See, this is why we need Donald Trump to Make America Great Again! Because only he can save us from the overwhelming number of illegal immigrants (not all of them, but most...probably, because that's all Mexico sends), murdering people left right and center. Your gardener, the woman at Taco Bell, the assistant at the dry cleaners, your taxi driver, all of them part of the massive crime wave sweeping America!
And Jeb! wants us to have compassion, nay love, for the ravenous murdering scum! Vote Donald Trump 2016!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* Bonus fun fact regarding that first graph above: Fox News launched in 1996.
Vox on the evolution of the NRA from an organisation focused on hunting and sportsmen, and supportive of gun-control, to the radical front for the gun-industry it is today.
* Note, that he now says he backs limits on the terms of peers...presumably non-retroactively, and starting right after he leaves No. 10. By which time the number in the House should be two-thousand or so.
The Iranian/Persian stuff that ended up in my collection accidentally/serendipitously doesn't come up in the shuffle often, but I love it when it does, and it's something as lovely as this.*
* No, I don't speak Persian, but I'm reasonably sure she's not singing about Death to America or nuclear weapons, or anything much more than a traditional love-song. ** Yes, that is from the same source as I was listening to. If you must know.
*** Dimensions as taken from YouTube. Whether the video is cropped, or what the original dimensions were I cannot say
I missed this earlier, but it is delightful, and may well become a defining image of Marco Rubio's quest for the GOP nomination.
This would be damning even if it were a Photoshop or a cartoon, but it is, instead, a real-life photo-opportunity that Senator Rubio choseto make for himself. A candidate whose defining selling-point (next to being Cuban-American), his youth, and relative inexperience, is also potentially his greatest weakness.
I'm a serious contender for the presidency. Whee !
Reuters: Wal-Mart to stop selling AR-15, other semi-automatic rifles. In case you wondered, they say this has nothing to do with all the mass-killings in America, and is simply a response to customer-demand. They 'are instead focusing on hunting and sportsman firearms'. Which seems odd as in the next sentence in the article, the AR-15 is described as a 'modern sporting rifle' and as it is very much intended for hunting...humans.
GOP Presidential Candidate Piyush 'Bobby' Jindal forced to deny being an 'anchor-baby', and hilariously refers to himself as a 'pre-existing condition' instead. Oh, that Republican humour...
Ukraine's Poroshenko compares Novorossiya or 'New Russia' to...Mordor. By which, I gather (from the BBC) he meant that Novorossiya, like Mordor...was fictional ? Because, the would-be Novorossiyans would willingly build a fictional identity that likened themselves to the slavish orcs of Sauron ? Or maybe he was referring to the more industrial nature of Eastern Ukraine versus the West...making...Western Ukrainians...Hobbits ? Or he just meant that they were bad, bad, no-good orc-like people, or...? No, no matter how much I unpick this, I still don't get what the fuck he was trying to say.
The plan to save the tourists at New York's Times Square from the desnudas, and all the harassing plushies: 'Just dig the whole damn thing up!' Er, Yokay...
If public-service broadcasting, one of the best thing we've ever done creatively as a country...if it was a car industry, our ministers would be out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs that would bring.
If the BBC were a weapons-system, half the cabinet would be on a plane to Saudia Arabia to tell them how brilliant it was.
And yet, it's quite the reverse: They talk of cutting down to size, of reining in imperialist ambitions, of hiving off, of limiting the scope, and they do it with all the manic glee of a doctor ever so reasonably urging his patient to consider the benefits of assisted suicide.
Not that I don't agree with many criticisms of the BBC myself, such as, for one, that it shouldn't be competing with the commercial networks for the rights to rebroadcast popular shows from the US.*
* Championing content from other European networks, that would likely not otherwise be seen, on the other hand, I support wholeheartedly.
And then most of the news-stories seem too obvious, too old, too boring, too depressing, too Trump-centric even in the case of one country's politics, for anything other than a link-dump. Wait, women-only train-carriages ? Is Corbyn advocating Sharia ?! Scandal ! Scandal ! Scandal !
Always cartoons, and Bell's latest is a beaut., if only for what he did to Harman, but I just ran Bell, and I have to have some kind of standards. And for some of the other dailies...
But I do feel I should post something more than a half-century-old song, so*...
I do feel like the specific sport of Ginger-baiting is more a phenomenon of the British Isles than elsewhere, but no doubt some degree of discrimination is present in any country where redheads are a minority (ie, er...well, practically everywhere). I'll never understand it.
* If only out of laziness in continuing to avoid a couple of other subjects on which I meant to write.
So, as individuals close to cuddly Uncle Joe Biden continue to hint at a run for the Democratic nomination, suddenly everyone in the media's dredging up pesky facts from that ole' thing we used to call 'history.' Here, from Slate:
A large part of running for president is intense scrutiny on personal history and political records. But once you’re in office, that scrutiny subsides. Once you’ve left, it almost disappears. Right now, Biden is beloved, an avuncular and light-hearted figure who contrasts the president’s stoic cool and adds a touch of heart to the seemingly mechanistic Obama White House. Forgotten (at least, outside academia and a few corners of political media) is Biden’s earlier persona: a leader in America’s drug war. For a generation, Biden was at the front of a national push for tough drug laws and police militarization.
If you consider her time in Bill Clinton’s White House, that’s true for Hillary, too. The difference is that she was first lady—an advocate for her husband’s policies, but not a lawmaker. That’s why she’s able to meet face to face with members of the Black Lives Matter movement and not look disingenuous when she says she has changed her mind on the subject. Biden’s Senate career, by contrast, was defined by his aggressive and vocal support for the drug war. Here are the highlights of that history:
In 1984, he worked with Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond and the Reagan administration to craft and pass the Comprehensive Control Act, which enhanced and expanded civil asset forfeiture, and entitled local police departments to a share of captured assets. Critics say this incentivizes abuse, citing countless cases of unfair and unaccountable seizures....
In 1986, Biden co-sponsored the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created new mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including the infamous crack-versus-cocaine sentencing disparity. A crack cocaine user with only five grams would receive five years without parole, while a powder cocaine user had to possess 500 grams before seeing the same punishment. The predictable consequence was a federal drug regime that put its toughest penalties on low-level drug sellers and the most impoverished drug users.
Biden would also play an important role in crafting the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which strengthened mandatory minimums for drug possession, enhanced penalties for people who transport drugs, and established the Office of National Drug Control Policy, whose director was christened “drug czar” by Biden.
His broadest contribution to crime policy was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly called the 1994 Crime Bill. Written by Biden and signed by President Clinton, it increased funds for police and prisons, fueling a huge expansion of the federal prison population. As journalist Radley Balko details in The Rise of The Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, it also contributed to the rapid growth of militarized police forces that used new federal funds to purchase hundreds of thousands of pieces of military equipment, from flak jackets and automatic rifles to armored vehicles and grenade launchers.
The “crime bill” also brought a host of new federal death penalty crimes, which Biden celebrated in his defense of the bill. “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” he said to Sen. Orrin Hatch, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”
Senator Joe Biden speaks at the signing of the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.
Say it ain't so, Joe ! Not our lovely fuzzy liberal icon onto whom we can project all our progressive fantasies !
But never mind about all that. It's not as if the real-life consequences of those policies are being highlighted more than ever as the prison-population continues to soar, largely filling up with the poor and ethnic minorities, and as every day seems to bring new stories of unarmed men, women, and children shot dead in the street by militarised cops who see themselves as occupying forces in American cities.
Always appreciated the plain-speaking of (the probably far-more intelligent than Trump) Jeremy Clarkson*. And found him...usually...entertaining. But vote for the fucker ?
Links to petitions & letters to the LAT, links to encourage various media-outlets to cover the story, or to just buy Ted's books or donate directly here.
Update: So apparently, Ted is reviewing his legal options, but perhaps more importantly whether he can afford the costs of what could be a difficult legal battle. So if you'd be willing to support him with that, you could let him know so in the comments here.
could be the start of something interesting. But I can't help noticing two things:
That most media-outlets are uncritically associating this with #blacklivesmatter, without differentiating between this and the official Black Lives Matter group.
That certain phrases such as 'institutional racism'*, and 'white supremacy' seem to be absent.
The page http://www.joincampaignzero.org/problem/, outlining the apparent problem, doesn't in fact use the word 'race' in any form at all. It talks about police-violence, the fact that most victims were unarmed, and the fact that other countries don't kill civilians the way the US does, without mentioning race even once. The racial disparity in the deaths is so blatant in the US, that I'd almost suspect the absence of that word as deliberate.
More than one thousand peopleare killed by police every year in America
Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless "quality of life" behaviors or mental health crises.
This year is no different. There have only been nine days this year when the police have not killed somebody. Last month alone, the police killed 125 people. This must stop. We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country.
We can live in an America where the police do not kill people. Police in England, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even cities like Newark, NJ, and Richmond, CA, demonstrate that public safety can be ensured without killing civilians. By implementing the right policy changes, we can end police killings and other forms of police violence in the United States.
At any rate, the framing does seem quite distinct from that of official BLM**:
#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and dead 17-year old Trayvon was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder. Rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society.Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.
It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.
When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. How Black poverty and genocide is state violence. How 2.8 million Black people are locked in cages in this country is state violence. How Black women bearing the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families is state violence. How Black queer and trans folks bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us, and that is state violence. How 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows. How Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war. How Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by white supremacy, and that is state violence.
#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. We affirm our contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project–taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets. The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation.
It's almost as if*** we're talking about (at least) two completely different groups, one focused upon practical solutions to police-violence, in the context of race, and the other, looking for some sort of outright revolution (against a patriarchal cis-normative hetero-white supremacy natch). Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.
I've yet to see what the more official BLM reaction to this effort is**** (interesting timing to release something over a weekend, isn't it ?), but I'm genuinely curious how this will play out, and to what degree the two groups will find common cause or cause for competition.
* Did see 'systemic racism' a few times, and also 'racial' & 'racism' several times.
** Emphasis mine *** Almost as if all black people don't think the same. I know, who knew, right ? **** If any -- The attention of the mainstream white media doesn't necessarily mean anything after all. ***** And I didn't even mention MLK or Malcolm X once...Yay me ! /snark.
New sources of helium found ! Unfortunately, mostly in the same country that sold off its strategic reserves of helium at bargain-basement-prices for largely ideological reasons.
And finally, via Vox, via Slate, what the poster on YouTube described five years ago (more simply than they) as 'Serious Seinfeld':
* The older I get, the less and less sympathy I have for so-called 'States' rights', which more often than not, seem to simply enable the worst behaviour by the worst actors, in the worst corners of the so-called 'United States.' ** Yes, that Kevin Ring apparently
Personally, I still think this e-mail-crap is all bullshit, but then, I think Mister Trump is at best a stand-in stooge competitor for the presidency, so what do I know ?
One of America's largest cinema chains, Regal, is now searching bags of film-goers following several attacks on movie theatres across the US.
Regal's updated policy says it wants customers and staff "to feel comfortable and safe" in its cinemas.
It is not clear when it began, but reports say some people had their bags checked at some of the company's 570 cinemas this week.
Earlier this month, a man attacked cinema-goers in Tennessee with an axe.
He was shot dead by Nashville police, but no-one else was killed.
"Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America," Regal Entertainment Group's admission policy now reads on the company's website. The company has not yet commented publicly on the new regulations.
"To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission," it continues.
Last week, police were deployed outside the Regal cinema in Los Angeles ahead of the premiere of the film Straight Outta Compton.
Two weeks before the Nashville attack, two people were shot dead and nine others injured when a man attacked a cinema in Lafayette, Louisiana.
The change in policy also comes the same month Colorado theatre killer, James Holmes, was given a life sentence for killing 12 people and injuring 70 others at a screening of a Batman film in 2012.
Bag-searches & metal-detectors make me feel comfortable & safe, how about you ? Far more so than having rational gun-laws & freely available treatment for mental health-issues in the twenty-first-fucking-century. And machine-guns in airports, limits on liquids, removing shoes, patdowns & body-scans, cabin-doors that can't be forced even if it turns out your pilot is a suicidal nut determined on taking everyone with him into the side of a mountain...
Well at least we don't have to worry about nuclear weapons any more...except that our leaders seem determined to provoke a new cold war with Russia. And then we have armed drones, and the weaponisation of space. And who knows what new biological horrors our increasing understanding of the human genome will unleash in terms of new weapons, never mind all the conventional illnesses that we thought conquered till our commercialised use of antibiotics increased resistance across the board.
If only writers in the twentieth century had had the foresight to warn us against this sort of madness...
* And yes, that is the entire 'article'. Sorry, Beeb, but if you will limit your entire article to a tweetable length, then it does become rather harder to excerpt.
Really liked especially this bit from George Monbiot in the Guardian, and intended posting it with the title 'QOTD'.
To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.
But re-reading the piece again, there's too much that needs repeating. So...
On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates. Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority. The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.
In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers – as the SNP did in Scotland – could smash the political concrete.
To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.
As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to Ukip at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are flocking back to him.
...
Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back Ukip supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout? What is attractive about a party prepared to abandon its core values for the prospect of electoral gain? What is inspiring about a party that grovels, offering itself as a political doormat for any powerful interest or passing fad to wipe its feet on?
In an openDemocracy article, Ian Sinclair compares Labour’s attempts to stop Corbyn with those by the Tories in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, seen by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her.
Across three decades New Labour strategists have overlooked a crucial reality: politicians reinforce the values they espouse. The harder you try to win by adopting your opponents’ values, the more you legitimise and promote them, making your task – and that of your successors – more difficult. Tony Blair won three elections, but in doing so he made future Labour victories less likely. By adopting conservative values, conservative framing and conservative language, he shifted the nation to the right, even when he pursued leftwing policies such as the minimum wage, tax credits and freedom of information. You can sustain policies without values for a while but then, like plants without soil, the movement wilts and dies.
...
Rebuilding a political movement means espousing what is desirable, then finding ways to make it feasible. The hopeless realists propose the opposite. They assemble a threadbare list of policies they consider feasible, then seek to persuade us that this package is desirable. If they retain core values, they’ve become so muddled by tacking and triangulation as to be almost indecipherable.
So great has the damage been to a party lost for 21 years in Blair’s Bermuda triangulation that it might take many years until it becomes electable again. That is a frightening prospect, but the longer Labour keeps repeating the same mistakes – reinforcing the values it should be contesting – the further to the right it will push the nation, and the more remote its chances of election will become. The task is to rebuild the party’s values, reclaim the democratic debate, pull the centre back towards the left and change – as Clement Attlee and Thatcher did in different ways – the soul of the nation.
Because Labour’s immediate prospects are so remote, regardless of who wins this contest, the successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again. Only one candidate proposes to do that.*
One might also note that by trying to take the more centre-right (at best) ground formerly held by the Tories, that Tony Blair helped force the 'Conservative' Party further to the right as well, such that, as has already happened with the Republican party in the US, it is become increasingly a radical party, an extremist entity. In fact, I'd suggest that Tony Blair had almost as much to do with the Tories' disgusting transformation as Keith Joseph. And that arseholes like Liz Kendall & her supporter David Miliband also deserve much of the blame in their complicity for what England has now become.
Was watching part of an LBC interview with Liz Kendall earlier, till I got to the point that I wanted to vomit. She said something about not being able to bear seeing 'fifteen years in total of a Tory government.' Strange. If we're talking about right-wing rule generally**, and New Labour are arguably to the right of what the 'Conservatives' once represented even in my lifetime, then I'd say the number would be more like forty-six.***
* As a non-partisan, I find it interesting that Monbiot seems to be only talking about Labour regaining power in the context of an outright victory, rather than considering the possibilities of a broader progressive coalition, but then this is an article in the context of the party's leadership-election after all. ** And frankly, who gives a shit more about the names of the parties or their members than actual policy ? *** ie May 1979 to May 2025
Not that you should trust the former Russia Today on, well...anything. Their story is based upon a damning report from the 'National Security Network' which you can read in its entirety here.
China and India look to joining up with Russia on drilling in the Arctic. Huh, our attempt at isolation of Russia over Ukraine is working brilliantly, no ?
AT&T worked closely (and enthusiastically perhaps ?) with the NSA to aid in spying on Americans and others, including the United Nations ? No ! Say, it ain't so ! Not good ole' AT&T, surely ?
Seek out experts in illegal memory-manipulation to erase any memory you may have of Windows 7, or of the world prior to Vista generally**.
Use Windows 8.0 for twenty-four hours
Use Vista for twenty-four minutes
Hit self over head with shovel whilst chugging Smirnoff vodka
Repeat steps 1-4 as needed
Speaking of which, Boing Boing has more on Windows 10's 'spying' on users
There is truly no limit to the films/franchises that Hollywood will not ruin in the name of bottomless greed: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/12/beetlejuice-2-is-really-happening-confirms-winona-ryder. And in the case of ill-thought-through reboots of truly iconic figures, we need not even wait for the stars (*cough*, Man from Uncle, *cough*) to die before we shit all over their legacy.
The latest book to be banned: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by the Principal of a school in Tallahassee, Florida. Because it didn't 'show proper reverence for God and the Christian faith'. I guess I can see why, what with the character's thought-process having the ability to inspire critical thinking, and how that might threaten religious conservatives. Regardless, fuck this, and fuck them.
The LA Times somehow...has the balls to tell Ted Rall that they are doubling down on his unjustified firing, even in light of the apparently exonerating evidence of the cleaned-up tape. Lawsuit, here we come...***
Whistleblower Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning facing indefinite solitary confinement for, amongst other things, possession of 'expired' toothpaste and magazines (with, for some inexplicable reason, the magazine with Caitlyn/Bruce on the cover attracting the most headlines). Meanwhile, another high-ranking leaker of state-secrets (rhymes with 'slay us') continues to walk free.
Veteran astronaut's claims regarding peaceful aliens' attempts to prevent nuclear war on Earth. By far, the best part of which is this, from readers of the Mirror:
The lengths to which paparazzi-scum will go to get pictures of the maybe one-day future-king of the rUK...despite his parents if anything oversharing with the media thus far.
The DHS' 'no-fly' list based upon unspecified assessment of pre-criminal intentions, as determined by the government, rather than any actual criminal activity. Constitutional ? Who cares, sez the govt.
And finally, never cared much for Funny or Die myself, but if they can make the cast of Fox News' The Five this mad, they must be doing something right...Stalin & the Devil !
