Howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey

Howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey I went to an art house movie theater this afternoon to see the movie I Carry You With Me. It was the last showing at this theater. After a half hour drive I got there to find the theater didn’t have electricity. Neither did the surrounding shopping plaza or the traffic lights in the area. Stormy weather in Michigan. I should be able to see the movie in Ann Arbor over the next week. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reviewed a bit of history. Moscow Mitch had been opposed to the third relief payment from the time it was first being considered last summer. He only relented in December when he wanted to protect two Senate seats, which he lost anyway. State and local governments are now starting to receive aid from a Democrat-only aid package. Instead of lying – see what I did for you, Kentucky – Mitch complained.

I was astonished to see the new administration recommend that we spend $2 trillion more," he told a group in Kentucky Tuesday. "Well, it passed on a straight party-line vote. Not a single member of my party voted for it. ... So you’re going to get a lot more money. I didn't vote for it, but you're going to get a lot more money.

Translation: Please thank Democrats for this aid that you’re getting. Please restore the GOP majority so I can make sure it never happens again. Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed how House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shot himself in the foot. He had been part of the call for a bipartisan committee to investigate the Capitol attack, one that would have equal Democrat and GOP representation. Realizing this investigation would reveal how complicit many GOP members were in the attack he spoke against it. So the House, on its own, approved their own investigation in which the GOP would get only 5 of 13 seats. Then McCarthy made serving on the committee so toxic only the most toxic members (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene) would want to serve and whom Pelosi would reject. So instead of getting a balanced committee in which GOP members could thwart any action Democrats attempted McCarthy could end up with no GOP representation. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was caught on a recording saying as a GOP member of the House his job “for the next 18 months is to do everything we can to slow all of that down to get to December of 2022. ... I actually say ‘Thank the Lord—18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done.’ That’s what we want.” That prompted McCarter to wonder: How many more GOP members in how many ways need to say the entire purpose of the GOP is to make sure the Democrats can do nothing before Democrats (at least certain Democrats) believe them? When the Texas governor calls the legislature into a special session the members can consider only the items on the governor’s agenda. Gov. Greg Abbot has released his agenda for the session that has just started. And it is a conservative’s wish list: Bail reform (how to keep people locked up). Election integrity (how to keep more people from voting). Social Media Censorship (make sure conservative voices are included), Youth Sports (keep transgender girls out), Abortion inducing drugs (make them harder to get), Critical Race Theory (ban the teaching of our racist past), and a few more. The regular session ended when Democrats walked out to prevent a vote on a voter suppression bill. So how might Democrats thwart this special session? Greg Dworkin, in his Wednesday evening pundit roundup for Kos, included a few related quotes. From Joe Trippi of USA Today:

We have all lived in an America with two political parties for generations. It is the only way we understand to participate and speak about our politics. A two-party lens is the only way the news media knows how to cover Washington and, of course, elections. It’s why so many of us cannot give up on the idea that there must be a two-party solution to the danger of the moment. I wish it was possible. It’s not.

From David Rothkopf of Daily Beast:

Because even the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate. We were raised on lies—including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today. That’s the problem. We are as a society—and by “we” I mean virtually all of us on the planet —brought up to believe howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey from our very first moments on Earth. We have massive lie-delivery systems that are the core institutions of our society. And we have created cultural barriers to even questioning those fabrications which are most deserving of skeptical scrutiny. For example, we regularly label as sacred those ideas that are least able to stand up to scrutiny. (Heck, we have folks in our society who can’t even handle the idea that the history we teach our kids might actually be based on what happened, you know, back in the past.)

From Benjy Sarlin of NBC:

What's keeping democracy experts up most at night? An overturned election. There’s no legal avenue for Trump to reverse the 2020 results. But a half-dozen scholars who study democracy and election laws told NBC News they are increasingly worried that 2024 could be a repeat of 2020, only with a party further remade in the former president’s image and better equipped to sow disorder during the process and even potentially overturn the results.

The Mozilla Foundation, the people who make the Firefox browser and other programs available for free, did a study titled YouTube Regrets. It collected data from users who followed one of YouTube’s recommendations and regretted it. David Neiwert of Kos reported some of the findings (I’ll let you read the rest): The YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate their own policies. Recommended videos were 40% more likely to be regretted than videos searched for. In 43.6% of cases the recommendation was completely unrelated to what the volunteer watched. Those regretted videos acquire 70% more views per day than other videos. Neiwert wrote:

The top priority at YouTube, as Mark Bergen at Bloomberg News explored in 2019, is “Engagement,” getting people to come to the site and remain there, accumulated in data as views, time spent viewing, and interactions. Moderating extremist content is often devalued if it interferes with the company’s main goals. "Scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world’s largest video site surfaced and spread,” Bergen reported. “Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat." The company announced early in 2019 that it intended to crack down on the conspiracism. However, part of its problem is that YouTube in fact created a huge market for these crackpot and often harmful theories by unleashing an unprecedented boom in conspiracism. And that same market is where it now makes its living. The result has been a steady, toxic bloom of online radicalization, producing an army of “redpilled” young men disconnected from reality and caught up in radical-right ideology.

YouTube says it is cleaning up its act. Few people believe them. Eliot Middleton of McClellanville, South Carolina owns a restaurant. Previous to that he and his father ran a car repair shop. Last year he found a way to give back to the community. He fixes up old cars and gives them to people desperate for transportation, usually single mothers. Rural areas don’t have public transport systems. He has donated over 30 cars and has another 90 cars that were donated to him.