Deah me, bring me mah smellin’ salts!
by digby
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2015
“Sometimes the kid dies, sometimes the cop dies” (Usually it’s the kid, though.)
by digby
I wrote a little piece about Ferguson for Salon today. I looked back at the last year of killing, protests and injustice. Here’s an excerpt:
But a backlash formed as well. There was, as usual, the right-wing media’s reflexive rejection of anything that resembles racial justice. And in the wake of the massive Eric Garner protests in New York, the police themselves reacted with petulant immaturity by turning their backs on the mayor because he warned his bi-racial son to be wary of police power.
The New Yorker profiled former officer Darren Wilson recently and he explained it in very simple terms:
There’s more at the link. I warn you, it’s depressing.
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When you’ve lost Bristol …
by digby
The war on the wrong women continues:
On Monday, Bristol Palin published a blog post that torched Erickson for saying “decency” is a line politicians and “blunt talkers” alike shouldn’t cross. She pointed to the time that Erickson published a “demeaning” fake photo of her mother, former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, which depicted her in a revealing Santa Claus outfit. The younger Palin also noted that Erickson appeared to cheer for Trump when the billionaire took a sexist shot at actress Rosie O’Donnell during last week’s debate.
“Fox and Erickson need to get off their high horse on how outraged they are NOW about sexism and decency,” Bristol Palin wrote. “I used this blog to point out how liberals use the ‘outrage industry’ to manipulate people and keep their power. Now Republicans are just as bad.”
“Now” they’re just as bad. Imagine that.
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As long as you’re white, you’ve got the right
by digby
Here are some white knights for you:
One year after criticizing the militarized police force in Ferguson, the Oath Keepers — a group of armed white militiamen — took to the city’s streets, clashing with protesters on Monday night.
The day after a tense standoff between cops and protesters, as well as the police shooting of an armed teenager, hundreds of protesters gathered on West Florrisant Ave after a state of emergency was declared in St. Louis. Officers in riot gear told the crowd to disperse and arrested people who did not comply. Then, several white militiamen showed up to the protest carrying rifles, and would not leave when demonstrators asked them to.
“Open carry is open carry,” said one of the armed men. “I’m not an attorney, I’m just happy we’re able to defend ourselves. It’s been our right for a long time, and various states have finally come on line and acknowledged that’s what the people want.”
“People got knocked down and stuff stolen from them, that’s why,” said another.
But according to Ferguson Committeewoman Patricia Bynes, their presence put a spotlight on the hypocrisy of Missouri’s open carry law. “If there were black and brown people in this country who showed up in the streets open carrying assault rifles in paramilitary garb would they still be received the same way?” she speculated to NBC News. “It seems to be that especially when it comes to the Second Amendment there seems to be a different way that it is enforced.
Uh, yes:
Ohio, where both of the above incidents happened, is an open-carry state.
I wrote about the Oath Keepers in Ferguson last year:
Mr. Andrews, a former Defense Department contractor who is now a weapons engineer in the St. Louis area, set to work. Under the auspices of a national group called the Oath Keepers, Mr. Andrews accelerated plans to recruit and organize private security details for businesses in Ferguson, which are receiving the services for free. The volunteers, who are sometimes described as a citizen militia — but do not call themselves that — have taken up armed positions on rooftops here on recent nights.
“It’s really a broad group of citizens, and I’m sure their motivations are all different,” said Mr. Andrews, who is in his 50s. “In many of them, there’s probably a sense of patriotism. But I think in most of them, there’s probably something that they probably don’t even recognize: that we have a moral obligation to protect the weakest among us. When we see these violent people, these arsonists and anarchists, attacking, it just pokes at you in a deep place.”
[…]
On its website, Oath Keepers released a recruiting message to “all skilled veterans and patriots” and asked them to “grab your gear and start rolling toward Ferguson.” The post listed nine types of people the group was seeking, including paramedics, police officers, “private drone operators” and videographers who could “film any encounters with looters.”Right. The only thing those poor people in Ferguson had to protect them were the city, county and state police and the National Guard. Thank goodness the cavalry came to town. And with loaded guns, ready to start shooting, This fellow does say he weeded out racists which is nice. I wonder if he weeded out trigger-happy yahoos?
The police didn’t want them there and the Oath Keepers ended up protesting the police. Seriously. The good news is that none of them got violent or started looting. But then, they were the good guys. Right? Weren’t they?
Not so Smart Objects
by Tom Sullivan
One morning in Glacier National Park years ago, I walked through a campground past a teepee. In the next campsite you could see through the picture window of his RV a guy reading the paper and drinking coffee as the news played on TV. People who can’t enjoy nature without their experience being mediated by an internal combustion engine always puzzled me. Getting out into the woods for them means ATVs or dirt bikes. Going for a swim means personal watercraft. Quiet simplicity seems foreign.
Then again, tech junkies shouldn’t talk, constantly checking our phones and computers. Connectivity, baby.
How much tech is too much? How much anything is too much? It is almost un-American to ask.
Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, wonders if Smart Objects, the Internet of Things, is a dumb idea. A hacked car (or cars) or airliner, for example, would be a safety nightmare:
The Internet of Things is also a privacy nightmare. Databases that already have too much information about us will now be bursting with data on the places we’ve driven, the food we’ve purchased and more. Last week, at Def Con, the annual information security conference, researchers set up an Internet of Things village to show how they could hack everyday objects like baby monitors, thermostats and security cameras.
Connecting everyday objects introduces new risks if done at mass scale. Take that smart refrigerator. If a single fridge malfunctions, it’s a hassle. However, if the fridge’s computer is connected to its motor, a software bug or hack could “brick” millions of them all at once — turning them into plastic pantries with heavy doors.
Wired magazine is all about Smart Objects and biometrics:
FOR ALL THE talk of smart objects, most of the stuff in our homes is remarkably dumb. Objects just sit there, inanimate and indifferent to the person using them. But just wait. According to Alex Rothera and James Krahe, it’s only a matter of time before even the dumbest of objects are embedded with a magical sense of interactivity. Eventually, the designers say, our stuff will be able to react to us based on data transmitted right through our bodies.
That will be magical. And if it sounds like something right out of Disney, you win a stuffed mouse. Wired asks, “Have you ever wished that your T-shirts could tell you the optimal water temperature for removing that pesky mustard stain?” Actually, no. No, I haven’t.
But the Internet Protocol for Smart Object (IPSO) Alliance has. ISPO just announced semi-finalists in its third annual IPSO CHALLENGE. Congratulations to the ten semi-finalists. With the Smart Toilet of the future, for example, no more tedious choosing Number One or Number Two buttons when flushing. Your Smart Toilet, the Department of Sanitation, the entire Internet will know just what you have done.
It is all beginning to sound too close for comfort to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and Sirius Cybernetics machines with Genuine People Personalities (“GPP”). The Vulcan Science Academy describes where this is headed:
Marvin, the paranoid android, by far the most beloved character in the guide is a super intelligent robot with ‘Real People Personalities.’ This means Marvin thinks and feels everything that a human would, and he is utterly depressed by it. As computers get more and more advanced and artificial intelligence lies just beyond the horizon, this may be a serious problem soon facing humanity. Marvin has the mind of a human but the insight and intelligence of a super-being, and it is clear that his feeble human traits cannot handle such immensity. Computers are sure to one day gain this type of personality, will we soon have a crisis of ethics on our hands as these poor souls fight with their own consciousness? Or will we once again be ignorant of the suffering due to preconceived ideas and debate as to whether the computers really feel it?
Once we’ve given them Genuine People Personalities, will we be morally obligated to expand Medicare Part D to cover digital antidepressants for our toasters?
A single phrase characterizes the need product engineers feel to pack as much into an electronic product as technically feasible: “feature rich.” It is not enough to have a watch provide accurate time when it can do so much more. Yes, I can have a coffee maker that is also a timer, an alarm clock, satellite radio, and that starts and warms up my car on cold mornings. But all I really wanted was a cup of coffee.
Keeping America pure
by digby
This is a very interesting piece by Dara Lind at Vox about American attitudes toward immigration. If you’ve been listening to the right wing talk about this in recent years, this will not surprise you:
For many white Americans — the Republican Party’s most important constituency, in both the primaries and the general election — immigration isn’t as simple as legal versus illegal. Their primary concern is preserving American culture. It’s not that these Americans care less about immigration than the people who are categorically opposed — to the contrary, these are often the people who are most concerned about who’s coming into the US. It’s just that their concerns don’t line up with typical policy messages.
Surprisingly, Wright and his co-authors found that it wasn’t common for Americans to care some about an immigrant’s legal status. Either they accepted (or rejected) every single hypothetical unauthorized immigrant, or they accepted unauthorized immigrants about as often as legal immigrants — which is to say, they didn’t care about legal status at all.
Most of these weren’t open-border supporters who accepted every immigrant they were asked about. They were just looking at other factors: employment, education, religion, and national origin. An unauthorized Christian immigrant fared better than a legal Muslim one. An unauthorized immigrant from France fared better than a legal immigrant from Mexico, but an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico fared better than a legal immigrant from Somalia. In other words, says Wright, this group of people cares whether an immigrant will contribute to the community economically, and whether she will assimilate culturally.
That’s not all that surprising. After all, polls show Americans are surprisingly ambivalent about whether immigration is a good thing for American culture. Agreement that immigrants strengthen the US rather than burdening it keeps rising, but very gradually:
immigrants strength burden Pew
Pew Research Center
Wright’s study found that when looking at particular immigrants, economic factors mattered alongside cultural ones. But other studies have shown that American anxiety about immigrants’ cultural impact is much more consistent than economic concerns. As one study put it, “Evidence about the role of economic concerns in opposition to immigration […] has been inconsistent. On the other hand, symbolic attitudes such as group identities turn up as powerful in study after study.”And Latino immigrants generate more anxiety than immigrants from other regions. One study found that Americans didn’t perceive Latinos as more of a threat than immigrants from other regions, but they were more anxious about them. Another found that when asked about hypothetical immigrants breaking laws or — especially — cultural norms (like stepping on an American flag), Americans were much more offended when the hypothetical immigrant was Latino than when he was European.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many white Americans are seriously anxious about the cultural threat immigrants pose. We do know, however, that when anxieties about immigration are higher, people become more likely to identify with the GOP. A 2015 book called White Backlash by UC Berkeley political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Marisa Abrajano concluded that “greater opposition to increased immigration nationwide” in one quarter was linked to an increase in partisan identification with the GOP in the next quarter.
Even the Republican candidates who take the hardest line on immigration policy — Rick Santorum and (sometimes) Scott Walker — address it in economic terms: They’re worried about American jobs. But Americans are less worried about American jobs than about American culture. Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly accused the government of Mexico (and possibly other countries) of deliberately sending its worst people to immigrate to the United States. That’s much closer to the heart of American anxiety.
They are polluting our pristine American bloodlines and our pure and homogenous American culture. The next thing you know the whole damn country will be filled with the descendents of immigrants. And then what?
Read the whole piece. That’s not even the worst of it, not really. A whole lot of Republicans just hate Latinos and blacks. It’s not much more complicated than that.
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Trump for what Ailes you
by digby
I don’t know whether I believe all this but it’s fascinating, nonetheless:
Until Thursday’s GOP debate, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and Donald Trump had been executing one of the most successful examples of media synergy in recent memory. But the Trump–Ailes alliance — which helped generate a record debate audience of 24 million — has been in tatters ever since Fox’s debate moderators peppered Trump with critical questions on stage in Cleveland. From the moment Trump faced reporters in the post-debate “Spin Room,” he’s been attacking the network’s treatment of him, with special venom reserved for Megyn Kelly.
Now, it appears both sides want peace. This morning, Trump tweeted that Ailes called to assure him that Fox will cover him “fairly” going forward. According to two high-level Fox sources, Ailes’s diplomacy was the result of increasing concern inside Fox News that Trump could damage the network. Immediately following Thursday’s debate, Fox was deluged with pro-Trump emails. The chatter on Twitter was equally in Trump’s favor. “In the beginning, virtually 100-percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” one Fox source, who was briefed on the situation told me. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”
Things got worse for Ailes over the weekend. In a phone conversation, Trump told Sean Hannity that “he was never doing Fox again,” according to one person with knowledge of the call. The anti-Kelly emails, and threat of a boycott by Trump, seems to have pushed Ailes to diffuse the war. One Fox personality told me that Fox producers gave instructions to tell in-house talent not to bring up Trump’s controversial comments that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” during the debate. According to one count, Fox only aired Trump’s comment once since Friday, while CNN mentioned it at least 50 times.
In recent days, Ailes got a glimpse of what a Trumpless Fox News would look like. On Sunday, Trump called in to the four other public affairs shows; this morning he gave interviews to Today and Morning Joe. Inside Fox, this was alarming. “This thing with Megyn got way ahead of Roger and bigger than he must have thought,” one Fox personality said. “Roger wants this to blow over,” another source added. “He’s upset that conservatives are mad at Fox.” Online, Ailes also took flack. Both The Drudge Report and Breitbart News carried pro-Trump headlines.
I find it a little bit hard to believe that Ailes didn’t set out to cripple Trump. And he knows very well that doing so would cause Trump to boycott the network. I assume that’s what he wanted. I’m going to guess that the anti-Megyn emails and perhaps some ratings and polling numbers made him shift his strategy.
Whatever it was, it’s an amazing show of Trumpish power. At this point, I don’t know what it will take to take him down. The only thing I can think of is eventual boredom with the whole storyline. It certainly doesn’t seem as if anything he says will do it.
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New numbers
by digby
I don’t vouch for any of them. This one is slightly different from the NBC snap poll over the week-end:
The poll, conducted among a subsample of 746 self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, shows Trump running slightly better with male voters than with female voters. His support is disproportionately strong among older voters and those who say national security is their top issue; he is weakest among those who have earned a college degree.
Trump’s support shows no evidence of slipping after he told a CNN anchor on Friday night that Kelly, one of three moderators overseeing the Fox News debate, had “blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”
In a series of interviews over the weekend, Trump said he didn’t mean to imply Kelly was menstruating when she asked Trump pointed questions about his earlier statements about women. Trump’s Republican rivals stood virtually united in condemning his attack on Kelly, a popular host on the channel that commands attention from a big proportion of the Republican electorate. On Monday, Trump again refused to apologize.
The share of Republican primary voters who say they view Trump favorably increased since the last tracking poll, to 62 percent from 57 percent. But the number of registered voters who say they see Trump unfavorably remains high — 52 percent of all voters say they see him in a negative light. That makes Trump both the most popular candidate within the Republican field and the least popular candidate Republicans could nominate for next year’s general election.
Thursday’s debate, viewed by a record-setting 24 million people, did not provide a boost for any other leading Republican contender. Carson, Walker, Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) all clocked in at about the same level of support as they did the previous week, while Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) saw his support drop from 7 percent to 4 percent.
An earlier debate, held for candidates who didn’t make the list of top 10 contenders that included Trump, gave a boost to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. After her performance in the so-called Happy Hour debate, Fiorina won support from 3 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, up from 1 percent the week before. The percentage of voters who said they have a favorable view of Fiorina – 25 percent among all registered voters and 39 percent among self-identified Republicans – spiked sharply as well.
[…]
The Morning Consult national tracking poll was conducted Aug. 7 through Aug. 9 among a national sample of 2,029 registered voters. The poll, conducted online, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The subsample of 746 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.59 percentage points. The subsample of 896 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.27 percentage points.
And here’s a poll conducted on one right wing website which is sort of fun:
There will be more polling throughout the week, I’m sure and we’ll get a better sense of how the debate shaped the early primary. But so far, at least, Trump’s obnoxious behavior hasn’t hurt him one bit. I’d love to know why anyone thinks it would. That’s what these people love about him.
Donald Trump continued to defy the laws of political gravity on Monday as a Reuters/Ipsos poll found the real estate mogul holding onto a wide lead among Republicans in the U.S. presidential race despite an acerbic debate and a feud with a female television anchor that have bolstered charges of sexism.
Trump led the party’s 17-strong 2016 presidential field with the backing of 24 percent of Republican voters, unchanged from before Thursday’s televised debate.
His closest rival, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, trails at 12 percent, down from 17 percent before the debate. No other candidate earned more than 8 percent in the online poll, conducted between the end of the debate and Sunday.
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Carly Fiorina, political pugilist
by digby
I wrote about Carly Fiorina at Salon today. The polling is all over the place so we don’t know whether or not the debate really helped her or if it was just a brief Villager crush. But it won’t matter. She’s in the race for another reason:
The other day when the donor lists to various campaigns were revealed many noticed an odd curiosity about Fiorina’s donations. A pro-Cruz super PAC controlled by millionaire Robert Mercer (who had written checks for 5 million to Cruz’s effort) sent $500,0000 to Carly Fiorina’s super PAC. How often does it happen that a PAC for one candidate helps one of its rivals in a primary campaign? But New York Times reporter Amy Chozick cleared up the mystery when she tweeted:
Fiorina finance chairs told me supporters of other candidates have thrown them $$$ to have a woman in race attacking HRC.
Now that makes sense. (And it also explains why the Koch Brothers invited her to their recent billionaire meet-and-greet.) The Republicans understand the minefield they are going to be walking if Clinton should become the first woman nominee for president of one of the two major parties. It will be helpful to have a woman on the trail making a slash and burn case against her without incurring the wrath of Clinton’s woman supporters. In her closing statement at the Kiddie Table debate that’s exactly what she promised to do:
Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, lies about her emails, she’s still defending Planned Parenthood and she is still her party’s frontrunner. 2016 is going to be a fight between conservatism and a Democratic Party that is undermining the very character of this nation. We need a nominee that is going to throw every punch, not pull punches. Someone who cannot stumble before he even gets into the ring.
I don’t know who she’s talking about there, but I’d guess his initials are J.E.B. She won’t, however, have the help of her 2010 campaign staff for this great crusade, however:
Twelve of about 30 people who worked on Fiorina’s failed 2010 California Senate campaign, most speaking out for the first time, told Reuters they would not work for her again. Fiorina, once one of America’s most powerful businesswomen, is now campaigning for the Republican nomination in 2016.The reason: for more than four years, Fiorina – who has an estimated net worth of up to $120 million – didn’t pay them, a review of Federal Election Commission records shows.
Normally fantastically wealthy candidates like Fiorina pay campaign debts themselves, simply in order to maintain a reputation for being something of a decent human being. Of course with Fiorina that ship sailed some time ago so perhaps she felt there was no point.
She did finally pay up just before she announced her run for president so that’s nice. One of her high level staffers said this to a Reuters reporter: “I’d rather go to Iraq than work for Carly Fiorina again.” There are probably tens of thousands of former HP employees who feel exactly the same way.
Rotten Science
by tristero
When I was a little kid, my sister and I would put our baby teeth in a glass filled Coca-Cola and wait a week. The results – throughly rotten molars – were thrillingly disgusting to our pre-teen sensibiilites. But this is just disgusting:
Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.
The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.
“Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’ — blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on,” the group’s vice president, Steven N. Blair, an exercise scientist, says in a recent video announcing the new organization. “And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”
Health experts say this message is misleading and part of an effort by Coke to deflect criticism about the role sugary drinks have played in the spread of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. They contend that the company is using the new group to convince the public that physical activity can offset a bad diet despite evidence that exercise has only minimal impact on weight compared with what people consume.
Riiight.
Dr. Blair and other scientists affiliated with the group said that Coke had no control over its work or message and that they saw no problem with the company’s support because they had been transparent about it
But as of last week, the group’s Twitter and Facebook pages, which promote physical activity as a solution to chronic disease and obesity while remaining largely silent on the role of food and nutrition, made no mention of Coca-Cola’s financial support..
The group’s website also omitted mention of Coke’s backing until Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity expert at the University of Ottawa, wrote to the organization to inquire about its funding. Dr. Blair said this was an oversight that had been quickly corrected.
“As soon as we discovered that we didn’t have not only Coca-Cola but other funding sources on the website, we put it on there,” Dr. Blair said. “Does that make us totally corrupt in everything we do?”
Actually, in this case, yes:
Marion Nestle, the author of the book “Soda Politics” and a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, was especially blunt: “The Global Energy Balance Network is nothing but a front group for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola’s agenda here is very clear: Get these researchers to confuse the science and deflect attention from dietary intake.”
Exactly. Bottom line: don’t drink Coke, or any other liquid sugar delivery system, except as a once in a blue moon special treat. Better yet, train yourself to get your jollies from real food – e.g., veggies, fruits, grains – and not garbage offered for sale for no other purpose than to make someone filthy rich at the expense of you and your family’s health.
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