Some thoughts on prejudice

 Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

 -Phil Collins-

What is an observation without a frame of reference?  We like to think we can observe facts and make rational deductions, but we can't.  Anyone with training in psychology as it pertains to law enforcement  is likely to tell you that eye witness accounts of the same occurrence will vary markedly and it's been clearly demonstrated that observers concentrating on one thing will be completely unaware of  important people and objects in their direct view.

When I read about an unarmed African American "child" kneeling with his hands up being shot multiple times, I was truly irate, I was ready to write off reports of his just having perpetrated a class B felony and his having charged a policeman who had ordered him to stop as racism. It fits with my habitual beliefs about the police and racism.  I may well have been totally wrong and it may not be the first time, but if it turns out that the 6 foot 4 200 pound "Child" did in fact charge the officer, things might just be other than I was primed to believe.

You might relate it to the halo effect: the tendency to have a view of people and things because of, in this case, his being a member of a traditionally disadvantaged class We do after all read about all sorts of injustice based on race and racism seems to explain a lot. But sometimes, of course we're wrong. Sometimes we fail to see things through the eyes of people who run stores and gas stations in "bad" areas whose lives are in danger every day.  Is it too easy for me  to condemn it from the safety of my gated community and the comfort of my air conditioned office? It depends on your viewpoint, your frame of reference, the things you associate with other things because your human and you have a memory.

For most of my life, I was firmly convinced that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were framed.  I galled me that they were Jews and their trial and execution would reflect on me.  I found it easy to find detailed opinions as to their having been innocent. There were lots of people who agreed, lots of signs and protests from lots of convinced people. People I despised were convinced of their guilt. I was ready to see the whole sad affair as yet another example of the persecution of liberals and most of all Jews.  In fact I was passionate about it. I was wrong.

But we see connections between things, relationships, reminders and all the things that lumped together are called bias and prejudice.  Watching the endless coverage of the gruesome and heartbreaking killing of Stephen Sotloff -- the tall dark man with the knife condemning Obama, blaming Obama for what he was about to do and threatening to do it again and again, in the name of peace and freedom  My rage and loathing must surely have been augmented by the years and years of hearing similar rhetoric from Republicans of all sorts, from Fox News to barber shop conversations. It's going to be hard to temper my rage at the endless Obama bashing and ceaseless hatred of human values. These things are inexorably linked in my mind.

And what do we think of Vlad the Invader?  Putin is an arrogant, dishonest, power hungry autocrat, contmptuous of  Democracy, decency, human rights and Liberty. Contemptuous of us. Have you been listening to how Fox and its followers have been praising him as the kind of bold, confident leader American needs?  If you're a Republican you will have forgotten this instantly, but you'll still be contemptuous of Obama and blame him for being weak, for not waving our nuclear penis around. I still remember though and every time I hear you barking about strength, I will associate it with your fascination with tyrants. Evey time you call Obama a tyrant I will remember. Every time I hear you call him weak and indecisiveness, I will associate it with your praise of ruthless aggression.  I will never, ever trust you to tell us the time of day even if my watch confirms it. I know who you are and what you've done and it's all been a pack of lies.

So, yes, I'm human.  Yes, I know there is wisdom and enlightenment in trying to see things through other eyes, but there is discomfort in equal amounts from remembering, from associating or correlating one thing with another. I suffer from rage and closed mindedness and prejudice like everyone else does, so when I see bloody handed monsters I will think of Republicans. When I hear the word "conservative" I think of hate, of tyranny, of  arrogance -- of evil.  the camera can't show it, but I know that face behind the black mask and I see him everywhere.

I have seen the future

Or the selfie of the future, that is.

Selfie of the day, selfies of the week -- we can hardly breathe with the effort of working selfie into every page, every story, every moment of news.

6 uses of the word in a 15 second news spot and it's hardly unique. They're trending on Twitter and I effort to litter every page with SELFIES!

How did we ever get along without that word in those dull, crepuscular days without hashtags when only birds would tweet and that picture you took of yourself was a picture you took of yourself?  No,  selfie is here to stay and there is a future to come when old men in tattered backwards hats sit on park benches sharing shaky-handed selfies and  blowing farts through their boxers, belts around ankles and tweeting about efforting their bowel movements. Tattooed nonagenarians with Titanium hip replacements and gold-rimmed bifocal Google Glass, sharing selfies.

I have seen the future. Androgynous naked teens, covered in genetically engineered cat fur, brains wired together by the web, trending. They hide in the trees, laughing and taking selfies for their friends on the moon.

The conundrum of memory

Sometimes I get to wondering, sometimes I get confused about what our conservative brethren are trying to tell us.  I was reminded recently that my former Republican congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) amongst others,  vociferously  threatened to impeach the president for having provided air traffic control for the UN incursions into Libya; for having exceeded his constitutional authority by arming Syrian rebels.  Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) back in June of 2013 threatened to impeach President Obama if any U.S. troops are killed in Syria.  Is there a relationship between rhetorical amplitude and political passion and the shortness of it's half-life? 


I ask because currently the same party is chastising him for not having gone into Syria thus allowing ISIS a breeding ground. We need those airstrikes -- why didn't he make those airstrikes?  We need airstrikes, says John McCain, in his time-worn tradition of  damning Obama if he does or if he doesn't.  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to commit ground troops. This is all

 "due to our total inaction. And it's going to be one of the more shameful chapters in American history," says John McCain

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said the President's limited foreign policy is no longer acceptable. I have no idea whether that refers to the hundred airstrikes the Obama administration has unilaterally launched into Northern Iraq to help the hopelessly rickety and incompetent government Republicans bragged about setting up not long ago, but we can be assured of at least one thing: Republicans will damn him for doing it and damn him for not stepping in earlier back when they were trying to impeach him for it.
 .

What happened was. . .

It's been said so often we might as well attribute it to everyone: "we don't see things the way they are, we see them the way we are." So much in life hinges on tiny details. Things nearly identical can be seen in such enormously different fashion and we rarely seem to ask ourselves what the difference is. Sometimes the only difference is the way we are.

In a small Texas town yesterday, the Sheriff pulled 24-year-old Joshua Manuel Lopez's car over in a suburban neighborhood. Lopez had an outstanding warrant for graffiti. There was a scuffle, Sheriff Michael Pimentel was fatally shot.

What we think happened has so much to do with who we are. Much has to do with how the story is presented to us and this time, for some reason, CNN only gave us the bare bones facts, no a priori conclusions were jumped to. But there were so many ways of presenting this and as the metaphorical butterfly can set off a hurricane, it's the minute subtleties of our perception and the writer's perception that determine whether we sigh and go on to the next story, whether we feel bad for the officer, whether we see it as police brutality -- whether we talk about the way police treat minorities, write headlines about an innocent murdered for a misdemeanor or about those probably illegal Hispanics ruining America. There is far more than beauty in the eye of the beholder.

I doubt that the president will show up at the funeral or that the streets of Elmendorf, Texas will see loud and violent protest and I have to ask just how different is this case from other cases. Might it have been different if the ethnicity had been different, if the presumption of malice had been inserted in the coverage, if the trajectory of the bullet had varied by an inch or two? But my perception is meaningless, it's what the public thinks that matters. This is not an art museum and whether the painting is a Picasso or a Pissarro is not determined by the frame. It's determined by you and with whom you choose to side; by what causes you identify with, what party you belong to and what news you listen to. Perhaps the Buddhists are right and it's all an illusion, a great emptiness we fill with ourselves.

Will someone accuse me of racism here? of being unsympathetic? It doesn't matter and the "I" who wrote this is the you who are reading it. Nothing is true, all things are permitted.

Rush to Judgement.

Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love.

-Aeschylus: Agamemnon- 

We hear on the TV that most arrests in Ferguson Missouri are of  African Americans but we don't ask if the percentage given relates to the percentage of African Americans living there.  I don't know the answer, but I'll bet few people bothered to ask themselves because it complicates things and we're looking for "proof" of something we know a priori. Most of us would be very disappointed at anything in the way of opinion or conjecture or documented proof that things aren't the way we thought and perhaps not the way we hoped.  We want that cop to be guilty and his whole department complicit. It's plausible after all and that's enough for most of us.  Thank god for the law and the courts or we'd become what we think we oppose.

It's well documented by many scientific studies that people will believe a simple, plausible story with few selected supporting facts, or even fallacies for that matter, before they will take the trouble to sort through all the verifiable facts and analyze how they relate to our chosen opinion. Occam's razor cuts both ways and after all, our brains have evolved as machines for jumping to conclusions, not as calculators or statistical tabulators.  Hell, I suspect most people simply latch on to the opinions of the mobs they belong to, or aspire to belong to.  Far more witches have been burned than have been burned by witches.

I think there's great wisdom that comes with self doubt -- the ability to ask oneself  "what if everything I believe is wrong or absurd, or not worth consideration." What if the case is far more complex and the certainties for less clear? If we're lucky we have one of those epiphanic moments when it becomes obvious that we were wrong and we learn from it. We find out someone we were sure was guilty is innocent or vice versa. We find out we're not who we thought we were, that something we believed without question is demonstrably false, that someone or something we had confidence in didn't merit it. We find we've misjudged someone and we're forced, to go out and rage in the storm like Lear.  We suffer into truth and the truth is that if justice is to be served, we wait for the evidence and we look at all of it without prejudice. It's not easy.

The simple plausible truth behind the acquittal of O.J. Simpson was that he was the victim of racism. He's black, the LAPD has a history of  brutality against minorities,  one of the investigators was once heard using the N word and so when his defense attorney told the jury they had to send a message to "the Man"  all the endlessly damning evidence was forgotten.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, so many of us, so well aware of  racism in small town police departments instantly assumed that a "child" was murdered by some racist intent upon hunting innocent black children and were appalled by the jury's decision, because after all it was impossible that the innocent child jumped out of hiding in the dark at a "creepy guy" 4 inches shorter than him. Teenaged boys never do impulsive things, do they?  Impossible because we don't want to consider anything but black and white both in a real and metaphorical sense. We wanted to tie it to our mistrust of guns and laws that had no part in the trial and so we did rightly or wrongly, guilty or innocent -- case closed, minds closed.

When we heard some "child" was shot in Missouri. We saw the inevitable graduation picture wearing a mortarboard hat.  It was just so obviously a racially motivated murder to consider otherwise and of course if we want to pause and wait for more than confused and conflicting eye-witness reports we display endless anecdotes about racism in Ferguson.  So just as we as good liberals shouted "rush to judgement" at the lengthy Simpson trial, we turned about and rushed to judgement even before any investigation in those other two affairs.  Who wants to suffer? Who wants to be seen as a racist?

For those of course, of a different political persuasion, quite the opposite is true and Timothy McVeigh is a hero but Dr. King is not.  But enough about Fox News.  Enough too about questioning the need for the National Guard to stem the violence -- it's necessary because we think the situation is obvious and we are sure that nothing will be done if we don't demonstrate and exhibit our credentials as racism fighters before we really know what happened.  We don't.  We've just assumed and just decided what's obvious.  We get angry because we assume a cop assumed and because we assumed that cops always assume and we make sure that everyone knows every thing that might be construed as evidence  of racism so that we don't pause to reflect that sometimes we're wrong when lives hinge on our being right.

No it's absolutely certain that someone reading this will call me a racist or apologist for racism because I'm attempting to temper your crowd-sourced certainty.  If you do, you're not a liberal nor a defender of human rights or of justice but a prejudiced partisan a long way from wisdom.

Madness

Browse around the web and you'd think the world was going crazy and no, I'm not talking about Ferguson, MO.  Perhaps it is and perhaps we're all crazy too, but within a couple of minutes looking for stories other than about Ferguson, I found out far more than I wanted to know about a morgue attendant indicted for having sex with a hundred corpses of crime victims. Good thing I skipped lunch today.  But on any particular day you'll get demented Christian leaders telling us that public nursing causes people to become gay. Maybe all those baby Jesus pictures in churches do the same thing or maybe they cause people to become psychotic like this guy, but who knows?  It's a mad, mad, mad world and it's all Obama's fault for playing favorites with his black cronies.  

Larry Klayman, who is not a racist, is surprised that Obama isn't calling it the black House yet, but no, he's not a racist and Florida Governor Rick Scott whose company stole hundreds of millions from Medicare and who  takes personal credit for the economic recovery he had nothing to do with blames his opponent, former governor Charlie Christ for the recession. You know, the one that ended under Obama.

Think he's embarrassed by a campaign endorsement from a convicted slave trader or taking money from a contractor Florida employs to run prisons?  Nah and nobody else cares because Obama is on vacation while there are so many crises going on!  Really, and even though Obama had cut it short to be in Washington the other night, I broke off a long friendship with someone who didn't think it was fair mentioning the all time presidential vacation record holders, Reagan and Bush.  Bush took 879 Vs. Obama's 150 of course and I seem to recall a few crises during the Bush years. 2 1/2 years of vacation time but never mind -- Obama is just Obama and facts don't matter.

Of course there are crises galore in Ukraine and Africa and Iraq and Obama is being blamed for all of them by people who essentially don't give a damn about any problem but the one that suits their agenda and so it's hard to feel too much sympathy for anyone, crazy or sane.  Yes, it's a crazy world, a self obsessed and heartless and insane world with enough pain and suffering and grief  to fill a hundred worlds for a million years, but to most of us, it's our problem and it's who we can blame it on that matters. It's how much we can hide behind the smoke screen of bogus outrage that matters, because if blame were assigned fairly -- well we can't have that, can we?

You'd think we'd find a way to do something about it, but really, how many sane people are there other than you and I and besides, that damned Obama is on vacation.

Studies show

Studies show.  How many fraudulent arguments and political pieties begin with that statement?  Milk produces phlegm, Gluten causes inflammation, calories don't count, Obama caused the recession, money trickles down from the "job creators"  human activities don't affect the climate.  No matter how many large, double-blind studies are published in peer-reviewed journals, these flawed "Studies" many of which are speculations and fabrications or selected anecdotes persist.

Nobel laureate psychologist and Economist  Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow posits that we have two ways of making decisions: fast and slow as you might suspect from the title, or as he calls them: system 1 and system 2.  Reading it might just cause you to reevaluate a lot of  things you've been led to believe because people who want to enlist your support, sell you their products, receive your donations and secure your votes make skillful  use of this knowledge.

We have statistics thrown at us every day and we make decisions based on our statistical illiteracy, our intellectual laziness and the tendency to make decisions based on limited facts and wishful thinking.  So much of Kahneman's work applies to how we choose investments, but it applies to virtually everything we prefer to approach with the unreliable "system 1" rather than to wade rigorously through volumes of data until our heads hurt. In a large part, "studies show" is enough for most of us.  there's always a study, an authority, a  book and it's usually enough. We prefer to judge, to evaluate on limited evidence and we prefer intuition over analysis and when we believe something to be true, whether it's because we identify with a party or an organized faith or an ethnic group, we are

"very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.  If system 1 is involved, the conclusion comes first and the arguments follow."

That doesn't sound very profound or startling and yet we virtually always fail to detect such tendencies in ourselves, perhaps more so when we think we are highly intelligent.  As Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory says "If I were wrong, don't you think I'd know it?

We tend to disallow legitimate science and valid statistical conclusions out of hand if we are engaged in politics that argue to the contrary and apparently intelligence has less than enough to do with it. The difference between that quoted statement of the obvious and the body of work summarized in the book is an enormous amount of documented science.  ( I'll mention the Nobel prize once again.)

But this is not a book review and what I'm getting at is not another Lefty attempt to show the shoddy thinking and fallacy filled folly of the Right Wing. I'm making a case for divorce.  I'm just not getting the kind of liberal thinking out of the Democratic party I need.  I feel neglected and betrayed, ignored and saddened at the endlessly tainted logic, the misused statistics and conclusions supported by faith and gerrymandered facts. I want a divorce. Let me explain.

I got an appeal yesterday, to rethink my position on the legal modifications to prior self defense laws the press likes to call "stand your ground."  Places that have such laws have more murders, states the pleading, and not just more murders but more murders of  African Americans because non-African Americans tend to see dark skinned people as hostile and dangerous and likely to be carrying weapons. But don't take their word for it and you guessed it: studies show.

It so happens that I took part in the cited study which consisted of  pressing a key with either the right or left hand  to show whether the small black and white images of human eyes belonged to white or black people. Small images were also displayed which included items like crossbows and maces.  Delays in pushing either key determined whether or not I was a racist and wouldn't you know it -- I am a racist.  The study shows  and never mind the various possible reasons for time delays. Never mind any other study.

The problem from my standpoint is that it was impossible for me to determine the 'race' of well more than half of the eyes much less analyze the emotion  and there was a greater delay in pushing the key when I had that problem.  The delay is said to be proof that I associated black people with weapons and hostility, albeit mostly medieval weapons.  Seriously, but none the less, studies show. 

Now from this study, taken to be conclusive and irrefutably so, comes the leap of fallacy that I cannot be trusted to determine whether or not someone is a threat to my life because I'm a racist and by extension, no other whit person can be trusted because white people are racists. I would expect Liberals to gasp and perhaps to gag, but Democrats don't.  Democrats cling to this conclusion because studies show it's safer for to require me to run away from the attacker with a gun, white or black, and because they're Democrats after all. The conclusion comes first and the arguments follow.

Back when the Feds finally killed the 55mph speed limit, there were impassioned arguments from self-styled liberals like Alan Dershowitz telling us that there would be a bloodbath and indeed for a very short time there was a slight increase of highway fatalities. It was a statistical blip and those fatalities have continued to decline. Dershowitz made the mistake of taking statistically irrelevant data as proof of a trend -- of ignoring, as most of us do, regression to the mean and of choosing facts to fit the prior conclusion .

So my first reaction to the "states with SYG laws have more. . ." statement was the question: did they have more beforehand? and has the alleged increase been long enough to have statistical significance?  Will Regression to the Mean make this increase go away?  Without answering that question I'm supposed to hear Studies Show and jump on the bandwagon.  Sorry, I can't and because it's nearly universal in political advertising to play games with statistics, I have to side with Dr. Kahneman again when he explains that a few facts and a plausible story tend to trump informed and rational conclusion. WYSIATI he calls the gambit: "what you see is all there is" and we're all prone, in our laziness and longing to belong, to fall for it. If we fear guns we won't ask questions.  If we are invested in guns and gun rights, the opposite is true. First comes the conclusion.

The problem with interpreting statistics isn't just the pervasive ignorance of statistical method, the confusion between context and causality, but the laziness we're encouraged to cultivate in our consumer society. The vast majority of educated people will read the syllogism:

All roses are flowersSome flowers fade quicklyTherefore some roses fade quickly.

says Kahneman and agree, but of course it's not true, because it's possible that there are no roses among the some flowers that fade quickly, but my head hurts when doing the work needed to analyze it. It looks plausible,  the statements before "therefore" are true even if they are not the only facts that need to be considered and therefore we settle for "it's true" and will defend any argument based on it's truth. What with our liberal backgrounds, it's easier to agree that all white people are racists and defend policies based on it than to question Liberal authority. Easier to explain gender differences on society than on science and therefore it's fine to suppress data and prevent studies which might show. the studies that agree with us are always right.

Because it gets cold outside and insulation is necessary to sustain life, no one should interfere with our right to own warm clothing.

Does that mean that we're not allowed to own a coat in Key West but only where it gets cold? You know what I'm getting at here. Context means more than what's actually said. We see what we want to see, believe what we're disposed to believe.  We're not afraid of mittens, but still we think we're rational. We think we're guided by science and are objective, independent thinkers.  If I am actually to be all that, can I still be a Democrat?  Can I still be a Democrat if than now means I can't trust anyone in any way, that heresy is everywhere and the job of Democrats is to root it all out and punish it  even if we have to cut a swath through truth, science and  humanist values to bring the unbelievers to the stake?  No, I think I need a divorce.

Shame

People get killed in almost any kind of racing and everyone knows it. It's a rough sport, like the sports Americans love the most.  People get hurt playing football.  People get killed on ski slopes and while surfing and  skateboarding.  People go out during hurricanes to kite surf and board surf and when they get killed in the process the responsibility is usually clear. People run out into highways, people walk around on railroad bridges and they get hurt and nobody blames anyone but the fools who do it, but that's in the real world, not the strange world of journalism where it becomes necessary to ask whether there will be criminal charges against Tony Stewart who ran over and killed a teen age driver who deliberately ran out on a race track fired up with childish egotism and deliberately stepped in front of his race car, finger held high. "Will he face criminal charges?" asks CNN?  Do you ever feel shame?  I have to ask.

And speaking of shame, can we write it off to early stages of dementia that John McCain can get away with blaming the raging barbarians now running loose in Iraq on President Obama's having pulled troops out on a schedule agreed to by George Bush and at the demand of the incompetent, ill-prepared Iraqi Government set up by George Bush that alienated a large portion of  the population? It's time for the public to ask, but it's time for the Media to start asking out loud since unlike the rest of  us, they remember all the details about a war sold on a false pretext with the full cooperation of  armchair heroes and war profiteers and in which so many people died.

 It's time to ask how much the American public would have supported keeping thousands of stoops there for another decade or longer since it's unlikely that the schisms going on in Muslim countries are going end or stop taking advantage of the kind of power vacuums provided by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, inter alia for no other reason than the love of  conquest. I'm sorry, Mr. McCain, but you backed the destruction if Iraq and you asked for the destruction of Iran from the comfort of your own safety.

You've blamed Obama for the results of the laws of supply and demand in a free world market.  You've been offering predictions of all kinds of disasters, military and economic and have been proven wrong -- and indeed nothing you've been warning against has happened. The "everything is Obama's fault" has disgraced you and any sympathy you may have earned for having been a prisoner of war and if I do not call you unscrupulous, dishonest and dangerous to America, it's because I think you're demented and to be pitied.  It's time for him to retire from public life, but it's time to ask why the media gives such credit and support to a man who has stepped in front of truth in a fit of childish egotism and does it without a hint of shame.

And speaking of shame, can we direct further disgust toward the media for the shamelessness of asking why a tiny supply of a highly risky and experimental serum was given to two Americans instead of selecting two Africans somewhere?  How disgusting to talk about racism when we know full well they'd have been asking whether there should be criminal charges had the serum, never tested on humans or monkeys, proved fatal.

Obama's Policies

Obama's 'policies,'  we hear so much about Obama's policies and so little about what those might be that it puzzles me. If we're talking about any policy he might have been able to persuade congress to implement, we have only the Affordable Care Act which was supported by a majority of Americans and still is when you ask them but isn't when you ask them if they support "Obamacare."

Of course "Obama's Policies" is a metonym -- a stand-in word for a Black man in the White house -- and not as a servant.  Very often the dung flung at him is recycled from accusations fairly made against his Republican predecessors and just as the amorphous Whitewater investigation was an attempt to pay back the Democrats for Watergate and successful attempt to handcuff Clinton -- just as Bush was called the worst president ever for bankrupting the economy, destroying the job market, lying to get us into the longest and most expensive war in our history that ran up unprecedented debt, they try to retaliate and pin the tail on the Negro.  Obama is the worst president ever, Obama started the Recession, Obama, despite 6 years of steady recovery is all to blame for the lack of recovery. It isn't true and it can't be argued for, so Obama's Polices usually go unnamed or falsely attributed. "Obama's Policies" used without specifics identifies the user as a coward, a scoundrel and a liar.

Stay inside, hide under the bed and play video games

Because life is just too dangerous to live!

Really, this is the safest time to live in the United states there has ever been and I'm guessing that's true of  the civilized, "first-world" in general. Your kids are more likely to grow up big and strong and to live longer than you do, just as you're likely to live twice as long as folks did a hundred or so years ago, but you'd never know it to listen and to read and to feel.

Have you seen the recent car commercials where the distracted young mother with child in the back seat ( kids can't ride in the front seat any more) nearly rear-ends another car but is saved by automatic braking? Last night I saw another one where Young Mother gets into oncoming traffic on a bridge but the car saves her at the last moment.  Self-driving cars are being tested now and self parking cars are a reality. Cars warn you of other cars in your "blind" spot you would have seen anyway if you were looking and we're supposed to be as giddy and elated about it as an American who just worked "selfie" into a sentence for the first time. We're in terrible danger because learning to drive safely is beyond us and the future must be about cars that drive themselves without participation from you. Driver training?  What?

 Oh, brave new world that has such cowards in it!  What a wonderful world where no risk of any kind is permitted or tolerated outside the world of video games, where a woman can be arrested for letting a 7 year old walk to the park.  Yes, arrested, not scolded or cautioned -- and she faces 5 years in the slam. Maybe she should tke the kid with her -- it's safer behind bars.

No, the joy of driving an open car, a sleek powerful masterpiece of engineering down a country lane, the joy of riding a bicycle unsupervised when you're 7, of walking to the park on a Summer day -- there are parents who won't let their kids play in their own suburban yards unsupervised, whose every moment is scrutinized, analyzed and proscribed lest there be any danger at all of any kind.


How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

Brave New Words

Ever notice that look people get when they've just said "Selfie?"  It's like they've been waiting for an opportunity so long and it feels just so hip and with-it and just like the cool kids at the cool kid's lunchroom table even though people have been taking pictures of themselves for 275 years?  Historians 275 years hence will be able to date articles with reference to the year of the Selfie just as they will mark the moment that "awesome" exploded into hip American English or the "like" outbreak of the 1990's.

I wonder how long saying selfie will require the micro-skit behavior, the little grin and shrug it requires. The requisite tonality of  awesome still persists after more than a decade.

But sure, language has to change and always will change and probably will hereafter be changed by the
Peter Pan syndrome and total disrespect for education that characterizes modern life. I mean who reads literature any more? Who looks anything up in a dictionary?  Not when you can take awesomely impactful selfies and post 'em.  I mean like it never gets old.

Free range, organic, natural and unprocessed idiocy

Life must be frustrating for Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  Hell, life is frustrating for most of us, but his problem is us because he's just so damn much smarter.  The anti-science bozos just can't leave him alone as evidenced by a video of him responding to a French interviewer and defending Genetically Modified Organisms and the right to profit by patenting genomes.

To me there's little difference between flat-Earth Biblical Bullshit and the kind of twaddle we read every day about "processed" foods and "grain Brain" and "paleo" diets and the world being destroyed by seedless watermelons, drought resistent corn and zombies, because not only do people cling to hokey pseudoscience, paranoia and processed opinions, they're just stupid.

But what can I say, I've probably got Grain Brain from the gluten in that half bagel I ate this morning and the coffee I drank made from water processed by boiling, and beans processed by roasting and grinding when I should have dug up some organic and unprocessed and all natural grubs in the back yard and eaten them raw. Of course chewing them is processing them, isn't it?  I guess you just can't win

Florida Libertarians want to eat your flesh!

If there's anything left worth eating after reading the Daily Kos.

Florida-bashing has become a popular sport and of course there's plenty to bash, it being a Red State. It's a corrupt state as well, but then Florida is not unique in either respect nor are we unique in supporting parties and agendas that don't benefit and do harm our quality of life.  But sports and parties take on lives of their own and like all things that live, the prime motivation is to live and prosper at all costs.  So when we run out of  Flori-Duh stories, we confect some tasty and blog-nourishing stories out of a few carefully selected observations and peddle them everywhere. The Daily Kos ran an article the other day putting forth notion that because, in the heat of  tropical Summers, a kind of dangerous bacteria knows as vibrio vulnificus can be found in ocean waters.  It's warm in Florida in the summer, this is not news.

Now if  this "necrotizing" bacteria gets into a cut or scrape it can begin eating your flesh.  If it gets into your blood stream, it can kill you.  Hot climates everywhere have certain dangers and every year we read of  all the many children and dogs that die from being left in hot cars and every year we're made to think there's something new about it. We're never told whether the long term trends, if there are any, are up or down.  In fact we're usually made to believe there's a crisis at hand and that we need to be afraid or angry or motivated to read all about it: motivated to vote one way or the other. Florida is deadly! Says the Kos and the comment section is full of hissing hatevipers.  Never mind that you can get the bacteria anywhere the ocean is warm, at the beach in Texas or from eating raw oysters in Mobile Alabama. Never mind that you can die from Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba, anywhere: at  a Kansas swimming hole or a Minnesota water park, but Florida is dangerous, let us scare you, let us not inform you of the risks or whether it's getting better or getting worse, let's blame it on someone we don't like. You know, there are more boating accidents in Florida than in Utah -- must be the politics.

Perhaps the major difference between the swimming pool drownings, the lightening strikes, the heat stroke deaths, the shark and alligator attacks one finds more of in this climate, and the ordinary risks of disease and accident that account for so many deaths everywhere, is that they can be pinned like a paper tail on that old donkey, Florida by any half-baked  blogger or scandal hungry TV station and so all the media needs is some mold to press it into and sell it like candy. Florida is dangerous whether because of the lightening or the gun laws or the sharks or the bacteria or predatory racists.

You see all these people - all 11 of them are getting sick because of the Libertarians in Florida.  It's their fault that we don't test the waters at the beaches says Kos -- on our entire  2,276 Statute Miles of tidal coastline, the bays and estuaries although they offer no evidence of it.  Of course we do -- of course bacteria levels are monitored constantly in populated areas and beach closings and openings are announced all the time. When someone contracts the disease, it makes headlines even in right wing newspapers.

 Water pollution in fact is a very political and very hot issue here, with huge quantities of toxic industrial and agricultural waste being dumped into heretofore pristine waters, but even the Republican populace, if not the Republican representatives, is up in arms about cleaning it up.  Fishing and all water sports, in fact, are a very major support to the local economy.  The current Gubernatorial race seems to be all bout who will spend the most money on the environment, but nobody in Keokuk, Iowa or Manhattan will question the story and particularly not if they're jealous of Florida's climate or if they just need cheap reasons to be smug about living where the sun don't shine.

The Gun Culture

It felt strange, even for someone who has owned some kind of firearm for more than 50 years, to open the trunk of my car, take out an assortment of rifles, and openly walk through the parking lot with what any newspaper reporter would love to  describe in lurid verse as an "arsenal" and including of course "weapons of war."   Wars are wars after all, even those that ended 150 years ago.  I was hardly the only one with an armful of expensive  hardware of course, it being a gun show. There were acres of cars that the acres of "gun nutz" had arrived in, but if I had been expecting vintage Dodge Chargers with Confederate flags or jacked up trucks with nasty bumper stickers and layers of mud, I would have been disappointed.  No Daisy Duke. I was parked between a Prius and a Cadillac.  After having  my relics examined by a nice chatty fallow to be sure they weren't loaded, to insert plastic zip ties to be sure they couldn't be loaded, I was advised not to take any less than $900 for one rifle.  Welcome to gun prices.  Welcome to the gun culture.

Lots of army surplus clothing, holsters, belts, boots --  even bulletproof vests on display. Booths from a local gun range offering senior discounts on Tuesdays: booths full of sporting goods and bow-hunting items, a booth with costumed civil war reenactors who kept me there a long time talking about my 1863 Tower carbine.  Some of the gun culture, a large part of it, is history culture.

Tables and tables of new commercial ammunition, hand made cartridges, surplus ammunition which usually comes in boxes of  100, or 250 or 500 rounds and would having even one box delight those people who write howling headlines?  A couple of hours at the range?  Hell no, it's an arms cache suitable only for a mass murderer.

And of course there was a large, well staffed NRA booth with a bowl of Tootsie Rolls and piles of safety pamphlets.  Maybe they were perverts and murderers and closet Nazis -- even the ladies -- but they didn't look it. Still I walked on.  Well dressed businessmen, an off-duty cop I know, some guys in camo, some guys in Army uniform, a fellow Ham and pillar of the community Sunday School teacher type just there to buy a few boxes of ammunition for cheaper than Wal-Mart sells them.  It's the South and everybody loves guns. Even your mama.

All in all, a nicer looking crowd than I see at the barber shop and some of the restaurants I frequent.  I spent more time talking about history and historical weaponry and to people making sure I knew what my stuff was worth,  than I  spent conducting business and met several history buffs but not one snob and not one unfriendly person. No swastika tattoos, no white sheets, no one talking to himself. What can I say?  I may do it again.

I sold most of what I brought and all to licensed firearms dealers who yes, despite what you hear, really do conduct background checks  and boy, were my pockets  bulging when I left.  Did I mention that gun prices have soared and continue to soar?

I don't know, maybe it's like my experiences with the scary "biker Culture" that have had nothing whatever to do with the stereotypes we fling around.  I've begun to suspect that there are so many gun cultures that don't resemble either the others or the stereotype as there are kinds of Liberals or Conservatives or Bikers or Bookworms or Bloggers.  There might be a lesson about lumping people together, stereotyping people and making cheap shots here somewhere, but it's time for dinner and I'm part of the food culture too, doncha know.

39 bullets?

I suppose I should be used to it by now, but such is the state of journalism these days that you can be sure that most of what you see and hear and read is not only in error but usually tendentious, intended to mislead, to create an impression, to add emotion for a purpose.

Whether it's about automobiles, health and nutrition and especially if it's about firearms, you can almost be sure the story is misleading and often intentionally so.  Certainly every story about firearms needs to be salted with buzzwords even if they don't apply. Anyone with more than two guns, for instance has an arsenal and even though it's common to buy ammunition in boxes of 250 rounds or more, the story must always stress how many "bullets" the owner has, (most often they're "high caliber, high velocity and armor piercing) and how frightening that is.  

So although there are several important things to discuss, several questions to be answered in the story of a Darby Pennsylvania shooting of a social worker and a psychiatrist, the headline reads that the deranged shooter was carrying "39 bullets" in his pocket and obviously intended to reload his ".32 caliber revolver."  Now to me, the question worth asking is how a convicted bank robber with many felony firearms convictions in his portfolio was walking about free, had a gun at all and got into a hospital with it.

Frankly I'm suspicious that the writer really doesn't know a revolver from an autoloader since .32 revolvers tend to be antique and use ammunition that hasn't been made in a long time, but it doesn't matter, the man had a gun, took it to his psychiatrist's office, flew into a rage about signs prohibiting firearms, shot a social worker at close range and shot the Doctor too, but only wounded him.  Now if you believe the story, he was attempting to reload says the story but he was also tackled by two men and he was also shot three times by the psychiatrist (with a .32 autoloading pistol.)  Will the real story please stand up?

Why did he need to reload after two shots?  Was he really using a two barrel Derringer?  Was he tackled after he was shot three times and critically wounded?  Will the psychiatrist, who had a concealed weapon permit get into trouble for having a gun in a restricted area? Will he have to face trial, lose his job for saving his life?  Do Pennsylvania laws require him to have run away instead of standing his ground?   Perhaps he will be prosecuted, perhaps not, but our Federal and State gun laws are very complex, very tough and often punish the innocent, despite what you hear.

We can be assured that the NRA will use this to argue for more guns in hospitals and we will guffaw in righteous indignation, but the fact remains that Dr. Silverman saved his own life and likely that of others by having a gun, terrible shot although he appears to be.  Democrats will fail to be embarrassed by the axiom that people cannot protect themselves with guns.  We'll be demanding "tougher" and more strict laws without really having an idea what they might be or knowing what already is in place, but apparently we won't be asking why all those regulations designed to keep guns from crazy people with violent and lengthy criminal records are walking the streets and finding ways to get and carry guns illegally, seem no more effective for all the severity. Some will go on insisting there are no regulations or restrictions of any kind and perhaps one of those will post an angry comment, as they so often do.

It's not about 39 bullets, it's not about the childish terminology, its about the reliance on legislation to make crime stop, it's about reliance on severe and inflexible sentencing instead of  spending money on security and enforcement. It's about refusing to look at statistics concerning types of weapons used in real crimes instead of hypothetical and highly inventive speculation.  Everything this killer did was illegal and I want to know if he bought this weapon under the table and if so, from whom.  I want to know if he passed a mandatory background check and waiting period -- if so, why and how and I want less hooha about ending crime by making it illegal. Murder has been illegal for a very long time.

Please sir, can I have some more?

Pecunia non olet said Vaspasian, or so they say. Money doesn't stink, or so you'd think looking at the way Florida governor Rick Scott laps it up like a cat with spilt milk. Showing up Monday at a  Boca Raton, Florida home of GEO Group CEO George Zoley for his $10,000 a plate fundraiser ( another $3K if you want to come to the reception) would suggest that Scott can't  smell dirty money, as Zoley's company is in the business of running private prisons -- some say the worst in the country -- that squeeze the life and health out of prisoners as well as exposing the guards to unnecessary danger.

Of course it may be that Scott smells it all too well and, like a culture, is attracted to the smell of graft and corruption and human suffering. You'll recall his involvement with the largest Medicare fraud ever exposed. You may not recall that Zoley gave Mr. Scott $20,000 to add to the $800,000 of taxpayer money to pimp up the governor's mansion. Yes, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the great flood of lobbyist money soaked up by the Governor, but Scott is not one to forget his obligations to contributors.


No money doesn't care who owns it and it doesn't stink even though the people and deeds connected to it may reek. The dollars saved by understaffing prisons and serving substandard, sometimes maggot infested food to prisoners adult and juvenile affirm his credentials with his party and particularly because so many of the inmates rotting and starving and being beaten in GEO prisons are immigrants. Last year a group of protesters  chained themselves to the doors of the GEO Group corporate headquarters in Palm Beach in protest over  GEO's "pivotal role in promoting discriminatory laws that target people of color,

immigrants, youth, transgender individuals, and the poor."   There have been hunger strikes.  There have been investigations looking into accusations that inmates were being served rotten food and suffering from food poisoning at the Broward  County, Florida facility. There were also allegations of sexual assault among detainees and reports of several suicide attempts says the Broward/Palm Beach NewTimes blog.  Did I mention that Scott is a Republican?

But we can't accuse old snake eyes of total blindness to appearances.  After all Zoley was a second choice after it became known that the original host, real estate mogul James Batmasian, was convicted of tax evasion in 2008. Batmasian, who spent eight months in federal prison and completed a two-year supervised release program, also had his legal license suspended in Florida. That stinks, even if his money doesn't.   It stinks almost as much as his rather dishonest and scurrilous accusations made against his likely opponent, Charley Crist, but to his supporters it doesn't matter any more than facts do. Rick Scott saved us money by abusing prisoners and a penny saved is a penny you can spend on yourself.  And besides, prisoners can't vote.

Who fired that shot?

Another Malaysian plane goes down, but this time we know why. We don't know who, because Putin denies it, the Russian separatists say it wasn't them and the Ukrainian government says it was. All of them are wrong however and we can be sure our friends the Republicans will soon let us know that this crisis, like all crises can be charged off to Barack H. Obama, the Kenyan born, Madrassa educated, communist Muslim jihadist demon.

What did you think? After all he didn't invade and his sanctions were either too little or too much and that's impeachable. Just as George Bush's decision to allow minor immigrants to have a hearing before deportation was Obama's fault -- just like The Republicans refusal to beef up security at the Benghazi embassy was Obama's fault and the deplorable conditions in Central America have never had anything to do with any Republican administration or policy.

Isn't it amusing -- or perhaps disgusting, but we can be sure that our Republican Congressional hostage takers will take precious time out from doing nothing but Obamabashing to bash Obama, but hey -- at least we'll know whose' fault it is.

What a piece of work is Man

Lovely meal, nice restaurant, best company, but the people at the next table were telling each other just what the Universe thought about this or that and how the Universe had solved some problem one of them had had. You don't get this at the Taco truck or the Wendy's drive through.

Perhaps they were Northerners.  The locals would simply have substituted the word God with no embarrassment, or perhaps they were the last holdouts of Deism, the folks who seek God in nature and not in churches or scriptures.  Who knows? But I hear this a lot.  I'm even wondering whether our practically  infinite universe is large enough to contain an ego of the size required to believe it had such significance in comparison to all there is or was or ever will be.  I'm guessing none of them were astronomers or astrophysicists or even of sufficient awareness to question the idea that something of the nature of nature itself was sentient or of  good intentions toward men -- men of good will or otherwise.

But say for the purposes of cynical condemnation, that the universe was a brain that somehow coalesced from a primal particle of infinite energy and infinitesimal size.  What can be a brain like that be composed of? Given the speed of light, and make no mistake, the universe does give us the speed of light -- given an all-there-is, the extremities of which can never, ever be reached in an infinite amount of time,  the allegedly sentient universe isn't old enough to have noticed us yet and never could be, even if somehow it were interested in our dining pleasure or our marital problems.  That which we can see of the universe is 30 billion light years across, a combination of  absolutely nothing and absolutely everything: violent on an unimaginable scale, both random and predictable and driven by principles we don't fully understand - but it can suggest to Shirley that she break up with Dylan or Cody or that I buy a new car. A sentient universe must need be speechless.

What a piece of work is man -- what quasi-demonic deity could match us for arrogance, for self-importance? 

Ecce Simiae

Behold the Ape

One of the things I find difficult to discuss with fellow Liberals is the question of intelligence and its heritability.  That observable differences in cognitive function may be no more than learned behavior, or a the most a product of childhood experience, seems to be one of the credos that today's Liberal must share at the risk of losing the label.  Of course there is evidence to show that childhood deprivation of several kinds does affect the way one performs on IQ tests and perhaps in the experiences of life, but looking at people who are incontrovertibly brilliant it's hard to select parenting skills as the cause without looking silly.  The result is often that  people who have achieved great breakthroughs, often incomprehensible to the rest of us: people with great powers to analyze, calculate and create have their accomplishments explained by diligence or the willingness to work. That is something to which we can all aspire and fits into our cultural ethic

I heard in a movie trailer yesterday, that old and quite untrue saw "we only use 10% of our brains" which is patently untrue but  survives by offering hope that, like J.N. Barrie's Wendy Darling, we too can aspire to great ability if we only try hard and truly believe. No matter how hard I try, I still cannot follow Einstein's math much less develop the ability to have worked it out myself.

But to preserve the ego: to preserve the hope of a possibility that we're not second or third rate, we analogize with other achievements.  After all me can train to run farther or faster, to lift greater weights, to play sports better. We only have to use that latent 90%, to buy the "Baby Einstein" CD's and never mind the lack of evidence for success.  We can decide that specific talents are not part of some greater measure of mental ability, and some remarkable ability to calculate or to write music might just be latent in all of us if we try harder. We might decide to see some physical ability as a compensatory type of intelligence to offset our other intellectual lacks and in fact that's a component or the " intelligence is learned behavior" school of Liberal thought.  How brilliant must a Gibbon be, a squirrel, a bird!

But as I said, one risks ostracism by the trustees of conventional enlightenment by discussing, even in jest, such shibboleths as the genetic basis of intelligence, of racial features or even physical stature. What I'm saying is that by many measures, we Liberals are not the opposite of conservatives but just another variant. We too believe what is comfortable and what makes others comfortable with us and what is very uncomfortable to all good people is racism. I've heard it said many times that we cannot research certain things lest we play into the hands of racists or sexists or eugenicists and other miscreants. It's so much like that refrain from so many 20th century horror films: "there are things men were not meant to know."

And so we will ascribe that bell curve to other things. We will question, and perhaps rightly, the ability to test intelligence accurately, writing off vast differences in number crunching ability or short term memory or pattern recognition to cultural things, even when culture has little to do with those tests.  We talk about 5% differences and ignore the 100% differences that can hardly be written off so easily and  not only because we aspire to undeserved greatness, but because we're afraid others will misuse the data.

So it's interesting to see how we very conservative Liberals will see peer reviewed studies like the one in Current Biology that arrives at these conclusions:

•Individual differences in chimpanzee cognitive performance are heritable

•Cognitive traits found to be heritable show significant genetic correlations

•Sex and rearing history do not significantly influence cognitive performance

Will we decide that a biological basis for intelligence only pertains to modern Humans and not our immediate or more distant ancestors?  Perhaps it will be decided that our ancestors learned to be sapient the way we learned to lose out body hair and gain larger brains.  If not, we're going to have to learn to stop hiding and to address the real problems, the cultural and social and ethical problems of how we treat other people directly. We're gong to have to learn to separate all sorts of human variation from estimations of human worth, rights and dignity.  That's far harder to do than to wear a blindfold and demand that others do as well.

My guess is that the "no scientific basis" will remain a strong political force despite any degree of  sabotage by science because truly, there is no conservative more tenacious than a Liberal.

Ramadan Kareem

"I didn't want to wish you Ramadan Kareem on the air. . ." said Jake Tapper just now on CNN, thinking his mike was off.  He had just interviewed some lawyers irate at being under surveillance without any reason save for their being Muslim.

His mike was on and I wonder -- just why was he unwilling?  Is there a war on Ramadan?