How to train your brain to be more compassionate
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
I had my “art show” at the Gun Show today and here is why I feel good about
doing so. I walked away with a little feeling of accomplishment. Maybe someone had to think outside of their comfort zone. Maybe?
People attending the Gun Show asked me questions about my being there and nothing about my paintings.
I never answered them when they said things like,”do you have permission to be here?” “you need to leave the premises!” A few curse words and names came my way of course.
Finally a man associated with EASTMAN GUN SHOWS came out to talk with me. He was polite and he told me that many people have complained that I am making them uncomfortable and that my paintings are offensive to them.
I thought to myself, My paintings offended a bunch of people coming to a civic center to look and buy guns and weapons. I’m glad I could make them uncomfortable. That was my goal. The Eastman Gun Shows and their customers make me uncomfortable and they offend me. I picked up my things and before I walked off I looked the man in the eyes and said, “it looks like y’all are making a lot of MONEY today.”.
NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) does it again
Whenever I meet someone who informs me proudly, “I get all my news from NPR,” my heart sinks. Because I know if we get into a discussion, I’m going to have a lot of re-educating to do, and it’s exhausting. People simply do not understand that the once-proudly independent public radio system is a thing of the past. Oh yeah, great music and nice features, but the news content reflects the bias of the corporations from whom they now get the bulk of their funding. It’s subtle enough that intelligent people are fooled, and that’s what makes them so effective. Like this story — go read the rest, it’s illustrative of their approach:
NPR Morning Edition aired a report this week that reeked of anti-union bias, and inadvertently promoted the Koch brothers’ agenda to reduce collective bargaining rights, which means smaller wages and benefits.
The report was rife with errors, missing facts, bollixed concepts, and a meaningless comparison used to impeach a union source.
Below I’ll detail the serious problems with reports by Lisa Autry of WKU Public Radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but first you should know why this matters to you no matter where you live.
A serious, very well-funded, and thoroughly documented movement to pay workers less and reduce their rights, while increasing the rights of employers, is gaining traction as more states pass laws that harm workers. A host of proposals in Congress would compound this if passed and signed into law.
News organizations help this anti-worker movement, even if they do not mean to, when they get facts wrong, lackbalance, provide vagaries instead of telling details, and fail to apply time-tested reporting practices to separate fact from advocacy.The advocates are sophisticated. They pose as “nonprofit research organizations,” but are better described as ideological marketing agencies.
There’s nothing wrong with marketing ideology, only with not being honest about what you are doing.
These tax-exempt outfits operate on the model of Madison Avenue; reinforcing instincts, hopes, and desire to stir demand for what may not be good for you or be of dubious effectiveness.
Carefully read, their reports are mostly assertions with a sprinkling of cherry-picked facts and projections, which I have found, reviewing them years later, turned out to be wrong.
Martin O’Malley’s not awful
He’s just kind of robotic. (As Molly Ivins said, you can’t become president without “the Elvis”). And he’s sounding more like Elizabeth Warren every day:
The most serious structural reform we can make is reinstating the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that kept commercial banks separate from investment banks. Under Glass-Steagall, our country did not see a major financial crisis for nearly 70 years. If that law hadn’t been repealed in 1999, the crash would have been contained.
The largest banks should be broken up into more manageable institutions. Today, five banks control half of the financial industry’s $15 trillion in assets. Even members of Congress, several Federal Reserve Board governors, and major players in the financial industry are recognizing that institutions that are too big to fail are too big to succeed.
Structural reforms aren’t enough. We must bring fundamental change to the culture of Wall Street, beginning with real accountability. To this day, the Justice Department and financial regulators have done virtually nothing to bring criminal charges or hold leadership accountable. Legal deterrents are critical for improving the culture of Wall Street and showing that fraudulent behavior will be punished.
We can solve this problem in a few ways. The first is to replace the leadership at banks that are repeat offenders. CEOs should not remain in charge of institutions that they have failed to manage properly.
Second, we must appoint people to positions — attorney general and SEC chair for starters — who will prosecute those who commit or permit crimes. Thus far, settlements have been nothing more than CEOs using shareholder money to buy their way out of jail.
Third, we must end the days of “neither admit nor deny,” and force law-breaking banks to publicly admit it. We have allowed big banks to avoid admitting guilt due to claims that it will cause them too much harm — it’s time to end that game and let banks face the legal consequences and harm to their reputation.
Fourth, we must make banks bear the full weight of financial penalties. As unbelievable as it sounds, the worst actors on Wall Street have written off large portions of these penalties — as if they were donations to charity. We should not allow banks to deduct fines from their taxes.
Finally, we need a “three strikes and you’re out” or a points-accrual policy — like the one drivers face — to revoke a bank’s right to operate if they repeatedly break the law. This would increase transparency, reduce recidivism and put banks out of business if they repeatedly disregard the law.
Unfortunately, while many good people who work in finance and in Congress understand our vulnerability to another crash, further reform faces an uphill climb against powerful special interests.
Today, most Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on disassembling the Dodd-Frank Act. And too many Democrats have been complicit in the backslide toward less regulation. All while last year’s Wall Street bonuses were double the total earnings of all full-time workers making minimum wage.
It’s time to put the national interest before the interests of Wall Street.
The future of our economy — and America’s middle class — depends on it.
Poor Sheriff Joe
A federal judge says he will not consider calling off an upcoming criminal contempt hearing against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his top deputies for failure to comply with court orders unless a settlement is reached and he’s confident Arpaio will pay money out of his own pocket.
“Let me make this clear, the schedule remains the same,” U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow said Friday afternoon before ending a status conference. “If there is a settlement, let me know.” The orders resulted from a 2007 class-action civil-rights case that alleges the Sheriff’s Office’s immigration sweeps amounted to discriminatory policing against Latinos. The hearing was scheduled before Arpaio, and Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan consented to a civil contempt finding in a court filing earlier this week.
[…] Arpaio’s attorneys have proposed he issue a public, videotaped statement admitting guilt, a gesture his critics have sought, unsuccessfully, for years. Snow said Friday that he’d want Arpaio to do that in court and an additional unspecified place. Arpaio would also ask the county to set up an initial $350,000 to serve as a compensation fund for confirmed victims and would “seek to adjust this figure” should it not cover all of the claims. Snow also questioned whether that money would come from Arpaio’s budget or from taxpayers. And he expressed concern about whether all victims could be identified and on setting a limit on the amount of money needed to compensate all victims.
[…] Arpaio and Sheridan have also volunteered to personally donate $100,000 to a civil-rights organization with a mission of “protecting the constitutional and civil rights of the Hispanic community.” Snow worried whether that money would come from Arpaio’s own pocket or his legal defense fund. He wants Sheridan to pay out of pocket too, but not as much as Arpaio because the judge said Sheridan has acted in good faith.
There’s a dead cat at the bottom of Unit 1
Remember when I compared the Fukushima situation to that old joke about “the cat’s on the roof”? Yes, I remember all the reasonable, rational, technically-employed menfolks (not here, over at the other site) explaining to me how irresponsible and crazy I was for saying this was what happened. But it did:
The Tokyo Electric Power Corp. says Unit 1 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant did, in fact, meltdown during the 2011 accident.
TEPCO released results from a three-day study in February of the Unit 1 reactor building jointly with the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning. The two companies collected data until March 10. The project used cosmic rays to inspect the interior of the building. By analyzing the flow of muons, which are subatomic particles generated when cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere, TEPCO was able to generate X-ray like images of the interior of the reactor. Muons can pass through concrete and iron, but they are blocked and change direction when they hit high-density substances such as plutonium and uranium, creating a “shadow.”
TEPCO said the fuel had melted because there were no shadows around the reactor’s core, and the fuel had likely melted and fallen to the bottom of the building into a containment vessel. The operator also said there was no accumulation of water in the core of the reactor pressure vessel.
TEPCO said the results confirmed previous assumptions of a meltdown. The utility plans to continue measurement until it gains enough data to conduct a statistical analysis, and said the data gained will help it work out a plan to remove the debris, most likely by robots due to the high amounts of radiation in the reactor.
First of all, it’s not an “accident.” TEPCO cut corners to save money, and this is the predictable result.
And who are they kidding? The containment vessel melted, too. They didn’t scan the containment area because they don’t want us to know that. That fuel is out there. And we can probably assume the same about Unit 2.
It’s frustrating to have the kind of mind I do, because I so frequently get an accurate gut reaction (which is really my brain hitting overdrive and connecting random experience and pieces of information) and I do not know how to download all that data (remember, I’ve read an estimated 60,000 books, minimum, and countless articles) and put it into context for people who don’t have the same data set. I frequently fail, which annoys me. I usually lack the patience to sift through the data in a way that will communicate the same conclusion to others, but I sometimes try.
It is even harder to communicate what’s happening with a situation like Fukushima, because engineer types believe in their fail-safe systems — the system does not fail! But that’s because technical people don’t accurately assess human factors like corruption, company leadership and dangerous cost-cutting until they see it with their own eyes.
So let me remind you: It is a well-established principle in governance that the “responsible” thing to do is withhold information that will cause a panic and other negative social and economic ripple effects. (I seem to recall there’s even a U.S. law to that effect.) So they will never, ever really tell us the actual risks to the U.S. population from this meltdown. To their way of thinking, there’s no need for us to know.
Boy’s lonely birthday transformed by the internet
I have so many family members and friends on the spectrum, so this really touched my heart:
Freedom!
When I think of Paul Ryan, I think of this.
Freedom to become a pauper, freedom to hurry up and die! Digby says:
So Paul Ryan is out there instructing states not to set up state exchanges if the Supremes knock down the federal exchange subsidies. He said he’s been assured that Justice Alito will convince the majority that they need to delay kicking people off of insurance until the Republican congress can offer a conservative alternative that will be acceptable to the Republican Governors in every state.
Guess what they’re talking about as the alternative?
His remarks Thursday offered the most detailed vision yet of the House Republicans’ thinking. Mr. Ryan suggested the GOP caucus was most enthusiastic about allowing states to strip some of the health law’s requirements that insurance plans must provide certain minimum benefits and a requirement that insurers sell to all customers equally regardless of their medical history.
“We think things like community rating and other regulations make insurance needlessly expensive for most people and that there are better more targeted ideas out there to help those with pre-existing conditions get affordable care,” he said. “We just want to give people market freedom and personal freedom so that they can buy what they want.”
The single most important aspect of Obamacare, the one thing that one would assume nobody would try to mess with — the ban on denying insurance because of a pre-existing condition — is the main provision they want to get rid of. In other words, they want to make sure that people who are sick are either tied to their insurance companies (with back-breaking premiums that go with that) for life. Or maybe death since a lot of people just won’t be able to afford insurance at all so they’ll just die.
Take a look at this headline
“They made it crystal clear that the ask was from Hillary”: Inside the Clinton fundraising machine — as secretary of state
Sometimes in D.C., the crime is what’s legal: Inside the massive Clinton fundraising operation at State
Now read the story, which is about Hillary Clinton doing her job as Secretary of State.
It’s so fucking exhausting, pointing out all this shit. But it’s got to be done. Look how Salon twisted this book excerpt to imply there was something venal about something that wasn’t. Apparently they’ve decided that Hillary hate sells.
So now we know something about Salon.