Whiskey Fire

Job stressors

by flory

I'm still trying to figure out what happened in Oakland last week.

Why are cops only held to the same standard of self control as civilians? The BART cop who shot Oscar Grant was convicted of involuntary, rather than voluntary, manslaughter because the jury agreed that his fear of an unarmed black man, face down on the subway platform, was 'reasonable'.

How is this outcome reasonable?

We, as a society, give cops guns and badges and the authority to use both because we trust that they have a level of training and self control that would restrain them from a reactive use of either. If their training isn't good enough to prevent unprovoked manslaughter -- because they're afraid -- then what good is it?

Nobody believes Johannes Mehserle committed murder. He didn't go to work on New Year's Eve planning to kill someone. It was manslaughter, but it was a more nuanced killing than 'voluntary' or 'involuntary'. It was manslaughter by someone who's supposed to be trained to avoid committing manslaughter.

If we're ever going to stop the unprovoked killings of unarmed brown people, then police need to know that they're being held to a higher standard than a civilian. Why isn't there a special category of manslaughter conviction that would recognize that a trained police person should be able to manage their fear -- or they don't belong in a uniform in the first place?

Random acts of something

by flory

So last night I came home from an evening at the theatah to find eight police motorcycles parked at the bottom of my street.

Oh -- did I mention? -- I live in downtown Oakland.  The Whole Foods that got vandalized is two blocks away.

We apparantly do random riots here.  Granted, it could have been a lot worse. The city had cops mobilized from all over Northern California, plus the National Guard on standby. It was the riot that kinda sorta happened.

Still, it was ugly and scary and completely random. Why Oakland? Johannes Mehserle wasn't an Oakland cop, he was a BART transit officer. Oscar Grant lived in Hayward. The trial, and the jurors delivering the verdict, were in Los Angeles. And yet, the demonstrations that turned into random violence and looting formed up in front of Oakland City Hall. Three quarters of the people arrested were from out of town. 

I dunno, maybe I'm just old, but I find myself as furious at the out-of-towners finding my city a convenient place to trash as I am at a system that's weighted against a young black man and his family getting real justice.

My world in circles

by flory

Has the hiring and firing of a newspaper reporter ever received as much attention as Dave Weigel's truncated tenure at the WaPo? He should be glad BP is still fucking up by the numbers or he'd probably be leading the evening news.

And amongst the many hundreds of column inches so far written, I found this a rather strange paragraph:

But within the Washington Post, Weigel's politics (he is a libertarian with clear progressive leanings) appeared to surprise management, some of whom assumed he was a conservative. The ethos (or perhaps perception) of impartiality is still closely held in the Post newsroom. And with a recent slew of opinion/reporter hires (Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, and Weigel), some of the old guard felt uncomfortable.

The first sentence would seem to imply that he had a job because management thought he was a nice conserative boy. Then the second sentence goes on to tell us that the "ethos of impartiality" mandates that he lose his job because he was actually "a libertarian with clear progressive leanings."

So if I'm understanding this right, conservatives are naturally impartial; the rest of the world is pathetically biased and unfair.

Then the paragraph concludes with the "slew" of dirty fucking hippies -- all three of them, including Weigel the libertarian -- that are more than the righteous armada of conservative old white men (Will, Kraphammer, and 'The Dean') can withstand.

Musical chairs

by flory

Two wars, an economy looking upwards to see the gutter and the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history are but mere distractions from the pressing concerns of our journalistic elite.

Helen Thomas' front-row seat isn't even cold yet, but that's not stopping speculation within the White House press corps about who'll get the prestigious spot right in front of the podium

Tomorrow's dissertation topics today

by flory

I don't normally look to Cheers and Jeers over at The Great Orange Satan for inspiration for a serious blog post, but a throwaway line in today's offering got me thinking:

Today's seven- and eight-year-olds have never known a time when we weren't shooting people and blowing stuff up overseas.

I would take that a large step further. Kids don't really develop much of a grasp of the larger world until they're school age. By that measure, today's middle schoolers have never known a world where their government wasn't blowing up brown people living in deserts. With no readily apparent explanation why.

What kind of country will the children of our imperial adventures want for themselves?

Baby Boomers grew up during the Vietnam era. It would be hard to argue that didn't have a pretty profound effect on us. Good and bad. How will The Wars on Brown People affect our kids; and in some cases, grandkids?

And there are a few additional cultural touchstones for today's middle schoolers:

Foreclosures: 15% of mortgages are in default or foreclosed. That's nearly one in five homes nationally. In some states (Nevada, Florida) it's one in four.

What kind of attitude towards homeownership does a kid take into adulthood when 1 in 4 of their friends loses their home to foreclosure? And what does that mean for the economy in twenty years when so much economic activity is directly attributable to the homeowning business?

The Great Recession: My parents were products of the Great Depression. And that had a lifelong impact on their mindset. They were savers par excellence. Hoarders, almost. They didn't spend money on 'wants', they spent it on 'needs'. They were recyclers before recycling was cool. They didn't believe in credit but they did believe in a big cushion of cash in the bank.

Today's middle schoolers have seen their familes live thru the same upheavals that my parents lived thru. Will it have the same effect on their financial decisions as adults? And what does that mean for the economy in 2030?

Transcrap

by flory

It gets better and better. Turns out there's a bit of history with Transocean, the owners of Deepwater Horizon::

An aside: given all the help they're getting from the Coast Guard, the military, and state, federal, and local agencies, it's a bummer that Transocean, which was a Houston-located company until the brass moved to Switzerland in 2008, has been so acutely focused on NOT paying U.S. taxes, according to this report from Portfolio.)

Zeroes

by flory

In a timely demonstration of the essential truth of this observation:

They are trying to make vulgar materialism fashionable.

You know what's most depressing about this? (Other than the sheer karmic tragedy of it all.)

The more money Grifterella thinks she can liberate from the deluded, the less likely she is to be willing to give it up to run for office again.

Which deprives the rest of us of the joy of anticipating the trainwreck.

Pass the potatos

by flory

Perusing the Great Orange Satan:

 A peer-reviewed study in 2009 ("Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood") calculated that 49% of children will receive food-stamp benefits sometime before they are 20 years old.

Really? One half of all children in this country will need government assistance to get decent nutrition before they reach adulthood? And we're supposed to be the richest country in the history of ever?

I don't know how Shelley O. feels about that statistic, but it makes me anything but proud of my country.

Attention wingnuts! That's a statistic to make any thinking human depressed. And anyone who wants to try and defend it is a fucking psychopath.

That guy did something

by flory

Since I try not to spend my spare time wading thru the murkier corners of the internets, I don't know anything about  Publius' Forum except that it showed up as a link at Naked Capitalism, where there's generally good economics posts and interesting links. 

Except, not always. In today's news, Publius is trying to make the case that there's something fishy in Andy Stern's resignation from SEIU. Something fishy involving the black guy in the White House, naturally. All roads lead there.  Only thing is, neither of his/her bits of evidence support.....much of anything:

 As F. Vincent Vernuccio reports in the Washington Times, Stern has left the SEIU in pretty shabby shape.

SEIU has seen its liabilities skyrocket during the past decade. The union's liabilities totaled $7,625,832 in 2000. By 2009, they had increased almost by a factor of 16, to $120,893,259. Meanwhile, SEIU's assets barely tripled, growing from $66,632,631 in 2000 to $187,664,763 in 2009. 

I dunno, maybe this person has trouble with numbers containing two commas, but lets try some basic math: 2000 assets of $66.6 million less 2000 liabilities of $7.6 million equals 2000 net worth of $59 million. 2009 assets of $187.6 million less 2009 liabilities of $120.9 million equals 2009 net worth of $66.7 million. Exactly how does an increase in net worth of $7.7 million leave the SEIU "in pretty shabby shape"?

So there's Argument #1: The Innumeracy Files.

Then we have Argument #2: Politicians Do Stuff.

For those unaware former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is under federal indictment for trying to sell the Senate seat that Obama left when he won election to the White House.

The accidental release of an un-redacted motion filed by Blagojevich's legal team has the following nugget of interest:

Blagojevich's defense team basically alleges that Obama told a certain labor union official that he (Obama) would support Valerie Jarrett's candidacy for the Senate seat. Jarrett, referred to as "Senate Candidate B", is now a senior advisor to the president.

Obama told a labor union official -- the innuendo being it was Stern -- that he would support a woman he's known for years as a senate candidate. As opposed to what? He should only support porcupines? The key to the Blago indictment is that he was trying to sell the Senate seat. Do you see any reference to money anywhere in that paragraph?

I don't think even Publius knows what point he/she's trying to make here. But I'm pretty sure Presidents talking to labor union officials about endorsements isn't actually illegal.

Not to mention, if this is all Blago's defense team has got -- he's fucked.

A little closure

by flory

I generally leave discussion of wingnut philosophical debates to Thers -- mostly because he can make them entertaining. And humor is the only safe way to enter the conservative body politic. Sort of a wingnut condom.

But Noah MIllman has a very long post about the whole 'epistemic closure' fandangle over at The American Scene, and this part really struck me:

yet the common perception of those who worry about the “closing of the conservative mind” is that something has changed – certainly since the right’s intellectual heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. (emphasis mine)

I think what struck me was how this has become received wisdom -- on both the right and the left -- that there was some kind of intellectual golden age in conservative thought in the 70s and 80s. And that got me thinking about exactly how the right's political agenda was shaped by Reagan era thought. To wit:

1. Communists are bad. I think communists figured that one out on their own. Not sure how much conservative intelligentsia contributed.

2. Relatedly -- giant shiny missile shields will protect us from scary communists. How's that one working out?

3. Tax cuts for the rich are teh bomb!

4. Deregulation uber alles!

5. Going to war with brown people living in deserts will fix.......pretty much everything.

I'm sure I'm missing a few but that's my not-conservative memory of the intellectual output of movement conservatism from the Reagan-Bush era.

Maybe the fact that this is considered their golden age is the answer to what's wrong with wingnuttia?