement: involuntary immigrants into the US through the maternity ward are entitled to citizenship.
    Also near total agreement: involuntary immigrants who entered any other way have to beg for it.
    Don’t believe me? Find me a few people who agree that DACA is a right, not a privilege.
    –TP

  294. I actually don’t buy the “near total agreement” on pretty much anything except marijuana.
    But there’s a ton of money to be made in private prisons, so the feds are unlikely to change that policy at the national level anytime soon.
    To be honest, I’m not sure that all that many people have a clear idea of what they think about most matters of public policy. Or probably more accurately, they’re just not all that interested beyond the points where it touches them, personally.
    I’m not sure what “agreement” means, in that context.

  295. I’m not sure what “agreement” means, in that context.
    Near total agreement: Ignorance is bliss.

  297. Yep. NPR, to hear from some of my lefty type compatriots, is just another neoliberal corporate shill. But hey, what do you expect from public broadcasting, Danny the Red?

  298. All they need is a single Sunday morning show entitled “Trump is Awesome!” and he’ll be all in on funding them in the future.

  299. over exactly the kind of hysteria over them taking jobs that prevails today.
    My impression is the hysteria is more about their skin color, the language they speak, their proclivity to hang out together with their foreign ways, opening businesses with signs that do not use English, and their inability to immediately “assimilate”. No “decent” person “wants” the jobs they perform.
    And they entered the country ILLEGALLY because that’s what truly matters (i.e., Whatever gave you the idea it is about race?).

  311. Bobby, I kind of missed any mention (let alone authorship) of Barbara Boxer.
    Beyond that, not sure what message you think I ought to be taking. The GOP is broken, and toxic? Yeah, I know that and have said so. Voting down Republicans, at least toxic ones, is the only way to fix that? Know it; do it. So what, exactly?

  312. Mentioning your lefty nemesis Babs was a bit of humor.
    The message is: Don’t vote for any Republicans…even the allegedly good ones.
    Have a good one.

  313. Attempting to get my humor tracker kick-started….
    The thing is, if I don’t vote for good Republicans, that means the worst ones are the only ones who have any success. Which, in turn, means that the GOP just keeps getting worse.
    If there was a third party that looked viable, that might not matter — the Republican Party could just go the way of the Whigs. Unfortunately, I don’t see one. And the country needs two viable parties to function properly.

  314. The Democrats could split easily enough into two viable parties in the absence of Republicans to oppose.

  317. wj: … the country needs two viable parties to function properly.
    Another of those nearly-everyone-agrees shibboleths. Is it true?
    “Viable” does not mean “sane”.
    For that matter, what’s a “party”? As I keep pointing out, the ONLY operative definitions of party membership in this country are:
    1) Your voter registration, if you’re a citizen; and
    2) Your vote for Speaker or Majority Leader if you’re a legislator.
    The current leadership of the “Republican Party” in most legislatures in the country (including CA?) is batshit nuts. A candidate for office running as a “Republican” is almost certain to vote for that batshit leadership — and absolutely certain not to vote for Democratic leadership. Since leadership sets the agenda, a “sane” candidate running as a Republican is basically asking for impotence.
    The NRA-backed, plutocrat-beholden, religio-nationalist. racist-supported GOP is now the Putin-apologist party too.
    When a player in one of our major sports leagues covers himself in glory, his number gets retired. Time to retire the label of the major party that has covered itself in shame and ignominy. Vote Democrat, crush the GOP into extinction, and then be a splitter for the sake of perpetuating our adversarial party system.
    –TP

  318. Keeping in mind a significant portion of the US electorate considers most of the Democratic leadership batshit crazy in their own right.
    So, not necessarily a good argument for voting against batshit crazy Republicans.

  319. a significant portion of the US electorate considers most of the Democratic leadership batshit crazy
    If you are part of that portion, you might want to define “batshit crazy”.

  323. a significant portion of the US electorate considers most of the Democratic leadership batshit crazy in their own right.
    different strokes.

  324. 17 more names that will be appearing in the comments
    driving home tonight, listening to “marketplace” on NPR because I’m a coastal elitist and that’s what we do, kai ryssdal mentions:
    there are more places to buy a gun in the US than there are starbucks in entire world.
    call the names. it won’t change anything, but people at least deserve to be remembered, even if only for a minute.

  325. there are more places to buy a gun in the US than there are starbucks in entire world.
    Look, this is just the free market at work. Clearly we need more guns than coffee, otherwise the market wouldn’t produce that result. Similarly, if the market wasn’t demanding mass shootings of high school students, there wouldn’t be any. Who are we to interfere with the natural workings of the invisible hand, which steps in without any central planning and almost naturally balances the demand for dead students with the supply.
    You might ask “but what about all the dead children?” to which I would reply that letting the market work makes us all better off in the long run (except, like, those dead kids)

  326. Keep in mind that the NRA has laundered money for the Russians to give to the GOP.
    Yes, the victims are people, and shouldn’t be victims again to rhetoric. But people, please, this is a – what do you call it – conspiracy?
    Batshit crazy? Okay, I’ll cop. I’m being driven batshit crazy by this unending preventable tragedy.

  328. You might be mentally ill if
    1) You think the problem of violence In our country is people owning AR 15s.
    Y’all just spent a whole thread on how Americans think violence is an acceptable answer solving problems.
    Then, when faced with the blindingly obvious result of that cultural phenomenon, the problem is suddenly guns.
    F*cking violence everywhere in our culture is the problem. Solve that. we will have less wars and less shootings. No matter how many gun sellers there are.

  330. You think the problem of violence In our country is people owning AR 15s.
    Y’all just spent a whole thread on how Americans think violence is an acceptable answer solving problems.
    Then, when faced with the blindingly obvious result of that cultural phenomenon, the problem is suddenly guns.
    It is possible to believe that “Americans think violence is an acceptable answer solving problems (although I don’t), while recognizing that guns, especially automatic and semi-automatic guns, make violence much more massive.

  331. I never guessed there were sperm depicted in republican presidential portraits.
    I figured all along that murderous filthy subhuman republicans couldn’t bring themselves to even think the word “sperm” when they were calling for the death of AIDS sufferers back in the 1980’s.
    I wanna be bit by the bat that made republicans so murderously batshit so I can be batshit in the death of all of them.

  333. “In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course, the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.”
    Elephant —Roger Ebert

  334. • Mass shootings aren’t getting more common, but they are getting more deadly.
    • Gun crime and gun violence are still way, way down from 20 years ago.
    • All mass shooters are “mentally ill,” but defining that term is no easy feat.
    • Would restricting certain types of weapons make mass shootings less deadly?
    • Do strict firearms laws reduce gun deaths?
    Yes, This Is a Good Time To Talk About Gun Violence and How To Reduce It: The Florida school shooting is horrific, but making sure such tragedies never happen is no simple matter.

  335. The “batsh1t crazy” definition of a cardinal and observer of the Galilei trial: To believe that the Earth revolves around the sun is as insane as not believing in the Virgin Birth.
    A colleague of his also knew how to get rid of heresy once and for all: kill all mathematicians* because math is the basis for all heresy.
    Definitions of crazy are quite volatile in space and time.
    *for the nitpickers: ‘mathematicus’ is the classical latin term for astrologer. The guy was not aiming for a slot on the Texas Board of Education on the GOP ticket.

  337. btw Marty, I know you think that argument is a cute one, but if one feels that violence is an issue for Americans, (and incidentally, you must have noticed that it was a discussion of American foreign policy right?) the last fucking thing you want to do is to put guns in people’s hands. So either you don’t think violence is a problem for Americans (and maybe you don’t, you figure that it is only the right people who get shat on, but at least have the balls to say that straight up) or maybe you do think it is a problem, mirabile dictu and you might want to think of ways to defuse such violence.
    I know that my kids here in Japan can come home from school at 10, 11 o’clock at night and I don’t have to worry about them. And my college age daughter can come home at 3 or 4 am in the largest city in the world and I can be blissfully unworried. So cut the ‘ha ha, your liberal arguments are so hypocritical.’ It makes it hard to take anything you say seriously.

  338. Good for you lj, but your kids aren’t safe because there aren’t any guns. They are safe because attacking them would, first, not be considered.
    Your comment absolutely proves my point, which isn’t cute at all. Why are they not in danger, from a simple mugging much less a mass shooter?

  339. Do strict firearms laws reduce gun deaths?
    Three weeks ago I posted “Number of shootings in UK schools in the last 20 years (post Dunblane): 0”
    Gun control aside, the UK is not very unlike the USA. But the number is still zero.
    Does that answer your question?

  340. No matter how many gun sellers there are.
    there is no possibility that the presence of a gun encourages the owner to use it. just like there is no possibility that easy accessibility to guns encourages people who want to kill other people to acquire and use guns to kill people.
    sure, it happens with everything else in life. but guns are special.

  341. Your comment absolutely proves my point, which isn’t cute at all. Why are they not in danger, from a simple mugging much less a mass shooter?
    Bullshit. You focus on what was discussed here and now you are trying to squirm out of it. If you want to have this discussion, you don’t start with
    Y’all just spent a whole thread on how Americans think violence is an acceptable answer solving problems.
    How about if I said I know that my daughters won’t have to worry about someone bringing a gun and shooting them. Or that I don’t have to tell my students to keep their phones on in case something happens on campus. Or that I don’t have to worry about getting in an accident and having the other guy pull out a gun.
    But do tell how it’s just a cultural thing and America has to live with it. But don’t try to claim you were making a serious comment about muggings and violence. Cause you know you weren’t…

  342. Well, I would say that school security in Japan is likely greater than in the US, do they use rfid to track students? Aren’t cell phones banned from most Japanese schools?
    As far as squirming out of anything, you always use that as a personal attack when you have nothing. I said the problem was violence, the acceptability of violence In US society affects a broad swath of problems, including mass shootings.
    You brought up coming home at late hours, that led to being safe muggings, because of what?
    Get over yourself.

  343. there is no possibility that the presence of a gun encourages the owner to use it. just like there is no possibility that easy accessibility to guns encourages people who want to kill other people to acquire and use guns to kill people.
    sure, it happens with everything else in life. but guns are special.
    This.

  344. I’d say the cultural problem that leads to mass shootings is that celebrity is seen as more important than virtue (in so far as there’s any perceived difference between them). And the practical problem is that nutters have easy access to guns.
    Whereas the cultural problem that leads to muggings is that wealth is seen as more important than virtue (in so far as there’s any perceived difference between them). And the practical problem is that thieves have easy access to guns.
    The latter problem would be less effectively addressed by gun control, since knives work too.

  345. It is certifiably insane that U.S. schools – from college all the way down to nursery schools – have “lock-down drills” as a regular part of their year.
    Freedom, I guess.

  346. It is certifiably insane that U.S. schools – from college all the way down to nursery schools – have “lock-down drills” as a regular part of their year.
    it’s part of the 2nd A’s requirement that we all live in fear of being shot.

  347. Ahh, marty, a bit of a dilemma. You want to try and make this about societal violence, but that thin reed of a comment can’t bear the weight, so you have to try and interrogate what I said. You go first, why did YOU make the comment? After all, I only replied about my kids to your comment, so it is only fair.
    The fact is that either you need to argue that you had some overarching deep thoughts about violence that we should intuit from your comment, or you have to admit that you just wanted to tweak the liberals and you thought that doing it with a school shooting was a great idea. The former makes you look stupid, the latter makes you look like a jerk. As they say in chess, you are forked. Perhaps some of the others here can offer you a way out, but to me, it looks a lot like karma…

  348. Well, Ugh, whats ridiculous is that they are not locked down all the time. Many schools in other countries, and the US, have pretty strict security that would prevent these shootings. Although no security is perfect, walking in a school with a gas mask on carrying an AR15 seems preventable on a lot of levels.

  349. it’s part of the 2nd A’s requirement that we all live in fear of being shot.
    An armed society is a terrified society….
    Also, ISTM, carrying gives those people permission (from their-selves) to act in real life the way people act online. Because, hey, if someone reacts negatively to me being an asshole, I’ll just draw down on them and teach them a lesson.

  351. carrying gives those people permission (from their-selves) to act in real life the way people act online
    whew. armed IRL trolling. that’s an unpleasant combo.

  352. Obviously the way to end school shootings is to end schools. Not only would this relieve many from the forced remittance of onerous property taxes, it would reinforce their belief that education is essentially a waste of time.

  353. F*cking violence everywhere in our culture is the problem. Solve that. we will have less wars and less shootings. No matter how many gun sellers there are.
    i think this is exactly right. the only thing i’d add is that, were we not so freaking violent, plain old supply and demand would probably bring the number of gun shops down to a reasonable number.
    to reply to LJ, i take yur point but i don’t hear marty saying we need to just accept it.
    to follow on tony p, if you have a shotgun or rifle for hunting, you’re likely not nuts. if you have an ar-15, probably not nuts, but i’m gonna keep an eye on you.
    if you have multiple ar-15’s and a stockpile of multiple thousands of rounds to shoot with them, you likely have some issues.

  354. ok, I will let my first comment stand. The thread on a broad consensus that Americans see violence as an acceptable solution to problems, followed by a complete blindspot that the same acceptance makes violence an acceptable solution for mass murderers is what I noted.
    You brought up more mundane examples of when you didn’t have to worry about your kids, I simply responded to your examples.
    My mistake.

  355. whats ridiculous is that they are not locked down all the time
    what’s ridiculous, and more than ridiculous, what’s pitiful and profoundly sad, is that it’s even something that is needed, ever.

  356. if you have an ar-15, probably not nuts, but i’m gonna keep an eye on you.
    AR-15 styled rifles account for 60%+ of US rifle sales. the top five best-selling rifles in the US are AR-15 style. not one of them is a traditional wood-stock ‘hunting’ rifle.
    that suggests, to me, that fantasy fulfillment plays a big part in the kind of guns people buy. most want to be Rambo.

  357. what’s pitiful and profoundly sad, is that it’s even something that is needed, ever.
    we are held hostage by the “conservative” gun fetish.

  358. yup.
    people with “molon labe” bumper stickers.
    the guy down my block with an american flag banner on his truck whose stripes are made of gun silhouettes.
    and so on.
    it’s not about hunting.

  359. I wake up this morning and
    1) 17 people are still dead;
    2) He, Trump is still president;
    3) Marty is still Marty.
    Hardly worth getting out of bed.
    –TP

  362. Keeping in mind that schools all over Europe, and in Japan, have much better security than many of our schools. But we don’t want to secure our schools because…
    In the school system my children went to there was one guarded entrance, for the last 30 years. 3000 kid high school, smaller grade schools. All exits were alarmed, entrance through the front door only. Every person after school started signed into the office, it wasn’t voluntary.
    Was it perfect, no. But a kid jn a gas mask couldn’t walk in with a rifle.

  364. But we don’t want to secure our schools because…
    because Freedom™!
    but mostly because it costs money, and we don’t have any money. and that’s because the GOP, top to bottom, is totally uninterested in raising money, let alone spending it on schools.

  365. The thread on a broad consensus that Americans see violence as an acceptable solution to problems, followed by a complete blindspot that the same acceptance makes violence an acceptable solution for mass murderers is what I noted.
    In what context was this broad consensus, and was that in regard to Americans in particular or people in general. I remember it being about war, and I remember it being about human nature.
    That said, I wouldn’t argue that Americans aren’t more violent than their counterparts in other economically developed nations. And I wouldn’t argue that if we were less violent, we wouldn’t be … well … less violent. Um, yeah…
    But, to what problem are you proposing that people (or Americans) see school shootings as a solution?

  366. Schools in the UK have increased security over the last few years. But that’s designed to resist abductions – primary schools are much more thorough than secondary schools.
    The security measures would be ineffective against a nutter with an AR-15. That doesn’t matter at all, since nutters in this country haven’t got AR-15s.

  368. thoroughly securing the inside of schools would stop shooting inside schools. that’s true.
    and if we all lived in schools, that would solve the problem completely.

  369. The kids can run, one at a time, crouched and in serpentine fashion, from the school to the bus when school lets out. It might take a while, but it’s better than putting restrictions on gun sales.

  370. we could teach kids responsible gun ownership, in grade school. we could teach them what guns do, how they work and how to use them responsibly.
    but, we have a country where one party is completely beholden to an organization, and a gun-worshipping culture, that over and over fights laws to ban toy guns in school because they think that banning toy guns in school would demonize real guns.

  371. but, we have a country where one party is completely beholden to an organization, and a gun-worshipping culture, that over and over fights laws to ban toy guns in school because they think that banning toy guns in school would demonize real guns.
    Why is that party beholden?
    The plutocrats aren’t even our own.

  372. Marty,
    Where do you get your allegation that “schools all over Europe, and in Japan, have much better security than many of our schools”? Is this the latest NRA dodge or FOX couch meme? Should we be expecting to hear He, Trump tweet it?
    Between
    1) turning schools (and churches, and cinemas, and shopping malls, and outdoor concerts) into fortresses, and
    2) inconveniencing “responsible gun owners” with laws that keep addled would-be Rambos from owning guns,
    what value system makes you think 1) is better?
    –TP

  374. novakant, I wrote this (very unfortunately without a question mark) earlier this morning. What do I need to re-read?
    In what context was this broad consensus, and was that in regard to Americans in particular or people in general. I remember it being about war, and I remember it being about human nature.

  376. And the practical problem is that nutters have easy access to guns.
    *****
    The security measures would be ineffective against a nutter with an AR-15. That doesn’t matter at all, since nutters in this country haven’t got AR-15s.
    This, this and thrice this.
    For the avoidance of doubt, the UK (and the rest of the developed nations) have: the same heritage of human predilection for conflict, just as many disaffected youths, just as many kids chained to their computers playing violent video games, just as many sociopathic young men from abusive backgrounds and just as many violent criminals from violent families. What these people don’t have, in countries other than the US, is guns.

  377. It will always be too soon.

    Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted that the shooting was “designed and executed to maximize loss of life.”
    But he said that it was too soon to debate whether tighter gun laws could have stopped it.
    “You should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim could have prevented it,” he told Fox News.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43071710

  378. should be noted that we’re coming up on the 1-year anniversary of Trump signing a bill that makes it easier for mentally-ill people to get guns.
    gun violence in the US: it’s objectively what the GOP wants.

  379. Do strict firearms laws reduce gun deaths?
    At the risk of injecting actual data into the discussion:

    “What I’ll tell you is that mental health issues in this country are growing and it’s a challenge.” That is an explanation favoured on the American right. It does not take account of the fact that the toll of gun violence in other rich countries, with comparable health indicators, is negligible by comparison. America’s gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher than a group of 22 other developed countries, according to the American Journal of Medicine. This is mainly because America has so many more guns than those other countries. It has less than 5% of the world’s population and almost half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms.

    and, perhaps more on point:

    States with the most restrictive gun laws in America, such as Illinois, tend to have the lowest rates of gun homicide. Florida, where more than 1.4m people have licenses to carry concealed weapons, has some of the laxest gun laws. To buy an AR-15 rifle, the model used by Mr Cruz, which is based on the M-16 assault rifle, requires a background check so cursory the authorities almost might as well not bother. It takes a few minutes. And if you happen to be on the FBI’s terrorist watch-list at the time, no problem. [emphasis added]

    Obviously there will be variations, especially because carrying a gun across a state line is trivial. But the pattern is clear.

  380. let’s tie some threads together!
    the only country with a higher mass shooting incident to population ratio than the US is… Yemen!
    more fun information about violence caused by Republican guns:

    If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
    A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
    Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.
    Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
    …
    America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.
    Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
    Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
    They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
    More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.
    This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

    ban them. melt them. turn the slag into tracks for light rail.

  381. Many schools in other countries, and the US, have pretty strict security that would prevent these shootings. Although no security is perfect, walking in a school with a gas mask on carrying an AR15 seems preventable on a lot of levels.
    And yet, in the days before the NRA because a mass-marketing arm of the gun manufacturers, and gun ownership skyrocketed (i.e. when I was in school), schools did NOT have lock-down drills and were not locked down. Yet we never saw a school shooting. Wonder why that was….

  383. The “thoughts and prayers” thing reminds me of that joke (or parable) about the guy stuck on his roof in the middle of rising flood waters refusing all the help that came his way because he had faith that God would save him.
    In case anyone doesn’t know that one, here’s a version of it:
    A man was trapped in his house during a flood. He began praying to God to rescue him. He had a vision in his head of God’s hand reaching down from heaven and lifting him to safety. The water started to rise in his house. His neighbour urged him to leave and offered him a ride to safety. The man yelled back, “I am waiting for God to save me.” The neighbour drove off in his pick-up truck.
    The man continued to pray and hold on to his vision. As the water began rising in his house, he had to climb up to the roof. A boat came by with some people heading for safe ground. They yelled at the man to grab a rope they were ready to throw and take him to safety. He told them that he was waiting for God to save him. They shook their heads and moved on.
    The man continued to pray, believing with all his heart that he would be saved by God. The flood waters continued to rise. A helicopter flew by and a voice came over a loudspeaker offering to lower a ladder and take him off the roof. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he was waiting for God to save him. The helicopter left. The flooding water came over the roof and caught him up and swept him away. He drowned.
    When he reached heaven and asked, “God, why did you not save me? I believed in you with all my heart. Why did you let me drown?” God replied, “I sent you a pick-up truck, a boat and a helicopter and you refused all of them. What else could I possibly do for you?”

  385. Florida Governor and Voldemort Doppleganger Rick Scott (R, naturally) just said in a press conference that “Pulse was a terrorist attack” to which Florida responded by hiring 50 new “counter-terrorism experts”. Scott was distinguishing Pulse from Parkland, which evidently was not a “terrorist attack” in his snake-ish little brain.
    To be fair, I suspect that Lord Scott is not alone in defining “terrorism” in such a way that a school massacre is not terrorism. Presumably, that’s because religion (as long as it’s the wrong kind) and ideology (as long as it’s not “policy”) must motivate a massacre in order for the massacre to be “terrorism”.
    Evidently, the Cult of the Gun doesn’t count as a pernicious religion in America.
    –TP

  387. My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting.
    What does that mean? Aren’t you supposed to pray to God?
    Which of these prayerful US politicians does actually get down on his knees to seek succour for the bereaved? Does it occur to them that God can do whatever he does without their public statements of intention to pray? Do they also pray that school shootings not happen in the first place? Does it bother them that the latter prayers don’t work?

  390. This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
    The 15 nations with the highest rate of gun ownership.
    Only about 1/4 of Americans own guns. The great majority of those people own one, or two.
    Most deaths by firearm in the US are suicides. Typically older guys, most likely among the folks who own one or two firearms.
    The way we get from a rate of gun ownership like Switzerland, or Sweden, to the rate of gun ownership we actually see here – almost double those places – is the 3% of the population that own half the guns.
    About 7.5 million people in the US own about 130 million guns.
    So, that’s the gun ownership picture.
    In many states, there is not only lax requirements to buy and carry a firearm, there are no requirements. Zero.
    In Vermont, you need a license to go fishing, but there is absolutely zero requirement – no training requirement, no licensing requirement, no psych evaluation, nothing – for carrying a firearm. The feds impose their own requirements regarding purchase, beyond that the state imposes nothing.
    By far, the majority of states are either unrestricted right to carry, or are shall-issue, which means if somebody asks for a permit, they will get one.
    In most of the US, there are no meaningful restrictions on who can purchase and carry a firearm.
    To me, the debate about “is it the guns?” or “is it the culture?” is kind of moot. Guns are profoundly easy to get and carry in the US, because we have a culture that supports that. And, the ready availability of firearms supports and reinforces that culture.
    If you’re a disaffected kid in most of the developed world, you’ll get in fights and maybe steal somebody’s car.
    In the US, you also have the option of walking down the street and buying a firearm that was designed to let the bearer prevail in near-ish range firefights. A combat weapon.
    No doubt the ability to procure a firearm about as easily as buying a sandwich makes violence by firearm more likely.
    No doubt living in a culture where millions of people indulge in fantasies of bloody self-justifying violence and carnage makes a robust market for firearms more likely.
    It’s all of a piece.
    Americans are inordinately prone to shooting themselves and each other. That’s the reality. Ready access to guns facilitates that, but the guns are not the root or cause of the problem.
    I don’t think so, anyway. Factor out the 7.5 million with a dozen guns or more, and gun ownership here is not that different from places like Finland, or Sweden, or Switzerland.
    And those folks don’t shoot themselves or each other at the rates that we do.

  391. ban them. melt them. turn the slag into tracks for light rail.
    count-me in! How’s this for a compromise….?
    If the 2nd Amendment was removed from the Constitution, states could presumably pass their own laws as desired by their own political forces in play. Wyoming could make open carry mandatory. New York could make owning a gun a felony crime. Look….local control!
    Real States Rights for people, not phony states rights for plutocrats, racists, and religious fanatics.

  392. To paraphrase Chris Rock, republican politicians had better get down on their knees and pray that they find God before God finds them.

  393. I am going to start replying to some of the replies to me earlier this week. It will come in spurts.
    First, Cleek’s comparison of 11 Washington Post stories on Yemen vs 5 at the American Conservative.
    I counted six when I checked Daniel Larison’s archives for this year. I am not going to do a total count, but it would not surprise me if he has done literally hundreds of posts in the past two and a half years on our role in Yemen. I am sure I remember days when he has done more than one post and weeks where they seemed to come almost every day. In the past several weeks he has focused more on Trump’s insane militarism towards North Korea. I suspect virtually everyone here would agree with his posts on that, and would also agree with me that North Korea is at the moment more important even than Yemen, given that we have a wildly irresponsible child-man with his tiny hands on the nuclear button. But Larison hasn’t forgotten Yemen. He has posted six times on that this year, but is more focused right now on North Korea.
    As for the Washington Post, I can’t read all their stories because I go through my monthly limit fast, but it’s not the same. Without criticizing the content of what they actually have done, these stories for the most part are not focusing on our role. They are informative, but they aren’t focused on our wrongdoing. A couple do. There was one from late December that dealt with Mattis and his “stern” response to people who suggest that we aren’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties. He says it would be worse if we weren’t there. Bullfeathers. The Saudis couldn’t be doing much of what they do without our support.
    The American Conservative has some (IMHO) really stupid articles on economics and other issues from time to time, but on foreign policy they are far to the noninterventionist “left” compared to most liberal outlets. It isn’t just Larison. Andrew Bacevich is a regular poster. I do read the NYT regularly and their opinion page is just a joke when it comes to foreign policy and that’s on a good day, when it isn’t obscene. I don’t read the Wash Po opinions, but never see them cited by noninterventionists except in a negative way.

  394. Then there were several people (actually including me) who point out that we each have our own issues. True and I think that is as it should be. It would not be good if everyone focused obsessively on America’s foreign policy sins and ignored health care or economics or civil rights or global warming or our out-of-control mass shootings. I focus on our foreign policy sins because they are important and because I think it is clear that they are deliberately downplayed by the political mainstream. The Beltway crowd and the mainstream press live and breathe American exceptionalism, which in their case means the bedrock belief that they are the rightful rulers of the world and should be free to argue for or carry out violent interventions in any part of the world where they see fit, without their good intentions ever being questioned. You can, at most, criticize the policies on pragmatic grounds. All they learned from Iraq is that the American people will turn against a war if thousands of Americans are killed and tens of thousands wounded. This criticism applies to both parties, though Republicans are on average worse. And this is why scandals on a much smaller moral scale, like hacked emails and possibly illegal political ratfucking and obstruction of justice are the biggest crimes we ever see treated as scandals. Torture, for instance, was a policy issue. People denounced it, but there was no determination to hand it over to an impartial investigator to get to the bottom of it and then, depending on the facts uncovered, send it to the courts to decide. The rule of law is something that only applies if the laws that were broken aren’t too big to prosecute. The political system can’t handle issues that big. Brennan spied on the Democrats when they were investigating torture and then lied about it and now liberals are saying it is terrible that Trump casts doubt on the intelligence community. Well, Trump has zero credibility on anything and is probably afraid of what Mueller is finding (whether or not it involves Russian collusion), but no, the intelligence community should not be our heroes.
    I don’t expect to see high ranking officials tried for war crimes in the US. But I could imagine a societal change for the better if ordinary people demanded honesty from our press, our pundits and even some of our politicians about what powerful people get away with, instead of pretending like whatever ratfucking occurred in 2016 represents the worst thing that ever happens in the political system.
    More later, maybe.

  395. Just thought of an example.
    Back in the late 90’s, there was a debate about whether the US should join the International Criminal Court. The opponents, typically Republican, argued against it, said it was bad because our enemies would devise trumped up (no pun intended) charges against innocent American servicemen. The advocates, typically Democrats, argued that this was a misguided objection because the ICC would only have the authority to step in when a country clearly lacked a functioning judicial system. When a country had such a system it could prosecute its own war criminals. We have such a system.
    This is the kind of debate on that issue that our elites have, one that is self-servicing and detached from reality. The idea that maybe a high ranking US official might deserve to be prosecuted simply wasn’t part of the serious debate. And there is this strange mythology about democracies, that they are so good that they simply don’t commit the kinds of atrocities that dictatorships commit, when the reality is they don’t commit atrocities against their own citizens (usually), but may very well do so against foreigners. The foreigners can even be people that live within and under the control of their society.

  396. As for the Washington Post, I can’t read all their stories because I go through my monthly limit fast
    Two options:
    1) go into your browser and clear your cookies/browser history (at least for the Post).
    2) when you want to open a story, do so in a private browser (for which cookies are deleted when you close it).
    Presto! Limit erased.
    P.S. Works for any other site which limits you number of stories. Ah, technology!
    (In a similar vein, The Economist has dropped the link to Comments at the end of stories. But the comments are still there. You just have to go to the URL and add /comment at the end. Ah, technology again.)

  398. From Ugh’s link:

    It would be exceedingly difficult to seize every one of these weapons currently on the streets by force, but it would be easy and effective—given sufficient political will—to ban their manufacture and sale.

    I’ve made the point before that there aren’t illegal-gun factories. There also aren’t factories specifically for guns that will be used to kill people or for guns that will be used for other crimes.
    Legal guns become illegal guns, and either can be used for murder and other crimes. Continued easy access, legal and illegal, depends on continued production.
    If guns used in crimes were confiscated and destroyed without being replaced, the number of guns would go down, and the people who still had guns would keep far tighter control over them. They would become very “sticky” from a commercial/trade/market standpoint, and wouldn’t find their way into the hands of criminals so easily (says me).

  400. These are all interesting ideas, and the odds that we will do them any time sooner than a generation from now are slim to none.
    We won’t get rid of guns until we change people’s attitudes toward guns, other people, and their own government.
    That’s a profoundly big lift. It’ll take years and years. That’s not a reason to not start the process, it’s just a realistic assessment of what it is you’re talking about.

  401. Well, the other possibility would be to change people’s, especially politicians’, views of the NRA. For example, if the NRA was shown to have been consciously acting as an agent of a foreign power in influencing an American election, taking funds from them might become politically toxic.
    Admittedly, a low probability scenario. But not totally impossible.

  402. I think the way to go is strict liability. Make the gun manufacturers liable any time anyone shoots anyone they weren’t aiming at. Make the registered owner liable any time their gun is used in a crime. So you still have your freedom to own a gun, you just have to pay some of the true costs.

  405. As a small step, ban gun access, ownership and purchases by anyone under 21.
    We recognize the immaturity of the teen brain in many other aspects of law, and there seems to be consensus that the ‘mentally ill’ should not have weapons. I think just about every parent would agree that teens are mentally ill, at least sometimes.
    So if you have weapons in your house you have a legal duty to prevent a teen from having access.
    If someone like the latest bozo is displaying weapons, that would give the police the right to investigate and confiscate.
    We just had another student arrested in WA because grandmom saw he had an AK in a guitar case. He was apparently planning a school shooting. His attorney said he was legally allowed to have that weapon.

  407. i bought a rifle when i was 17. they let me do it on lay-away. didn’t even ask my parents.
    i promptly got arrested for hunting in a state park (unknowingly, we wandered in over an unmarked hillside).
    21 would be great.

  408. What’s the best-evars sniper rifle, how much does it cost, and where can you buy it? Asking for a fiend.

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