Aw, Poor Bobby Jindal...

Graphic: Gurman Bhatia/Poynter

Wait, what I am saying ?  Fuck that guy.

Left: 'Official' Portrait of Gov. Bobby Jindal/Right: Some Random Brown Dude

Chart, h/t TBogg

And Jindal Is In

As another pure joke-candidate.

Who nonetheless presumably paid someone to produce this logo.

Well, at least it's not burdened with an overwrought slogan.  'BOBBYJINDAL (sic) FOR PRESIDENT', that's succinct.

See America Has to be Exceptional No Matter What, Whether That is in a Good Way or a Bad

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."

A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."

Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.

Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans.  Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.

And as for the thing about the US being out of step with the rest of the world, the thing you have to understand, is that this is a point of pride in the US, where obsession with national greatness and inherent national superiority has turned the international and indeed consensus generally into something inherently suspicious.

One case in point being, the US' pride in being just one of three nations still refusing adoption of the metric system.  The US had pledged to do so, and presumably originally intended in fact to someday so do, but at some point, as it dragged its feet on and on, rather than let itself feel any guilt or sense of failure over the continuing delays over adopting Metric, politicians instead seized on the outlier status of the US as a point of pride, and started to turn what was once accepted consensus over international standards into an absurd bogeyman-style conspiracy.

Hence, here we are in the year 2015, such that when a Democratic candidate for the presidency says this:

Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.

He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."

The response of one of his Republican candidates for the same office is inevitably this:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”

Because the entire rest-of-the-world would benefit so much from replacing something as easily understandable and easily calculated as a base-ten system of measurement with something from the Middle Ages based around such things at the size of a particular monarch's foot or hand !

The country is run, to the shame of its sane residents, by a bunch of childish extremists.  The sort of people who, in the wake of a historically black church being shot up by an evident white-supremacist extremist racist (the event itself in the wake of so many other acts of mass-shootings and so many other demonstrations of racial violence), argue that we must not make the event 'about race', and that those who want to bring discussions of gun-control into the debate are radical demagogues, and who insist that, really, the asshole was targeting Christians, not blacks.

Who did so, despite his own words to a survivor of the attack, explicitly outlining his motivations, and his desire to start a race-war.  Some of whom, will no doubt continue to do so, even given the recent discovery of an online manifesto making his violent racist aims and motivations even more explicit.

The United States' problem is perhaps its own success.  A nation rich and powerful for much of its short history, and so rich and powerful since the end of the Second World War that it has come to see itself as beyond criticism, as beyond the purview of mere mortals.  The US is/has long been suffering from a sort of God-complex.  Rather than embracing criticism, and learning from its mistakes, the tendency is to demonise the critics, and to celebrate even its own failings (such as say the dismal state of healthcare in America) as successes (it's a sign of how free we how we compared to you Euro-commies !).  Live free, die young and poor; But opportunity abounds; You could have been rich and successful...theoretically...

Perhaps demographic changes will one day reduce the ageing lunatic fringe to enough of a minority that the non-maniacs can take over the asylum.  The numbers are promising.  Then again, the lunatics may just burn down the asylum before that could/in order that that never be allowed to...happen.

Especially as the tool of choice in burning down this particular asylum would likely be not lighters, but cheap, readily-available, and hugely (especially, thanks to the NRA, since the inauguration of a certain black president) stockpiled bullets.


* As always, Thanks Harriet Miers !

Why Wasn't He Just Sent to Room 101 ?

VoldemortGovernor Rick Scott

There are different levels of crazy when it comes to Governors of US States; There's Bobby Jindal crazy, there's Sarah Palin crazy, and then...there's Rick Scott crazy.  Two-term governor Rick Scott, as in Florida actually re-elected this man after his first four years of radical Talibangelican craziness.

Florida, with its large population of transplants from New York and other Northeastern areas used to be thought of as one of the more liberal more Democratic states.  But today, it's rapidly turning into a lunatic-fringe Orwellian hellhole.

An employee of Florida’s environmental protection department was forced to take a leave of absence and seek a mental health evaluation for violating governor Rick Scott’s unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” under any circumstance, according to a complaint filed against the state.

Longtime employee Barton Bibler reportedly included an explicit mention of climate change in his official notes from a Florida Coastal Managers Forum meeting in late February, during which climate change, rising sea levels and the possible environmental impact of the Keystone XL Pipeline were discussed.

On 9 March, Bibler received a formal reprimand for “misrepresenting that ‘the official meeting agenda included climate change’”, according to a statement from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), a nationwide non-profit that champions public employees’ rights and providers resources and guidance to whistleblowers using its network of members across the country.

Bibler was instructed to stay away from the office for two days and told he could return to work only after a mental health evaluation from his doctor verified his “fitness for duty”, the complaint said. In the letter to Florida’s inspector general, Candie Fuller, the state’s Peer director calls for a full investigation to the matter.

Bibler told the Miami Herald that he “didn’t get the memo” about the gag order, so when he introduced himself by congratulating other officials on the call for the “exciting” work they were doing to address climate change, the “reaction was mostly shock”.

Keep in mind, this is Florida we are talking about here.

Of course, South Florida is not the only place that will be devastated by sea-level rise. London, Boston, New York and Shanghai are all vulnerable, as are low-lying underdeveloped nations like Bangladesh. But South Florida is uniquely screwed, in part because about 75 percent of the 5.5 million people in South Florida live along the coast. And unlike many cities, where the wealth congregates in the hills, southern Florida's most valuable real estate is right on the water. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development lists Miami as the number-one most vulnerable city worldwide in terms of property damage, with more than $416 billion in assets at risk to storm-related flooding and sea-level rise.

South Florida has two big problems. The first is its remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level. Its highest natural elevation, a limestone ridge that runs from Palm Beach to just south of the city, averages a scant 12 feet. With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades.

Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. "Imagine Swiss cheese, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like," says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily – it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. "Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."