I don’t think he’s ever made his own bed, let alone his own breakfast, lunch or dinner a day in his life, let alone worked a deep fryer in a fast food joint. My first real W-4 job was at a Burger Chef. I worked the night shift and that included closing up and an hour of cleaning the food prep after closing. Show me the staged photos of him cleaning the prep area after closing…go ahead…this man could not have handled the work involved back when he was a teenager himself, let alone now.
He’s had everything handed to him his entire life and that’s why he gets pissed off whenever he doesn’t get his way.
I’m gaining a little more data this morning about why I was having to listen to bullshit about FEMA’s hurricane response yesterday while I was trying to eat my Texas Roadhouse dinner. This excerpt from an article in The Atlantic came across my Bluesky feed just now…
“Elon Musk…claimed…FEMA was ‘actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.’ That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. ”
When I tried to view the article I discovered that it was subscriber only. I am already over subscribed to various news sources so I had to pass this one up. Here’s the banner:
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
By Charlie Warzel
Good thing it’s not so bad you can still hide it behind a paywall.
I did a little digging for that Elon Musk post and could not find it on his Twitter feed. But this is one of the Google results I got for it.
FEMA is actively hindering relief efforts. Moreover, they’re claiming the Starlinks that I’ve personally delivered as ones THEY’VE delivered.
You follow the link and you see that Musk has deleted the text of that tweet and replaced it with an angry emoji.
But then there is this tweet which is still up:
SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMAis both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!
They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of devastation: roads, houses, electricity, water supply and ground Internet connections completely destroyed.
@FEMA wouldn’t let them land to deliver critical supplies … my blood is boiling …
This tweet is still up despite that (according to Politico) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg talked by phone to Musk and walked him through how flight restrictions in an emergency zone and airport closures work, after which Musk agreed that the Secretary was “on the ball”.
This Politico article gives a pretty good overview of the situation with Musk’s disinformation campaign against FEMA. It ends with this:
In the U.S., some Republican state lawmakers have pleaded for conservative influencers to resist spreading falsehoods.
“PLEASE help stop this junk,” GOP North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin implored his Facebook followers on Oct. 3, citing false stories such as Antarctic weather control, land grabs over lithium and FEMA stealing donations.
A fellow lawmaker had received 15 calls in one day about untrue rumors, he added. “I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” Corbin said.
The next day, Musk reposted some of those same falsehoods to his 200 million followers, with one word: “Wow.”
What is the cost of lies? Last night I was watching a documentary on the last stages of WWII and the taking of Okinawa. Towards the end of the documentary, as the Japanese military is falling apart, and the ragged, brutalized people of the island are finally emerging from the caves where they’d either been hiding or held in captivity, we learn the people were terrified to seek help from the American soldiers because Japanese propaganda told them the Americans would rape and kill them, and that it was better to commit suicide than be captured by the Americans.
You wonder how many of them did just that, but what you saw in the footage were a lot of trembling, terrified people, including children and the elderly, physically emaciated and desperately needing care that the Americans were always willing to give to them…and also to the enemy, provided they put down their weapons and surrendered.
This morning I’m reading this:
Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, ticked through false rumors — that FEMA was “confiscating supplies” or only providing $750 in total assistance to storm victims — that he said are already harming the agency’s ability to help survivors.
“The misinformation is extremely damaging to the response efforts from Helene and from any disaster,” he said. “It is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance.”
…and this:
A man identifying himself only as Anthony called into Sirius XM’s “Dan Abrams Show” this week to share the story of his father-in-law, whose property near Ashville, North Carolina, was badly damaged by Helene. Despite the destruction, Anthony said his father-in-law is unwilling to accept assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“He has refused all FEMA help because he’s a hardcore Trumper,” Anthony told Abrams. “He literally believes that if he accepts anything from FEMA, they’re going to take his house.”
This is a twisted lie about a good FEMA program that will let FEMA buy your flooded out house if it’s been flooded out four years in a row and they and you can agree on a fair market price.
This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.
So people are afraid the government is going to take their house and decide to stay instead of evacuate. How many lives were lost because of this lie, we may never know because the dead can’t explain why they chose not to leave.
On VOX I see this snippet of conversation:
Sean Rameswaram: Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?
You still occasionally hear Musk referred to as a libertarian, but that was never the case. He badly wants Trump to win this coming election because he’s all in on the culture war and what he ridiculously calls the “woke mind virus”. I was a libertarian once. Reagan cured me of it, but I was there. No actual libertarian would ever come near to wanting a man like Trump having the levers of government in his hands. Musk is decidedly Not in favor of small, or even limited government. He is that angry drunk at the end of the bar babbling about socialism and mind viruses but with billions of dollars at his disposal to impose his pink elephants on the rest of us.
So many of us have forgotten since Reagan coined his infamous nine most terrifying words is that helping the American people cope with emergencies is what government does. Democracy, as Lincoln once put it, is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government is the mechanism by which we, the people, help our neighbors in times of need. Those FEMA workers they are being taught to demonize are their fellow Americans. They want to help. They are risking life and limb to help. And Musk and Trump are spitting in their faces, and also the faces of those they want to help.
It is not FEMA that’s getting between the survivors of Helene and the help they need. It’s Musk. It’s Trump. It’s Fox News. It’s the MAGA noise machine. It’s what they Have to do, regardless of who it hurts, even if it’s their own voters.
Because once people realize that those men and women from the government really are there help, it might lead them into thinking that maybe big government isn’t the problem after all, that the problem is only how to make government work better for everyone.
Valery Legasov:What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: “Who is to blame?” -HBO, Chernobyl
Before I left for my Disney World trip, I stopped at my local Texas Roadhouse for dinner, and was given an envelope with a coupon of some sort inside. But I was not to open it until their anniversary guest appreciation week, and then it could only be opened by a authorised staff member. Okay…this is some sort of promotion to get people into the restaurant that week, thinks I. But it did its work, although I’d likely have gone there anyway. I go there regularly because I like the food and the margaritas and it’s not very expensive. But that may be changing.
It is the last possible day to go to Texas Roadhouse and have staff there open the mystery envelope. I get a coupon for ten bucks off a meal, and order their top shelf margarita and ribs. I sit at one end of the U shaped bar where I usually do. This is so I’m not squeezed between other people at the bar. To my left are some folks the bartender seems to know because they’re chatting easily about this and that.
Eventually someone who I think is a floor manager walks over and asks how I’m doing. This happens regularly at this restaurant so I’m pretty sure it’s not about me or any of my Facebook check-ins here. As always I give her a thumbs up. The food is good, and while I am not a country-western or sports bar kind of guy there’s at least one big screen TV here showing an Atmospheres stream I can glance at. Satisfied, she walks around to the folks to my left and starts chatting with them, with the bartender joining in. Now I’m thinking they’re not just regulars but either personal friends or current or former employees.
They talk with the bartender about a rude customer who would not take no for an answer when he asked her if she’d be up for a date. I almost join in. It’s one thing to gawk at a beautiful face, and I’ve done my share of that, but it’s another to hit on someone whose job it is to be nice to you. But I stay out of it. Then the conversation turns to the recent hurricanes.
You realize that, at a country-western kind of place, you are going to encounter some percentage of MAGA nutcases, or a best Fox News junkies, even here in mostly sane central Maryland. I can accept that so long as I don’t have to listen to it, and the food and margaritas are good. But there’s an election coming, the drums are beating, and the Fox News/MAGA lies are swarming like locusts.
As soon as the conversation turns to the hurricanes they start yapping the flavor of the day lies about how Biden and Harris aren’t doing anything for the storm damaged communities, and that FEMA is actively slowing down and/or preventing local relief efforts. This last especially makes me angry, almost instantly livid, because so many dedicated government workers and local national guard troops are doing what they do in difficult and often dangerous conditions to get help to these communities. They are heroes. The Biden administration has set aside millions to hurricane relief, while the religious fanatic who is our current speaker of the House is refusing to call the House back into session to address hurricane relief…a thing that was commonplace once upon a time. And Every Florida Republican In The House voted against giving the afflicted states relief money. Then complained that the feds were withholding relief money!
It is despicable how Trump and Vance are lying about it. And not just to score points, but more insidiously to maintain the Reagan fiction that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.
Because among white supremacists and the ultra rich, a government that works for all of us cannot be allowed to stand.
So I’m getting angry hearing this crap about Biden and Harris and FEMA, and I reckon it’s starting to show in my face. The floor manager walks around to my end of the bar again and says something about hurricane relief. I give her the Sam Elliot stare…the one dad could and his two sons can suddenly flash when we’re really pissed off. And I get off a couple sentences about how FEMA is doing its best down there and it’s dispicable how so many decent government workers are being lied about. And she instantly pivots to what she probably thinks is some sort of customer neutral ground, because after all this is a hospitality business.
She says, apologetically, that people will believe any bad thing they want to believe and isn’t it a shame. I suppose the look on my face told her not to press it further.
To my left I begin hearing about sleepy Joe and lying Kamila. My dinner is just barely half finished. My margarita only about a quarter done. I ask for my check. The bartender looks surprised. She asks me if I want a box. Somewhat emphatically I say no.
I leave my usual 20 percent tip. Never blame the bartender for the conversation at the bar.
People will believe any bad thing they want to believe…
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
I’ve been thinking lately about “misinformation” since Facebook removed one of my posts about Project 2025 as being false (it wasn’t), and comparing the slippery way Meta is defining “disinformation” with what I and most of us in the gay community have witnessed from the homophobic right over the decades.
I’ve been doing a takedown of Dick Hafer’s horrifically homophobic comic book “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, and I mentioned in the last post I made in that series being stunned at the outright lies I uncovered, simply by following a cite to its source, which was almost certainly something Paul Cameron published.
You dig up various articles about Paul Cameron and you will read that he was either expelled and/or denounced by The American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association for his consistent misrepresentations of psychological and sociological research. But to call what he’s doing “misrepresentations” is itself a misrepresentation of sorts.
I’ll admit that use of that word in regards to Cameron had me bamboozled for a long time. You dig into his cites and you expect to see some sly twisting of the data. But that isn’t it. He straight up lies. He pulls facts and figures out of thin air and presents them as though the study he’s citing says what it clearly does not say, and it isn’t even close. He lies. And lies and lies and lies and lies.
I can appreciate that men and women of science don’t like making declarations that are quite so certain. To work in science is to be well aware of all the areas of uncertainty in the data that you have to navigate on your way to a conclusion. But a decent respect for the human status tells us there have to be limits. When the lies are obvious it does none of us any good to soft peddle that fact, let alone what it says about the person(s) dispensing them.
And if we can’t point out the staringly obvious lies, then how do we deal with the slippery conniving falsehoods hiding behind a lot of word salad?
What Makes Us Human, Versus What Makes Us Talk Radio Babblers
Some days I just gotta thump my pulpit. But this is why I blog I suppose…
I’m slogging through a New Yorker profile of Dan Bongino, the new extra strength Rush Limbaugh, whose YouTube channel was recently taken down (more of that please!) because Bongino tried to do an end run around a previous YouTube timeout. The New Yorker often goes into deep detail about its subjects and that makes the articles quite long at times, but they’re almost always worth the read. New Yorker and Consumer Reports are the only two magazine subscriptions I’m going to keep when I transition into living on retirement money.
I want to talk…okay, vent…about this exchange with Bongino and the New Yorker reporter that caught my eye the other day:
For Bongino, the policies of the pandemic – mandates for masks and vaccines, admonitions against experimental treatments – have always rested on a dubious expectation of trust. When I asked him why he challenged the science, he cut in: “Time out.” He fed my words back to me: “’You challenge the science’ No! That’s not the way science works! Science is a process of challenges.” He went on, “What are you, a lemming? Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out.”
This is such a perfect example of how these wingnut talk radio babblers manipulate not just the facts but also, and slyly, the language, that it takes your breath away. It is pure gold. And the reporter, unless he covers it later in the article that I haven’t read yet, does not push back on any of it. But I can cut this reporter some slack for that because without a doubt your typical New Yorker reader can see through this multilayered bullshit.
But let’s us take it apart…
Science is a process of challenges. Well…yeah. Jacob Bronowski talked in The Ascent of Man, about the newly arrived students at Göttingen University bringing to their studies “…a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” And in that same episode, titled “Knowledge or Certainty”, he argued passionately against arrogance and dogma, what he called “the despot’s belief that they have absolute certainty.”
All knowledge he insisted, is confined within an area of uncertainty, or as he preferred to call it, an area of tolerance. Science is what we do to sift out the facts from the fictions, however passionately hoped for. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. But there is more to it than that. In Science and Human Values Bronowski wrote that “When you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard with it what a man is.” It is the search for knowledge, the habit of truth Bronowski spoke of, that makes us human.
But that is precisely what Bongino discards here. You challenge science, with more and better science. Not with theology, not with strongman politics, not with a lot of half assed goofball conspiracy theories, not by calling anyone who follows the science lemmings. For one thing, lemmings don’t hurl themselves off cliffs in mass suicides. That’s a myth, popularized here in the United States by a Disney nature documentary that was…well…lacking in science.
Just because people tell you to do things doesn’t mean you should automatically do it. See how deftly he shifts the focus from science tells us, to what “people tell you to do”? Now he’s not challenging the science, he’s quite reasonably not blindly letting “people” tell him “to do things”. What people? What things? No need to be specific, the point is to derail the question. If crazy uncle Batsinthebelfry tells you to go jump off a bridge you wouldn’t do that would you? So don’t listen to Dr. Fauci unless you’re a lemming. And as it turns out…unsurprisingly…Bongino doesn’t know any more about Thalidomide than he does about lemmings.
Pregnant women took thalidomide for morning sickness. That was the consensus of the time. Look how that worked out. Notice he doesn’t say it was the consensus of the science of the time. Because the science wasn’t quite all there. And to get the full story on that, you need to look up Frances Oldham Kelsey, who in 1960 was a reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration. It was Kelsey who kept the thalidomide tragedy in Europe from becoming one here in the US. Because…
Kelsey had the power to prevent a drug from going to market if she found the application to be lacking sufficient evidence for safety. After a thorough review, Kelsey rejected the application for thalidomide on the grounds that it lacked sufficient evidence of safety through rigorous clinical trials. -Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2017, “The Woman Who Stood Between America And A Generation Of Thalidomide Babies”
That “consensus of the time” Bongilo casually throws out there, was in fact careless marketing of a drug initially as sedative, that was never tested on pregnant women, but was marketed to them for morning sickness after the drug maker discovered it could also be used for that. There was no “consensus of the time”, there was only marketing and tragically superficial approval based on nothing more than the drug maker’s own testing. And Kelsey didn’t think that was entirely honest either.
Reports of the side effect peripheral neuritis—painful inflammation of the peripheral nerves—were published in the December 1960 issue of the British Medical Journal. This raised an even bigger red flag for Kelsey: “the peripheral neuritis did not seem the sort of side effect that should come from a simple sleeping pill.
She asked for more information from Merrell, who responded with another application merely stating that thalidomide was at least safer than barbiturates. Kelsey then sent a letter directly to Merrell saying that she suspected they knew of the neurological toxicity that led to nerve inflammation but chose not to disclose it in their application. Merrell grew increasingly upset that Kelsey would not pass their drug, which had been used in over 40 other countries at this point.
The science was not there. It was only Kelsey demanding to see the science before she’d sign off on it that prevented a bigger tragedy in the US than happened.
Eventually, after reports of birth deformities began appearing overseas, Merrell withdrew the application. But samples of the drug had been distributed to more than 1200 physicians and from these to tens of thousands of their patients. That resulted in 17 reported cases of congenital deformities here in the US. It could have been thousands “…had the FDA not insisted on the evidence of safety required under the law (despite ongoing pressure from the drug’s sponsor).”
For Bongilo to use this as an example of why not to trust the scientific evidence of the effectiveness of vaccinations is stunning in its brazenness. But these people are nothing if not brazen about it these days. What Trump taught them is not to hold back. Don’t just fudge the facts. Go ahead and brazen it out. Everyone knew thalidomide was safe until it wasn’t. Now they’re telling you the COVID vaccinations are safe. We all know how that’s going to turn out… Bongilo isn’t merely challenging the science, he’s challenging the very thing that makes us human…our rational facility…short circuiting it with tactical rhetoric and disinformation.
So his side can win the culture war. But what, exactly is the prize? Ends and means are not separate and unrelated items. To paraphrase Bronowski, when you discard the test of fact in how effective a vaccine is, you discard with it what it is to be human. Also, you get people killed. People. Not lemmings. People with lives. People with families and friends who loved them.
Is Donald Trump really worth dragging yourself down into that abyss? Is he really worth discarding everything inside of you that could have been noble and decent? If the devil is still out there trying to buy souls, he must be really pissed at the downturn in quality lately.
Fox “News” is a right-wing propaganda operation wrapped inside an entertainment channel. It does not adhere to the professional standards of journalism. And every moment is it allowed to operate under the guise of “news” gives it more credibility than it deserves as it chips away at our democracy.
You must Absolutely go read this! And especially Froomkin’s suggestions to reporters as to how to deal with the grave danger to our democracy it poses, because a lot of that are things we should All be doing.
Here are three items I think everyone can work on:
Demand that search and social media platforms not treat it as news. Legitimate news organizations should not have to compete against propaganda under the rubric of news. Demand that Facebook News stop linking to Fox. Urge Google News to downgrade or identify propaganda outlets.
Establish that people and businesses showing it in public places are making a political statement. Once you establish that Fox is not simply a news outlet with a different view but a dangerous disinformation vector, then its public display should be seen as an attack on news and truth.
Stop partnering with it in any way, including debates and distribution deals. Fox News sullies whatever it touches.
Fox News gets money from your cable provider whether or not you watch it, simply by being available there. So I hear, that money is a big part of what keeps it afloat. Tell your cable provider you want them to remove Fox News from your lineup and not make you pay for it, and if they make excuses drop them and switch to streaming a’la cart content instead. I have a Roku box, but there are many ways of ditching the cable. Make sure you tell them that it’s Fox News that drove you to it.
Read this. We are not helpless. We can fight back.
I get up early these days, make some sandwiches for lunch, put food and fresh water out for the calico. Many street cats here in Baltimore like her have one ear tipped. It’s a sign that she’s been fixed and given at least an initial round of shots. The city would like it very much if you don’t bother the tipped ear cats. They keep the rodent population down, and also the street cat population since they can no longer breed.
I live where I can walk to work when the weather is nice. This morning I’m out the door just after 5am. I was up at 4. It’s my insomnia. I try to make it work for me. When it gets me up early enough, but not too early, I just stay up. Flex time means I get to go home early too, and maybe do some work at the drafting table before bed. The early morning summer dawn lights my way, but the street lights are still on. I go out the back door because I don’t want the calico following me.
The alley behind my little Baltimore rowhouse is still and quiet. Everyone here has done their backyard up a little differently. Some have big expansive gardens, others have put in parking pads or big outdoor decks with barbecues and deck furniture. Trees, probably planted decades ago, have grown taller than the utility wires strung down the alley, and have to be regularly trimmed. A couple dogs wander close to their fences as I pass by, but do not bark at me. I’m a familiar human. They will rise a hellacious din when an unknown human walks down the alley. Or a known human walking their dogs.
Or a squirrel. In the years I’ve lived here I’ve seen maybe a few hundred squirrels for every rat. Or maybe it’s just a couple squirrels and they just get around. Tree branches and utility wires are all the same to them. The street cats do their job keeping the rat population down. Also the city. You have to make a really big mess of your property for the city to complain about it, but a single rat sighting will get animal control knocking on your door faster than the speed of sound. But it’s not all just squirrels and rats and pigeons. I’ve seen deer and foxes, which probably come down the Jones Falls river (creek trickle stream) from the ‘burbs. Last winter I looked out my front bedroom window one night and saw a deer feasting on the ivy buried under some freshly fallen snow.
Deer in fact, were a frequent sight in my neighborhood, which is just a couple miles from the urban core. I’ve seen foxes too. One night I opened the front door to see if the Calico needed feeding and found a raccoon by the empty food dish giving me a look as if to say, well, where’s the food buddy!? You got a food dish here and it’s empty! What’s up with that!? Hawks, owls and falcons are regular visitors, especially around Wyman Park and Jones Falls. Snakes too, alas, but so far I have seen no venomous ones. But the empty lot at the end of my street where the wildlife used to gather has been turned into expensive luxury townhomes. Starting price was 350k and most of them sold for over 400k. The development was completed just last spring, and now the model home is the only one left unsold. A storage container factory that used to be located not far away was closed and the building demolished and they are building even more expensive townhomes on the site as I write this. Another empty lot behind the Giant Food grocery store a couple blocks away was turned into a luxury townhome development that was completed last fall.
On my way to work this morning I walk past the Giant. There are places in this city that are food deserts, but my neighborhood isn’t one of them. I live within a short walk of the Giant, and there is one of those trendy organic food stores in “The Rotunda”, a largish old building that was once the headquarters of some big insurance company, and is now a small city mall with stores and offices in it. What was the big parking lot behind it has been turned into a 400+ luxury apartment complex, with rents ranging from just under a thousand bucks a month to just over 3,800 for a space that’s still fewer square feet than my little Baltimore rowhouse. I have no idea who is paying that kind of money for those units or where they work, but they seem to be nearly all rented out now.
There is a Starbucks among the Rotunda shops that opens at 5:30am. I stop in for an ice coffee and danish to take with me as I walk to work. The Rotunda is a halfway point in my walk. A few delivery trucks are parked at the loading docks, but the morning is still very quiet. The day shift is just getting started. There is the Mom’s (that trendy organic grocery store…), the Starbucks, a drugstore, a barber shop, a UPS store, a couple restaurants and a dine-in movie theater here. The folks who live in the apartments above them probably have it even better than me when it comes to walkability, especially if they work in the Rotunda, as some of my coworkers do.
I go on my way, down 40th street to University Parkway. Now I am walking through what is probably Baltimore’s most upscale neighborhood: Roland Park. My path just gives it a glancing blow but even here the homes are big and lovely. There are large English style rowhomes, with slate shingle roofs and large patches of lawn and garages behind them, accessible through the alley. Even at the money I am making in my current job I could never afford one of these. They’re all old, solid, and beautiful. And they adjoin Wyman park, which itself adjoins the Johns Hopkins University, which is where I work. Not for Hopkins, but for AURA, the Association of Universities conducting Research in Astronomy.
We operate the Hubble Space Telescope here, and are working on the ground systems for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Hopkins graduate programs in Biological, Biomedical Sciences, Engineering (Biomedical, Electrical & Environmental), Human Development and Family Studies, Health Sciences, Humanities, Physical and Mathematical Sciences and International Affairs and Development, all rank among the top 10 of their respective disciplines. Students come here from all over the world. It’s a lovely campus to work at, and taking my lunchtime strolls I hear languages of the world spoken among the kids. But this is not an inexpensive university to attend. These kids, unless they got grant money, come from money. But it’s a different kind of atmosphere here, than one I suppose I might find at a Yale or a Harvard. These kids are here mostly to become scientists, researchers, astronomers, or engineers. Some days I walk among the carefully maintained greens between the campus buildings, or along the walkways of San Martin Drive with Wyman Park on one side and the University on the other, and I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.
Now I walk through Roland Park to University Parkway, and from there across a bridge over Wyman Park to San Martin Drive, which winds and bends between the university and the park. Tall trees and forest on one side of the road, I could imagine myself in one of the national parks, perhaps somewhere along Skyline Drive. I go past the Lacrosse field on the other, and the ROTC. Soon I am at my workplace. I have to use my key card to open the door as it is very early, and sign in at the security desk. Security is tighter here now, than when I first started working here, since we began building the Mission Operations Center for James Webb here. One of my key cards grants me access to the building, and I have access to several computer rooms configured on it. Two other cards on my strap grant me access to the James Webb MOC and to Goddard in Greenbelt Maryland.
I am but a mere integration and testing person, not a flight engineer, and I also write business software for progress tracking and reporting. So when my phase of the work is completed they’ll probably take away my MOC access. But I can say I was there, and was a part of it all. I have participated in testing James Webb’s optical and science instrument assembly (OTIS), and watched it speaking its first words on my telemetry screen as I helped capture data for later replaying and testing of the ground systems we’re developing here.
Here. In my hell hole rat infested city. Except it isn’t. It’s one of America’s vibrant, busy, energetic cities and there is lots more going on here than you might think if all you ever watched was The Wire or read Donald Trump’s and his peanut gallery’s tweets. I feel as though I lucked out unreasonably getting the job here I did, and the little Baltimore rowhouse I have within walking distance of that job, and the grocery stores, and the lovely bars and restaurants and shops that compass everything I might need on a day to day basis. The nightlife hub locally is called “The Avenue” and it’s become so popular most of the bigger places have valet parking now. But I can walk to it so that’s another perk of where I live.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. I thought I’d live in the ‘burbs all my life. Then I discovered what it’s like to have everything you need in walking distance. My city neighborhood is as safe as any suburban development I’ve ever lived in, and since we are all more tightly packed together here than in the ‘burbs we know each other perhaps a little better, and we can keep an eye on our neighborhood a little better. Diversity. It works. My neighborhood is largely white, but has a growing mix of black, Asian and Hispanic leavening it. But that’s just one part to diversity. My neighborhood also has a nice mix of older retired folk and younger professionals, and that means there is always someone here during the day keeping an eye on things, and at night not everyone keeps the same bedtime schedule. The neighborhood never really sleeps, it just gets quiet. Which is a relative term here in the city. The entire neighborhood doesn’t just empty out during business hours like some of the suburban apartment developments I’ve lived in. And older rowhouse neighborhoods like those here in the city, have Front Porches! This is something the new “luxury” townhouses are sadly leaving out. Front porches are places where people sit when the weather is nice, and chat with each other, and passing neighbors out for an evening stroll. People like me.
City life is Wonderful. Baltimore is wonderful. Yes, it has its problem zones, like all big cities do. And if Donald Trump and his constipated voter base think otherwise they can certainly help improve the livability of this and other American cities by staying out.
I was reading an article a few years back, about how the writer’s elderly father used to be someone pleasant and sunny to be around…until he started watching Fox News. Unfair as it is to pin our current national nightmare on any one individual (there is lots of credit to go around), if I had to pick one name as the icon of the American gutter now in power, and its hysterical babbling angry all the time grass roots, it would actually be an Australian. His name is Rupert Murdoch, and he became a citizen of our country just so he could own TV and radio stations here, and transform the American Dream into his personal sewer. Do not blame Donald Trump for the fire burning down our democratic institutions…
…the Reality Show President, like the writer’s father I mentioned above, is an avid follower of Murdoch’s venomous anti democratic propaganda mill. Here’s what Trump was applauding just last night…
Once upon a time feverish nutcases like this, moral runts who’d burn to ashes our democratic institutions rather than let their festering resentment at everything fine and noble that they could never be just stew in their own private sewer, were limited to late night public access channels, private shortwave stations and dial-a-nazi phone numbers (any of my Washington readers here remember “Let Freedom Ring“?). Murdoch gave them a national television network to spread their poison on.
That’s led us directly here:
I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this. But honestly, I wish the motherf*cker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, sh*ts all over Twitter, sh*ts all over us, sh*ts all over his staff, then hits golf balls. F*ck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.
That’s from a blog post by Eric Erickson, who runs the Redstate blog, which I will not link to here. Erickson is as hard right as they come, and he’s upset at the damage Trump is doing to the movement. The post is a conversation Erickson had with a “conservative” member of congress at the local Safeway grocery store and it is a stunningly blunt, profanity laced, diatribe that the congressman was grateful to Erickson for letting him finally get out of his system.
But look at that. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town. This is Murdoch’s doing. And the idiots at Clear Channel who gave a nationwide radio network home to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. And now Sinclair Broadcasting, turning local TV stations into stealth rightwing propaganda media. All so the angry fathers of America can stay angry and fearful all the time because that gets them to the polls which is the only way Murdoch republicans can stay in power. And keep giving those lovely tax breaks and treasury money to the very rich and powerful, and gut the New Deal protections for workers and the elderly that they despise. And now republicans, even hard right republicans who would love nothing better than to take this country back to the 19th century, can’t stop an out of his depth manchild from destroying their party, let alone plunging the world into nuclear chaos, without losing their seats in congress because Murdoch’s angry old men would be livid if they so much as spoke a word against him.
But…let it be said…they’re not any different in substance from those angry fearful Murdoch grass roots if they’d rather let America burn than losing elections to democrats.
And…let it be said…here’s the man who let Rupert Murdoch into our airwaves…
…the guy whose first act as president was busting a union. Who began his presidential run in 1980 with a speech about state’s rights seven miles from where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered for registering black citizens to vote. Who laughed at the rededication of The Statue of Liberty when Bob Hope joked that she may have caught AIDS from the Staten Island Ferry (Fairy) or the mouth of the Hudson. He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave Murdoch our airwaves.
ABC plans to air an interview with former FBI director James Comey Sunday night. The promo spot above teases pretty hard what we might hear, including that Comey believes our sitting president operates like a mob boss (although George Stephanopoulos may be putting those words into Comey’s mouth). Axios claims a source present at the taping:
According to the source:
The Comey interview left people in the room stunned — he told George things that he’s never said before.
Some described the experience as surreal. The question will be how to fit it all into a one-hour show.
Comey answered every question.
If anyone wonders if Comey will go there, he goes there.
“There” being the question of whether Trump should be impeached, presumably. Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” arrives in stores on Tuesday.
So Hannity was prepping the kook pews on what to think about the Comey interview. We’re not a bunch of crooks, he’s the crook! It’s like Al Capone accusing the FBI of being the mob, not him.
Sully is, in theory, based on Sullenberger’s 2009 memoir Highest Duty (co-authored with Jeffrey Zaslow). “Until I read the script, I didn’t know the investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he had done the wrong thing. They were kind of railroading him,” says Eastwood in one promotional trailer. It’s not surprising Eastwood was ignorant of any railroading by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), since it’s a narrative absent from Highest Duty, or anything actually said or written by the NTSB.
Go read the whole thing to see the takedown of the movie’s central lie. This movie laughs in your face and lies to you. There’s just no other way to put it. Its central fact, that the National Traffic Safety Board tried to railroad pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles, is a lie. A damnable lie.
But a lie you could see coming in the first trailer released for it. This is Talks To An Empty Chair Eastwood telling the audience in the Fox News cocoon everything they want to hear about how evil the federal government is. In the process he’s turned people who lived these events into stick figures in an antigovernment morality play, meant not to tell the story of an American hero but to encourage Americans to fear and mistrust their own government. Eastwood spits in the faces good people who work diligently every day to make travel safer for all of us. Because in the libertarian mindset, a government that can require corporations to care about anything other than profit, such as customer safety, can only be evil.
It’s a damnable lie, easily seen for what it is with even a cursory fact checking of the sources. But Eastwood knows his audience. They don’t want facts, they want their bigotries validated. Even if it means that someday the aircraft they’re on crashes and burns because CEO compensation mattered more than their lives, and lawsuit settlements were seen to be less costly than fixing a potential life threatening problem.
Anti-equality organizations are enthusiastically promoting a new study on sexual orientation and gender, hoping it will be new culture war ammunition.
The study by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh appears in “The New Atlantis,” a journal co-published by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Center for the Study of Technology and Science, which shares an address with EPPC. The New Atlantis is not a peer-reviewed journal, and has critiqued peer review, widely considered the gold standard in scientific publishing.
I first caught wind of this from a headline on a religious right website that appeared in my Google news page. I did a search to see what I could find out about it. There wasn’t much at that point, and I got less than a page of hits back. But Every Single One was to a religious right website, or a political website deeply aligned with the religious right.
That’s telling. A real science paper will appear first in the science journals and then percolate out from there into the commercial press depending on the popular interest in its topic. But for some time now what we’ve seen is that junk science from the anti-gay industrial complex first hits some right wing vanity publication with a sciencey sounding name, or a small journal easily compromised by a big right wing foundation with buckets of money, and at the same exact time it also hits one or more of the big players in the religious right echo chamber, and from there it spreads; first via the usual suspects like World News Daily, and talk radio, and then into the commercial press when it smells a controversy. That was the pattern with the Mark Regnerus paper on children (allegedly but actually not) raised by same sex couples. What this is telling you is that the paper is part of an orchestrated campaign. Real science doesn’t work like that. Religious right junk science only works like that.
I haven’t read the paper yet, but the press releases say it makes two basic points. You need to understand that both of these points are actually long standing religious right anti-gay tropes: First, that there is no evidence that a homosexual orientation is innate at birth…Second, that social stigma does not account for how mentally unstable homosexuals are. These have both been a part of the homophobe chorus since at least the 1970s.
The first simply digs in its heels and refuses to accept any of the mountains of evidence that sexual orientation is innate, at least in part if not wholly genetically determined, and cannot be changed through any kind of therapy. And that, as I read the first wave of reviews, is what this paper does, although it seems to acknowledge that the twins study does indicate a genetic “predisposition”, but that is homophobe doublespeak. The dogma is homosexuality is a perverse sexual addiction that people are either lured into or fall into through godlessness, bad habits and low morals, and which they can always choose to not act on. These arguments quickly start sounding like arguments about creationism versus evolution, and that is no coincidence. It is the same exact mindset.
The second point the paper makes neatly dovetails with the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness and removing it from the list of known mental illnesses only happened because militant homosexuals pressured the psychiatric profession into it. This knife in the back mythology as to how the understanding of homosexuality and sexual orientation evolved and changed among social scientists and professionals has a long, long history, and it is a foundational belief among the few still practicing reparative therapy like Joseph Nicolosi and his organization NARTH.
Which makes the smarmy dedication Lawrence Mayer places at the beginning of the paper he co-authored all the more loathsome…
In his preface, co-author Mayer dedicates his work to the LGBT community, “which bears a disproportionate rate of mental health problems compared the population as a whole,” and to “scholars doing impartial research on topics of public controversy.” He declares himself a supporter of equality and opponent of anti-LGBT discrimination.
You have never had spit flung in your face so sweetly. This bullshit about being an LGBT supporter is also one with a long pedigree, going back to every 1950s movie with a sick and pathetic faggot character and a plea for sympathy for the mentally ill…
“And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop. I thought if I could have just one night, I could get it out of my system. Just one more time…”
We should not be cruel to these poor sick creatures, they can’t help themselves… But to say you disagree with abusing the mentally ill is not to say you are supportive of LGBT people, let alone our civil rights, let alone the pursuit of science. There is nothing wrong with us. The science has been demonstrating that for decades now. If you can’t see that it’s because you are not interested in the science.
Which the two men who wrote this paper manifestly are not. They did not publish in a respected peer reviewed journal but in a right wing vanity publication in tandem with what was clearly a prepublication publicity campaign in the religious right echo chamber. That is not how science works.
But it’s how the kultar kampf is waged in the kook pews. There is a pattern to this that is becoming routine. A new paper is published in some science publication nobody has ever heard of before, that refutes the last 50 years of research on homosexuality and sexual orientation. The echo chamber picks up on it and next thing you know the entire religious right is trumpeting this new research that proves homosexuality is a cancer on society, or at the very least a tragic mental illness a civilized society should find a cure for, but certainly not grant special rights to. From there it moves into the popular press, and suddenly it’s in all the papers and news broadcasts.
Now it starts getting the critical attention it had been avoiding in the vanity press. But no matter that: critical attention always lags behind that first exuberant wave of publicity. Debunking takes time, and usually demands the attention of the reader more than the initial sound bite headlines the paper has already generated. So several news cycles, maybe even a year can go by before the debunking takes hold. In the meantime the homophobes have the stage practically all to themselves. This is what happened with the Regnerus study.
And then…it stops. The sails lose their wind. The curtain is drawn back. The lies are exposed. The commercial press moves on. Gay folk and our allies learn how to debunk the latest round of religious right junk science. The public conversation turns away from the latest faux controversy…
…and the haters duck back into the shadows…back into the echo chamber…repeating the same lies to themselves over and over…embellishing them even…holding onto them as long established truths that no amount of fact checking can touch…because in the gutter the only facts that matter are the ones prejudice and hate tell them that matter…
Soon there will be a new study…another paper…another round of it to go with the human gutter. Ask the Jews how long they’ve been dealing with it. Ask your black neighbors. Ask any hated minority. They say love always wins. Perhaps. But hate never gives up. Because it has nothing else.
This is par for the course, whenever an act of violence against gay people makes national, let alone international headlines. The pushback to erase the motivation of anti-gay hate from the crime, divert attention onto something else, real or fabricated, comes quickly after from all the usual suspects, and is forceful. And when challenged on it, they just dig their heels in. In a few months to a year there will be articles from right wing “think tanks”, and documentaries purporting to prove that homophobic animus had nothing to do with it at all, and that those of us who kept pointing it out are ourselves guilty of politicising a terrible tragedy to support the Gay Agenda. It is all so predictable. Because to acknowledge the hate that motivated it, might lead to questions about the climate of hate, and those who cultivated it for votes, and money.
And ratings. Perhaps in a few years ABC 20/20 will do a documentary explaining how it was all really a drug deal gone bad…
This came across my Facebook stream this morning. It clarified something I’d wondered about the relationship between American fundamentalism and its veneration of brutal survival of the fittest capitalism. How do you get from the sermon on the mount to Jesus would want us to take food stamps away from poor families?
Henry Parsons Crowell was a purveyor of oatmeal. He is best known by business historians as the president and founder of Quaker Oats, one of the pioneers of the branding revolution. He used a combination of packaging, trademark and massive promotional campaigns and transformed oatmeal from a commodity into a trademarked product.
Crowell took oatmeal that used to be sold out of large barrels in your general store, put it into a sealed package, slapped a picture of a Quaker on it and guaranteed it pure. Now it no longer mattered who you bought your oatmeal from, only what brand you chose.
A company’s reputation was once rooted in its owner, but the trademark created this virtual relationship with consumers that was pure fiction. The trust that is engendered by a Quaker has no relationship to the company itself. There are no Quakers involved in that. Crowell was a Presbyterian.
He was also a purveyor of religion. And he did to American Evangelicalism what he did to oatmeal: he packaged and trademarked his brand of Christianity into a form that engendered a wholly fictional trust in its purity. It was that old time religion.
I mean…if you were raised in that culture like I was, doesn’t just reading that phrase make you hear it now…that song you heard over and over…
Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, Give me that old time religion, It’s good enough for me.
Admit it. You’re hearing it right now. You’ll have that ear worm in your head all day. But it wasn’t just a church song…it was an advertising jingle.
I grew up hearing the phrase “that old-time religion” so often it became something you just accepted as fact without knowing how it came to be that in your mind. It wasn’t until much later in life I began to understand that American Evangelical Protestantism was “old” only in the sense that a Ford Model ‘T’ is an old automobile. Yes, yes…the tin lizzy is about as old as they come alright. But the automobile itself isn’t exactly old transportation technology (let’s give a nod of grateful thanks to Mr. Horse), and American Evangelical Christianity isn’t exactly old if you’re measuring back to the time of Jesus. Actually it’s a pretty new thing.
Generously, I just assumed that phrase “old time religion” harkened back to that first generation Americans born after the revolutionary war. That was the time of the “Great Awakening” and it would have been, so I thought, from grandparents and great-grandparents telling their stories to their grandchildren that the phrase “that old time religion” came from. But no…it was pure advertising technique, from the man who convinced people they could trust a brand name more than the local merchant they actually knew, by putting a smiling Quaker’s face and the word “pure” on the package. His oatmeal had no more to do with Quakers than his “Fundamentals of Christianity” were “old time religion”. But he knew how to sell a product.
And it was when Evangelicalism became a product that it became about money. All those megachurches and TV ministries with their leadership living in lavish luxury can trace their roots back to the moment in history when Evangelicalism became a product rich men sold, and people bought. It’s old time religion like Quaker Oats is Quaker and Country Time Lemonade Flavored Drink Mix is country lemonade.
Tom Cotton: Bombing Iran Would Take “Several Days,” Be Nothing Like Iraq War
“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”
Yeah…yeah… But as I recall that wasn’t the end of it. And the next step was advertised as being another several days thing. If that. And…it wasn’t…
Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.
Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, “Sir, can you speak German?” When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, “You’re welcome.” I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, “Sir, do you have a king?”
My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a “Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck” attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, “Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon”. The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, “I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday.” The other chuckles and says, “The war will be over by then.”
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