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HRC did not lose to Trump because of Russian “hacking”

I think NPR really came through on this piece of journalism:

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/12/12/505272992/the-russian-hacking-kerfuffle-what-we-do-and-dont-know

They probably stand alone among the media, who have profligated (I made that word up!) a pretty tenuous notion that it was Russian “hacking” – and nothing else! – that cost Hilary Clinton the Presidency and put Donald Trump there.

Here is the simple logic which deflates such a notion:

  1. Hilary Clinton didn’t really lose the election, unequivocally. Another blazing news item is the discrepancy between the Popular Vote and the Electoral Vote. The Russian “hacking” argument says, essentially, that Hilary’s character was so defamed by these alleged Russian media artifacts, that she lost a significant part of her constituency? First, that doesn’t match the Popular results.  So, that refines the claim to say that the Russian meddling somehow influenced the Electoral College? How exactly? It would have to be shown, in a mathematical way, that enough votes shifted, from one or more States, from Democrat to Republican, so that the majority went to Repulbican, hence the Electoral College voted Republican. It would require a mathematical explanation, ultimately.  But, does it even really sound reasonable, in the first place?
  2. The argument is unequivocal – it purports to rule out every other possible cause for her loss – right?  Aren’t we saying “Hilary Clinton lost the Presidency because of Russian hacking?” There is never any “and….failure to win Bernie’s constituency; failure to appeal to the Midwest laborer vote, etc.” No. The argument as presented is that if there had been no interference, Hilary Clinton would be the 45th President – no contest.
  3. The most strikingly ridiculous part of all of this is that we are comparing some media items which defame Hilary in some way, to the mountain of media artifacts that defamed Trump throughout his campaign, and we are saying that Hilary’s defamation came out worse? Trump’s ludicrous Tweets alone should have cost him the Presidency, if this is really the argument.  He demonstrated bigotry, racism, sexism, philandering, ridiculous tax records – I mean, what did the Russians put out there that trumps all of the public embarrassment that Trump embodies? The NPR article says. That’s it? I mean, the DNC emails were mean-spirited, indeed, as were the “jokes” about Benghazi.  But ties to powerful bankers?  How does that lessen Hilary, in comparison to Trump?
    1. The messages revealed the gritty inner workings of the party elite and showed its preference for Hillary Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders supporters were outraged; the embarrassment prompted the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
    2. Later, WikiLeaks released emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, which depicted her and the campaign’s ties to powerful bankers, internal jokes about the Benghazi investigation and other such exchanges.
    3. Parallel stories about the FBI’s investigation into the private email server that Clinton used at the State Department

That’s it? I mean, the DNC emails were mean-spirited, indeed, as were the “jokes” about Benghazi.  But ties to powerful bankers?  How does that lessen Hilary, in relationship to, of all people, Donald Trump?

NPR does not mention the “fake news” campaign, which is also regularly described as “hacking” (in a pretty non-technical sense, publishing fake news cannot be considered “hacking”, since anyone, including my mother, can do it. The Washington Post, famous for uncovering the Watergate scandal, did the most thorough investigation (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.abba7b86a8b9). This is their conclusion:

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

So, it’s just spreading right-wing point of view across social media?  This is supposed to have lost – I mean actually functionally lost – the Presidency for Hilary Clinton? The WP goes on to say

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders.

Note that the rhetoric switches from the Democrats, to democracy, and from Hilary Clinton, to its leaders. The Democratic Party is hardly equivocal to Democracy, and Hilary does not represent the leaders of Democracy.  But back to the point – the point was that Russian “hacking” lost Hilary the Presidency.  The point was NOT that Russian “hacking” ruined our Democracy (it’s a Republic, by the way; abandoned Democracy when the popluation exceeded, say, 100).

Take this into account, from the NPR article

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said in September that the Republican National Committee also was hacked during the campaign.

Well, well.  So the Russian “hacking” damaged Hilary significantly – or the DNC, anyway – but had what, the opposite effect on the RNC?

The bottom line is this: the Russian “hacking” argument needs to be expanded beyond the facebook bytes and Tweets: what is the actual position? The only real question is this:

  • if the Russians took votes away from Hilary, where did those votes go? One can’t imagine that these were closet Republicans, just waiting for unsubstantiated claims against Hilary, for them to “swing” all the way to the Right? Right? It seems more likely that the 1,000,000 Bernie supporters, who deserved to be the most offended by the “hacked” emails (the emails weren’t actually “hacked” – that is, they were not altered: what the DNC Chair said about Bernie was the (her) truth), might have chosen not to vote at all.  But one can hardly imagine that they voted for Trump.
  • who was swayed by this dys-information?  Who read those Tweets, and acted on them?  Staunch Hilary supporters?  Reading what, the Breitbart Twitter feed?  Word: the staunch Hilary supporters don’t even really know what these media artifacts even say – at least they didn’t until after the election.  Democrats read Democrat social media, and believe it all; Republicans read Republican media, and nothing else. So,
  • Who, exactly, did the Russian influence?

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Ever been to Atlanta? 

Take a look at this:

http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Atlanta-Georgia.html
What I want to point out first about this site is that it is real data.  From police records.   This site has no funding – just banner ads. 

Here’s what you don’t know about Atlanta – the parts are not the same as the whole. For example,  downtown Atlanta is where Gone with the Wind premiered. It is also a very dangerous place.  The place called “Buckhead” is where frat boys go to drink and vomit.   Also dangerous if you are a nice girl. 

If you look on the map in the link,  you will see that red is considered very high crime. Pink is only high.  All of the city center is pink. High.   

I knew two missionary priests who ran a halfway house downtown.  Lasted  years before they were shot and killed. 

In the northeastern part,  the crime rate is orange,  normal. Wealthy white people work there. It is filled with corporate parks with their own private security. The whole place it on lock. There has been controversy regarding the train: for many many years something has prevented the downtown train from extending out to the corporate heaven. Inherent racism. Everyone who lives there knows it. 

And directly north of the city the color is yellow – low crime.  That’s where all the people who work in the corporate parks live. 

If you go too far north,  you will notice two things: there are only white people. And the gun law is open carry.  I took the wrong cab once,  ended up listening to a preacher on the radio,  and the cabbie showed me the Colt 45 he carried in his glove compartment. It was like Deliverance.  The color of the rest of the map is white – very low crime rate. Don’t know if that’s a joke or what. 

Atalanta is famous for the change in its crime rate. In 1994, Atlanta was ranked the most dangerous city in the country by the Morgan Quitno Press.[5]   I was there.   I know. But this was famously solved by a true civil rights leader, Maynard Jackson. He was Atlanta’s first African-American Mayor – in an of itself a true win for civil rights. What Maynard did was to “connect” the scary downtown with the business burbs,  and he did this with a lot of politics and not a little money. Actually, Maynard was Mayor two times. The first time,  he fired the white police commissioner and replaced him with an African-Amreican. He took heat for this.  But he overcame all of this and came back strong. Really,  if you are unfamiliar with  this,  you should educate yourself.  But just to be sure

Maynard Jackson provoked a major racial crisis in May 1974 when he attempted to fire the incumbent white police chief, John Inman. Jackson believed the change was needed to grapple with Atlanta’s growing crime problem and charges by the black community of police racial insensitivity toward African Americans. Whites opposed the firing and racial tensions rose, detracting from Atlanta’s proud motto: “too busy to hate.”

In August 1974 Mayor Jackson appointed A. Reginald Eaves, a college friend and fellow activist, as Public Safety Commissioner. Eaves was criticized for lacking police experience. He generated controversy by appointing an ex-convict as his personal secretary but was criticized more for what was considered as a system of quota promotions and hiring in the police department, which many decried as “reverse discrimination.”[4] Despite the outcry, Jackson retained Eaves in his post. By the spring of 1976, Atlanta enjoyed a drop in crime rates 

That is civil rights activism.  This has real results. 

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Standardized Childhood Assessments: I Fear for our Children’s Emotional Safety

My father dedicated his life to education.  He dedicated his life to children.  He defended children against an ever-growing Orwellian machine that classified and branded children, and its only goal and end. I wish he were alive to help me.

In this article, Selecting an Appropriate Infant-Toddler Assessment, from Kaplan, the criteria they use are particularly instructive:

  • Screening and assessment materials should be developmentally appropriate and created specifically for the age group in your care.
  • Assessment should utilize a variety of tools and processes, including children’s representative work (artwork, stories they write, etc.), observation records, and progress summaries.
  • Assessment should be inclusive and recognize diversity in children’s backgrounds, learning styles, and rates of learning.
  • Assessment tools should support children’s development and learning; assessment should not make them feel bad about themselves. A focus on what a child can do independently and with assistance is the best marker of his or her growth and development.
  • Assessment should rely on procedures that occur during real activities and classroom experiences instead of putting the focus specifically on skills testing.
  • Regular and periodic assessment should occur in a wide variety of circumstances with information about children’s growth, development, and learning being systematically collected and recorded.
  • Teachers should be the primary assessor, but assessment should also promote parent involvement and encourage children to participate in self-evaluation.
  • Assessment should encourage parent-teacher collaboration with information about children’s growth, development, and performance being shared regularly by both parties.

I won’t deal with each one, but you should read each one carefully, and think about any experiences you have had that either support or deviate from these.

The first  point is: Assessment should utilize a variety of tools and processes – it should not be limited to a short interview, or really any assessment kit (I will list those later). Clearly, an on-the-spot test, in any subject, for any purpose, will NOT be reflective of the actual state of the person taking the test. This is often referred to as the observer effect, although this, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are misused in the context of psychology.  The correct notion is the Observer-expectancy effect.  This should be well-known by anyone who is assessing your child.  If your assessor is not aware of it, and is not able to cite its origin, then you should not trust their qualification.

 

Second, Assessment should be inclusive and recognize diversity.  This should not be dumbed down to only refer to cultural/ethnic  differences.  Often overlooked are the learning styles and rates of learning.  By and large, the childhood assessments I have seen are completely devoid of Howard Gardner’s Theories of Multiple Intelligences .  And that’s not OK. You certainly would laugh at someone assessed a visually-challenged child with flashcards, right?

Probably the most important for me is: Assessment tools should support children’s development and learning; assessment should not make them feel bad about themselves.  Standardized assessments are the antithesis of this!  They e-value-ate individual children on the basis of social and cultural norms, in alleged cognitive skill areas.  Nothing could be further from support.  It’s just evaluation.  And mostly, de-valuation.  Regardless whether someone tells the child “how they did”, the know – from a very young age – that they are being evaluated.  Further, subtle changes – or sometimes drastic changes – in the behaviors of parents and teachers after an assessment will be picked up by the children!  Do not think you are above this!  If you were raised in America, you have been damaged by the cult of performance.  We are NOT put on this earth to produce or to entertain!

Assessment should rely on procedures that occur during real activities and classroom experiences.  Ok.  Pretty obvious that an interview or testing situation does NOT meet this criterion, and should be invalidated.

Teachers should be the primary assessor, but assessment should also promote parent involvement.  Nothing here about a third-party evaluator.  Nothing at all.  Rest-assured, there ARE plenty of “professionals” who hire out for this.  Mercenaries who play on the insecurity of both teachers and children in their ability to assess the children they interact with every single day!  Preposterous!  Enable yourself!  Be the solution!

Once you have digested this, you could begin to look at the assessment instruments that are available – and COMPARE!  Here again from Kaplan is a handy chart. Look carefully, because it is NOT the case that having check-marks across the graph is the best!  Indeed, give the above discussion, only three of the tools listed do not use standardized (normative) comparisons. Particularly, a discussion of E-LAP and LAP-D used in rehabilitation could possibly change the way you think . This study uses Functional Independence Measure for Children (WeeFIM). E-LAP  (or E-LAP3) is neither standardized nor normative, whereas LAP-D and the WeeFIM are normalized.  The point here is, it’s not easy! But these tests can provide some insight in cognitive disorder, which could supplement (only!) teacher and parent awareness.

I particularly like the series Reaching Potentials.  There are two volumes, and you can get the PDF online right now and begin reading!  Here is the

Description:

Designed to assist early childhood professionals in applying the guidelines for appropriate curriculum content and assessment developed by NAEYC and NAECS/SDE, Volume 1 addresses reaching developmental potentials for all children—including those with varying language and cultural backgrounds and children with disabilities—and reaching the potentials of teachers and administrators.

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I’m sorry but the revolution you have dialed is no longer in service

this is a shout out to my new friends in the Traveler scene – you’re standing still, doing nothing.  and I need you, we all need you, to stop sucking air. we all need you to do that which needs to be done now. let me explain.

dressing in hippie rags, jamming the d chord, living on the street, has all been done.  it cannot be done again, at least not in the same context it was done by the hippies in the 60’s, or, the way Woodie Guthrie did it, or , the context that was applied to any of the countless movements from the past, in the United States, which contained the element of social diaspora.

what I mean by “done” is this: the Hegelian Dialectic.  It goes, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.  In terms of the 60’s, the restless youth met the status quo as thesis and antithesis.  Then, they merged. Yes, that’s the secret – there was no winner, and no one came out unscathed.  And what the synthesis is, in your face, right now, is yoga gentrification in Washington DC, it’s Whole Foods, that does indeed brings you vegan butter any day of weeks, but also ass rapes you and the People of America on the way out the door, with dense ties to markets share and Wall Street.  Do you see?  It was a synthesis, which means the hippies did not disappear.  It was not a failed experiment that you all need to do again – because it cannot be done again.

If you listen Gil Scott Heron today, you are wasting time.  Because if the Black Panthers marched onto the steps of the White House today with guns, it would be STUPID, right?  Because the President of the United States is Black, and so is his entire family!  Likewise, we don’t listen to James Brown sing about a “Funky President”. Not exactly for the same reason as Gil Scott Heron, but for the same reason as Whole Foods.  Obama is neither the thesis, nor the antithesis: he is a synthesis. That’s right: he’s not just Black; he’s White too.  That’s how it turned out.  The hard thing to see is that, once the Dialectic has run, you can’t run it again because your rally want Nihilism or something.

So back to you guys.  The revolution that is available now is not on the streets of Portland.  Instead, it is on the streets of Mumbai.  Actually, it is in the business colleges of Mumbai.  yes, the revolution that you could take part in is way out there – not in here.  It is in the World, not Haight-Asbury. And here’s the cool thing: it DOES take your traveler skill. What you need to do, instead of drop out and turn in, is to get your IBMA at an Indian University, (because their language of study is English and they are  concurrent, not latent).  Weird, right?  Wow, that’s not as cool as having dreads and listening to Marley. But look, all this  will require that you be able to smoke the chillum before class, and then ride your twin cycle through the streets of Mumbai, whiffing the vanilla smell of brown heroin. And then you need to visualize the Real World, which is this cyberspace concept that rules the minds of all people, but they are unaware.  Do you see this, the new On the Road?  The new Baba Ram Das?  It is so much higher, faster, farther.  Get on it!

Because what you are doing is not hypothesis versus thesis: it’s the past versus the future, and that is actually not a real “battle”, right?  Because no matter what you’ve read, the past ceases to exist immediately. The present is inconceivable, only feel-able.  And so what really exists is a future continuum. There is no such thing as living in the past. Revolution means full circle. YOU ARE STANDING STILL.

Yes.  We don’t need for you to re-enact the 60’s, to relearn how to bop, to deepen your consciousness with acid. Really, it’s kind of like watching Star Wars again.

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Bruce 

This is about a giant Schnauser. I mean like a human dressed as a dog. Black. 

We are in the CVS, which led me to the sign on his little jacket , Service Dog. 

His owner was a Marine, about my age. Puts him around Desert Storm? His pile of medicines puts him around Agent Orange. So maybe he was 20. He paid for everything with his drivers license. 

He was Black, but not like his dog. This guy had evolved into  a big round brown bear. Probably called him Bear back in the war. But we don’t know his name. We know his dogs name. 

Bruce. He said it once per minute on the pretense of demonstrating the peecision disincline of this giant Service Animal. Not. 

Bruce doesn’t do shit. Bruce gets oatmeal baths from his groomer each weak. The main command is “Bruce say Hi”, at which Bruce stands up at his full height of 6 ‘ 2″ and puts his paws either a person or the Pharmacy counter. 

But his main trick is hugging his master the Bear, for which he is rewarded by the inane question “Do you love me?”

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Hitler, alias Schickelgruber

”From the beginning of 1877, 12 years before Adolf was born, his father called himself Hitler, and his son was never known by any other name until his opponents dug up this long-forgotten village scandal and tried, without justification, to label him with his grandmother’s name of Schicklgruber.” – Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock

This is my goto list on books about Hitler:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/17/top10s.hitler.thirdreich

I saw this movie recently called Youth.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3312830/

It was about Age, naturally. What kind of movie do you make about youth? Seriously. Youth is that life-segment in Western Civ where we weave the stories that define us.  Age is the realization that they were just stories. Optional reading.

This movie had that heinous tendency of weak writers/directors to equate gratuitous shock with boldness in art. Among those heinous moments was when we finally discover the secret role that Paul Dano’s character has been preparing, by observing the old people in some Swiss sanitarium.  It’s Hitler as an old man! And he certainly did milk the shock value of the revelation as much as he could.

What he didn’t realize is that Hitler, the mention of Hitler, alone, is just not that shocking.  Now, the idea of Hitler as an old man is modestly interesting – the idea gave me about two minutes of new thought. But then…pfffft…

The deal is, what we can now see in retrospect, is that Hitler was actually NOT the demon mastermind of the extermination of 6 million Jews and the harbinger of WWII.  He was a little squirt from Linz, Austria, who had been rejected (by Jewish academics) at the Kunstakademie in Vienna. He was a short guy.  His mom didn’t love him.  His dad didn’t love him.  Does this really require that much intellectual effort?

What, in fact,  is frightening and bizarre and horrific is the rise to dominance of the Third Reich, and what is most terrifying about it is that it was NOT dopey Hitler’s doing, but the confluence of all the hatred and greed of human society, at its weakest moral point, supported by Western corporations, and carried on the shoulders of normal people.

There’s a BBC series that I follow, called Foyle’s War.  In Season 9, Episode 2, they deal with the substantial support of Hitler’s Third Reich in it’s early years, by Western industrialists. General Motors, Ford, IT&T, Standard Oil…all contributed directly to the Third Reich’s enablement. Here is a short list:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-147191

But the list is much longer, and the details, as they are unearthed in this century, remind me of a worldwide organization, something like ISIS, except with unparalleled business and policy expertise backing it. And, it is key to note that each of these material supporters was also a major stockholder.

I’m not trying to forgive or forget Hitler.  I’m just hinting at the likelihood that he was more like a ghoulish George W. Bush – an oaf, that appealed to an ocean of peasants.  But backed by a seamless, invisible multi-national machine, largely US and British. I mean, it is not realistic, when you trace Hitler’s rise to power, that he did so with a band of SS thugs, and his charisma, alone.  Right?

The lesson is this: a bunch of rag-tag jihadists are not capable of funding and managing an efficient worldwide terror organization. Take it as a given that the bulk of the mechanical, financial, and technical infrastructure is taken care of behind the scenes by, yes, the very nations that the terror organization seems to be against! It defies simple reason, which is why the cloaking mechanism has been so effective, all the times this strategy has been employed. Add to this the fact that many of the key public players in the conflict are, themselves, unaware of the intricacies of how their holy war is being funded, and sharing this ignorance with the key public players on the Western front, and you have this bonus smoke screen of clumsy attempts to actually fight – when there’s no one to fight against! We are all in the same Roman arena, slaves pitted against one another, unaware that our immediate opponent in the ring is actually our brother.

 

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Buzzfeed vs. Buzzkill – Another Round missed the point in Hilary interview

I’ve been listening to a new (6-month-old) Buzzfeed podcast, called Another Round.  I like it, because it reminds me of my cousin Grant’s podcast, where they sit around and drink, and record the podcast.  I love that idea, and I love how it represents the unwieldy power of the podcast.

Hilary Clinton appeared on Another Round, just before the debate.  NPR’s “The Takeaway” interviewed the Another Round hosts, Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/real-hillary-clinton/

The funny thing about The Takeaway – or not funny; just regular, given the show’s name – is that the show gives you the bullet points. In one particular instance, the Takeaway guy, John Hockenberry, played a clip of the women “nailing” Hilary for evasion of a question. They asked her what she planned to do, if elected President, about the gross inequities that Blacks are subjected to in the prison system.  Clinton replied that most prisons were subject to State and Local law, and not Federal – to which Hockenberry and the Another Round hosts cried out EVADING THE QUESTION!

Now, please listen to the actual podcast, and listen to Clinton’s response in full.

https://soundcloud.com/anotherroundwithhebenandtracy/28-hillary-clinton-for-pos

Did you listen to it?  You see, the problem is the collective ADHD of our culture.  No one takes the time to listen.  Neither did the hosts.  They are from a sound-byte/tweet generation, and to listen to a rather long response, carefully, with the intention of understanding, is not something they were trained to do.

In fact what Clinton said was VERY important, and very educational, especially for these “young radicals”, who cry out for change, and are incensed that somebody doesn’t do something when the yell! Clinton said that the President of the United States has not power over State law.  Wow.  You have to study how this government was designed, which these women haven’t just yet, to see that we are really in a bind – if the States don’t want something, the President can’t make them!

I think Heben is the one who is the active Twitter tweeter.  She says she tweets suggestions to Obama all the time with suggestions.  I may sound condescending here, and maybe I am.  Or maybe I am old and in the way.  But I think she would want to know that she comes across as very naiive and very uniformed.  Whether she is, or whether I am, I will leave to her to figure out.  But here it is: the President is not a King, and there’s is a lot of deeper meaning in that.

Hilary said that while the President can push for Federal laws that radically change incarceration and law enforcement directives at a Federal level, this can only be used an an example for State to follow, if they choose.  So what she was trying to teach these young women is to point your barrels in the right direction!  Don’t interview the President, and demand change. Interview the the Governor of Alabama, for God’s sake!  Interview the Sheriff of Cobb County in Georgia.  Because you will probably discover some racist motherfuckers in that nest, and THEY are making and upholding the laws you hate.

The hosts were very focused as well on Hilary’s meeting with the Black Lives Matter crew:

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/8/19/watch_full_video_of_hillary_clintons

They were again very desperately trying to make her into the enemy of all Black reform.  And let me take the opportunity to state right here that I have NO LOVE for Hilary Clinton, and that deep down inside, they are completely right: she is a white woman’s white woman, and the fact that she protested in the 60’s and was inspired by Dr King is, well, you know, a little bit of Centrist bullshit.  So there.

But this does not give permission to these podcasters and new age Black Panthers to make the argument about the Clintons.  Because to do so has but one effect: nothing will change.  That’s right: if you muck around in angry protest, the Machine will just roll over you.

The Round hosts asked Hilary to take responsibility for the legislation that came about in the wake of the Rodney King mini war in LA in the early 90’s.  That’s it – she wanted to know if her and Bill were going to confess to their “fucked up” legislation, that has resulted in all these young Black men being incarcerated. Wow.  Don’t even know where to begin.

First of all, Hilary was the Wife of the President at that time.  She had nothing to do with any Federal laws that were passed.  Second, that business in LA was a war. Sorry.  It may have had everything to do with horrible injustice to Black men like Rodney, but the result was a fucking war on civilization.  And everybody, including Reverend Al Sharpton, called for the country to stop the violence.

But let’s say that Heben and Tracy are completely right: that the Clintons and all the other White people in government in the 90’s are responsible for the current state of cops killing Blacks.  How on earth does their confession have any effect on the HERE and the NOW?

The deal is this: start a revolution.  But then keep it going.  Hilary kept trying to get them to hear this, but the missed it.  How many new revolutions are started these days, by a round of passion, only to just fizzle out within a few years?  Lots.  Most of them. If Black Lives Matter is going to succeed, and it had fucking better succeed!, then they have to figure this one thing out: they are up against the Big Machine, and they are not going to topple it with tweets.  This will take intelligent, and sustained effort, for years and years to come, beyond the slogans and the popularity of dreads. Dr. King worked steadily for years and years and years, carefully eroding the walls of Big Government.  That’s how it happened.  The Black Panthers walked up the steps of the White House one day with sawed off shotguns.  Test question: which of these two acts, or both, have created any change in the state of engrained racism in the law of the United State?

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Psycho Killer: Qu’est-ce que c’est?

Psycho Killer
Qu’est-ce que c’est
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better
Run run run run run run run away

Christopher Harper-Mercer was withdrawn and quiet as he grew up in southern California…

The problem is, this topic is just to difficult, intellectually, for Americans.  It’s a sad state of affairs, but even those American who have had an excellent education, have been systematically deprived of the training in logic and rhetorical analysis to maintain focus in an argument from beginning to end.  And that is what is needed, from everyone.  This problem will not get solved until critical thinking is re-introduced into our laughable “curriculum”.

When I do my analysis, it is non-partisan.  I intend to find the correct answer. I am equally shocked at the flawed reasoning presented by both sides.  While I would like to chide the Liberals because they should know better (because they claim to), and malign the Right, because they “must be” consciously manipulating their arguments, motivated to achieve the goals prescribed by their self-titled “Right-ness”, I can see (can you?) that this kind of underlying pettiness is NOT GETTING US ANYWHERE.  In fact, this underlying juvenile bickering is sorely to blame for the deaths of innocent people, and we ALL should be ashamed for not looking at this problem like ADULTS.

Here is one way to reason  it:

    1. The argument that mental illness, not guns, is the problem, is muddled on both sides.  Liberals cite statistics like, “Fewer than 6 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.”  
      • In rhetorical logic, this is called a false dilemma: when a problem is presented as having only two causes, when, in reality as we know it, this is rarely the case.  This argument is chock full of false dilemma.
      • First, must it be either mental illness, OR, proliferation of guns? Can’t it be both?  Really.  What a poor excuse for reasoning.  Of course it can be, and clearly is, both mental illness and the availability of guns, than contribute to mass killings.
      • Second, does one have to be completely mentally ill, or nothing?  Certainly there exist many layers of psycho-emotional disturbance that could lead, very quickly, to such rash actions, without first reaching the level of clinically discernible pathology.

      The other flaw with this argument, from the Liberal side, is the use of misleading statistics – this statistic from Vanderbilt U. does NOT give us the number of psycho-killers who were mentally ill; rather, we get the number of psycho-killer who were both apprehended, and then diagnosed.  Please. If you don’t see this, then return to Plato, and do not collect $200.

      So, what’s the answer, Mr. Know-it-All? Well, that’s the deal – it’s not so easy to just get an answer that fits into the Twitter block, and that you can consume along with your Starbucks.

    2. The second major problem in a hard one to swallow: it is a long-standing sociological truth that law does NOT function as a deterrent to crime.  Repeat: does not.  Thus, making every single gun in the world illegal will have marginal, if any, effect.  In short, there is no such thing as gun control. But don’t believe me!  You should walk to Powell’s books, and select three Sociology 101 textbooks, and turn to chapter 5.  Am being serious. You can look at a summary here : http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

Here is a deeper analayis, from and Oxford paper, which claims:

But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 24, Issue 2, Pp. 173-205)

In case you don’t have the time, consider these ideas:

In States with the death penalty, the murder rate is markedly higher than in States where there is no capital punishment. This could be taken as an argument against capital punishment, rather than one against making laws against guns.  However, if you actually do your research, you will see that there has already been a large degree of strong gun control legislation, often obfuscated by those who feel that obfuscation serves the common good, and this legislation has had no effect.

What about this?  Does making murder illegal stop people from murdering?  Isn’t there already a law against murder? This hearkens back to the capital punishment example.  Does making the enforcment against and punishment for murder have any effect?  Seriously.  The United States has, on the contrary, become the center of violent murder in the World.

So, is time, finally time, to abandon this path.  This is not to say remove all gun control, nor is it to say that we should not seek stricter enforcement of licensing. It is only to say that this it not the solution, and further debate on the 2nd Amendment, further criticism of the “gun coalition” , further plying of gun toters against tree huggers, is A WASTE OF LIVES.

You wanted the answer, right?  And I mentioned that it is not such an easy one.

It begins with understanding something like what Pope John Paul the II described in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which is often referred to as “the culture of death”.

“Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable,”

Unfortunately for all of those who have died, this valuable document with great insight from a true logician, and empathetic person, has been muddled by extremist Right, and blithering Left, as being an “abortion” document. It does use the idea of abortion in a critical way, by saying that abortion is one of the ways that our society has become desensitized to death. Forget your ego for a second, and try to follow the idea: the more cases in which we say “it’s ok to kill; it is justified in this case”, the more opportunities we provide for people like Christopher  Harper to conclude, with legal and social precedence, that it is justifiable to kill someone. The point the Pope was trying to make was that if we add up the ways in which we “allow” death in our society, including abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, assassination of threats to the United States, warfare of any kind, if we add up all the movies, TV Series, books, social media, that focus on a rich portrayal of violence which leads to murder, IT ADDS UP to a society that is more aligned with DEATH than with LIFE.

The answer is, possibly, to take fundamental steps to unbuild this culture of death. Wow!  It seems insurmountable! It would be so much nicer to fight for gun control.  But unfortunately, a sick society, like a sick person, is a burden to which we must devote our hearts, despite our feelings of futility.

 

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Money Flows With Refugees – the Good of Capitalism

“Money Flows With Refugees” – suspend your blind faith in a belief you did not come to on your own! Capitalism solves problems that neither Liberals, Leftists, nor even Capitalists can solve!

It’s really simple – the is a kind of spontaneous generation of solutions in the social organism: “necessity is the Mother of invention.” But really, what does that mean?

It means that while no large nations of the world were ready to step forward to provide the means for refugees to find safe passage to new homes, smugglers and pirates – the world’s oldest capitalists – could easily provide these services.  In return, they don’t require allegiance to a religious or political doctrine – they just want your money.

And there is the other side of the coin – the “refugees” in this case, are not some impoverished band of peasants. Instead, many of them are affluent (enough) to pay for their freedom themselves!  No need to ask the United States for a handout – they had the money all along to direct their own futures.  They just weren’t that committed to taking the responsibility into their own hands.

And how do I know this? Well, just look for yourself!  There it is, in black and white (pixels): there is a booming business in Turkey, fueled by someone ?!?  Guess it must be the refugees.

Why is that hard to accept?  I guess we would prefer refugees to be weak, helpless victims of totalitarian warplay.  And you betcha – there are plenty of those refugees!  I am not making a generalization about refugees here.

What I am pointing out is that those who CAN take care of themselves need a little push, and then the WILL take care of themselves – which then leaves the real refugees – the poor, the destitute – to be cared for through Love and Charity. Because we can’t carry everyone (everyone doesn’t need carrying).

The “push” these people needed was only money.  Maybe that is the push the Great and Mighty Government powers need too?! But in truth, the many, many such situations in the world – micro- (as opposed to macro – , i.e. not “small”) struggles for autonomy, that lead to some sacrifice, are best handled by local resources – the “village”, of Hilary Clinton, only “village” is far too naive a term. Something an affluent Eastern Seaboard baby would come up with.

The agents of social change are transient, created at the moment when the need and the resources are brought together. You don’t even need to know your helpers, and, they may even cheat and stab you sometimes!  Like real elves and fairies!

But you know, the faery tale has changed a bit – or rather, returned to the original Grimm version.

Source: Money Flows With Refugees, and Life Jackets Fill the Shops – The New York Times