2014 archive
Droning On 0
Fire officials spotted the drone over the so-called Sand Fire on Sunday and immediately called police to find the drone’s owner and have the toy grounded to avoid a possible mid-air collision, a California fire official said.
Drones are not the problem. It’s the droners.
Medicine Show 0
What happens when crackpot state legistors arrogate the role of doctor?
Debra L. Ness and Charles Cutler answer that question in the Inky. A nugget:
One of these laws forbids doctors from telling patients which by-products of natural-gas extraction may be making them or their children sick. Others prohibit physicians from discussing whether a gun in a patient’s home might be within reach of a small child. Still others require doctors to subject women seeking abortions to unnecessary medical tests or inaccurate information.
This Republican quackery needs to end.
Chris-Crossed 0
Mike Kelly tries to understand Chris Christie’s veto of a bill to limit the capacity of ammunition clips.
Police say that it is hardly surprising that most mass killers of the last decade have used semi-automatic, military style guns that can be equipped with high-capacity magazines. Whether it’s a Glock or an AR-15, the essential workings are similar. The shooter only has to pull the trigger to fire. And with a magazine that holds a large number of bullets, a killer can keep firing – and murdering — without reloading. What about that last sentence does Chris Christie, our blunderbuss governor, not understand?
You can read his answer at the link, but facts and logic have nothing to do with it.
The base Republican base loves it some guns, and no Republican politician–hell, no Democratic politician–has the guts to go against the gun nuts. Those folks get touchy when their substitute phalli are threatened.
Twits on Twitter 0
Twits who are beyond the Palin.
Merchants of Death 0
Cenk dissects the duplicitous drivel.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite to mothers-to-be.
She was shot in the head Saturday evening while being shown a gun at a friend’s house in Brooksville, authorities said.
She and her husband, Carson Hoover, had gone to visit friends at 20079 Suncrest Drive in northwest Brooksville, just outside the city limits.
Sometime around 6:45 p.m. inside the house, William DeHayes was showing the Hoovers some of his guns, including a .22-caliber revolver. The gun accidentally fired and shot Katherine Hoover in the head, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office.
Another gun owner too stupid to own guns, and. apparently, another gun that just fires itself.
Color Test 0
Dennis G. at Balloon Juice points out that mass migrations are normal parts of human history over millenia and highlights the racist motives of the right-wing anti-immigrant clamor. A nugget (emphasis added):
Please do read the rest.
Wherever the scalpel cuts into American “Conservatism,” racism will be found at (and in) the base. All the rest is window-dressing.
Shortflower 0
It’s growing out of the window box, right along with the geraniums and impatiens and the vincas.
Suffer the Children 0
The New Haven Register shares the stories of some of the immigrants refugees who have lately fled to the United States from Central America and found themselves in Connecticut. If you want to know why these children are heading north, read them.
They are chilling. Here’s a bit from one:
Hazel said the principal of her school told the students that they would be safe there, but no one believed her as students disappeared, either fleeing the city or victims of extortion.
Nothing illustrates the venality, the cynicism, the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers more fully than its crusade to victimize these who are already victims.
Are You Bit-Curious? 0
Linux Voice’s Ben Everard explains bitcoin. It’s an editorially neutral, technical explanation, but if you are bit-curious about the mechanics of the scam* or want to better understand what all the fuss is about, it’s worth a read. A nugget:
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*I don’t mind editorializing, in case you haven’t noticed.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
California is sinking into the sea, just not in the manner that many predicted.
Vlot’s wells are collapsing, crushed by the shifting soils. The dam Hurley depends on to divert water into the company’s canals from the San Joaquin River has sunk so far – about 3 feet in just five years – that the river is threatening to spill over. If that happens, he’ll have less water to distribute to farmers who grow cotton, tomatoes and a range of other crops.
Cali’s not the only place with that sinking feeling.
Regressive Politics 0
Facing South explores similarities and one glaring difference between Teabaggery and the Southern Populist movements at the end of the 19th Century. A nugget:
Tea Partyers know this, but much of their anger is misdirected. Unlike the Populists of the 1890s, they despise organized labor. Their benefactors — the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth — would have it no other way. The old Populists wanted government to serve the people. The Tea Partyers want government to go away.
Myth-Makers: How the South Won the Civil War 0
The North may have won the war, but the South won the peace.
The myth of the nobility of the Lost Cause and of its proponents was part of its winning strategy. The tales of gracious Southern hospitality, of kind masters and happy slaves, were essential to building the myth. Gone with the Wind was the myth-builders’ apotheosis, their master-stroke, myth-making on the grandest scale. Even more corrosively, it was a myth devotedly believed by its proponents in their desire to absolve themselves and their ancestors from the evils they had perpetrated.
I’m sure that my ancestors, many of whom wore the gray and some of whom held slaves, were mostly good people as best they knew how (except for Henry Alexander Wise, who may have been single-handedly the most important individual in convincing Virginia to secede), but Southerners’ romanticizing slave-holders, slavery, and those who fought to perpetuate slavery and “Our Way of Life” must end before the South finds redemption.
A way of life built on blood and torture and rape and theft of labor must be no longer romanticized, no longer admired, no longer remembered with wistful tears nor with misty water-colored memories. It was not romantic when it happened to the sound of whips and the clank of chains; it warrants no wistful tears, no water-colored memories. Until Southerners confront and admit this, their–our–sin will not be purged.
But it’s not going to happen, is it?
Far too many of our countrymen want “those days” back. For sake of economy, we’ll call them “Republicans,” as Nixon’s odious Southern Strategy, by which he expected to entice bigots to support the Republican Party, has come full circle, so that bigots now control the Republican Party.
So long as some of our fellow citizens look wistfully to the Old South as a promised land, America’s original sin of slavery will continue to soil the polity and America’s soul.
Afterthought:
If you want to walk back into the myth of genteel racism, try watching Disney’s Song of the South. Except for the cartoon bits, it’s little more than racist propaganda, full of kind masters and smiling happy darkies singing in the fields.
My friend and I watched it a while ago. The “live action” scenes took all the fun out of the cartoons. It was, quite frankly, to gag.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Proselytize for politeness.
“There’s evidence that he took offense to the issue that there were signs posted at Mercy Fitzgerald Health System indicating that it was a gun-free zone,” Whelan said. “That’s the only motive we have been able to determine at this point in time . . . he was upset about that policy.”