May 14, 2016

Michael Moore's "Where to Invade Next?" makes me very angry

at how much the GOP/conservatism/corporatism/greed/racism/religious nuts/American exceptionalism/American stupidity have fucked us up as a nation.

Other parts made me cry at what we have lost.

Really, everyone interested in politics should see this movie, to see what is possible-- and I hope where we can take this nation and this world.

May 14, 2016

I've been a Bernie guy all the way, but let's face it: for all intents and purposes Hillary

... has won the nomination.

Fair or not, she will be the Dem nominee, and no one ever said politics was a clean sport.

I've never been thrilled about Hillary, but there are a ton of reasons why she is preferable to Trump. Belief in climate change as being real, is a big one for me. So like it or not, that is our choice: Hillary versus Trump.

I for one, am now ready to rally behind Hillary and the Dems.

I'm not saying other states shouldn't finish their primaries or that Bernie should drop out. I just mean that I accept Hillary being the likely nominee and I will vote for her if she is the nominee. I don't freaking care about her email server at all.

My big point is that I actually see a historic opportunity for Dems to really take back control of the government, because Trump will turn out to be such a disaster as an GE candidate. Honestly, this is a HUGE opportunity. I know there are a lot of worries about Trump, but in the end, he is a horrible, toxic idiot, who I think will flameout, as people realize how unsuitable he is for the presidency.

So while I know, the vast majority of Dems will unify eventually, I hope it happens sooner rather than later, and we can concentrate on taking back our government from the horrible GOP psychopaths.

May 13, 2016

The Pentagon is building a ‘self-aware’ killer robot army fueled by social media

The DOD is freaking out of control. This is fucking insanity.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-pentagon-is-building-a-self-aware-killer-robot-army-fueled-by-social-media-bd1b55944298#.ezqxg5mtr

"Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram"

May 12, 2016

A very high stakes election: our highly militarized nuclear-power could fall into the hands of

a complete clown and conman, someone unbalanced and completely unfit for office.

Clearly the only sane choice is electing a corporate Democratic warhawk and tool of the oligarchs!

For Clinton supporters, Trump seems like a huge gift to insure her election, if only that pesky Bernie Sanders wouldn't keep getting in the way. Bernie and his supporters-- you're risking the future of our country by hurting Hillary's chances! This couldn't be more serious. The country could be literally destroyed under Trump.

For the Sanders supporters, Trump seems like a perfect conspiracy to scare liberal voters to death and make sure they vote for the corporate Democrat again! Except that there is much evidence that Bernie would do better against Trump than Hillary. Why won't the Hillary supports see this????

What a weird, nerve-wracking election we find ourselves in.

May 12, 2016

Bernie Sanders' Fantasy Agenda

Aggressively fighting climate change and treating it as the emergency it really is...

Prioritizing healthcare over the military industrial complex and giving every citizen a right to decent healthcare...

Raising taxes on the wealthy while giving working people a living wage...

Breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and enacting a Wall St. transaction tax

Getting money out of politics...

Stopping the job-killing TPP...

Having a sane and humane criminal justice system...

Treating Palestinians as people in dealing with Israel...

What a freaking nightmare!

May 11, 2016

Trevor Noah goes after Bernie on the Daily Show

I'm sure some here will appreciate this (but not Bernie supporters).

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/videos/video/the-daily-show-bernie-sanders-stays-in-the-race

Definitely too many cheap shots there, in my opinion.

I also saw Samantha Bee also be fairly dismissive to Bernie on her show Monday night.

May 6, 2016

Trump wants to put the US through bankruptcy. WTF? How does that make America great?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-astounding

So many stories in presidential politics, in all politics, are more sound and fury than substance. This one isn't. It's hard to overstate how big a deal it is. Donald Trump caught a lot of grief during the primaries for putting several of his companies through bankruptcies during his career. He's also made a point of arguing that he'd bring his brand of "deal-making" to the presidency. It now seems like both of those things may have been way more significant than maybe anyone realized.

On CNBC this morning Trump suggested that one strategy he'll use for reducing the national debt is having bond holders accept "haircuts". To be clear what that means, he'll try to get people who own US Treasury bonds and are owned X to accept X/2, or some reduced amount of what they are owed.

That's called defaulting on a debt obligation.

In other words, he wants to put the US through something like bankruptcy. Now, to be clear, in the world of business this is not at all uncommon. In a bankruptcy proceeding almost everyone takes a haircut. Many lose everything. You were owed $7 million and you have to accept $2 million. It often happens in simple business negotiations too. Things aren't going great. Debt has to be restructured to help the company survive. A creditor thinks they might lose everything so they'll accept 50 cents on the dollar.

May 4, 2016

And now the real race -- between the conservative and the liberal wings of the Dem party

the winner is yet to be determined!

May 2, 2016

Our gun myths are all wrong: The real history behind the Second Amendment clichés

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/30/our_gun_myths_are_all_wrong_the_real_history_behind_the_second_amendment_cliches_that_have_sustained_our_lethal_gun_culture/

An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there. Some celebrate and some condemn this relationship, but it is in either case unique. Guns have long been a commonplace part of American life, which is why guns pretty much sell themselves. The Second Amendment, ubiquitous to contemporary gun politics, was a prominent presence historically and is a source of the gun’s unique stature, while the idea of gun control is more recent. The American gun story is about civilians and individual citizens, and they are its heroes or its villains—the frontiersman, the Daniel Boone “long hunter” who trekked far into the wilderness alone, the citizen-patriot militiaman, the guiltily valorized outlaw, and the gunslinger. The gun’s mystique was forged most vividly on the violent western frontier of the 1800s, and this mystique is about individualism: guns protect citizens against overzealous government infringement of liberties; they protect freedom and self-determination.

This book tells the story of American guns from the perspective of what the gun was—in essence, an object, produced by businesses, to be sold. The story that highlights the Second Amendment, frontiersmen, militias, and the desires and character of the American gun owner is not to be found in the pages of this book. Or, more accurately, my work deliberately skews the story of the gun in another direction: it focuses on the missing element of the gun culture rather than reworking the familiar themes. As such, it has different characters, motivations, plot twists, highlights, and timelines, and all of these elements call into question the gun clichés that animate contemporary politics.

*

Perhaps the most powerful cliché is gun exceptionalism. Many people on both sides of the debate about guns believe that America has a unique and special relationship to guns, and that this exceptional relationship—whether celebrated or condemned—is a foundation of American gun culture. Americans have always loved guns, common wisdom holds, or, “guns are part of the American identity.”

A main thesis of this book is a simple but important one. We became a gun culture not because the gun was symbolically intrinsic to Americans or special to our identity, or because the gun was something exceptional in our culture, but precisely because it was not. From the vantage point of business, the gun was a product of non-exceptionalism. Perhaps not in the earliest years of its manufacture, when the government construed the gun as an exceptional instrument of war and common defense, whose more efficient production merited guaranteed contracts and markets, generous funding, protective tariffs, and a freewheeling exchange of innovation across public armories to germinal private industry, but in the key years of its diffusion, and for many years thereafter, it was like a buckle or a pin, an unexceptional object of commerce. No pangs of conscience were attached to it, and no more special regulations, prohibitions, values, or mystique pertained to its manufacture, marketing, and sale than to a shovel. Indeed, there were no special rules concerning the international trade of guns until modest presidential embargo powers became effective in 1898. By that time, Winchester’s company sat at the center of its own web of gun commerce that radiated outward to six continents. No exceptional regulations existed when Winchester and his competitors were first “scattering the guns,” in his terms, to create US markets. Although the gun industry produced an exceptional product—designed to injure and kill—it followed the ordinary trends and practices of the corporate industrial economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In short: the gun was no exception.

May 2, 2016

Since Hillary supporters appear to be quite confident right now, perhaps I could finally get

an answer to a question I've been asking for months:

How do you rationalize away her war-mongering?

It's not one or two bad decisions. It's a clear pattern of militancy throughout her career in office.

As far as I can tell, the woman has never met a US war or intervention she didn't like, often with disastrous results. She's basically a Republican in terms of foreign policy.

Honestly, in terms of domestic politics, I don't have any major problems with Hillary. But her foreign policy sickens me.