Author: tristero

The Futility of Engagement 

by tristero

Mickelson went on to argue why jails, which he claimed are a “pagan invention,” are inferior to slavery: “We indenture them and they have to spend their time not sitting on their stump in a jail cell, they’re supposed to be working off the debt.” 

“Wouldn’t that be a better choice?” the host asked. 

“Well, it really would be,” Huckabee replied without missing a beat. “Sometimes the best way to deal with a nonviolent criminal behavior is what you just suggested.”

Who Sez the NY Times Got No Humor? 

by tristero
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First, there’s the headline: Latest Unease on Right: Ryan Is Too Far Left. Anyway you cut it – haha or peculiar – that’s a funny thing to say. And then there is this hysterical lede:

Far-right media figures, relatively small in number but potent in their influence, have embarked on a furious Internet expedition to cover Representative Paul D. Ryan in political silt.

“Silt?” That’s not the first word that comes to mind when I think about what far-right figures like Schafly cover their opponents with. Kind of looks a little bit like “silt,”though. But the “i’s”in third position and there’s an “h”in second.

And then there’s this:

[Paul Ryan] was half the brain on a 2013 compromise with Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, to funnel more money to the government and avert two years of budget brinkmanship, even though two years earlier, he had refused to sit on the original committee that tried and failed to find a solution to the government’s financial problems.

“Half the brain?” Yeah, I always thought that about Paul Ryan.

Oh, I’m running low on popcorn now. Gotta make more.

Reaganism Reversed 

by tristero

Wonderful op-ed by Naomi Oreskes, well worth a full read. But I was especially struck by this:

Government and academic scientists alerted policy makers to the potential threat of human-driven climate change in the 1960s and ’70s, but at that time climate change was still a prediction. By the late 1980s it had become an observed fact. 

But Exxon was sending a different message, even though its own evidence contradicted its public claim that the science was highly uncertain and no one really knew whether the climate was changing or, if it was changing, what was causing it… 

[Exxon’s] efforts turned the problem from a matter of fact into a matter of opinion. When the Exxon chief executive, Lee Raymond, insisted in the late 1990s that the science was still uncertain, the media covered it, business leaders accepted it and the American people were confused. 

For people close to the issue, it was never credible that Exxon — a company that employs thousands of scientists and engineers and whose core business depends on their expertise — could be that confused about the science. We now know that they not only understood the science, but contributed to it.

In other words, government isn’t the problem here. Business is. Or more specifically, the rabid, self-interested pursuit of money at the expense of all other factors – including simple sanity – is.

Kevin McCarthy is Wondferful! Why is Everyone Dissing Him???

by tristero

This makes absolutely no sense, all this bizarre contempt, even disrespect, everyone’s showing for Kevin McCarthy. Give the guy a break!

Granted, he’s not the brightest star by a long shot, but anyone who’s seen him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers knows that he can play a stiff and extremely unromantic romantic lead in the space of extraterrestrial horror better than anyone. And he’s a mensch, too, what with his cameo in the Phillip Kaufman remake. Heck, he even got an Academy Award nomination for Death of a Salesman, for goodness sakes!

Wait, wait, it’s not that Kevin McCarthy? it’s this one?

You sure?

ROTFLMAO

by tristero

The funniest headline I’ve read all year:

Good luck with that, pal.

by tristero

Another right wing sex scandal.

The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana — he cosponsored the state’s “religious freedom” law — resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his “Contacts” list, the Advocate’s Bill Browning reports… 

During his five years in the legislature, McMillan has crusaded to “protect the integrity of the institution of marriage,” but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that “the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community” and that “[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example.”

A Strange Editorial 

by tristero

I don’t disagree with this editorial but the language in which most of it is couched is quite bizarre.

The assumption is that there is a right wing to the Republican party on the national level to which Boehner and his ilk do not entirely ascribe. This assumption is false, built on the entirely spurious trope – still common among mainstream journalists –  that there is something resembling rational thinking in the GOP. As the editorial says towards the end, by no stretch of the imagination can Boehner be considered remotely close to a moderate. What he and his cronies are disagreeing on are means to the very same racist, homophobic, fellate-the-rich end.

Distinctions among the extreme rightwing are truly distinctions without a substantial difference. A failure to recognize that helps perpetuate an extremely dangerous imbalance in American politics.

Happy Assets Day!
by tristero

Great rant from Doug Smith at Naked Capitalism.

Voter Disenfranchisement: Prelude To Genocide 

by tristero

Myanmar has stripped the minority Rohingya of their right to vote. The details are complex but essentially, Buddhist extremists (yes, even Buddhism has its Tea Party/Trump faction) have decided to to take the disenfranchisement of the Muslim minority to genuinely alarming lengths:

As an elected lawmaker and member of Myanmar’s governing party, U Shwe Maung attended dinners with the president and made speeches from the floor of Parliament. But this weekend, the country’s election commission ruled that despite more than four years in office, he was not a citizen and thus was ineligible to run for re-election in landmark voting in November. 

“I was approved and considered a full citizen in 2010,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “Now, after five years, how could I not be eligible?” 

Mr. Shwe Maung’s plight is but one example of what appears to be the mass disenfranchisement of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority who number around one million in Myanmar. 

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who cast votes in elections five years ago have been struck from the electoral rolls, election commission officials have confirmed, although without providing a precise number.

 Disgracefully, “Even Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and champion of democracy, has been largely silent about the plight of the Rohingya.” The Nation continues:

Myanmar’s appalling treatment of the Rohingya constitutes an early warning sign of genocide. The second-class status, government-built camps, – plans to curb movement, plus social mobility and basic well-being of the Rohingya are already in the pipeline.

Any American who has any doubt about the pernicious nature of voter suppression efforts in our country should be closely following this truly ominous story. It is not going to end well.

by tristero

Recently, I posted a Times article regarding Coke’s funding research that would enable them to mislead the public into thinking that exercise alone would enable people to lose weight. Scientific American follows up with an interview with Charlotte Markey, a “Rutgers University–based diet and behavior expert:”

We actually know a great deal about what leads to obesity. It’s not a great mystery. People are eating too much and not exercising enough…that makes it inevitable that people will be obese. The group’s emphasis on physical activity is misleading based on what the data shows. There’s no data to support saying if you exercise for 30 minutes three times a week that this will take care of the problem. We have data refuting that. 

In reality, we need people to stop drinking sugary beverages like soda. Soda is the one consumable beverage that is repeatedly cited as having the biggest impact on obesity rates. From a public health standpoint, we want soda out of schools and we want cities to really decrease intake of soda—and Coca-Cola knows this…

Yep. From the standpoint of basic human hygiene, Coca-Cola and its ilk should be tiny little companies selling occasional treats (treats are great, every once in a while). Instead, they are colossal corporations selling obesity-delivery systems as if they were an essential food group.

That’s what you call a serious public health problem.