PREPPING FOR AN AUDITION TONIGHT...

...so, as usual, no post this evening.  As usual, I'll be back tomorrow.  Tell me to "break a leg"!

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Study Finds Marriage Equality Doesn’t Affect Opposite-Sex Marriage Rates

From Think Progress:

The idea of marriage equality as an “attack on traditional marriage” is a favored talking point of opponents. In April, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said legalizing same-sex marriage would discourage marriage among heterosexual couples because the traditional understanding of marriage as a means of reproduction would erode. The Family Research Council has argued that “traditional” marriage keeps men from cheating on their wives once the women are no longer fertile. Two anti-marriage equality advocates from the Heritage Foundation said it would lead to the erosion of marital norms, even though opposite-sex couples already cheat, divorce, and decline to have children (or are unable to), even in states that still restrict marriage.

While there is no harm to opposite-sex couples, studies have shown that ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage are actually psychologically harmful to the gay community.
More here.

Yeah.  This was always pretty stupid, a testament to how irrational and emotion-driven the whole "debate" about gay marriage has been since the idea became commonplace enough to freak out people who don't like it.  That is, it never really was a debate.  It was just a whole bunch of goofy whining and squirrel arguments.

Gay marriage has NEVER been an "attack" on or a "threat" to straight marriage.  And this is pretty easy to illustrate.  How, exactly, is heterosexual marriage harmed by allowing gays and lesbians to get married?  Anti-equality advocates have always been pretty vague on this one, scrambling to make the institution all about child rearing, or general fidelity within society overall, even though hetero counter-examples to these notions are so common as to render such "concerns" meaningless.  It's always been desperate clutching at straws, and nothing else.

And it's no exaggeration to say "desperate."  It changes the definition of marriage!  Yeah, sure, ever so slightly, but so what?  How does that affect you?  Remember Rick Santorum's assertion that gay marriage would lead to "man on dog"?  That's so incredibly laughable that it cheapens my intellect to even formulate a response.  Anti-equality advocates have made total fools of themselves over the years trying to explain why gay marriage is something we don't want.  What's amazing is that anybody at all has ever taken their demented pleading seriously.

Indeed, the study from the linked article now shows what all honest observers already knew to be true: in states where gay marriage has been legalized, straight marriage continues just as it always has.  What on earth was everybody so paranoid about?

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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U.S., citing use of chemical weapons by Syria, to provide direct military support to rebels

From the Washington Post:

The United States has concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in its fight against opposition forces, and President Obama has authorized direct U.S. military support to the rebels, the White House said Thursday.

“The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Rhodes said U.S. intelligence had determined with “high certainty” that Syrian government forces have “used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”

More here.

Well, I suppose that "chemical weapons" serves as a useful version of the sinking of the Maine, or the sinking of the Lusitania, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or Saddam's WMD, whatever.  This is a really bad idea.  The rebels seem to be just as brutal and bloodthirsty as Assad's regime, right down to using chemical weapons, too.  Yes, lots of innocent people are being killed, but there is no good solution here, no way to force a situation such that people are not being killed.  Involving ourselves in a civil war where both sides hate us is the height of stupidity.  It will come back to haunt us.  Definitely.  We have absolutely nothing to gain from intervention, and a whole hell of a lot to lose.

Why the hell do our elites love going to war so much?  They're sick, stupid people.  And they run our nation.

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The Big Shrug

New Krugman:

For more than three years some of us have fought the policy elite’s damaging obsession with budget deficits, an obsession that led governments to cut investment when they should have been raising it, to destroy jobs when job creation should have been their priority. That fight seems largely won — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like the sudden intellectual collapse of austerity economics as a policy doctrine.

But while insiders no longer seem determined to worry about the wrong things, that’s not enough; they also need to start worrying about the right things — namely, the plight of the jobless and the immense continuing waste from a depressed economy. And that’s not happening. Instead, policy makers both here and in Europe seem gripped by a combination of complacency and fatalism, a sense that nothing need be done and nothing can be done. Call it the big shrug. 

Even the people I consider the good guys, policy makers who have in the past shown real concern over our economic weakness, aren’t showing much sense of urgency these days. For example, last fall some of us were greatly encouraged by the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it was instituting new measures to bolster the economy. Policy specifics aside, the Fed seemed to be signaling its willingness to do whatever it took to get unemployment down. Lately, however, what one mostly hears from the Fed is talk of “tapering,” of letting up on its efforts, even though inflation is below target, the employment situation is still terrible and the pace of improvement is glacial at best. 

And Fed officials are, as I said, the good guys. Sometimes it seems as if nobody in Washington outside the Fed even considers high unemployment a problem. 

More here.

Krugman offers some explanations for why the institutions and individuals most concerned with the economy couldn't seem to care less about persistent high unemployment: lack of policy inertia, monetary hawks who have replaced the now discredited fiscal hawks, and my favorite, the fact that citizens don't matter in Washington, not in the way that the banks and corporations do.  All of this, of course, doesn't even amount to excuses, let alone good reasons for settling in and accepting that millions of Americans are now essentially useless to the economy through no fault of their own.

Whatever the explanation, though, it is completely clear that the American establishment is in the process of abandoning the implicit social contract between capitalism and the people.  That is, our economic system has for many decades been sold to us as the best one that could possibly exist because, in short, it delivers the goods, consistently, and in ways that other systems cannot.  Soviet Socialism, for instance, functioned, to an extent, for a very long time, but with a much lower standard of living for most people than existed in capitalist countries.  Sure, we've always had some poor people, but capitalism is an expanding pie, a rising tide lifting all the boats, and all that good stuff.  Just you wait, poor people, because capitalism is going to do its thing, and you won't be poor for long.  All you have to do is accept our assumptions, go find a job, any job, work hard, and your standard of living will improve.  Just trust us.

Since WWII, that very much seemed to be the case.  Wages improved.  Working conditions improved.  Middle class families could send their kids to college, go on vacations, have access to health care, all with a single bread winner.  Then came the 70s.  Wages stagnated.  Job security deteriorated.  Good middle class jobs became ever scarcer.  By the time the Soviet Union fell, and capitalism no longer had any real competitor, the last vestiges of the social contract were disappearing, as women entered the work force in droves, not because of feminism, but because they had to in order to make family ends meet.  As middle class families desperately attempted to maintain their lifestyles with the new easy-to-obtain credit cards the Banksters rammed down our throats.  As the cost of housing soared.  As the cost of health care soared.

Nobody in power has given a crap about this for thirty years, so why should they give a crap about it now?  The social contract was apparently always a ruse, a propaganda concept intended to make us hate socialism, and when it became clear that capitalism didn't have to use it anymore, the play-acting ended.  Screw the workers.  We don't owe them jobs.  We don't owe anybody anything.  And gimme my f'ing money.

It seems to me that if capitalism can't deliver the goods, if it is an economic system which, by design, exists solely to benefit only a relative few Americans, at the expense of everybody else, then it's time to find another system, one that DOES deliver the goods.

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The question libertarians just can’t answer

From Salon:

Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?

It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

More here.

Of course, the easy answer to this question is that there are no libertarian countries because libertarianism only works in one's imagination, and then only if one ignores a lot about how business functions.  That is, libertarianism's fatal flaw has been ever thus: removing government from the economic equation must necessarily result in big business not only running the country, but also running roughshod over it.  Indeed, removing government from the economic equation actually hurts the economy, a lot, because without an outside force controlling economic interactions, the strongest economic agents will assert such control themselves, which means one for you, nineteen for me.  And slavery, why not?

The reality is that the rise of "Big Government" perfectly coincides with the rise of big business.  "Big Government," in the end, exists because it has to exist.  There is no way the modern economy, the modern nation state, could exist without "Big Government."  We throw it away at profound risk.  Actually, no nation will EVER embrace American style libertarianism.  It's suicide.  Even we won't embrace it.  And everybody knows it.  I mean, big business essentially runs the country, anyway, but continues to do it through the government, which it knows it needs in order to keep the whole house from caving in on itself.

So libertarianism is pure fantasy.  A joke philosophy for know-it-all Peter Pan men to get a sense of superiority over you.  It is not a serious point of view.  That it has become such an important part of our public discourse is testament to the over-the-top insanity which has engulfed our nation.

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TAKING SATURDAY THROUGH MONDAY OFF!

Because my wonderful girlfriend is in town those nights, and I don't want to waste time here.  See y'all Tuesday night.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Gulf oil wells have been leaking since 2004 hurricane

From Grist courtesy of a facebook friend:

Oil has been gushing from a group of wells south of New Orleans since a platform at the site was wiped out by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and it appears that nothing is being done to staunch or control the leaking.

Efforts to cap the ruptures appear to have been abandoned in 2011. Instead of working to clean up or stop the spill, driller Taylor Energy Company is now providing the government with daily updates about the resultant slick.

Even those updates appear to be half-baked. A long ribbon of oil can clearly be seen spilling out from the site, but Taylor Energy claims its much smaller than does NOAA.

More here.

Sigh.  It's business as usual.  Oil companies pollute and nobody gives a shit.  Indeed, oil companies lie about the amount and impact of that pollution, and are then called on those lies by a federal agency, and nobody gives a shit.  It's like BP all over again, but for years and years, instead of a few months.  I'd say that at least the feds did something about the BP spill, which they did, and that's better than nothing, I guess, but, in the end, what the feds did was to simply enable what was a massive PR damage control scheme for both BP and the overall oil industry--most of that oil is still out there in the Gulf, broken up by toxic chemicals "just like the chemicals in your dish soap at home," doing god knows what to the environment.  I wonder if BP oil has been merging Taylor oil.

This, like global warming, is the kind of thing I don't think about.  It's too depressing.  Nobody in power cares.  Nothing's going to happen to make it better.  It's all spin and damage control.  I should just get drunk.

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The 4 Plagues: Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse

From AlterNet:

Every day, thousands, probably millions of people ask their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues similar and increasingly familiar questions: What has happened to our country? How did we get here? Isn’t it scary? Can anything be done about it?

There is an abundance of evidence that there are forces tearing apart the U.S. economy and society, causing increasing levels of fear, anxiety and trauma for large numbers of people. Many people are mystified as to the specific causes of their fears, with a mass media system that constantly broadcasts propaganda about how great America is and a new digital media system that may be exacerbating the problems for a society under immense and unprecedented duress.

There is the added problem that the theories and the means of social change we are familiar with, and to which we still turn, are not remotely up to the task we face, and have mostly proven to be inadequate. Virtually every problem we face has gotten worse over the past 40 years, and heavily sped up since 9/11 and the economic crash of 2007.

In an environment of confusion and despair, it can be helpful to name the beast—essentially to understand the forces at play, how they operate, and why they feel both intractable and overwhelming. So, what follows is a kind of Users' Guide To What Is Freaking Us Out.”

More here.

It may very well be that the biggest problem facing us right now is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get a handle on the seeming INFINITUDE of problems facing us right now.  

Politicians and the news media do a lousy job of connecting the dots, of creating an accurate narrative, or even a narrative at all.  The old narrative, American dream, work hard and succeed, freedom, whatever, is obviously no longer operative, but that's only the case when you can step back and take a look at the big picture.  Most people, however, either can't or won't see the big picture, which leaves them desperately clinging to the old mythology, wondering what they did wrong to keep them from living it out.  When you try to explain to them the entirety of what we're facing as a nation, you begin to realize that the story just goes on and on and on.  And who wants to hear a long and very depressing story?

I, for one, have given up on trying to explain everything.  I've settled for simply trying to expose the cracks in the American Dream story, trying to make plain the absurdities embedded within it, and hoping against hope that I can get some people thinking about things in ways they haven't before.  I can't change the whole country, but I can conceivably affect the people around me.  Maybe, just maybe, lots of other people are doing the same thing, too.  Maybe one day I'll look around and notice that everybody is doing the same thing.  Then we'll be ready for some real change.

At any rate, if you do want to try to get a handle on what's going on, the article linked above is about as concise as you can get.  Go check it out.

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IF YOU THINK JESUS WASN'T POLITICAL, THEN YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BIBLE

I recycled my post about Republican Christians a couple of days ago on facebook and it spawned a very nice little discussion.  Here's a bit of an exchange with an old school chum who is now a chaplain in the US Army:

Bill Bottom line, Jesus did NOT drag politics into His life and ministry. Try and keep that in mind during this discussion. Many of you can't stand it when politicians intertwine their political views and religion so I encourage you all to do the same. To call Jesus "progressive" is quite comical. He is God, plain and simple. He came to ultimately fulfill the Law...He did (without sin), and glorified Himself in the process. All authority is His, no one else's. Whether we like it or not, sometimes it's is quite okay and Christian to say "no" to someone or stand for the truth or what is right. Jesus did NOT heal everyone. He did NOT feed everyone. He did not eliminate all sickness. He came to provide eternal life, and not through a political platform. If He wanted to get all political, He would have hung out with the political leaders, the religious leaders, etc. He didn't...He showed His power through the weakest and most insignificant people...what an amazing God...the only true God...Jesus!!!

My response:

Ron Ah, finally, something on which we must disagree!

Jesus was EXTRAORDINARILY political. I mean, certainly not in the way that most Americans understand it. He didn't talk about "political issues" or support particular leaders. Indeed, he was downright what we would today call non-partisan--he didn't favor the Romans over the Jewish hierarchy and vice versa. But he was nonetheless downright politically subversive. Especially in a cultural context, Hellenistic Judea, where there was virtually no line between religion and politics. Consequently, to talk about religion, and especially to part radically from the conventional wisdom, was NECESSARILY political. And Jesus did, indeed, talk about religion, all the time, always.

You're telling me that "render unto Caesar" isn't political? That to portray a despised Samaritan as having superior morals and ethics isn't political? That to tell a rich man that the only way he could go to Heaven is to sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and to follow Him isn't political? That saving the adulteress isn't political? I mean, all these ideas, anti-racism, the corrupting influence of wealth, tearing down patriarchal attitudes that are destructive to women, are DEFINITELY considered political in today's context. How could they not be political in the New Testament context?

Further, even though Jesus did not heal everyone, he did heal. He healed a lot, in fact, so much so that he was known as a healer. Followers of Jesus today who do not heal, or, at least, do what they can to see that people are healed, are NOT being Christlike. No, Jesus did not feed everyone, but he did feed people, and it's the same thing with this: His followers MUST see that people are fed, or they are choosing a path that is different from the example set by their Lord.

Jesus was, in fact, one of the most political figures in the history of humanity. He was a radical. He moved masses to value and prioritize ideas and actions that were not only ignored by the ruling establishment, but that also stood in the way of how the establishment wanted society run. This was why they killed him. He was a very real, and very earthly, threat to the ruling elite. I think that many Christians today have become so focused on the salvation concept that they forget what a profound difference Jesus made during his time as a man.

And that saddens me.

Actually, in reference to how I've titled this, Bill has definitely read the Bible.  It's just that I think he's refusing to recognize as political stuff in the Bible that is not expressed in a way that many Americans would recognize today as being political, even though it is.  That is, lots of the country doesn't recognize the concept of politics unless it expressly includes politicians, candidates, and political offices, you know, Sunday morning talk show stuff.  So maybe it's that Bill doesn't understand politics, at least, in terms of political ideas that contemporary politicians don't talk about.  Or something to that effect.

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SOUTHERN BAPTISTS TO BOY SCOUTS: FUCK YOU
From CNN courtesy of a facebook friend:

The denomination will vote on nonbinding but influential resolutions during a convention June 11-12 in Houston.

“There’s a 100% chance that there will be a resolution about disaffiliation at the convention,” said Richard Land, the longtime head of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, “and a 100% chance that 99% of people will vote for it.”

“Southern Baptists are going to be leaving the Boy Scouts en masse,” Land continued.

And

The National Jewish Committee on Scouting, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors more Scout units than any other faith, all endorsed the change.

The National Catholic Committee on Scouting, which is run with oversight from a bishop, said Thursday that allowing gay youths in the Scouts does not conflict with church teaching. Each bishop will decide whether or not to allow churches in his diocese to charter Scout units, the committee added.

More here.

While not at all surprising, it is quite disappointing that my former denomination has chosen to further marginalize itself from mainstream American values.  Quitting the Southern Baptists is one of the best moves I've ever made.  They're already crazy, and they're on a one way road to open conflict with civilization, and they're cheering each other on while they do it.  I mean, c'mon.  Even the Mormons, the freaking Mormons, are cool with this.  It's not as though you have to endorse homosexuality in order to continue supporting scouting.  After all, this isn't really, and it never has been, about whether gay kids are in the BSA.  As with the military, gay kids have always been in scouting.  This is about whether those kids have to keep their personal natures secret.  But the Southern Baptists don't give a shit.  As somebody who grew up within their indoctrination system, I can safely and accurately say that much of what drives them is anger and resentment toward people who don't share their beliefs.  This needless fuck-you to the Boy Scouts stands as a prime example.

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It’s Time to Tell the Truth: Republicans Aren’t Christians

From Forward Progressive, courtesy of a facebook friend:

As I’ve said before, whether you believe in Jesus Christ or not is not the issue, what he symbolized and his story aren’t really debatable.  He spent his life helping the poor, sick and needy.  He never once spoke about homosexuality or abortion.  He embraced those from the lowest runs from society by saying that those that much had been given much is expected.  He taught love, hope, compassion and forgiveness.  He warned against those who would manipulate the word of God for their own selfish ambitions.  He opposed greed and encouraged giving.

You know, the exact oppose of what Republicans stand for.

But that doesn’t matter to these people because they oppose abortion and homosexuality—again, two things Jesus never spoke of.

More here.

Like I keep saying, one may interpret or understand the Bible however one damned well pleases, so I don't have much of a problem, really, with Old Testament obsessed fundamentalist weirdos ignoring virtually everything Jesus said and did while still calling themselves "Christians."  If you want to heavily emphasize the genocidal, barbaric, adolescent aspect of old school God, while transmuting "love your enemies" into "bomb your enemies back to the stone age," go right ahead.  The Bible is a big book with lots of stuff in it; you definitely have Scriptural support for condemning homosexuals and people who get tattoos.

Having said that, however, I have to admit that, even though I haven't affiliated with a church in nearly twenty years, I continue to be a pretty big fan of Jesus.  I mean, you know, not everything.  But I continue to look to the Gospels as a source of inspiration and morality.  And, yeah, a great deal of what Republicans push directly contradicts the example and words of Jesus, if you're reading the Bible honestly.  This is no overstatement.  Republicans are not simply void of compassion toward the poor: rather, Republicans seemingly have CONTEMPT for the poor, anger, resentment, hatred even, finding ways to blame those in poverty for their own plight, even as they manufacture the circumstances which keep those people poor.  And don't even get me started on love.  I see no love coming from the GOP.  None.  It's all about what they hate, liberals, foreigners, immigrants, intellectuals, other religions.  Of course, they do love guns, and war, and pissing off liberals, but I don't think of that kind of love as having anything to do with Jesus.

So, while Republicans have a perfect right to self-identify with whatever religion they want, it does disturb me, quite a bit, in fact, to hear them speaking so piously about their Lord while at the same time behaving like the people who crucified Him.  Show me some love, some real love, not that "tough love" bullshit, and I might change my mind.  But until that happens, when you put the word "Republican" together with the word "Christian," the only meaning that can result for me is "lying hypocrite."

Prove me wrong.

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Fox News Commentator: Breadwinning Women Are “Hurting our Children"

From AlterNet:

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson earned himself a lot of detractors Wednesday night when, responding to the news that a  record number of families rely on women’s income, he  argued on Fox News that it was “natural” for men to take the “dominant role” and that women being the primary breadwinner for families is “hurting our children, and it’s going to have impact for generations to come.”

But Erickson stood by his comments on Thursday, first tweeting, “Husbands and wives should play complimentary roles w/ dad as breadwinner,” and then  penning a longer piece on the site he edits, Red State, making the case for why women shouldn’t be the primary earner in a household. In it, he said that single mothers currently are able to handle parenting on their own solely because society “will subsidize their doing it all”

More here.

Of course, I don't follow Fox News, so I don't really know this Erickson guy, but I'd bet a week's tips that he also champions Reaganomics, or neoliberalism, or supply side economics, whatever name it goes by these days, you know, conservative stuff, cut taxes for the rich, cut social services, cut regulations, let the rich and corporations go crazy, that kind of thing.  And it would be no surprise if I won such a bet: tons of economic conservatives are also social conservatives who love to trash single mothers and, more generally, women who try to do anything outside of narrowly prescribed conservative notions of what women ought to be.  So single mothers are awful because children need fathers; women working outside the home are awful because their place is in the kitchen, or something.

The great irony here, which, of course, will never be appreciated by the people who need to appreciate it because conservatives don't do irony, is that economic conservatism is exactly the reason our culture has seen such a massive rise in single mothers and two income families.

That is, when you live in poverty, and your baby's father has no job, can't have a job because none are available, he then becomes an economic liability.  Being a single mother, under such circumstances, is exactly what a mother ought to do, for the economic welfare of her child.  Likewise, if you're in the middle class, maintaining that position absolutely requires, for most Americans these days, two incomes.  That is, having a stay-at-home parent is virtually impossible for most American families that aren't wealthy--a few try, and fewer succeed, but most just can't pull it off.  It's been this way since conservative economics became the Washington consensus starting in the 1970s.  

It just seems to me that somebody pushing the traditional family as a philosophical concept ought to also push a view of economics that makes it possible, instead of wagging a shaming finger, as if people actually had a choice in the matter.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AlterNet:

Black 14-year-old Carrying a Puppy Tackled and Choked 
by Police for Giving Them a "Dehumanizing Stare"

Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta justified the use of force, saying McMillan was exhibiting threatening “body language,” which includes “clenched fists.” McMillan adamantly denies this charge because, well, he was holding a puppy.

“Of course we have to neutralize the threat in front of us,” said Zabaleta.  “And when you have somebody that is being resistant, somebody that is pulling away from you, somebody that’s clenching their fist, somebody that’s flaring their arms, that’s the immediate threat.”

McMillan’s mother, Maurissa Holmes saw the incident and recorded it on her cell phone. She told WSVN-TV, "I ran over there and said, 'That's my son, that's my son. Can you get off of him? He can't breathe.'

More here.

Again from AlterNet:

1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes

"Operation Ghetto Storm" explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of "repressive enforcement structures". These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.

And

The report digs into how police justify their shootings. Most police officers, security guards, or vigilantes who extrajudicially killed black people, about 47% (146 of 313), claimed they "felt threatened", "feared for their life", or "were forced to shoot to protect themselves or others". George Zimmerman, the armed self-appointed neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin last year, claimed exactly this to justify shooting Martin. Other justifications include suspects fleeing (14%), allegedly driving cars toward officers, allegedly reaching for waistbands or lunging, or allegedly pointing a gun at an officer. Only 13% or 42 people fired a weapon "before or during the officer's arrival".

Police recruitment, training, policies, and overall racism within society conditions police (and many other people) to assume black people are violent to begin with. This leads to police overacting in situations involving African-American suspects. It also explains why so many police claimed the black suspect "looked suspicious" or "thought they had a gun". Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant in January 2009, claimed Grant had a gun, even though Grant was subdued to the ground by other officers.

More here.

And finally, this Youtube video coming out of my home town Houston, courtesy of a facebook friend:



The universe is telling me something when all this information comes my way over a twelve hour stretch.

I've written a lot here over the years about police brutality and corruption, and how certain aspects of police culture make it all inevitable.  But I've barely scratched the surface about a related but different aspect of police culture: American police forces exist in no small part in order to keep the black man down.  And I say this entirely without irony.  Because it's true.  You won't find it written in any mission statements anywhere, but you see it all the time, on the evening television news, in the papers, and just walking down the street.  

You can quibble about what the personal motivations are for a given cop who unjustly arrests, brutalizes, or kills a black man, but in the end personal motivation doesn't matter: this happens so incredibly often that its net effect is to oppress black men--you can't make that go away by talking about "bad apples," or how difficult the job is, or how you think black men wrangle with police more because they commit more crimes, which is a racist notion, anyway, from the get-go.  Cops oppress African Americans right in front of our faces all the freaking time.  This is one of the main functions of the American police officer, whether you want to call it that or not.

It's well past time that we have a massive public discussion about this.  I, for one, am sick to death of everybody ignoring what is a massive injustice.

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The Silent Death of the American Left

From CounterPunch:

It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.

Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.

This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.

More here.

I'm increasingly starting to think that maybe the Greens kind of got it right a few years back when they kept running Nader again and again.  It's just that they didn't go far enough.  And they didn't keep it up.  As long as Americans continue to think that the Democrats are the party of the American left, then that's what they are, which renders meaningless the entire concept of left-wing politics.  Because, you know, subtract the social issues, and the Dems are actually pretty conservative.  That means that Americans don't really understand that there are, in fact, alternatives to corporate rule, that we don't have to live paycheck-to-paycheck, constantly worried about drowning, never having any real hopes to improve our lot in life.

So the fake liberal party needs to pay.  Dearly.  They need to be savaged so mercilessly, so continuously, that it becomes understood that they are the party of the wealthy elite, that they work tirelessly to rip you off, that they are liars, that they're corrupt, that they're the enemy.  When their defenders tell you that opposing them will put the Republicans in power, you need to up the volume and just freak out on them.  That's all we have?  A choice between right-wing politics and psycho far right-wing politics?  A great big "fuck you" is all that such a rhetorical ploy deserves in response.

The whole voting for Nader equals a vote for the Republicans thing seemed to make sense a decade ago, even though I disagreed at the time.  But as the years have gone by, things have only gotten worse.  Just as many on the left predicted back in the day.  Keeping the Republicans at bay, at this point, strikes me as nothing but a sophisticated sleight-of-hand maneuver to accomplish conservative goals without the GOP's direct involvement.

So we should go to war with the Democrats.  Or, at least, that's where my thinking is at the moment.

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Scientists Agree On Climate Change, Why Doesn't The Public?

From NPR's All Things Considered:

RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Academies of science around the world agree that climate change is real and caused largely by burning fossil fuels. So do many professional scientific organizations. Polls of scientists point to the same conclusion and so, now, does a review of the scientific literature. It shows that 97 percent of the time, scientists who express a view say that human activity is warming the planet.

ED MAIBACH: It's not a surprise at all. But it is the best, the most ambitious and biggest study done on this point, to date.

HARRIS: Ed Maibach heads the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. He wasn't involved in the study, but one of his students was. Volunteers combed through 12,000 studies from around the world. In about a third of the cases, the authors took a position about climate change. In that group, only 2 percent of those papers rejected the idea that human activities cause climate change. This is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. And although this consensus isn't news to anybody who studies the climate, Maibach's opinion surveys show the public isn't aware of it.

Read or listen to the rest here.

Really, this ultimately is about how we know what we know.  That is, when you get right down to it, we don't really know, for instance, that the Earth revolves around the sun, or that the brain is where we think, or that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  I mean, humanity knows.  But the vast majority of us have to take the word of scientists that all these notions are true.  And that's okay.  Humanity has developed a vast body of knowledge about reality.  No single individual can truly do all the research and work involved in knowing everything.  But all individuals can learn enough about how science operates, about the whole system of observation, experimentation, hypothesis, ad infinitum, such that we can have a fair sense of trust that what scientists tell us about the nature of reality is, in fact, true.  We also can rely on the fact that, if we really wanted, we could, given enough time and opportunity, learn what we need in order to figure out a given fact for ourselves.  

And that's how scientific knowledge must work in a complex civilization such as ours.  There's a lot of stuff about which we have to trust the experts, with, of course, some knowledge about what an expert actually is, and how they approach their work.  Actually, it's a pretty good system virtually all the time.  Unless, as with the Catholic Church and Galileo, certain opinion-makers with megaphones don't like what scientists are telling everybody.  That's when the system breaks down.

So here's the deal.  Global warming, the kind caused by human activity, is a scientific fact.  Nearly all of the relevant scientists are on board with this, and have been for some years now.  There are no serious skeptics anymore, or, at least, none who don't receive their funding from Exxon or the Heritage Foundation.  But people who simply don't like that global warming has been scientifically verified over and over again are taking advantage of the trust-cracks in the relationship between laymen and scientists in order to create doubt about it.  That is, hardcore pro-capitalists, the wealthy, rank and file conservatives, the oil industry, and others intuitively understand that the only way out of this is to radically change how we approach economics, which also means radically altering who has power in our society.  So, instead of resigning themselves to the inevitable, they are doing their damnedest to make everybody put their heads in the sand.  And they don't give two shits that this may very well mean the end of civilization as we know it.

No, it doesn't matter that you took a geology class in college and you really think you understand.  You don't understand.  It doesn't matter that you read an article in some magazine somewhere trumping up the mistaken scientific views of one of the last honest skeptics.  You're wrong.  The only reason you're clutching at straws like this, the ONLY reason because you don't do this with any science but climatology, is because you hate what getting serious about global warming will do to your cherished conservative beliefs.  And all this crazed cognitive dissonance you're spewing to your friends and family is just confusing people.  You need to stop.  Right now.  Not only are you being totally dishonest, with yourself, and with the world, but you are also endangering your countrymen, your children, and your grandchildren.  You're endangering the nation.  The world.

Global warming is a scientific fact.  It is no longer controversial.  It hasn't been controversial for a long time.  The "debate" about it is a sick joke.  A delaying tactic that will doom us all.  When people engage in this denial, this intellectual claptrap, they become as guilty as any right-wing think tank butthole who gets on television with his suicidal disinformation campaign.  It needs to end.  Now.

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THREE DAY HIATUS

I'm in Houston right now helping my beautiful and brilliant girlfriend celebrate her birthday.  So I'm taking tonight, tomorrow, and Monday off.  See y'all Tuesday!

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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