Category: Rants

On Wednesday we saw the latest in the long line of Foiled Terrorist stories that pop up intermittently.
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A lone 21 year old man hatched a plot to blow up the New York Fed with what he thought was a half-ton bomb. The bomb supplier, of course, was an undercover FBI agent. We have seen this script play out many times, and it always ends with law enforcement and Dick Cheney and your right-wing uncle reminding us that, you see, They are still trying to kill us.

It is indisputable that the suspect in this case is, by intent alone, a criminal and I'm glad law enforcement was able to intercede. It is fair to ask, however, how real the danger is in these situations. There are tens of thousands of lone wolf nutbars out there, from Islamic terrorists to bunker-dwelling survivalists and white supremacists. Many of them have the intent to commit this kind of act and their heads are likely full of various "plots" and schemes to strike at their enemies. The overwhelming majority – 99 percent plus – never advance beyond the idea stage, and 99% of the ones that progress beyond that point fail due to a lack of money, equipment, or sufficient intelligence to hatch a workable plot.

Of the remarkably small fraction that remain – people who are really, actively attempting to execute a terrorist attack – would any of them even get close to completion without undercover law enforcement showing up to offer, remarkably enough, whatever the plotter happens to need in terms of weapons or supplies? Would this guy plotting to blow up the Fed ever have managed to get his hands on a real bomb, or did he walk into a law enforcement trap specifically because he couldn't figure out how to get one?

These cases follow the same pattern and leave themselves open to the same question: Are these people "real" terrorists, capable of executing a plot of any complexity, or are they wannabes, so clueless that they couldn't knock off a liquor store until the FBI came waltzing in to offer them bombs, vehicles, technical skills (bomb-making manuals, etc) and other things they wouldn't otherwise get? Logically, if it is possible to get thousand-pound bombs (real ones) from some terrorist source there would be a greater number of terror attacks.

I mean, law enforcement couldn't intercept and halt all of them. Some plotters would end up getting their "bomb" from the FBI but others would acquire a real one from a real criminal/terrorist.

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The fact that this is not happening suggests that the only people out there offering to make 1000 pound bombs available to terrorists are…undercover FBI agents. People have almost exclusively fear- and gut-based reactions to the dangers posed by terrorism so it's no surprise that we don't think very deeply about these cases. It is worth asking, though, just how much danger this person actually presented on his own without the helping hand of the FBI. Did we just have a narrow miss from a major terrorist attack? Or did we just arrest a person with evil intentions that would never have materialized if left to his own resources?

I want a new car. I'm looking for something that meets the following criteria: drives like a Formula One car (0-60 in no more than 4 seconds), has eye-catching supercar styling, seats 7 with plenty of room for luggage, gets 90 mpg, and costs less than $30,000. I tried entering this into some online search tools and there were no matches. What gives?

While it might seem silly, this is not too far off from what many Americans want from the political process. The basic problem with American politics is that our elected officials do (or try to do) what we want, and what we want is increasingly stupid. We want a government to do all kinds of stuff (Just the stuff that benefits me. Go ahead and cut everything else.) and we don't want to pay for any of it. We've dealt with this not by taking a closer look at our expectations through the lens of reality and realizing that this is impossible. No, we've taken comfort in magical thinking and voodoo theories that tell us, yes, you can have it all. We can lower taxes and somehow the government will end up making more money! People in suits say this with straight faces, blissfully unaware of how closely their product description matches the "Miracle 100 mpg fuel additive THEY don't want you to know about!" ads in the classifieds.

And so it is that in the year 2012 one Willard Mitt Romney offered an economic plan that claims to do the following over the next decade:

– Add $2,000,000,000,000 to the Department of Defense budget
– Balance the budget
– Cut taxes by $5,000,000,000,000

On the opposite side of the ledger, of course, are the "spending cuts" that will make all of this magic work. Mittens offers examples such as – and I have no clue where these numbers come from but let's, uh, assume the proposed savings are somewhat optimistic – privatizing Amtrak (.
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5 billion), "repealing Obamacare" ($95 billion), reducing foreign aid ($0.1 billion), eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and Title X funding ($0.09 billion), and the ever popular "reducing waste and fraud" ( billion.
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Right.) Without even adjusting these figures downward to account for reality this adds up to a little over $150 billion. See? It all balances out…once we account for whatever fairy dust is going to "fix Social Security and Medicaid" without reducing benefits for anyone who currently receives them or will soon.

The math behind his proposal is so self-evidently stupid that I have to return to the list of options that I end up at increasingly often these days. One of the following things must be true about people who believe that this will work:

1. They know it doesn't work and they don't care. They just want their tax cut.
2. They believe that it works because they want to and/or they're not smart enough to understand that it can't.
3. They're pretty sure it makes no sense but they're highly susceptible to persuasion and commonly get suckered into things that sound too good to be true.

As a guess, I'd assume that the GOP donors and insiders are mostly #1, the poor/working/middle class base is #2, and old people are #3.
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A few weeks ago we talked about how even Romney doesn't seem to believe this, yet for some reason there are people in the electorate who do. It depends on that mix of greed, hubris, and rank ignorance that defines us in the eyes of the rest of the world.

When people believe this kind of voodoo I don't question their sincerity.
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They are serious. It's a testament to the power of motivated reasoning that so many people could believe, or publicly claim to believe without dissolving into laughter, anything half as stupid as what Romney is offering as his "serious" economic plan. At some point this ceases to be a political platform, though, and it turns into a religious creed; we believe it because we believe it and logic no longer applies.

I'm puzzled here, guys. Maybe you can help me out.

The right is crowing about Mitt Romney's post-debate bump in the polls. But I thought polls were all bullshit and they're not to be trusted. Please clarify.

Late last week everyone decided that the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment number is fabricated. For the past four years Republicans have been repeating it like they have Tourette's. Any light you can shed on this discrepancy will be appreciated.

Of course there's nothing to explain here except that intellectually dishonest hypocrites are doing more of the same. Conservatives are great at this. Hollywood is a cesspit of moral depravity and celebrities are all airheads, but they practically soil themselves with excitement when some star endorses a Republican or talks about running. Experts and academics in the ivory tower are never to be trusted, but hey did you see this new Exxon-funded study from Dr. Shameless at Texas A&M that totally disproves global warming? He's a scientist, so it has to be true. Government is bloated and expensive and must be drowned in a bathtub, except for the military, farm subsidies, the prison system, massive and politically expedient handout programs for seniors, and more.

Of the many forms of lying that make up the bulk of our public discourse, I find this type the most intolerable. I am used to people telling partial truths, massaging statistics, spinning, taking anecdotal evidence out of context, and all of the other tricks necessary to make things like trickle-down economics and Intelligent Design sound plausible. It comes with the territory for those of us who choose to follow politics. But there is nothing lazier, more damaging, or less intellectually honest than a constantly variable weight that gives different values to the same information at different points in time. In the case of the poll data and unemployment statistics this phenomenon is stretched to the limit – when the data do not confirm your preconceived idea of the world around you, they must be fabricated. Yep. Anything that contradicts your belief system is made up.

Virtually any news item can be discredited this way (having come from the Librul Media, of course). The entire economy can be selectively re-imagined from cherry picked data. The reverse scientific method – start with the conclusion, throw out all the contradictory evidence, and declare the issue resolved by whatever remains – is the foundation of their worldview. There's no point in trying to debate them; they believe all of their own conclusions as articles of faith, and nothing is capable, by definition, of undermining them.

Such people are, in an intellectual if not literal sense, brain dead. They're not processing any new information except to sift it through the filter of their beliefs and reject anything that doesn't fit. Yet at the same time, and at a more basic level, they seem incapable of believing anything. Do the polls matter, or are they made up? Does the unemployment rate measure the health of the economy, or is it politically manipulated? Are the troops being removed from the Middle East too soon, or not soon enough? If the answer to any of these questions is "It depends on who's winning / who's in power", congratulations. You're what's wrong with America. This is why we can't have nice things, like a half decent debate about our problems and how we might go about solving them.

Tuesday's unofficial viral video of the day featured a Wisconsin newscaster responding on air to an emailer who chastised her for being fat (hence a "bad role model, especially for young girls.") You can see the entirety of the email and the response here, or watch the video below:

Really there isn't much to say about this and certainly not much I can add. The complaining viewer is an asshat, the response is accurate, and so on. You get it and you don't need it explained.

There was a specific part of her response, though, that really struck me. She noted that children are far more likely to pick up bad examples from Mom and Dad criticizing everyone on TV than from seeing a fat person. At one point she says, "If you are at home and talking about the fat news lady, guess what? Your children are probably going to go to school and call someone fat." While I don't know if that specific statement is true – it's qualified, and I'm fairly certain that there's more that goes into becoming a bully than this – it certainly is true that kids internalize these "lessons" pretty damn well. Even when we get older and (in some cases) mature to a point at which we know better, it's difficult to shake the kinds of biases that are pounded into us before we even realize it.

I heard Kyle Kinane tell a joke once (possibly to be included on his next special) about being in South Korea, wandering around Seoul during the summer and randomly noticing that very few people were wearing sunglasses. "And I'm thinking why in the hell don't Koreans wear sunglasses? Oh, right, it's probably because their eyes are….oh, son of a bitch, now I'm racist." He's probably dressing up this anecdote for the sake of comedy, but it's funny because we can all identify with it. We think this kind of shit all the time. We don't intend to. We're not all horrible people. We're just raised in a cloud of it and it becomes part of our thought process even if we actively reject it.

I don't consider myself a racist – which is precisely what a racist would say, I suppose – but like many people I was raised in and around a staggering amount of racist crap. When I was young, that stuff was everywhere: at school, at home, in the neighborhood, and so on. I sincerely doubt that I am alone here, even if we are reluctant to admit it, or that this is exclusive to white people. It's hard to overstate how difficult it is to unlearn this stuff once it sinks in…and a solid 15+ years of it allows plenty of time for it to do so.

I'm 33 years old, highly educated (on paper), and at a point in my life at which I am trying actively to be less of an asshole all the time. Yet I still find the things I was taught (intentionally or otherwise) when I was five running through my head on a regular basis. We aren't born thinking "Oh god, look at that fat person. How disgusting." We learn it over time in a society filled with people who teach is to judge everyone, all the time, according to whatever biases we find appropriate.

Now, a couple things here. First, I'm not claiming that this gives people carte blanche to be offensive; "Oh my parents were racist, so I say racist shit all the time. Not my fault." You can hide behind that until adolescence, at which point you are cognitively capable of understanding how other people feel, what prejudices are, and when you are entertaining thoughts better not thought and certainly best not said. It doesn't matter how often grandpappy said the n-word, you remain capable of removing it from your vocabulary and thought process. Second, I'm not proud of the fact that I catch myself thinking offensive crap sometimes – sexist, racist, homophobic, and otherwise biased things that I consciously reject as an adult – but I'm not ashamed to admit it. Unlearning what we were raised to believe is a continuous process, and besides, don't act like it never happens to you. If you really want to post that long, self-righteous comment about how you would never entertain such thoughts, briefly reflect on the odds against that before hitting Submit.

Strangers on TV aren't the reason people think overweight people are ugly or gross or lazy or bad people or anything else; we think that because it's taught to us. Even if we know better with age, this stuff is like a stain on a carpet – even after you remove it, it's still there. You never really eliminate all traces of it. All of those things we learned from the people around us – inerrant laws about other racial groups, reasons women are bitches, methods of detecting gays (and why it's so important to do so), kinds of people who are worth less than Us – are maddeningly persistent. It's unfortunate that so many of us lack sufficiently developed senses of self awareness to recognize that if the fat woman bothers you, she's not the one with a problem.

(Preface: Stick with it. I'm going somewhere with this.)

Football fans are familiar with the frustration inherent in rooting for a team that can only do one thing well. If they do that one thing really, really well they might win some games and get your hopes up, but the long term prospects for a one-dimensional team tend toward disappointment. In order to win the big games, a team must have balance or else it becomes predictable and easier for a good opponent to defeat.

Take for example that 2008-2009 Cardinals team I loved so intensely. They were perhaps the best passing team in football but could not run the ball one bit. The coaches and players knew they had to run (eventually) in order to win, and they sure talked about doing so a lot.

But the pattern became familiar; at the beginning of the game they would make an obvious effort to run the ball, and when it did not succeed immediately they got frustrated and said, "Ah, screw this. We have a Hall of Fame quarterback and a receiver so good he might not even be human. Let's just air it out." And so they would overwhelm lousy opponents with their one strength.
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Eventually, though, their one-dimensional approach came up short in the playoffs. They weren't really committed to becoming more balanced, nor did they think enough about the long term benefits. Once they realized that growing pains can be unpleasant, they quickly reverted to the only thing they really knew how to do well.

As an avowed opponent of the sports metaphor as a pedagogical technique, I find this an all too fitting description of the Republican Party since I ran from it screaming in the mid-1990s. As the comments on yesterday's post demonstrate, the GOP is keenly aware of its very obvious demographic problem. We tend to focus on the Akin/Brewer/King-level idiots because they amuse us, but I sincerely doubt that Republicans on the whole are too stupid to realize that appealing strictly to white men, the elderly, and religious zealots is a strategy with diminishing returns. They know that they need to appeal to more people – more women, more Latinos, more gays and lesbians, more people under 40, more people who are not hardcore social conservatives, maybe one or two more black people beyond Herman Cain – and I think many of them even understand how to do it. Stop using gays and Spanish-speaking immigrants as punching bags to score cheap points with angry white people.

Stop devoting so much energy to pointless and embarrassing efforts to legislate the vagina. Stop kissing seniors' asses when doing so creates two enemies under 40 for every vote over 70 secured. Be honest about believing in government and government spending on some things (the military, Federal subsidies, bank bailouts, etc.) rather than coming off as a bunch of howling anti-government lunatics. It really isn't rocket science. They could be winning this election handily.

The problem is that the commitment to the long-term benefits of this strategy simply isn't there. They start out every election saying, "Let's try to appeal to a wider audience this time!" However, the second they experience some adversity or discover that winning over new voters is hard, time consuming work, they run right back to the comforting embrace of their tried-and-true playbook: Gay bashing. Campaign season anti-abortion jihads. Nativism, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. Bellicose foreign policy and saber-rattling toward an enemy of convenience. Shameless pandering to the elderly. Wild anti-government rhetoric.

The problem (from the GOP's perspective) is that sometimes this works. See 2010 or 2004. And because it has worked before they will return to it at the slightest hint of rough seas. Every time they employ this strategy they modestly increase their short term odds of success while putting one more nail in the coffin of their future. I do not suggest anything radical like the imminent disappearance of the GOP, yet it is plainly obvious that all of their hackneyed schemes – suppressive Voter ID laws, attempts to reduce Latino immigration, gerrymandering, restricting early/absentee voting, and so on – are like fingers plugging a dike. If they work at all, they will not work forever. The country is changing, as the country has never stopped changing since its founding. The narrow appeal of the modern GOP bodes ill for their future.

I am not concern trolling – far from it. First, I'm sure their trusty playbook will enable them to win some elections now and in the near future. It's not like they never succeed with it. Second, I don't really care about the fate they choose for themselves one way or another. Finally, I think the country might derive some benefit from having a second party composed of reasonably sane people, despite my encyclopedic list of complaints about the two party system overall.

As the McCain campaign eventually descended into a sad buffet of the standard Rovian fare, so too will the Romney campaign as the election nears and they continue to lag behind Obama.
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While individual candidates are rational actors who inevitably pursue short term success above all else, the right as a whole continues to stare down the barrel at a future they are not prepared to face. They know how to prepare, but they never seem to get around to doing it.

As many of you know I recently moved out of Georgia and back to the flatlands from whence I came. Having spent my entire life in the Midwest with the exception of the last three years in Georgia there is no culture shock or adjustment period upon returning.

It is as I remember it, which is to say that it's equal parts comfortable and depressing.

The city in which I live now is a perfect example of what people on the coasts think about the Rust Belt. If you look up "post-industrial" or "urban decay" you might not see an actual picture of where I live, but it would be hard to tell the difference. Even if you have never been here, there's a great chance that you've been to one of the dozens of places exactly like it across the Midwest or New England.
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If you've seen one Youngstown you've seen 'em all – cities that were awesome in about 1958 and everything has gone downhill since then.
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The factories all left, everyone with the means to do so left, and now the downtown area looks like a set for one of those movies wherein the protagonist wakes up to find that everyone else is gone.

What surprises me about this city is that the population has fallen over that time but it is spread over an area that has doubled in size.

The population density has plummeted and left us with the familiar "donut" pattern: an empty shell of a downtown surrounded by unplanned, idiotically sprawling suburbs. As a result, a city that could be somewhere that people actually want to live feels like a ghost town. Just imagine if everyone actually moved back to the city. Wouldn't that be neat?

But that would entail suburbanites living near, like, black people and poor people and stuff. And they wouldn't be able to have those giant yards they don't actually use. And the houses might not all have 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms (which is the minimum necessary for four people). And if you don't have to drive absolutely everywhere, how are you going to show off the car? Who wants to live so close to other people? What are we, peasants?

All the policy solutions in the world – tax incentives, harebrained "renewal" schemes, endless/fruitless talk about luring "high tech" industry to the city – can't overcome the warped attitudes and preferences that led us to the current state of affairs. We don't care if we never see or talk to our neighbors; in fact we prefer it. When people think the bugs are actually features, it's hard to expect any logic from their collective decision-making.

So, funny story: it turns out that the mass shooting outside the Empire State Building late last week was actually one guy shooting his co-worker and nine people being wounded by police bullets while they shot at the assailant. In what can only be seen as an unprecedented show of restraint on the part of the NYPD, the two responding officers only fired sixteen rounds. Some of them even hit the intended target.

We can assume that this sorry total would have been larger and more appropriate had more officers been present to join in the contagious shooting. Still, sixteen rounds for two cops isn't half bad. When you're pulling the trigger that rapidly, who has time to aim?

Living as we do in a society filled with classic authoritarian-follower personality types it does not take long for the full time Cop Apologists to make their voices heard in the few instances in which police shootings actually get heavy news coverage. It is unavoidable; every news segment, every internet forum, and every casual hey-did-ya-hear conversation will include the same stock quotes brought up like clockwork. So let us go ahead and address them up front.

Yes, police have to respond to things under pressure. Yes, they had every right and reason to have their weapons drawn at an armed man who had just killed someone. No, I wasn't there. Are we done? Good.

We as a society create and pay the police to respond to these situations better than you or I would. The arguments about fear and pressure and "If that was you, I doubt you would have done any better" are specious precisely because those things are true. We have police for the same reason that airlines pay a pilot rather than soliciting a volunteer from coach to fly the plane. The police are supposed to respond appropriately, not in fear, panic, and ineptitude like untrained citizens would. If the police can't deal with a suspect without beating him or work a shift without taking a bribe or draw their weapon and use it appropriately, then they aren't really law enforcement. They're just a bunch of regular-guy assholes with a license to shoot at you or otherwise ruin your day. Yes, if there was a situation in which I was responsible for stopping an armed killer I would probably pull out my gun and pull the trigger until it was empty, hitting basically nothing. That's why it's a pretty goddamn good thing that I'm not entrusted with that responsibility. Or a gun.

If New York or any other city has armed officers on the street who can't do any better than Spray & Pray, even the most ardent NRA-loving, authority worshiping people among us must find that unacceptable. Right? Is there some sort of right wing paranoid argument in favor of police being lousy shots that I'm missing? If we can't do anything about police being increasingly militarized and increasingly reliant on force (which, again, appears to have been well justified in this situation) we can at least insist that they hit what they're shooting at.

Oh, and on the subject of militarization, this is a great example of why police are meant to use standard police calibers rather than the military-style "MOAR POWER!" rounds they've been gravitating toward in recent years. If a bullet misses and strikes a bystander or hits the pavement, shatters, and then strikes several bystanders, pistol-type rounds are used to reduce the odds that those unintended injuries will be fatal. Imagine the body count if these had been among the frightening number of NYPD units with .223 rifles or other quasi-military weapons designed to penetrate walls and kill people on the other side.