.This blog is for my various interests, such as bicycling, karaoke, clean living, internet memes, video games, roleplaying games, progressive politics, humor, and futurism.
“The white power activist is running as a Republican in the May 15 Bonner County primary to become the top law enforcement officer. Winkler said despite the white supremacist beliefs he holds as a KKK imperial wizard, his brand of justice would be color blind.
“In the event I was elected sheriff, I would not act on racial profiling,” Winkler said. “Being in the white power movement, I know how it feels to be profiled by law enforcement.”“
Well, since you said that, I totally trust you and you have my vote.
No points from this (yet, and hopefully not ever), but something to keep a side-eye on.
I can’t believe this isn’t from The Onion.
(via stfuconservatives)
REPORT: By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, cable networks call on men over women to comment on birth control
(via stfuconservatives)
Fun guy chillin’ in South American rainforest finds plastic-eating fungi
Seriously, though this is kind of a big deal. Know that big problem we have? You know, the one involving a crapload of used plastic hanging around in landfills with nowhere to biodegrade for a couple million years? Well, Jonathan Russell might’ve solved that problem. See, Russell and his fellow Yale students went to Ecuador, where they found a new kind of fungus they’re calling Pestalotiopsis microspora. Big deal, you’re thinking. Anyone can find fungus anywhere! Well, something his fellow students found out after the fact is that this fungus can live on a diet of polyurethane alone — and even crazier, it doesn’t even need air to do so! In other words, we could potentially put it at the bottom of a landfill and cover it with plastic, and it would do the rest of the work. This might be game-changing if it works as advertised. (photo via Flickr user dbutt; EDIT: Updated with link to research abstract) source
Drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasise the maintenance of the status quo”. Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.
This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.
But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.
— The Right’s Stupidity Spreads, Enabled By A Too-Polite LeftGeorge Monbiot (via somepolitics)
You can be lazy and watch as big corporations finally take control of the Internet, or you can work to stop ACTA.
FOUND THE OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PETITION TO STOP ACTA.
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/end-acta-and-protect-our-right-privacy-internet/MwfSVNBK
Please pass along and sign!
signal boost go!
gogogo
(via stfuconservatives)
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:
“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”
On the one hand, I’m glad to see that someone at the Times is at long last considering the importance of reporters identifying and calling out lies. I can’t help but wonder how different the last 12 years would have been if they’d, you know, done their jobs and actually informed their readers, instead of letting lies from anonymous sources go unchallenged.
On the other hand, it’s appalling to me that this is even a question that needs to be asked. Isn’t seeking the truth and informing readers in the fucking job description?
The interconnectedness of the world economy means that US economic woes will have severe effects on others.
The official US unemployment rate is 9.1 per cent, but the “real unemployment” rate is 22.6 per cent
During the Tajik Civil War of the late 1990s, soldiers loyal to the central government found an ingeniously simple way to conserve bullets while massacring members of the Taliban-trained opposition movement. They tied their victims together with rope and chucked them into the Pyanj, the river that marks the border with Afghanistan. “As long as one of them couldn’t swim,” explained a survivor of that forgotten hangover of the Soviet collapse as he walked me to one of the promontories used for this act of genocide, “they all died”.
Such is the state of today’s integrated global economy.
Interdependence, liberal economists believe, furthers peace - a sort of economic mutual assured destruction. If China or the United States were to attack the other, the attacker would suffer grave consequences. But as the US economy deteriorates from the Lost Decade of the 2000s through the post-2008 meltdown into what is increasingly looking like Marx’s classic crisis of late-stage capitalism, internationalisation looks more like a suicide pact.
Like those Tajiks whose fates were linked by tightly-tied lengths of cheap rope, Europe, China and most of the rest of the world are bound to the United States, a nation that seems both unable to swim and unwilling to learn.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, a process that began in the 1970s and culminated with dissolution in 1991, had wide-ranging international implications. Russia became a mafia-run narco-state; millions perished of famine. Weakened Russian control of Central Asia, especially Afghanistan, set the stage for an emboldened and highly organised radical Islamist movement. Not least, it left the United States as the world’s last remaining superpower.
From an economic perspective, however, the effects were basically neutral. Coupled with its reliance on state-owned manufacturing industries to minimise dependence on foreign trade, the USSR’s use of a closed currency ensured that other countries were not significantly affected when the ruble went into a tailspin.
Partly due to its wild deficit spending on the gigantic military infrastructure it claimed was necessary to fight the Cold War - and then, after brief talk of a “peace dividend” during the 1990s, even more profligacy on the Global War on Terror - now the United States is, like the Soviet Union before it, staring down the barrel of economic apocalypse…
The United States is in a depression
No question about it.
Unlike the Great Depression of 1929-1943, however, Americans are not only suffering from lower wages, but burdened with skyrocketing “real inflation” of over 10 per cent per annum. Again, the official inflation rate does not adequately consider the rising costs of housing, food or energy.
The Obama Administration pretends there’s no problem. It has been in office for two and half years, yet the president has never bothered to submit a jobs-creation bill to Congress. Faced with falling poll numbers and a reelection campaign next year, Obama’s “jobs offensive” entails calls for “extending the Social Security payroll tax break, investing in infrastructure and extending unemployment insurance”, according to The Associated Press. Those measures stand no chance of passage by the Republican-dominated Congress - which is fine, since they would fall woefully short of the trillions in direct stimulus needed to jumpstart the stalled economy anyway.
Where could economic growth come from?
Not from the US government.
In 2009 the Obama Administration might have pushed for a radical reorientation of the federal government’s priorities, shrinking the military, ending its foreign wars, and redirecting investment funds domestically. They instead chose to grease their banker buddies. Now the political landscape has worsened for the Democrats. “There is no political constituency fighting for direct job creation by government, either through federal aid to prevent layoffs in local government or through public works projects,” notes Stephen Foley of the UK Independent. “These ideas represent the fastest way to lower unemployment, but government is now out of the business of job creation. It is cuts, cuts, cuts all the way from here.”
Nor will the next boom come from corporations.
Companies aren’t hiring because there’s no demand. There’s no demand because companies aren’t hiring. So much for the magic of the marketplace.
Corporations are hoarding so much cash - cash that could drive recovery if it were invested in expanded and new lines of business - that even banks don’t want it anymore. Bank of New York Mellon Corp. took the extraordinary step of charging a fee on deposits of amounts over $50m. “Since the beginning of the year, US bank holdings of cash are up 83 per cent, or $890bn, to $1.98tn,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Banks have more money than they know what to do with. “Consumer loans, by contrast, have grown 0.2 per cent, or $1.7bn.” …
Read Whole: aljazeera.net
I found this article both pathetic as well as amusing.
Pathetic because it was fixed.
Amusing because I have yet to lose an in-town race against a car or truck and I manage to get my eggs home in one piece. Hell, I’m usually halfway there before the motorists have even finished getting belted into their vehicle…
— OTB
I’m riding over just about the worst terrain that any urban biker has ever faced, in a city where the drivers consider it their moral duty to block crosswalks, pull across sidewalks, and run two-wheelers off the road. Yet, there’s still only a slight difference between my commute time on a bike or a car during light traffic hours. Now, compare to a car during high traffic times… well, I beat them so badly it’s easy to see why so many drivers might resent the two-wheelers that fly right past, never looking back.
If I had access to roads or maintained paths, instead of criminally disrepaired sidewalks blocked by standing vehicles, I’d shave fifteen minutes off my time, easy.
I must say I have really mixed feelings about things like this.
On one hand I find the harassment of cyclists by motorists to be particularly distasteful since I’m a car-less utility cyclist, not to mention that it’s a pretty cowardly thing to do.
On the other hand I’m always wary of re-packaging of extant laws. Most of what cyclists suffer, e.g. threats of violence, having things thrown at them, etc., are already crimes, so I see no need for new laws.
It also occurs to me that the ability for a cyclist to take a driver to civil court without waiting for the city to press criminal charges probably borders on feckless since — and let’s be honest about this — most of us out there riding around on two wheels instead of four do it for financial reasons and it’s therefore out of reach for a goodly number of us.
So, while I like the sentiment behind the law, I really do hate when people pass feel-good laws that don’t do much other than to clutter up the already byzantine maze of ordinances, laws, rules, etc. we already have to live with.
— OTB
What’s the best way to counter the MSM’s cowardly false equivalency on every issue? (image credit: ltsaloon.org)
With the ungodly amount of misinformation spread by the mass media, who lazily treat every story as if both sides are always equally responsible and both sides always have worthy arguments to make, what is the best way to counteract it? We have a society today in which strong opinions are discouraged even if they are demonstrably, provably right, and the other side completely and obviously wrong. The “sensible” approach is now always the fallacy of the middle ground, as it upsets no one and creates no criticism. Because of this, it also halts all constructive conversation and accomplishes nothing. It is an attitude that treats ignorance as just as worthy of attention as knowledge, and lies just as newsworthy as truth. I see this tendency most often among people who don’t know anything about politics but enjoy feeling as if they have the moral high ground. But it is an attitude that is also prevalent among people who would otherwise identify as being on the left and are simply averse to conflict.
The media has become so allergic to any intimations of “liberal bias” that reporters fall over themselves to provide a right-wing point of view on every issue, regardless of how insane or contradictory their views are. Ask yourself how it is possible that the mainstream media presented the debt ceiling crisis as an issue of too much partisanship on both sides, and yet John Boehner was able to say that he got 98% of what he wanted from the deal. Ask yourself why every time there was a Tea Party rally during the healthcare debate, no matter how small, it got national media coverage. Ask yourself when the hate and vitriol of people like Glenn Beck on Fox became “the same” as the message of tolerance (except for the intolerant) of people like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Ask yourself what it means that despite thirty years of hard evidence that shows trickle-down economics has only resulted in a shrinking middle class and more wealth to the already wealthy, that Republicans are still able to say tax cuts vastly tilted in favor of the wealthy are good for the economy without being questioned. Ask yourself why despite overwhelming evidence that global warming exists and comes from human CO2 emissions, to the point where 97-98% of climate scientists agree, there is always another guest invited to spout the same tired disproven lies and ad hominem attacks against it. And ask yourself why every time President Obama gives a public statement, equal media coverage and time is spent reporting on whomever the Republicans put forward to counter his message. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember this level of attention paid to Democratic responses under Bush (except for after the State of the Union.)
I’m not saying no one questions these things. I’m saying that reporters rarely do. It is always presented as if there are two sides to the debate, when there is so much evidence in favor of one side and so little in favor of the other. When the media frames the argument as if both sides are equally credible, crazy ideas with no basis in reality suddenly become acceptable, or even mainstream. After writing and researching for this blog for almost two years and being an active listener and learner for much longer, it is shocking how many facts are taken out of context or falsehoods repeated without so much as a caveat, even in otherwise reputable news sources such as NPR (to say nothing of CNN, or Fox.)
The media no longer recognizes that it is not a sin to intervene on the side of truth, even in politics. Either that, or they actively want to misinform. What can we do about it, with so much money behind the misinformation machine, and the false moral high ground given to those who are willing to ignore facts to be agreeable?
Edit: The answer is not violence. If people on the left engage in violence the backlash will be enormous. Violence gives the perfect rationale for a crackdown. It would accomplish exactly the opposite of what the violent thug intends.