Category: Quick Hits

It really isn't my intent to post about this every day, but the release of a surveillance camera video from the store allegedly robbed by Michael Brown has been posted to YouTube. It's impossible to say exactly what's going on there, but it looks an awful lot like Brown pays for cigars, doesn't have enough money for all of them, and throws the ones he can't pay for on the counter and floor. The clerk then comes around, probably to call him a dick for throwing merchandise, and then he shoves him/her and leaves.
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That's just my interpretation of it. It happens to be supported by the fact that the clerk didn't call the police or report a robbery. So then why did the police hold a press conference to let everyone know that Violent Thug Mike Brown was a suspect in a "strong-arm robbery"?

All that matters now is that white America has been given the narrative it needed to stop giving any shits about what happened.

You know, just another story about another Thug (wink!) who pushed a convenience store clerk and therefore deserved to be shot six times later on by a police officer who had no idea that this alleged robbery took place or that Mike "Jaywalker" Brown was supposedly a party to it.

I don't know what it is about this case that makes me want to see the Ferguson PD get it as badly as I do. The more I see how brazen their illegal and cocky behavior is, the more I hope to see them in cuffs in a Federal courtroom. I feel about them the way every baseball fan feels about A-Rod or Barry Bonds: "I hope I'm around to see this jagoff get what's coming to him."

This is such an amazingly, staggeringly terrible idea that it is hard to believe anyone would even try it. I mean, it's essentially the plot of Minority Report. Then you think on it for a moment and realize that this is exactly the kind of thing that we were bound to try at some point:

Risk-assessment advocates say it’s a no-brainer: Who could oppose “smarter” sentencing? But Mr. Holder is right to pick this fight. As currently used, the practice is deeply unfair, and almost certainly unconstitutional. It contravenes the principle that punishment should depend on what a defendant did, not on who he is or how much money he has.

The basic problem is that the risk scores are not based on the defendant’s crime. They are primarily or wholly based on prior characteristics: criminal history (a legitimate criterion), but also factors unrelated to conduct. Specifics vary across states, but common factors include unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.

Such factors are usually considered inappropriate for sentencing; if anything, some might be mitigating circumstances. But in the new, profiling-based sentencing regimen, markers of socioeconomic disadvantage increase a defendant’s risk score, and most likely his sentence.

It's pseudoscience at its most dangerous, with the false precision of tables and formulas and point systems coming together to create a matrix of your criminal future. Funny how reactionary assholes are rabidly anti-science and anti-intellectual until someone at the right think tank cooks up a Rube Goldberg machine that produces the exact results they want.

Another great day in a country in which it's far safer to be a white male openly walking around with a deadly weapon than a black male armed with either a fake gun (while in the fake gun aisle at Wal-Mart) or nothing at all. Rest assured, though, that when the cops gun down another black guy on suspicion of being a black guy with a gun (I mean, They all carry guns, right?
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To use against our womenfolk?) the news will focus on reporting about a handful of people who vandalized and looted a QuikTrip rather than the fact that the police added another name to the list of unarmed black men shot for being Probably Armed black men.

Gosh I sure hope that QT is alright.
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I usually use the Gin and Tacos Facebook page to make (attempt) jokes throughout the day. Recently I unleashed this howler, with an excellent rejoinder from a Mr. Martin:

His joke got me thinking about the thousands of words written over the last few months about the disaster that is the Brownback administration in Kansas. Specifically, I wish I had a better understanding of the mindset of people who vote for someone like Brownback. Mr. Martin and I may have been (mostly) kidding, but as usual there may be a kernel of truth. Do conservatives actually think, "I'm voting for Brownback because things will get better once he is Governor!" or have they simply embraced nihilism and chosen the person they believe will do the best job of destroying the state?

I know enough Republicans to know that they are not all frothy-mouthed sociopaths even if the people they're electing lately are. But a guy like Brownback is so obviously devoid of any skills other than destroying government that it's hard to envision voting for him with any other end result in mind. They do everything but come out and promise to burn the country to the ground, so help them God. The next logical question, then, is why so many people think that when their Teabagging elected officials succeed at destroying the state, Republican voters will survive the ensuing chaos. I mean, who needs government infrastructure or a functioning economy when you've got a whole buncha bad-ass guns and a yard full of buried Glenn Beck gold?

Political scientists have been well aware since the early 1960s that what most people know about politics and government is minimal and that their beliefs lack constraint. Constraint is the idea that the things one believes should make sense together. Philip Converse (who is still alive, believe it or not) made his name by demonstrating that only a small percentage of Americans constrain their thinking in ideological terms. In the past decade or two we've seen an explosion of the use of ideological terms – liberal, conservative, socialist – but that doesn't mean they are used correctly. To the average crank, "liberal" means "Stuff I don't like."

This is not news to anyone. Whether you keep yourself current on public opinion data, study political science, or merely listen to the nonsense ideas people express constantly about politics, we recognize that opinions about one issue are not necessarily connected to opinions on another.
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This is true of Americans of any demographic, although better educated people tend to have slightly more coherent belief systems.

Writers who need to generate some content but can't think of a good idea can reliably churn out a "Look how stupid Americans are!" piece using polling data. It's hardly surprising. That said, I think most of us were a little floored to see just how little sense the political beliefs of "millennials" make. As in, they appear to make no sense at all.

This made the rounds online recently, and they do require some caveats. One is that young people generally know the least about politics, and this is not unique to the current crop. The second is that it is possible to have somewhat useful political beliefs without being able to answer the kind of questions that academics and pollsters expect you to be able to answer. Even with those caveats, this is pretty bad. A couple things stand out.

Even more than most Americans, their beliefs appear to hinge on how things are pitched and what terms are used. They are repelled by the term "Obamacare" to a greater extent than their elders, despite liking Obama and being supportive of national healthcare (What?). It seems that these responses are twisted by opposing forces – these kids have been bombarded by conservative propaganda since birth (hence their allergy to terms like "liberal" and "Obamacare") while their own political preferences, to the extent that they have any, are not nearly as paleolithic.

The years of Fox News and Tea Party-themed lectures from dad lead to them rejecting things that contain the wrong keywords – Government bad! Liberal bad! Taxes evil! – but that aversion is not necessarily connected to any of their actual opinions.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to read something into the aggregate data; maybe they really are as ignorant as the numerous "OMG look at how dumb they are" pieces suggest. Nonetheless, the data imply that things won't be getting much better in the foreseeable future.

On a long drive to the Gulf Coast a few weeks ago I happened to drive right past Leakesville, Mississippi. This would be of no interest to me or anyone else ordinarily, but Leakesville is the final resting place of Bill Hicks. Now, Mr. Hicks was an important figure in my life even though I never met him. My respect for him goes a bit beyond Fandom or "He's a comedian I really like." So I considered it obvious that I should stop to pay my respects.

Briefly, Leakesville, MS is a goddamn dump.

In my travels through 49 of the 50 states (I'll get you, Alaska) I've been through hundreds of Leakesvilles and so have you. The rusted-out farm implements / hardware store announces the beginning of the town and its end is marked by the combination gas station / Subway. Between those navigational aids you find a handful of churches, one or two dilapidated bars, and mostly deserted houses of the pre-WWII vintage. Despite having only a few hundred or thousand residents there are three or four pharmacies in town to tend to the elderly and a not-incidental number of prescription opiate addicts.
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If anything else is open for business – and that is a big If – it is a rehabilitation center to help old people move their withered limbs and wheeze through their Winston-stained lungs for another year or two. The only thing in the town that looks like it could withstand a stiff breeze is the Post Office (or on the Plains, the USDA office). The population consists of people under 18 waiting to escape and old people waiting to die.

Census after census we see that small towns are dying all over the country.
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Very few Americans live in them anymore. Once the current cohort of elderly stragglers dies, they will be abandoned for all intents and purposes. From that perspective I can never figure out why we venerate these places. They are, by nearly any criteria, terrible. And more importantly, they're already shells of their former selves. It is as if we have some kind of collective hysteria in which we pretend that Small Town America is a thing even though it is about as real as the Wild West at this point.

Even in so-called rural states, the majority of the population now lives in urban settings (including suburbs). The election year pandering to "hard working Americans" and good ol' salt of the Earth types (read: white and white, respectively) is indicative of nothing more than lazy, Beltway-centric media coverage that relies on tired tropes and is aimed at an intended audience with an average age of about 70. Even those elderly news viewers are increasingly urbanized, unless anyone out there considers southern retirement meccas to be small towns.

Every election year – and more accurately, every time I take a long drive through the back roads – I am baffled by our obsession with the idea of small towns. We might as well be holding tight to the idea of Conestoga wagons. If it's anything other than a yearning for the idealized version of the 1950s Norman Rockwell America that never was and actually kinda sucked if you weren't white and male, I don't know what it could be.

In the early stages of any foreign policy crisis – long before anyone knows what actually happened – only one thing can be certain: Noted Foreign Policy Expert John McCain will be on TV talking about it, and by "talking about it" I mean waving his dick around.

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) declared on Thursday there would be "incredible repercussions" if Russian forces or pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine shot down the Malaysian flight that crashed earlier in the day.

In an appearance on MSNBC shortly after news of the crash broke, McCain stressed it was too early to come to definite conclusions.

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However, he pointed out Ukrainian aircraft have previously been shot down in recent days and "mistaken identification" of the Malaysian plane could be "part of a pattern" that demands a powerful reaction from the United States.

"This was an airliner headed towards Russian airspace and it has the earmarks — and I'm not concluding — but it has the earmarks of a mistaken identification of an aircraft that they may have believed was Ukrainian.

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If that's true, this is a horrible tragic event which was certainly unanticipated by anybody no matter who they are. And there will be incredible repercussions if this is the case," he said.
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"If it is the result of either separatist or Russian actions mistakenly believing that this is a Ukrainian warplane, I think there's going to be hell to pay and there should be."

I wonder if he knows he's not the president.

It's time to tiptoe into the world of merchandising (posters and stickers aside) with some super-hip t-shirts like all the kids wear these days.
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Zazzle runs a tad pricey, but there are sales weekly.
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Any clothing purchase by midnight today (Tuesday) is 30% off with the lamentable code "SUMMERSTYLEZ".

Here's a direct link to customize and order your very own Gin and Tacos shirt, available in a range of colors and t-shirt styles (prices vary) if this bleak gray doesn't do it for you.
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If asked to name some of America's oldest old money families you would no doubt throw out names like Rockefeller, Morgan, du Pont, Ford, Cabot, and the like. The extended members of these clans still show up in the society pages today just as they did during the Gilded Age (fun fact: Did you know Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt?) Most of you, I assume, are unfamiliar with the Rosenwald family. Like the McDonald's empire had little to do with the MacDonald Brothers (who sold out to Ray Kroc and were long gone when he turned the company into a global behemoth) Julius Rosenwald took over the Sears & Roebuck Company just two years after it was founded and turned it into the retail hegemon it was until the closing decades of the 20th Century (Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck contributed little more than their names). Rosenwald was one of the richest men of his time, yet he avoided the kind of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" publicity of many of his plutocratic colleagues.

During the Depression he founded the United Jewish Appeal and underwrote Tuskegee Institute, whose board he sat on until his death. While I can't speak to the ethics of what he did to amass his fortune, he did have his heart in the right place when it came to disbursing it in his later years. Of course there was plenty left over for future generations of the Rosenwald family too. And that brings us to his granddaughter and heiress, Nina Rosenwald. You have never heard of her either. But I bet you've seen her money at work.

Whenever the bombs and bullets start flying in the Middle East – lamentably, it is always just a matter of time before Israel and Palestine get back to brawlin' – and the American Pro-Israel Industry launches another media blitz, you're seeing Rosenwald's handiwork. She has been called, and has rightly earned the title of, "The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate." People like Daniel Pipes, Geert Wilders, David Horowitz, and other right-wing Islamophobes have been living off of her money for two decades now. She is to the universe of Islamophobes what Sheldon Adelson (another one of their prominent funders, by the way) was to the Gingrich campaign or what the Koch Brothers are to the Tea Party. Rosenwald has even directly underwritten settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (although she is widely considered something of a rube, an ideologue with a huge bank account and little going on upstairs) along with Adelson.

The noise machine is more active in Europe at the moment. Turns out that most of Western Europe is no better than the U.S. when it comes to assimilating brown-skinned, Arabic- or Turkish-speaking immigrants into their societies. But every time the Israel-Palestine conflict flares up, groups like AIPAC and people like Daniel Pipes start to show up on the talk shows and editorial pages again. Follow the link to learn more about how an heiress you've never heard of has underwritten the entire movement from the shadows.

Do yourself a favor and read this summary of the Texas Republican Party platform if you want to see what modern Republican party activists believe in their heart of hearts (or, as the linked piece says, what they say when they are essentially talking to themselves.) I don't want to spoil it for you but let me say this: they're big fans of some really novel ideas.

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Like nullification.