Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Architecture that is hostile to the homeless

Chad Loder is founder and CEO of Habitu8, a company that creates videos of security awareness. In a Twitter thread he documents architecture that is hostile to the homeless. This includes:

* Benches with “armrests” in the middle of the seat to so homeless people can’t sleep on them, benches that are not flat, and where the seat can get folded up and locked at night. The most annoying are benches with intermediate arms that are painted with pride colors or such benches with advertising signs that say, “Homelessness kills” – such cognitive dissonance.

* Areas under bridges with lots of spikes or unnecessary bike racks.

* A place in Paris that installed several vertical metal poles. A homeless person threw a board and mattress on top of them.

A commenter added what looks like a slogan from British Conservatives: “We plan to cut all homeless people in half by 2025.” Umm…

Another commenter shows a bench from RainCity Housing. Part of the back of the bench folds up as a roof.

Sabra Boyd commented about the Seattle sculpture of “Homeless Jesus” appearing to sleep on a bench – which prevents a real homeless person from sleeping there.

Fionna O’Leary linked to her thread about how Helsinki handles homelessness – they’re put into city owned housing. The city has 60,000 social housing units. It also runs its own construction company. Each district of the city must have a strict mix of social and private housing to limit social segregation. It also insists on no visible external differences between public and private housing.

That linked to an article by John Henley in The Guardian about what Helsinki did. The city leaders realized that shelters and short-term hostels were not getting people out of homelessness.
As in many countries, homelessness in Finland had long been tackled using a staircase model: you were supposed to move through different stages of temporary accommodation as you got your life back on track, with an apartment as the ultimate reward.

“We decided to make the housing unconditional,” says [program leader Juha] Kaakinen. “To say, look, you don’t need to solve your problems before you get a home. Instead, a home should be the secure foundation that makes it easier to solve your problems.”
Sleeping on the street is now rare. But just giving people a home doesn’t work. Most need a large number of services for addictions, mental health issues, and medical conditions. Some need to relearn basic life skills.

Finland spent 250 million euros creating these new homes and hiring 300 more support workers. But savings in emergency healthcare, social services, and the justice system saves 15,000 euros for each person now in properly supported housing. However, this means the city actually must have the housing.

There is also the preventive side. There are teams to help tenants from being evicted and becoming homeless.

Living my best life

My plan for New Year’s Eve: About 11:50 I’ll find a livestream of Times Square. 12:00 I’ll watch the ball drop. 12:02 I’ll shut down the livestream, turn off the computer, and go to bed.



The English Department of Lake Superior State University has released their 45th annual list of words that should be banished due to misuse, overuse, and general uselessness. The first list, published on Jan. 1, 1976 was entirely created by the faculty of LSSU. Since then the list has been made up from nominations from around the world. Excerpts from this year’s list:

Quid pro quo. Most nominated.

Curated. An attempt at making something more than it is. Barb of Ann Arbor says, “Save it for the museum.”

Influencer. According to Urban Dictionary, “A word Instagram users use to describe themselves to make them feel famous and more important when no one really knows who they are or care.”

Literally. A word that has begun to serve as its own antonym. It is being overused to add emphasis to a figurative expression.

Living my best life. Are there options for multiple lives?

Sunday, December 29, 2019

You deserve the truth

I read through another Gaslit Nation podcast transcript. There are a couple new ones that look interesting, but the transcripts aren’t online yet. This one, from December 11, is titled Christopher Steele and Ivanka Trump. I’m sure the hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa will pull in a few other issues as well.

At the time this podcast was released the House was introducing two articles of impeachment against the nasty guy. That timing prompted Kendzior to start off by discussing several other things the nasty guy should be impeached for: obstruction of justice (as laid out in the Mueller Report), abuse of migrants at the border, abuse of the pardoning power, and more. She laments how much time has been wasted before we got to this point and how much danger that puts us in:
The Trump crime cult did not waste that time. They used it to pack courts, purge agencies, create propaganda narratives, target private citizens, form stronger relationships with other autocratic regimes, and exploit every Democratic weakness and flaw, including the Democratic donor classes' blind trust in institutions and their refusal to think of the American people first.

This is a very sad day for our country, not just for the damage that has been done, but for how much of it was predictable and therefore somewhat preventable.
Chalupa thinks the Democrats are doing something right with narrow articles of impeachment, even though books can be written about the multitude of crimes for which the nasty guy should be impeached. What the Dems are doing right is speaking the enemy’s language. Conservatives have been united behind strong support for democracy in Ukraine. It is a good move to focus impeachment on a violation of that support. So when Republicans, contrary to their earlier steadfast support of Ukraine, now start spouting Kremlin talking points they are admitting to the crime of being a Kremlin patsy.

Kendzior is skeptical because this does not get at the root of the crisis in that the nasty guy is tied to the Russian mafia.

However, says Chalupa, the focus on Ukraine can be used to get at the rest of the story. The Dems can hold hearings on such things as how blood money works in Ukraine. Then go on about the strength of the rule of law, how the Kremlin takes advantage and weakens our national security, how political parties are being co-opted by the Kremlin, how golden handcuffs work, how much money is hidden abroad, and more. It’s enough to keep hearings going until just before the 2020 election. It should be a televised marathon on how our own corruption was used against us.

Chalupa adds that the Dems don’t want to do that because they benefit from the same system, though not nearly as much as the GOP.

About these continuous investigations Kendzior said:
The goal should be transparency. The goal should be rooting out corruption. The goal should be preserving election integrity. It should be delivering the truth, the full truth, to the American public because they deserve it. You deserve the truth. Don't settle for crumbs.

A new report by the inspector general of the Department of Justice says that Paul Manafort was under FBI investigation since the spring of 2016. Manafort has been a significant Kremlin tool in hijacking American democracy and became the nasty guy’s campaign manager in July 2016. It was appropriate for the FBI to be investigating Manafort back then because his crimes, including money laundering and tax evasion, go back decades. So the question: Why did the FBI allow a known Kremlin associate to be the manager of a campaign for president? Why was James Comey, head of the FBI at the time, not holding press conferences about that and instead going after Hillary Clinton, who had a private server because she knew government servers were getting hacked. This was a massive intelligence failure.

Another aspect of that is troubling: A number of former FBI directors, including Louis Freeh and William Sessions, went on to represent the Russian Mafia and its main players. Kendzior has a book coming out in April about some of these crimes, but she says we would need a book a month to cover each participant in this transnational crime syndicate. That shows the extent of this network and the magnitude of their crimes.

All that stuff on Manafort was in the public domain. Chalupa started tweeting about him in 2013 based on information on his Wikipedia page. Shortly after that Ukraine invited the FBI to investigate what happened to the tens of billions of dollars that deposed president Victor Yanukovich stole on his way out the door. If one is investigating Yanukovich, one is also investigating the people around him, such as Manafort.

Putin has made it known for quite a while now that in his opinion he is allowed to meddle in the affairs of any other country. But no one is allowed to meddle in Russia’s affairs. So like a despot. That idea is being extended to the nasty guy. And Attorney General William Barr and his henchmen are now acting like enforcers against what’s left of our intelligence agencies: if you dare to do anything that might remotely hold the Trump Crime Family accountable, we’ll come after you. And this intimidation is being done in plain sight.

We’re in this current mess because of the savior syndrome. If things are really that bad someone must be doing something about it. Which means the world is being destroyed because everyone assumes somebody else is saving it. So stand up for yourself. No one is coming. There isn’t a magical fix. Even if the nasty guy is removed there is still the corrupt GOP, the packed courts, the purged agencies and the gutted State Department, the Kremlin, and Saudi Arabia. That transnational crime network is still out there.

A way out of the savior syndrome is to talk to a teen. They see the current situation – climate change and the nasty guy – more clearly, they don’t have false expectations.

I’m three quarters of the way through the transcript before I get to the part that gave this episode its title. Christopher Steele is best known for the Steele Dossier. I got lost in exactly what this podcast says what that was. So I looked it up.

Steele is a counterintelligence specialist and a former head of the Russia Desk for British Intelligence MI6. Steele wrote a 35 page compilation of raw intelligence about the cooperation between Russia and the nasty guy campaign in 2016. The report was written for the private investigative form Fusion GPS, which had been contracted to do opposition research on GOP candidates. It was published by *BuzzFeed News* on January 10, 2017, only 10 days before the inauguration. Some of the allegations in the report have been verified, such as Putin actively favored the nasty guy over Clinton, others not. Details (lots of details) here.

Steele was accused of being biased against the nasty guy. He said that was ridiculous because he had a personal relationship with a member of the Trump family. We now know that member was Ivanka.

Ivanka’s job at the moment has two parts: (1) actually keep the crime syndicate running in preparation for taking over from her father and (2) gloss over all this crime by looking and sounding non threatening. She’s been doing rather well escaping scrutiny.

So Steele and Ivanka first met around 2007 and stayed in touch since then (though Steele is in hiding now). From what’s known now it seems Ivanka considered recruiting him, but then figured he couldn’t be turned to the dark side. She saw he would eventually get her in trouble. And he did.

Kendzior reminds us to be wary of the term Russian oligarch. These people have no loyalty to Russia, only to the Kremlin. What we are facing with Russia isn’t a battle of nation-states.
This is a battle between a tiny group of billionaire elites with sadistic impulses, highly involved in money laundering from over all the world.

This is not a group that you can track by ethnicity or even by country of origin or anything like that. They work together. It is a transnational crime syndicate and its victims are everyone else. Its victims are governments. Its victims are private citizens. Its victims are ordinary people just trying to live their lives. That is what the West missed when the collapse of the Soviet Union happened. They got very cocky. They assumed they won. They assumed that Russia and other dictatorships from the newly-independent states of the former Soviet Union would seek to emulate the West in the same way that, for example, the Baltic states genuinely did. That was not true. Instead, they saw total lawlessness.

They saw an opportunity to carry out crime in plain sight and call it hyper capitalism, call it getting used to a new way of doing things.
It is up to us to unravel this mess. So stay engaged.

Everything is connected to hate

There is one more British Arrow commercial I want to mention. I didn’t mention it a couple days ago because it isn’t on the British Arrow website and I had forgotten about it. It was brought back to mind today. Since you can’t see it and I don’t remember a lot of details you will only get an overall description.

We see a face. It tells us right off it is computer generated, an avatar of the internet. It is asked what is connected to everything. The answer: Hate. The avatar proceeds to quickly go through a long list of things people describe as hating as images of those things are displayed over and around the avatar. A lot of people use social media to describe or promote their hatred. A lot of different kinds of things are hated by someone or another. So, yeah, hate is connected to everything.



Hunter of Daily Kos responds to a Washington Post article in which various GOP lawmakers whine about the federal deficit. The beginning, a bit of the middle, and end of Hunter’s message:
Can we please, please finally stop with this nonsense that Republicans are upset by deficits? At all? Even in the slightest?

The closest we come to the actual core point is from Senate Appropriations Committee chair Richard Shelby, who rather bluntly declares that we need to slash "entitlements" and if we can't do that, screw it, no point trying. Yes, there you go. We might as well have stopped there, that being the best encapsulation of the last fifty years of faked deficit nonsense from Republican big spenders. Take him at his word and go home; there’s no sense worrying about deficits at all if it’s not in the context of cutting aid to the poor.

Give it up. Just stop. Quit with this ever-gullible nonsense, this pamphleteering for a cause that self-promoting "deficit hawks" have never, when in power, used for any other purpose than to hurt children, seniors, and anyone else who dares ask for a bit of help that could instead be used by the ultra-rich to purchase private yacht-launched submarines or whatever the latest better-than-you trend is among the people who own their Republican lawmakers outright. Just stop already. We’ve had a long damn year and do not need to hear this nonsense.



Ben O’Keefe, in response to the stories about candidate Pete Buttigieg meeting with donors in a wine cave, tweeted:
There are 607 billionaires in America.

There are 328,000,000 people in America.

Right now those 607 people have more access and power in our democracy than the 328m combined.

This isn’t about the dollar amount that people donate; it’s about what they get in return.
Candidate Elizabeth Warren has challenged Mayor Pete. O’Keefe is on Warren’s side. In another tweet he shows an image from the Warren campaign that says, “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.” O’Keefe adds:
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. This isn’t about “purity tests.” This is about corruption. @ewarren is taking on corruption and you bet corrupt people are going to do everything they can to stop her—that’s how you know it’s working.
I understand privilege is something people high in the social hierarchy construct as something they are allowed to do and those lower in the hierarchy are not. It is a way of saying see how much better my life is compared to them! So when equality comes along and removes that privilege these people lose a way of oppressing others. To them that lack feels like they are being oppressed.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Reportorial neutrality no longer applies

Georgia Logothetis did a pundit roundup for Daily Kos. She quoted an article of Paul Krugman, who asks:
Why do a small number of rich people exert so much influence in what is supposed to be a democracy?
Yeah, it’s campaign contributions. It’s also the revolving door of lawmakers taking jobs in consulting firms and think tanks.

And it’s also the news media in which the “usual rules of reportorial neutrality” no longer apply when the subject is rich people and their opinions.



Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes another look at the problems of concentrated wealth.

First, he tackles a misconception pushed by the wealthy:
When Michael Bloomberg runs a commercial saying he “created 400,000 jobs,” it needs to be remembered that he didn’t create anything. He employed 400,000 people, all of whom contributed labor toward increasing Bloomberg’s wealth.
Then Sumner shows a graph of the wealth of the 15 wealthiest people in America compared to the cost of some large public projects. One of those projects is the Superconducting Super-Collider, something really important to researchers into atomic physics. But it was canceled mid construction because tax cuts shifted too much money from public projects to private pockets.
But we’re in an age in which the least wealthy person on this list, Mackenzie Bezos [at $36 billion], could pay for the invention of the first practical fusion reactor, the operation the Large Hadron Collider, and the building the Freedom Tower—and still be a billionaire. And she would then own everything of value that any of those projects produced.
I had to look up Freedom Tower. It is what replaced the World Trade Center in New York.

A reply by RETIII says that in the first gilded age (we’re now in the second) private wealth was much richer than the federal government. The gov’t had to go to private sources to pay for a war or to recover from a Wall Street crash. That has shifted, where the government funds the war and the market recovery.
Properly understood then, the mania against taxes on the Right is not simply about retaining money but restoring power to the wealthy class away from democratic government. A second gilded age is precisely the goal, not a side effect.
As for that infrastructure week that hasn’t happened for three years RETIII says the holdup is Republican ideologues want to put public assets in private hands, so wealth can be generated from them. It’s a dispute about ownership.

Health care for the fetus

One of the blogs I read reminded me that the Bulwer-Lytton contest winners were announced several months ago. This contest, named in honor of the guy who coined, “It was a dark and stormy night,” awards those who come up with the worst opening sentence for a novel. A few of this year’s winners or dishonorable mentions:

From the Purple Prose category, submitted by Eric Mellinger of New York, NY:
Despite being a German, vegan book-cataloger from rural and upscale Connecticut, Marion was quite ignorant and overly opinionated about almost everything, except for Atlas Shrugged and atheism, which made her the embodiment of an Arian, vegetarian, ultracrepidarian-contrarian, non-sectarian, libertarian, librarian agrarian from Darien.
From Vile Puns, by David Franks, Fayetteville, AR:
Being a man of perspicacity, Alexander Graham Bell was able to treat his own stomach-ache (caused by eating three dozen raw oysters and a warm crock of sauerkraut on a bet) without the aid of his assistant, and when asked how he became ill, he would say only "Alimentary dare, Watson."
The winner of the Western category, by Stephanie Karnosh, Springboro OH
"Yeehaw, boys, and so long," called Eugene 'Bullettooth Dynamite' Jones as he rode off into the torrential downpour on his 32-inch-tall miniature horse, Kevin, hiding a frown because he knew deep down in his heart he had yeed his last haw.



On to serious matters.

The news magazine The Week has named Moscow Mitch the decade’s most consequential politician. That’s even over the nasty guy and President Obama. Their reasons:

* His refusal to do anything that might be seen as giving Obama a win. That includes refusing to allow a vote for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

* His work in holding federal judge positions empty under Obama and then rapidly filling them with far-right judges, several of them rated as not qualified.

* He has done nothing about foreign interference in our elections, and by his inaction he is inviting more of it.

Perhaps removing Moscow Mitch is more important to democracy than removing the nasty guy.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported on a study done by ProPublica and Vox about Texas having the highest rate of women without health insurance and the highest death rates for pregnant women and new mothers. One expert, Eugene Declercq at Boston University School of Public Health described it as…
the extreme example of a fragmented system that cares about women much more in the context of delivering a healthy baby than the mother's health in and of itself.
Some numbers: In Texas a woman qualifies for Medicaid if she makes less than about $320 a month. If she is pregnant she qualifies for Medicaid if she makes less than $3520 (if a family of three). But once the baby is born she likely loses Medicaid and then can’t afford to handle any complications a few months after birth.

In Texas a woman is only worth insuring if she’s pregnant. Put another way, the health care is for the fetus, not the woman.



Senator John Cornyn revealed what he and the GOP think about health insurance. He tweeted:

In 2017, the prices paid to hospitals for privately insured patients averaged 241 percent of what Medicare would have paid.
He was asked, so what’s the solution?

His answer: “Not Medicare for All.”

Translation: The GOP has no solution. Because the health care industry, his donors, would make less money. Because they would not be able to put their profits over the lives of their patients.



I had written about an editorial in Christianity Today in which they called for the removal of the nasty guy because of his bad character. Yeah, the lost subscribers. And gained three times the number they lost.

Friday, December 27, 2019

We’d rather get paid

I had an enjoyable afternoon at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mostly went through the current special exhibits, then attended the Detroit Film Theatre.

* Ending soon is Humble and Human, three rooms of impressionist art from the DIA and a gallery in Buffalo. There are two to three paintings each from some of the big names of that era – Van Gogh, Renior, Gaugin – and a few other names I hadn’t heard of before. I noticed that a few of these artists, like Van Gogh, died in their 30s.

* The big exhibit at the moment is Detroit Collects, art from black Detroit artists purchased by Detroit residents. These works are from private collections and rarely seen in public. There was some really cool stuff.

* Perhaps the most famous painting in the DIA is The Wedding Dance by Peter Breugel, Elder. It was painted about 1560. It shows a village of people dancing in honor of the new couple. It has been moved to a special exhibit along with displays of how the DIA came to own it, what conservators found when they did some restoration work (a few of the men’s codpieces had been painted out), how Breugel worked (the scene was sketched before being painted), and where some of his materials came from (the red pigment came from Central American bugs), and that the top two inches of the painting are not original.

* The photography exhibit has photos of scenes around the Great Lakes by Jeff Gaydash. He took long exposure photos so things that moved (waves, sky) were blurry and stationary things (old dock timbers) were in sharp focus.

Supper at the cafe, then off to the DFT show, which was the British Arrows. I’ve posted about them before. These are the British commercials that are recognized for outstanding quality or content. So yeah, one pays admission and goes into a theater to watch commercials for 75 minutes. But there is this British sense about them that make them different and worth watching. Since I watch very little American TV I can’t say how different. The commercials are all on the British Arrows website. I’ll mention the ones that I appreciated.

* Bronze: Secret deodorant presents a lively song and dance. A woman sings that a female empowerment ballad is nice but we’d rather get paid the same as men.

* Silver: Trolling is ugly. A young woman posted a photo of herself online and waited for the trolls to attack. It didn’t take long. Whatever they said she needed to do to look acceptable, her team photoshopped her image to comply – skinnier arms, narrower waist, broader hips, bigger lips, and so on – and updated the online image. The result was quite ugly.

* Silver: 100 years. As the voice says women can’t do this and this and this we are shown images of women doing each of those things. This is in honor of 100 years since women were given the vote in Britain.

* Craft Gold: As characters sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow we see various LGBTQ people being accepted for who they are. There is Pride in London, but still more work to be done.

* A young man trains for the sport of synchronized swimming. How did he get into an all female sport? He never asked.

* And gold for the really gutsy: Viva La Vulva.

Thursday, December 26, 2019

Propaganda deluge

I read the transcript of another Gaslit Nation podcast episode, this one titled The Endgame. This podcast is put out weekly. I wait for the transcript of an episode to be available – and sometimes I wait a lot longer (and even miss episodes) because, while they’re important, reading about the attacks on democracy can be depressing and so are frequently avoided. To prove my point, this episode is from December 4.

The hosts of the podcast are Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior. Kendzior studies authoritarian regimes. In the first part of this episode Chalupa talked about her international travel in November. She wrote and produced the movie Mr. Jones about a journalist trying to document the genocidal famine Stalin caused in Ukraine. The movie will come to America sometime next year. In November it was shown at selected venues in Europe, one of those being Ukraine, and Chalupa attended many of the showings.

Through this recitation of her itinerary Chalupa makes an important point. This movie and documentaries of today’s unrest are critical. As regimes in Syria and Russia tighten control these films show the truth. They help prevent the tyrants from whitewashing events.

Kendzior added there is a danger that these films, and a lot of digital archives, will be lost because tyrants want them to be lost. Truth matters. One quality that can link us together is the pursuit of truth.

They wander down another side topic. Chalupa’s sister Alexandra back in 2016 tried telling everyone (and alas, few listened) that Paul Manafort (now in jail) was Putin’s operative. And if Manafort was running the nasty guy campaign, it meant the Kremlin was running the campaign.

Because of that, other Russian assets have been trying to discredit Alexandra. During the impeachment hearings Devin Nunes brought up her name a lot. He always referred to her as a Democratic operative (she was not) and tried to get various witnesses to support his attacks.

Andrea responded to the mess. She notes that journalism is shrinking. We have a smaller watchdog. The jobs that remain are predominantly white and male. So we get a lot of news through a privileged white male lens and that comes with an echo chamber. The attacks and threats against Alexandra (and on Andrea because journalists don’t bother to tell them apart) is being treated like entertainment. They don’t look at the facts. They simply report on the propaganda indirectly pumped out by the Kremlin. Once mentioned by one lazy while male journalist others repeat the propaganda. And then they refuse to correct it.

But even the GOP has looked into the hit pieces on Alexandra and found nothing there.

So, after more than half the transcript, on to the topic of the episode – the impeachment hearings and the various witnesses. This podcast came out well before the House approved articles of impeachment.

Alexander Vindman told a bit of his personal history. He is from Ukraine. His parents were born in refugee camps. They fled the Soviet Union when he was 3½. He understands what happens if the nasty guy steals another election. He knows he is targeted. He has testified at great risk to himself and his family. His testimony should carry that much more weight and power.

Chalupa says that if that second election is stolen the floodgates will be opened and it will be a horror. The defense against it is community. So get involved locally. Make your state as blue as possible.

Marie Yovanovitch is also from Ukraine. Both because of where she was born and also because of where she’s done her public service she’s seen how brutal authoritarian regimes can be. She also knows, once they gain power, how hard it is to get rid of them. Kendzior notes that the parents of Vindman and Yovanovich came to America for safety, only to have the horror follow them. And now there is nowhere in the world for her to be safe.

Kendzior adds:
Democratic leaders claim they want to limit the scope of impeachment proceedings to Trump's 2019 Ukraine shakedown, but that's both impossible and insulting. The 2019 Ukraine shakedown is a continuation of the 2016 election heist, which was a continuation of Trump's lifelong deference to the Kremlin and his schemes with corrupt actors from the former USSR. Limiting the impeachment scope does a grave disservice to people like Yovanovitch, whose lives are in danger by the unwillingness of officials to examine crimes in context, and the refusal of institutions to hold perpetrators accountable.
Telling the truth is important because the propaganda jeopardizes people’s lives.

Kendzior again:
We're up against a propaganda deluge, and we're up against just incredible abuse of power and an unwillingness still among the Democrats to admit how dire things are and how high the stakes are, and that there's just not room for error.
They cycle back to the way journalists have treated Alexandra, noting that journalists are not immune from the propaganda deluge. And because the GOP has cleared her it means when GOP members now talk about her it is because they’re reading from a list of talking points that likely originated in the Kremlin. And that means those GOP members are likely compromised by Russia. Which for Devin Nunes has been shown to be true.

Speaking of the nasty guy Kendzior said:
He also needs to be impeached for other crimes, like abuse of migrants at the border, abuse of the pardon power. These are very serious offenses, and they need to be stopped now, the abuse of migrants at the border, the separation of families needs to be stopped now, but we also need to set a precedent, because if we're ever going to get out of this, if there's going to be another president, they need to not have this ability to look back at this time and shrug and be like, "Well, Congress said it was okay," or, "This is an acceptable pattern of behavior."

Because what people are going to remember in decades from now is not going to be the minutiae of the Ukraine transcript of Trump's little conversation with Zelensky. What they're going to remember is that children died in cages on the border of Texas and Mexico. They're going to remember that breastfeeding infants were wrenched out of their mothers' arms and taken away, and then that parent was deported, and the people just sat back and they did nothing, and they let it happen and they said, "Oh, we don't want to get into a partisan dispute," or, "Oh, we need to just focus on one issue for impeachment."
Kendzior expands into the world situation:
We're guided by a transnational crime syndicate that has infiltrated multiple governments. You're seeing it in the UK, you're seeing it now in France where you see Macron basically capitulating to Putin over NATO. We saw in Poland, in Hungary, we see it in Turkey, we see it in longstanding authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, we see it in states like Israel where Netanyahu will simply not leave despite his indictments. It's this consolidation of corruption, and it has very real human consequences. As people go on about, "Oh, will Ukraine catch on with Americans?" Ukrainians are dying and have been for half a decade, since Russia invaded Crimea and then began to escalate its war because of the failure of the West to step in.

That failure of the West, it's the same in Syria, it's the same in Ukraine, and eventually it will be the same in the West as we get devoured from within by complicit actors. And that is one of the reasons it is so important for the propaganda and the narratives that are allowing these atrocities to take place to kind of go under the radar, even though that seems almost impossible because they're so horrific, you would think everyone would be watching them, they get glossed over. They become political talking points instead of crises that humanity should be addressing.
All of what Chalupa and Kendzior are doing it to prevent the nasty guy’s endgame.

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Community weavers

I visited my sisters and their families, just five of us, for Christmas. It was a quiet and pleasant afternoon.

Over the last few days I’ve gotten quite tired of hearing Christmas carols on the radio. I enjoy classical music with a Christmas theme, such as Hodie by Ralph Vaughn Williams. But yesterday, in honor of the 201st anniversary of the first performance, my radio station aired a different performance of Silent Night each hour. By the time I turned the radio off I had heard that carol 7 times. I then sang it once more at last night’s Christmas Eve service.

So instead of listening to more Christmas music on the way to my sister’s house I switched to the NPR show The 1A. This episode was a rebroadcast, hosted by Joshua Johnson who is on his way to MSNBC.

The show featured four people described as Weavers, people who are trying to weave together American life, to build community. Each of the four heads a nonprofit organization. The discussion was held at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Dylan Tête is a West Point graduate and served a combat tour in Iraq. Once home he experienced many of the problems returning vets have with traumatic brain injuries. He searched for a solution and found part of it in a group home for veterans.

He developed that into a full solution Рthe Bastion Community of Resilience. They created 58 homes on a 5.5 acre site in Louisiana. With the veterans he invited civilians to join the community along with professional staff. The campus is designed so that normal daily activities, such as getting the mail, bring a person in contact with neighbors and a chance to be asked: How are you doing today? This is intentional neighboring. This one has worked so well that T̻te is looking for sites for more Bastion Communities.

Alejandro Gibes de Gac is the son of immigrants. As he learned the regular school curriculum he also learned how much influence his parents had on his education. After college he began teaching first grade in northern Philadelphia. This is a poor section of town and the school system treated low-income parents as a liability rather than as partners in a child’s education.

He founded the Springboard Collaborative. His reasoning was that he had the child for about a quarter of the child’s waking day. The people with the most influence over the other ¾ was the parents. He recognized that many parents were reluctant to help their children learn to read because they were illiterate. So the Collaborative trains parents on how to support and teach a reading child and trains teachers to be more engaged with families. They are now at 55 sites across the country.

Gibes de Gac was asked how does he deal with the negative perceptions of people announcing they’re here to help. He says he turns it around. The teachers go to the parents and say I need your help.

Sarah Hemminger founded Thread, an organization that works with underperforming high school students in Baltimore. The group harnesses the power of relationships to create a social fabric to support students. The volunteers, who are called Thread Family Members do whatever it takes. It could be as simple as packing a lunch and picking up the student to make sure they get to class. It also involves linking the student to other resources. It could also be a lot more. Of the students who have been a part of Thread for six years, 85% have graduated high school and 83% have completed a 2 or 4 year college program.

Asiaha Butler lived in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. She saw a little girl playing in the dirt in a vacant lot across the street from her home. She contrasted that with the resources children had in richer neighborhoods. Butler got to the point where she either needed to leave or do something. She started volunteering in as many neighborhood groups she could. That got her connected to other like-minded people. And that grew into the Resident Association of Greater Englewood or RAGE. They now have enough influence that City Hall listens to them. One thing that came out of that was a way for residents to adopt nearby vacant lots and do something productive.

These stories of building community were a great addition to a Christmas morning drive.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

The durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys

What determines “biological sex?” Some people want others to conform to their definitions of sex. This definitely a supremacy move to enforce male dominance and punish those that want to switch genders. But what test to apply?

Rebecca Helm describes herself as a “friendly neighborhood biologist,” though she is a professor at the University of North Carolina. She works through what makes us look male or female.

We’re used to the XX chromosome as what creates a female and XY as what creates a male. But it is really just one gene on the Y chromosome that turns on all the male traits. And sometimes that gene shows up on an X chromosome and not on the Y chromosome.

There’s more. Even with this single male gene other genes signal how much sex hormones to produce and still others determine how receptive cells are to these hormones.

One could have the XY chromosome, not have the male trigger gene, yet still produce a lot of testosterone, but whose cells aren’t sensitive to that hormone.

So is this person male? Female? Both? Neither?

Let’s just call them all human – and worthy of respect.

A reply included a chart from Scientific American that shows all the permutations. Alas, the print is small and hard to read.



Peggy Orenstein wrote the article The Miseducation of the American Boy for the January/February 2020 issue of The Atlantic. She spent two years talking to more than 100 boys ages 16-21 all across America. Though she talked to boys of all races and ethnicities she talked only to those in college or who were college-bound because they are most likely to set cultural norms.

These boys showed a huge shift from the norms of 50 or maybe only 20 years ago. They know what *toxic masculinity* is. Yet, when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy” they used the standard cultural definitions – dominance, aggression, sexual prowess, stoicism, and all the rest.

While girls see many ways of being a girl (though still valued primarily for appearance), these boys described only one route to successful masculinity. They felt they needed to “suck it up,” to control girlfriends, be ever ready for sex with as many women as possible, and to shun homosexuality (even as they have gay friends).
While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

This definition of masculinity wasn’t always the active one. In the late 19th century, when we still worked from home a man was compassionate and a caretaker. But as paid labor came from the factory those traits lost favor. During WWI women showed they could keep the home front humming. Shortly after that they got the vote. In response leaders emphasized the inalienable male right to power.

Now parents are unsure how to raise sons. That leads to a void that the culture of dominance gladly fills. However, this stunted masculinity yardstick is the way boys are measured.

Cole (names are pseudonyms) prefers to team up with girls on school projects to avoid appearing subordinate to another guy. He couldn’t discuss much of anything with his divorced father.

Rob can’t talk to his father either. He’s always told to “man up.” He gets the message if you can’t handle this on your own you’re not a man. He learned to confide in nobody. He had to keep his guard up.

Well, confide in nobody male. They boys confided in girlfriends, mothers, and sisters. But that teaches them that women are responsible for processing men’s emotional lives, which would be too emasculating for them to do themselves. Crying is seen as humiliating. Men can become unable to express emotions and be ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.

Sports culture, now known as “bro culture,” teaches pride, integrity, teamwork, and bonding – with those on the team. Those not on the team – such as women – are the enemy. Masculinity is established through misogyny and homophobia.

The word fag, long a pejorative against gay men, doesn’t get used against gay men, but more a referendum on a boy’s manhood. Adding no homo to a sentence is an inoculation against insults from other guys. That doesn’t mean gay boys are safe. But any boy who isn’t a jock isn’t safe either.

Bragging about sexual conquest is a crucial aspect of toxic masculinity. At 16 reputation is everything. But the need to brag makes boys afraid of intimacy. They need to prove themselves, they need to dominate. The girl – and it can’t be a “slutty” girl – is only a means to brag. And gossip about a poor “performance” can destroy a boy’s reputation.

A boy’s words to describe a sexual encounter to other boys tend to use violent language – nail, pound, bang, and others.
It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.
When called out, boys will claim they were being “funny.” But such humor hides sexism. And can escalate. When they get to “hilarious” they’re learning to disregard others’ feelings. And when decency compels them to speak up they become the target of derision.
The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. Charis Denison, a sex educator in the Bay Area, puts it another way: “At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?”

It is time to rethink how we raise boys. Obviously. But …
it’s a mistake to underestimate the strength and durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys. Real change will require a sustained, collective effort on the part of fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches. (A study of 2,000 male high-school athletes found significantly reduced rates of dating violence and a greater likelihood of intervening to stop other boys’ abusive conduct among those who participated in weekly coach-led discussions about consent, personal responsibility, and respectful behavior.)
Note that those discussions were coach-led. Which, at the very least, means the coaches were not urging the boys to be misogynistic, they were not part of the problem.

Cole wants to be part of the solution, even though he failed to stand up for good when younger. He said about the culture of misogyny:
To go up against that, to convince people that we don’t need to put others down to lift ourselves up … I don’t know. I would need to be some sort of superman. Maybe the best I can do is to just be a decent guy. The best I can do is lead by example. I really hope that will make a difference.

Friday, December 20, 2019

Concentrating wealth in fewer hands

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos shares a progressive economic plan. Here’s part of it:
* Individual wealth capped at $600 million.
* Annual income capped at $12 million.
* Inheritance capped at $60 million.
* $24K basic income for all Americans.
* Universal health care.
Huey Long, senator from Louisiana and potential candidate for president, created that plan in 1934 (numbers adjusted for inflation).

But Long wasn’t a socialist or communist – and in 1934 real socialists and communist were a factor in America. Long was a capitalist, one who understood both the benefits and harms of capitalism. Sumner wrote:
Long’s plan was just not within what we’ve allowed to become a very, very narrow view of capitalism that treats every alternative as a threat.
Alternatives are a threat to the supremacist goals of those currently at the top of the capitalism hierarchy.
The version of capitalism deployed across the western world in 2019, and the system impressed on up-and-coming economies everywhere, reflects only an extremely small portion of the possible spectrum. The ideas that the system promotes—about the value of the wealthy for “job creation,” about the value of investment vs. labor, about the brilliance of the unfettered “free market”—aren’t just untested … those ideas are proven failures.

Capitalism, as it exists in the United States and most of the world today, is an engine which has been exquisitely refined for the purpose of gathering wealth and concentrating it in fewer hands. Then it takes the wealth from those, and concentrates it into fewer still. Repeat until 600 billionaires have everything. Then keep repeating.

The astounding thing is that supporters of this system have sold this repeated failure so well, that many “serious people” now pretend that it’s not just right, but the *only* possible plan.
There was a time when what we have today was definitely not the plan. It was a time of genuine widening of the middle class and broad growth for all income levels.

Long believed there could be personal wealth, but not unlimited personal wealth. The economy could grow without giving more to those who already have a lot. We can have capitalism and democracy by getting rid of the parts of the system that do not work. We can build something better.
A capitalism that works for more people. A capitalism that inspires hope for more people. A capitalism that generates more entrepreneurs, more innovation, more advances, more genuine wealth … without putting that wealth in fewer hands.

The amount of genuine wealth available in the United States today is such that it could genuinely usher in a “post scarcity society.” The kind of society in which everyone has the ability to pursue dreams and innovations because chasing those dreams doesn’t mean putting their family in enormous risk. That the kind of society whose potential is almost incomprehensible.
I like Elizabeth Warren’s plans to tax the wealthy. But compared to the plans put forth by Huey Long, she’s rather timid.

A trial without charges

I reported yesterday that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she will not send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until they clarify how the trial will proceed. The nasty guy tweeted a solution (I’ll leave all the rage out of my summary): Hold the trial without the articles of impeachment. If the Democrats don’t show up they lose by default!

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos says, well, no. This isn’t intramural volleyball. But the nasty guy and Moscow Mitch are already proposing a trial without evidence. So what difference is there in having a trial without charges? It’s not like anyone is going to mistake the process for fair.



Brooklyn Dad Defiant! tweeted:
It is a damn lie that DEMs spent the first 3 years trying to impeach trump.

We spent the first 2 years fighting him off of our Healthcare and putting kids in cages.

Then we won the House in 2018 and passed 400 bills.

He just spent his first 3 years being very impeachable.

Anything we say about justice and righteousness

The evangelical magazine Christianity Today has called for the removal of the nasty guy. Excerpts:
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.
...
Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?
I object to abortion being called a great evil, though I like his argument. Another bit:
To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.
Of course, this brought on a flurry of rage-tweeting from the nasty guy.

This is an important evangelical voice and I’m glad they said it. But, alas, this is only one evangelical voice. Most evangelicals remain firmly in support of the nasty guy. They want supremacy and he is offering it.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Testimony might contain facts

I get emails from a few progressive organizations. Most of them, alas, either ask for money or ask me to sign a petition (and it seems all they accomplish is add me to more email lists). I also read a couple progressive sources and they frequently get quoted and linked here.

Over the last couple months, once the impeachment process geared up, a frequent sentiment in these sources was that the House should vote on articles of impeachment but never actually send them on to the Senate. All the Senate was going to do – as Moscow Mitch told us repeatedly – was exonerate the nasty guy. Then the nasty guy could launch into the 2020 campaign saying those Democrats harmed the country because he had done nothing wrong and the Senate acquittal proves that.

So those progressive emails urged me to tell Speaker Nancy Pelosi to not forward the articles of impeachment, instead to keep investigating and add more articles as appropriate.

Maybe she was listening. This morning Pelosi announced a delay. When articles of impeachment are handed over to the Senate the people doing the handing over are the House members who will serve as floor managers. Pelosi has said she can’t tell who those floor managers should be until the Senate decides what kind of trial there will be.

The Senate and Moscow Mitch are still deciding whether there will be witnesses. The nasty guy wants a circus – all the people he considers an enemy brought in for roasting. As Mark Sumner of Daily Kos put it:
That’s the point where not only Republican senators, but McConnell himself, are having trouble. Not because they are concerned about having circus that breaks with Senate decorum. But because witnesses have a tendency to provide testimony, and testimony might contain facts.

That’s the only thing McConnell definitely does not want.

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos thinks Pelosi’s maneuver is genius. It puts Moscow Mitch in a bind. It also gives Pelosi and Democrats leverage in the trial, something to which they would normally have no input.

Moscow Mitch put on a 30 minute rant from the Senate floor doing all sorts of projecting – accusing Democrats of doing what he intends to do. In response, Pelosi observed the Founding Fathers provided a way to deal with a rogue president. But, “I don't think they suspected we could have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.”

A few excerpts from Eleveld’s article:
McConnell is now caught between Trump, who is desperate for Senate acquittal, and his vulnerable GOP senators, who at the very least need the appearance of a fair trial to paper over the reality that they’re simply a rubber stamp for Trump.
...
Pelosi has put McConnell's “greatest strength” [exercising raw power] on trial for the American people to judge in 2020. And, based on the polling, nearly everyone outside of Trump's cultists is predisposed to side with Democrats.

Pelosi gets this, and she also knows that the longer she waits to transmit those articles, the worse it gets for McConnell. Trump will get absolutely rabid in his desire for acquittal, making vulnerable GOP senators even more anxious. And the more time that passes, the greater the likelihood of good court rulings that put more documents and witnesses in the offing. Refusing to take them up will only make McConnell look more partisan, more unfair, and more unfaithful to democracy. So Pelosi might take a bit to transmit those articles to the Senate.
This could take a while to play out. Which is good.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

A definition of “choice”

Wendell Potter was once a part of the health care insurance industry and describes himself as a “reformed insurance propagandist.” He’s annoyed with Democratic politicians defending the current insurance systems, saying it preserves “choice.” But he helped draft that talking point and he came clean in a Twitter thread.

That talking point was developed because the current system has a lack of choice – one can’t pick just any doctor without huge “out of network” bills. In addition, employers offer only “high deductible” or “higher deductible” plans. A lack of choice there too.

So the goal was to muddy the definition of choice, to get people to believe that any reforms at all would be “less choice.” There was even a campaign “My Care, My Choice” to mislead people to think they had a lot of choice within their restrictive plans.

Potter is annoyed with Democrats because they are using “choice” against each other – a cause for celebration among his old colleagues. But plans such as Medicare for All do expand choice – if every patient and every doctor is in the system and there is no “out of network” then one can choose any doctor.

Potter concludes:
So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve "choice," either they don't know what they're talking about - or they're willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way.

Witch hunt

I got an email today from the team that organized yesterday’s protest I was a part of in Ferndale. They said the attendance was 600! And the protest went for two hours – so at least a half-hour after I left (depending how one sets the start time).

Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos created a post with tweets from the rallies. It includes a tweet from Tom Chapman with a collection of his favorite signs. Some of them:

* BOGUS POTUS.

* Good News! Mexico will pay 4 the impeachment!

* I am a Witch on a hunt for Justice! [see the next item]



The nasty guy has been calling the impeachment proceedings a “witch hunt” and variations of that phrase. He even claimed those accused of being witches had more due process than he’s getting. Kim Driscoll, Mayor of Salem, Mass., knows a thing or two about witch hunts – it comes with the job – and she’s getting a lot of notice – and an interview on CNN – for trying to teach the nasty guy some history.

Knowing about witch hunts comes with the job of mayor of Salem because (for those who forget their history), there were 200 trials of witches in Salem in 1692, resulting in executions of 20. She tweeted:
Oy vey...again
Learn some history:
1) Salem 1692 = absence of evidence+powerless, innocent victims were hanged or pressed to death

2)#Ukrainegate 2019 = ample evidence, admissions of wrongdoing+perpetrators are among the most powerful+privileged
Mayor Driscoll is getting a lot of support of descendants of those accused and killed, and of those who played Elizabeth Proctor in school productions of The Crucible.

In another tweet the mayor quoted another response:
Additionally, sorcery is not being used as evidence in the impeachment inquiry, and the sentence is not death.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Kalispell to Bar Harbor to San Antonio

Since the House of Representatives has scheduled a vote on whether to impeach the nasty guy for tomorrow, rallies in support of impeachment were held this evening. They were organized by Move On, Indivisible, Public Citizen, and many more.

I took part in one in the suburb of Ferndale. When they were first announced this one was closest. The start time was 5:30, though protesters were gathering before 5:00. We were along both sides of Woodward Ave (Detroit’s main street that extends into the burbs) just north of Nine Mile, so downtown Ferndale. I stayed on the east side and could see the crowd on the west side extended at least a block. I think my side also extended at least a block, but I couldn't see to be sure.

We held signs that could be read by the traffic on Woodward Ave. Since it was already after sunset some signs even had lights around them. One sign called for the removal of “Benedict Donald.” A guy near me held up a copy of the Mueller Report book.

A lot of the cars that passed us honked in support, so it was rather noisy. The chants (some led by bullhorn), drums, and cowbells added to the din.

A reporter and cameraman from CNN talked to three men near me for several minutes. If you happen to see it I’m probably in the background, just past one of the men’s shoulders. Occasionally wiping my nose.

But it wasn’t very warm, just below freezing. I managed to hold out for almost an hour. They seemed to still be going strong when I left. Alas, I didn’t take pictures. I had left the camera in the car. Besides, it was dark. A few people took pictures of me and my sign, so I’m likely on social media somewhere.

This was only one of such events across the country. The Move On Twitter feed has pictures from many of them. In looking through the feed I see photos and videos from (in whatever order I saw them) Detroit, NYC, Portland, Phoenix, Riverside, CA, Fort Lauderdale. Boston, Philly, Chicago, Madison, Montgomery County, TX, Morris, MN, Healdsburg, Lexington, San Rafael, Denver, West Palm Beach, Boulder, Seattle, Minot, San Francisco, Bar Harbor, Raleigh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Dayton, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, St. Paul, Kalispell, Cleveland, San Antonio, Austin, San Jose, Tucson, Lansing, Omaha, Birmingham, Huntsville, Louisville, Knoxville, St. Petersburg, Jackson Hole, Reno, Houston, Los Angeles, Kansas City, New Orleans, Springfield, MA, and even Dems Abroad in Toronto.

Stand Up America says that 200,000 people had signed up to attend the protests.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Evil, illegal, and logical

The quote of the day for December 1:
Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
~~Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy, 2008



Candidate Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly called out the excesses of billionaires and how their wealth hijacks democracy. Eric Boehlert of the Daily Kos community asks an important question: Why is our media so obsessed with what billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren? Boehlert lists more than a half-dozen such news articles. He then notes:
The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don't. It's reminiscent of the media's 2016 campaign obsession with coal miners, followed close by its obsession with those who have manufacturing jobs, which sent the obvious signal that white working-class male voters were the ones who counted the most.



There’s been recent talk about why, well before the 2016 election, the FBI and CIA didn’t know or act on information that the nasty guy was a Russian asset? Twitter user Benjamin Franklin linked to a Buzzfeed article and asked:
What if the bad guys had already hollowed our defenses by 2016 so they were powerless to stop it? Something like this, except with the alphabet boys. Would that make more sense or less sense of the world?

Maybe the reason why the NYT ran 100 HRC email stories and zero Trump mafia/Epstein stories was because the bad guys were already inside the media industry helping make 2016 happen?

Does that make the world make more sense or less sense?



This Benjamin Franklin looked at social media analytics and saw that the far right is growing now as it did in 2015. And in these tweets “they” is Big Tech.
I believe that they are deliberately allowing this to happen, a belief only furthered by the fact that Zuckerberg accepted Russian oligarch money, that the google guys belonged to Epstein's billionaire society - a gateway to the international crime syndicate.

The amount of revenue they get from allowing this activity is peanuts. The danger of allowing far right content to thrive is proven. And yet these companies seem to bend over backwards to preserve the content leading to radicalization.



When current Attorney General William Barr showed that, in spite of his oath of office, he would do all he could to protect the nasty guy, people began to ask why Barr would be willing to take that hit on his reputation (which isn’t as sterling as people pretend it is). Sarah Kendzior tweeted a reply:
What's in it for Barr? A s---load of money and power, entrenchment in government with his family members who also benefit, resources with which to buffer his cohort from upcoming disasters like climate change, opportunity to fulfill sadistic fantasies for his crime cult, etc

Trump's entire life has consisted of breaking the law without repercussions, and Barr's entire life has been helping the GOP engage in corruption without repercussions, and they all got rich and more powerful. This was a logical gamble. Evil and illegal, but logical!



Steve Silberman is the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. He tweeted a thread in response to Greta Thunberg being named Time’s Person of the Year. A lot of reporting on Thunberg doesn’t include that she’s proudly autistic.
The "autistic" qualities of Greta's war on the status quo - her visceral distrust of rationalizations and vacuous rhetoric - are precisely the qualities all humanity must emulate at a time when global political discourse is dominated by nonsense and gaslighting. As the author of a history of autism, I've said for years that gut-level loathing for unfairness and injustice could practically be added to the diagnostic criteria for autism.
...
In the case of #climatechange the "social deficits" are all on the neurotypical side, on Greta's opponents and critics, who use misogyny, ableism, and ageism against her. They lie for a living, deceiving millions of fellow neurotypicals in the process. The success of climate disinformation campaigns in sowing seeds of doubt about science is proof of a potentially fatal "truth dysfunction" in non-autistic people. Want to know the role of #neurodiversity in our collective future? We may not have one without it. Go, Greta!

The natural way of things

Last night I finished the novel Dark Secret by Edward Lerner. It was serialized in the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact issues April, May, June, and July/August of 2013. Yes, I’m six years behind in my reading.

I enjoy science fiction, though a great deal of what I see in bookstores this days focuses on some sort of epic battle between this civilization and that one or is really fantasy. Even with that enjoyment I rarely discuss those stories in this blog unless there is a particular reason. And there is.

A spaceship of six adults – Captain Dana, Blake and wife Rikki, Carlos, Antonio, and Li – and a cargo bay full of thousands of human embryos heads out to establish a new human colony on a planet outside the solar system (I won’t go into reasons why). The nature of the story becomes apparent before they reach the new world – Li aims to go full-on supremacist.

The first glimpses are when Li suggests philosophers for the captain and others to read. All of them tout a strong respect for authority. One of those philosophers was Confucius. Of course, I’ve heard of him, but didn’t know he supported submitting to authority. The aim of each of these writers is to teach that authoritarian ways are the natural order and one should properly fit into this order and its social hierarchy.

Li’s quest for power is a lot more subtle and manipulative than I’m used to seeing out of the current GOP. Over the last few years what the nasty guy and the GOP have been doing are easy to spot (unless you like what they’re doing). It has been a blatant power grab, nothing subtle about it. Then again, the current GOP has been dancing to the tune of Vladimir Putin, and his ways really are subtle and manipulative.

Once the artificial wombs start turning embryos into children Li’s full plan is laid out. She wants all these children, eventually thousands, to grow up understanding that they are to treat Li as their queen and that is the natural way of things. One way Li does this is to imprint her face in the minds of the little ones along with good things and associate the faces of the rest of the adults, other than Carlos, with bad things like snakes. These other adults don’t understand why the children are scared of them. Another thing Li does is create a mythology around their arrival on the new planet, similar to Noah’s Ark, with herself as God’s Messenger.

When the other adults refuse to turn all child care duties to Li she engineers a coup – do what I say or I destroy the embryos and children. These other adults are labeled evil and banished from the children’s compound. Eventually, a child who is a bit too questioning is also banished.

Spoiler alert: Li’s reign is eventually brought to an end (though I thought it took too many years for people to act). Through that point Li’s actions as a supremacist are pretty much true to form. But in the epilogue chapter I thought the author did not get it right. Considering how deeply those children had been imprinted they would have to deal with a lot of trauma of suddenly having to live without their primary caretaker and among the people they had been taught were evil. That trauma wasn’t mentioned.

Friday, December 13, 2019

How big of a circus?

The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve articles of impeachment this morning. I heard the GOP members got into a game of who could shout “No!” the loudest. The articles now go to the full House for a vote sometime next week.

As the Judiciary Committee was contemplating its task, Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff took on the question: Why not wait for all those subpoena cases be resolved by the courts? He said the process could take months, then added:
The argument “Why don’t you just wait?” amounts to this: Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time?

That is what that argument amounts to.

The question now is what happens in the Senate. And no, I’m not talking about the final outcome. Moscow Mitch had been telling everyone who will listen (and there are a lot of conservative media ears for him to talk into) that there will be acquittal. The Senate (or at least the GOP side of the Senate and definitely Moscow Mitch) will do everything the nasty guy asks for (which I think is called juror tampering). So no pretense that anyone on the GOP side is going to do their constitutional duty.

The question is how big of a circus the trial will be.

As Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported a few days ago it could be a really big circus. The nasty guy wants witnesses. He wants a lineup of his opponents, such as Joe and Hunter Biden, so they can be persecuted in public. Says Sumner in response to a Senate desire of a quick trial:
But Trump doesn’t want it over, dammit. He’s come this far, doing all that stonewalling, obstructing, not cooperating, and more stonewalling. All that hard work of noncooperation has to be worth something, and he wants his show. According to CNN, Trump wants “a dramatic event.” He wants live witnesses. He wants tough cross-examination. He wants to see people hurt … so no one will ever think of doing this again in his second term. Or his third.
See people hurt. Seems to be the goal of the nasty guy in all situations.

A couple days later Joan McCarter, also of Daily Kos reports that they may not have witnesses. Sen. Mike Braun, GOP from Indiana called witnesses “mutually assured destruction.” Moscow Mitch admitted each witness needs 51 votes and it would be hard to get only the witnesses the nasty guy wants. Besides, why bother with witnesses? Everyone’s mind is already made up.

The only reason for the trial, says McCarter, is because:
dismissing the impeachment charges without one would be hard for vulnerable Republicans to defend in their reelection bids. Never mind that the outcome is the same: an abdication of their oaths of office and full acquittal for Trump.

Break every rule in the free-market playbook

I attended a performance of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Fallen Souffle by David MacGregor in production at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea. It’s got about another week to run, though it is probably sold out.

The show is a bit of a spoof of the Sherlock Holmes story, though it isn’t played as a comedy. It is the second in a trilogy. I didn’t see the first (though not a detriment to seeing this one). And while the evening was enjoyable it wasn’t so wonderful that I’d consider going all the way out to Chelsea to see part 3 a year from now. It felt like too much of the plot depended on who was holding the gun last.

One of the characters in this show was Bertie, Prince of Wales and oldest son of Queen Victoria. His attitude reminded me very much of the nasty guy. Holmes was quite unimpressed with the prince, and with monarchy in general.



Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish girl who galvanized climate strikes, has been named Person of the Year by Time. The honor is given to the person who has the most impact on the world (good or bad) in the year. Thunberg becomes the youngest person so honored.



Qasim Rashid tweeted:
In 5 weeks, billionaires Bloomberg & Steyer have spent ~$200M on their POTUS campaigns.

For 5 years, people of Flint have fought & scrapped for that kinda money for clean water.

Countless Americans suffer so a couple of guys can try to buy an election. Smh.

Taxation > Philanthropy
For those rusty on their math “>” means “is greater than.” So with that in place read that last bit again.



The Quote of the Day from Daily Kos:
Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process.
~~Naomi Klein, The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019)



I haven’t paid much attention to the news over the last few days about the FBI being cleared of partisanship in their investigation of the nasty guy’s 2016 campaign ties to to Russia. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports that an FBI counterintelligence employee told CNN says the attack by the nasty guy and Attorney General William Barr are having the *intended* effect:
We're constantly told to be agile and use all the legal tools available to us. But who is going to risk sticking their neck out now only to have DOJ chop it off?
A retired agent adds:
These comments will have a chilling effect on the workforce.



I should get back to reading and reporting on episodes of Gaslit Nation. One episode comes out every week. I’m sure I’m behind by a few weeks. Until I do so, here’s a quote from the podcast host Andrea Chalupa as tweeted by partner Sarah Kendzior. It explains a lot.
Hillary Clinton had her own private server because the United States government was getting hacked by authoritarian regimes like Russia and China in a major security breach that no one stopped. HRC has been vindicated.
It also makes the 600 day long attack of “but her emails…” all the more infuriating.



Lots of news as a result of yesterday’s British election and how the conservatives swept the Labour Party (the liberals). I’m not getting into Who to Blame or What it Means, especially as people try to apply those ideas to America. I will mention one thing that David Schneider tweeted:
One of the most significant stats of the election. 88% of the Facebook ads put out by the Tories contained a lie.

To paraphrase John Bercow: “the lies have it, the lies have it”
Schneider included some numbers:
Number of paid for political adverts on Facebook labelled as *‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful’* by First Draft.

Tory: 5,952
Labour: 0



Michael Lux of the Daily Kos community says that a recent speech by candidate Elizabeth Warren is her most important.

First came the economic ideas: Big corporations have hurt workers and the economy by focusing on short-term interests of investors. In market after market competition has declined. Stagnant incomes and rising costs have stretched family budgets beyond the breaking point.

Second was the theory of change: Making the structural changes to address the economic ideas will be hard. It will require a long term movement to fight through business as usual.

And finally, the core: there is long-term corruption in Washington that supports the current structure. We’ll need to fight the corruption as we fight for economic change.



Bobburnett, also of the Daily Kos community talks of the failure of capitalism, then reviews how likely the Democratic candidates will tackle those necessary structural changes. The seven candidates who have qualified for the Democratic debate next week are: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, and Yang. Steyer is a billionaire. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar call themselves moderates. They have not called for the reform of corporations.

That leaves Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Both have called out corporate greed, though Warren’s plan is a lot more comprehensive.

I’m with Warren on this one.

Monday, December 9, 2019

A nativity display with a statement

Claremont United Methodist Church in California has turned their outdoor nativity display into a statement.

For those not of the Christian tradition, a nativity display shows the Holy family – parents Mary and Joseph with newly born Jesus. Since the story says he was born in a stable and laid in a manger, those are usually part of the display too. Then one can add various farm animals, shepherds and wise men, perhaps an angel, and whatever else might fit the fancy of the person assembling the scene.

Anthony Breznican, a Vanity Fair, correspondent, tweeted a thread about the display at Claremont. I encourage you go to his thread to see images. Then scroll into the comments (these are mostly safe).

Breznican includes a bit of the statement that pastor Karen Clark Ristine posted to Facebook. Breznican notes that a huge number of the Facebook comments to this display are full of MAGA rage. She reminds us shortly after Jesus was born the family had to flee to Egypt to avoid the persecution of King Herod. Wrote Ristine:
What if this family sought refuge in our country today?

Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus no older than two taken from is mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,5000 children have been the past three years.
Breznican added:
I love the Nativity story. I love it not because it is warm and fuzzy, but because it is about perseverance against cruelty.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

His sycophants come out for blood

Mark Anderson of the Daily Kos community offers an explanation of why the nasty guy will probably not be removed from office. He answers the question: Why are Republicans defending him?
One reason congressional Republicans are defending Trump is that he is their useful idiot. Now, this worked better when they held both the House and the Senate. But the fact of the matter is that they just need him to push their agenda without question. Trump is not smart enough to know what he is signing, and he is easily manipulated. He is the perfect patsy to sign anything they put in front of him, and will push any agenda he is given: All it takes is to praise him and stroke his ego. Feed his narcissistic fire, and he will do whatever you wish.

They fear him. Look at how quickly Trump turns on anyone who speaks out against him; and when Trump turns on someone, his sycophants also come out for blood. Congressional Republicans fear this, as it could put them in the position of being primaried for their seats, or losing their seats to a Democrat in a general election. Looking at Trump’s polling numbers, I do question why they continue to fear him: He is increasingly unpopular across the country, and his lack of popularity is hurting Republicans more than it helps them.

Another example of why the GOP fears him – consider Rep. Justin Amash, when he called for impeachment, how quickly he was pushed out of the GOP. He’s now running as an independent with lots of GOP candidates running against him.

And another. Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida was troubled by the Mueller Report and even more troubled by the Ukraine scandal. Rooney talked about his feelings to colleagues. That prompted House GOP leaders to deputize fellow lawmakers to monitor Rooney, meaning they started spying on him. They also started a whispering campaign that made Florida GOP officials mad at him. That’s even though Rooney hasn’t said anything official about impeachment yet.

More from Anderson:
Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans are compromised by foreign actors just as badly as Trump is.
Anderson follows that with the news that Devin Nunes is compromised. Olga Lautman wonders why the mainstream media is surprised by the news that Nunes is dirty. Lautman concludes her Twitter thread with:
Bigger question is why Graham, McConnell, and others involved in protecting Trump/Putin have not been exposed. Peeling away Trumps loyalist layers would have left him vulnerable and defenseless to destroy America and democracy.

Sara Kendzior, responding to Devin Nunes being caught in the Ukraine scandal, tweeted:
They don't mind being caught, they mind being punished. Learn the difference. Trump and his backers have been committing crimes with impunity for decades. They get off on it.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat responded:
Exactly. Breaking the law openly is part of the thrill of holding power. It is a different mindset- the authoritarian ruler’s mindset.

Through it all what is the vice nasty guy doing? Hunter of Daily Kos has a colorful way of putting it. The VNG is “the master bootlicker” for the reelection campaign. He’s to be the opposite of the hate being spewed at nasty guy rallies. Hunter wrote:
Relax, Mike Pence is there to say. I am as holy as Jeebus Himself, and if I can put up with all Trump's criminal acts, grotesque public behavior, and lifetime of treating anyone and everyone with open, seething contempt, then you can swallow the jagged shards of your folksy pride, put on your best brown shirt, and vote for Team Asshole. He's rude, but he's racist. What more do you people want?
There’s another reason why the VNG be kept at a distance – in case the nasty guy really is removed, he is Plan B.
He's been there the whole time, but didn't see a thing and didn't know about any of the, you know, unpleasantness. He's spent the entire administration polishing himself as Plan B, should Plan B ever become needed.
Getting him out of Washington strengthens his bogus claim that he didn’t see a thing.

The wolf couldn’t blow down the disco ball house

CJ is the gender creative son of Lori Duron, who writes the blog Raising My Rainbow. For a sixth grade school project CJ had to design a set for a production of the Tree Little Pigs. He created a house made of money, a house made of hate signs, and a house made of a disco ball. As part of the story CJ said:
The wolf realized that he couldn’t blow the disco ball house down. The only reason he was sad and angry and blowing peoples’ houses down was because his parents didn’t accept him for who he was.
Wise child.

He aced the assignment.



When I last posted I included an item about the rich giving very little to charity. Here are a couple more charity related items, showing the lie the rich say that charities will pick up the slack.

That big tax giveaway to the rich from a couple years ago included raising the personal exemption. That gave a small tax cut to those who don’t have a lot of deductions.

But most of those deductions for people of modest means were because of charitable giving. No tax incentive for giving and people are less likely to give. And charities are feeling it. Fundraising revenue for the first half of this year was down 7.3%.

The nasty guy administration (showing why I call him the nasty guy) has proposed rule changes that would cause 3.7 million people to lose eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) otherwise known as food stamps.

In the GOP and nasty guy thinking 3.7 million people going hungry isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. It is a show of supremacy.

And charity – in this case food banks – can’t cover another 3.7 million people. Jocelyn Lantrip of the Food Bank of Northern Nevada said, “Food shouldn’t be a luxury.”



A few days ago I posted that because of the Democratic National Committee’s ever higher thresholds to qualify for debates, it prompts candidates to seek funding from billionaires and compromising their progressive message. It also prompts billionaires to enter the race.

That prompted Shannon to tweet:
I wish the DNC had adjusted the debate qualifying formula months ago, when it first become clear how easy it was for billionaires to game them. I truly don’t understand why they didn’t, and it’s too late now to make it up to the candidates who got screwed.
Candidates who got screwed include Cory Booker and Julian Castro.



Laura Clawson of Daily Kos has a few important things to say about the knife attack in London a few days ago:
As tragic as the murder of two people is, it’s nonetheless staggering that a group of people was able to join in the fight back—and survive.

Knives, it turns out, are less dangerous to crowds of people than are assault weapons.
...
Yeah, London has attacks where two people die and narwhal tusks and fire extinguishers help end things. The U.S. has mass shootings where dozens of people may die and where the rare case where a bystander—or a police officer—is able to subdue a shooter without more deaths is a national story for days. For that matter, we barely even consider it newsworthy if a shooting kills only two people. The horror of the London Bridge attack shows how bad things are in the U.S.



To coincide with the release of the movie Knives Out Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper Between the Lines published a profile of Jamie Lee Curtis by writer Chris Azzopardi. I’ve heard the movie is a comedy whodunit so I might go see it.

Most of the article talks about Curtis being an LGBTQ ally. For that it is a nice read. Towards the end discussion turns to which character in the movie is a gay icon. Voices on the internet have decided that nod should go to a flamboyant character. But Curtis disagrees with the choice. She thinks the true gay icon should be Marta Cabrera, the caregiver, “because she’s kind.” As Curtis explains:
You see, embracing LGBTQ issues, the root of it is kindness. Not clothing or lifestyle. The root of acceptance of a human being is kindness and the kindest person in ‘Knives Out’ is Marta Cabrera. I would hope what LGBTQ people focus on is whether someone is kind and loving and inclusive and expansive versus rigid, cold, judging and hateful, and that is, to me, the dividing line.

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Cheaper just buying the presidency

A major talking point of conservatives is that there is no problem cutting the social safety net because charity will pick up the slack. If the rich were taxed at rates that people are now calling for they would have less money to give to charity. So we had better cut their taxes.

Except, as Hunter of Daily Kos notes, the rich give very little to charity.

Warren Buffet managed to give nearly 4% of his wealth (gifts of $3.4 billion), Bill Gates managed to give 2.6% ($2.5 billion), and Michael Bloomberg gave 1.5% ($0.77 billion). The rest of the top 20 richest gave less than 1%, several gave less than 0.1%.

All of them gave to charity much less than they would have to pay under the proposed annual wealth tax.



A quote from candidate Elizabeth Warren that fits with my discussion of her in yesterday’s post:
Some people have figured out you know it’d be a lot cheaper to spend a few hundred mil just buying the presidency instead of paying that two cent wealth tax.



A.R. Moxon tweeted a long thread about billionaires and their take on the election. They’re getting nervous about Elizabeth Warren and are thinking about how to fight back. Moxon’s major point is that means they believe Warren and her anti-billionaire message has a chance to win. Billionaires see her as a feasible threat. They much prefer Joe Biden because he is pro-billionaire. They don’t care if Biden can win because the nasty guy is also pro-billionaire. A win either way.

So they are spreading messages (and they certainly have the resources to do so) that muddy Warren’s message. One of those is a message that candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is saying: It doesn’t work to have college tuition free for everyone because that means free for millionaire’s kids. Says Moxon:
"Anti-billionaire" doesn't mean "only some people should get access to public goods."

That's the billionaire's game. They win that game, and they'd love us to play it against them.

"Anti-billionaire" means "all these public goods are citizenship rights available to EVERYONE."

To say "we won't invest in public goods because *billionaires* will use them, too" is a pro-billionaire message.

Again: it is a *pro* billionaire message. They don't care about benefiting from public good. They care about not paying taxes.
A reminder: billionaires don’t want to pay taxes because they don’t want the government to fund programs that benefit anyone but themselves.
We're all interconnected and interdependent on one another. Government is how we manage that fact.

Billionaires wish to become immune to any responsibilities to that fact through wealth. They call any attempt to force them to acknowledge that fact "class war."

They call it war.



Speaking of Mayor Pete … Shannon reports that he
hired as his senior campaign adviser an operative who is infamous in NY for working for Dems whose primary goal is protecting conservative corporate interests in order to gain/maintain power.

Some of said operative’s favorite tactics are presenting the candidate as a progressive while working to block progressive issues, pitting different marginalized groups against each other to sow distrust and infighting, and sometimes straight up racist or anti-Semitic attacks.
That Mayor Pete would hire a person with that kind of reputation disqualifies him in my opinion.