Rant 5-27-16 - the Madness begins....

As the holiday weekend approaches The Professor notes with that his grim suspicion about the results of the engineered social panic are Trans using bathrooms – and the Professor feels the pedantic need to point out they have been using bathrooms for decades – Christine Jorgenson returned from Sweden in the 1940’s for mercy’s sake – are coming true – a self-appointed bathroom guardian has attacked a farther brining his 5 year old daughter into men’s room of a Walmart in Utah – because he didn’t want his daughter going alone into the ladies room – the kids just 5 for mercy’s sake. 

Guy in the rest room freaks out and starts a fight – turns out dad was bigger and a better fighter. The clown who attacked the man is in now in police custody.

This country is depressed the Professor more and more each day.

Meantime – I didn’t quite get a good look at the story as the internet was getting stroppy or just not functioning in the proper manner – a Michigan man has pulled his two sons out of school because a Trans kid was using the boys’ room.

Michigan being the land of the Michigan Militia it’s not shocking this happened – of course his utter panic about bathroom screams that all sorts of issues  that it is probably best a sane mind not delve into too deeply least one becomes tempted to use a ballpoint pen as a lobotomy tool to stop the horror.

The article has him ranting about the shame and humiliation this has caused his children – remembering what it was like to be a child I can assure him that the one causing them shame and humiliation is you my dear sir. They have to watch you having this sort of brain meltdown about something they probably haven’t given a single thought to.

While it is amusing in a grim way to note the increase in hysteria about bathroom use – considering that America is awash with frightened people with guns who are being whipped up in to a hate frenzy by either genuine nut cases (for example  suspects the gov of North Carolina is one of these) or cynical hacks who see this as a way to get the rubes to the polls this year – say Ted Cruz about whom not enough bad things have been written yet – the real danger here is that one of these nut jobs is going to be armed and we are going to end up with dead people. 

As a side note - For Sanders to debate Trump is utterly utterly insane. No good can come of it at all .

 

Rant 5-18-16 - And as punishment for our sins – Donald Trump shall be come President.

As the primary season comes to an end –with each side on the democratic race calling each other increasingly angry names… I noticed a Clinton ally said that Sanders needed to take his defeat ‘like a man’ which is pretty bloody insulting but their follow up complaint about Sanders ‘working the ref’s’ (i.e. leaning, squeezing bribing whatever the Super delegates) rings a bit false seeing as they, along with the utterly corrupt and useless DNC moved heaven and earth to make sure Mrs. Clinton was going to be the Democratic Party’s choice before a single primary vote was counted. The complaints that Sanders is trying to game a system that they previously rigged in their favor is a bit rich. Anyway as it winds down and the News from the GOP is that despite all their huffing and puffing most of the GOP is rushing and elbowing each other aside to kiss Trumps ring , a dreadful idea has taken hold of the Professor’s mind and refuses to go away , it’s horrible and it is gradually sucking the joy out of any part of the Professor’s life.


The thought? Simple, Trump’s going to win this thing.


The Professor doesn’t even like writing that down, in a weird fear that doing so will, as does measurement in a quantum event collapse the various probable outcomes that might happen into a one ugly certainty.


My reasons for concern – and these were out there even before the latest polls came along which didn’t help – are several


One – Clinton is not a natural campaigner – she doesn’t get that Mick Jagger rush of being in front of a crowd and she is going to have to deal in the general with a man who unless there are some health issues we don’t know about will campaign like an energizer bunny which leads us to


Two – She’s not a strong candidate, zeitgeist is trending against her technocratic little bit here and little bit here approach to governing. These days the feeling is more things are fucked up and bullshit and things need to be changed – not tinkered with but changed. She’s very much moderation small steps and reaching across it isle (which is I’m sorry in this day and age is insane) which won’t work. My sense is that folks will accept small steps in the pursuit of a goal but right now making the small steps the goal in and of themselves is just going to fly


Three – the Press loathes her and loves Trump – face it he’s good copy and he puts buns in the seats when he’s on the air. One the other hand they detest her, there is a huge amount of good old boy sexism in the DC press corps and they have hated the Clintons since they got here. As a result they will take every foul and ugly rumor about her and transmit it as gospel truth no matter how many times it’s already been proven false. Vince Foster will die again a thousand times between now and election day…it’s depressing as hell but it’s a real thing that will have to be dealt with.


Also personally I think those speaking fees are going to bite her hard – she got annoyed when Sanders mentioned them but she ain’t seen nothing yet boyo – I think Trump is going to make Goldman Sach’s her running mate. Of course it’s arrantly hypocritical from Trump to do that but neither he nor the press will care. If anything is shows a real lack of judgment on Hilary’s part. She knew she was going to be running for president in when she made them. As best I can tell  the defense is that since she has not overtly pulled strings on behalf of Wall Street it’s okay –  it’s not a bribe unless zoning laws are changed.


  But the main reason isn’t rational, it’s the sense that Karma is coming to get us – W was a horrible president and we did horrible things (we were doing horrible things before as well but leave that for now) to other countries and people because we were the strongest and had panicked. And for that sin along with the official use of torture still blackens our soul as a nation we will pay– that O did nothing to balance the books didn't help. This is a Karmic debt that needs to be paid by this country – we could have taken care of it ourselves but chose not to and it be collected for us – with the additional Irony of Trump who’s slogan is make America Great Again will be the agent of its downfall.

LISTEN: DEA agent cites ‘science’ to warn Utah lawmakers about fearless stoned rabbits

LISTEN: DEA agent cites ‘science’ to warn Utah lawmakers about fearless stoned rabbits

3-14-14- Pie day

It’s pie day and to be honest the Professor would rather be doing something about that but the problem is that the refusal of the Obama administration even to do anything about the CIS is to much even for a man as cynical as myself. What has happened is that it turns out that even the senate has limits in this case being spied on by the CIA with respect to the massive and by all reports very very damming report about American torture. There really isn’t much choice here. The Senate as ineffective and filled with corrupt and cowardly fools for the most part has the absolute right to look into the activities of the CIA – it’s the oversight function there in the constitution. There is no way, legally, to deny the Senate access. This of course is what the CIA has done. And Obama instead of having the Director of the CIA hauled up in front of him and read the riot act has seemed to for the moment to be on his side. Now what really galls me about this whole disaster is one – O is blame here for quite a bit of this mess. He was the one who promised ‘absolution without penance’ to quote Brother Charles Pierce. Which means the horrors inflicted upon innocents or even not innocents in our name were not brought out into the light, folks being made to say out loud in public what they did to people in our name and to simply lance the festering boil that was the war on terror’s intelligence arm which tortured a lot of folks but didn’t get much done form it. And the hell of it – look who he is protecting – George W Bush, Dick Cheney, the whole cabal of insane power mad monsters/brain dead cretins who were ‘monsters drunk on human blood’ to quote a movie that the Professor can’t quite bring to mind just at this moment. That is what well and truly depresses the Professor. That this seemingly decent human being has worked very very hard to protect these abominations. The Professor needs to rethink much.

Rant 11-20-13

The Professor has been busy with many projects lately and the neglected personal life has also cut into what little time the Professor has to jabber on blogs like this. However a few stories have crossed the internet transom that have attracted my attention.

The first one was where JPMorgan Chase – recent beneficiary of a plea bargain deal that let them keep most of the money they stole  -it’s moments like this that I remember the quote ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” – anyway JPMorgan Chase decided to have a ‘ask an important person twitter event’ this backfired in a major way as word got out and folks did their damnest to be rude and insulting and downright nasty in less than 144 words – or whatever – the professor does not have a twitter account as getting to the point takes me about 3 paragraphs. The idea was quickly shelved but not before they had been exposed to the one thing these folks cannot bear – mockery.  Although in his dark heart the professor thinks some of these folk’s heads are begging for the business end of a pike.

Meantime – McDonald’s in an effort to prove that they have their share of clueless idiots as well has been caught  - on an employee website  in the advice section no less – that a way to deal with stress is not to complain about it was that makes your stress level go up; they also suggested getting  food stamps so you shouldn’t starve on the shit wages being paid – the mind wanders again to an early Bob Newheart routine – the retirement party where the fellow retiring (an accountant), as part of his farewell speech mentions that if it wasn’t for the ‘fifty bucks a week I glommed out of petty cash I wouldn’t have made it on the lousy salary…’  - back to McDonalds -  they also suggested taking a couple of vacations a year;  and – and that singing is a way to reduce stress. The professor has a fantasy of one day walking by a McDonalds and hearing the strains of ‘The International’ or perhaps Moorhead’s “Eat the Rich” from the happy workers. 

We have noted on our travels though the internet that these stories always bring out – folks who write why are you so angry and hostile to the rich.  Followed up typically with a back in the day story and then a rant against their pet peeve as in this case probably the minim wage which they blame for well everything – One fellow was going on abut how back in the day he worked for 75 cents an hour at a soda fountain. Seeing as the minimum wage law is 70 years old now either the fellow was lying or at least 113 years old. And just to note in constant dollars the minimum wage was at its highest in 1968 a year lousy for a bunch of reasons The Tet Offensive, RFK and MLK being killed, riots and Nixon (who has proved worse than we thought more on that some other time) at  least unemployment was a 3.6 percent. (Granted there were some 500,000 young men overseas getting shot at but still it’s a lot better than the 71/2% that is regarded as good these days.)

Meantime the other great monolith  of modern capitalism Wal-Mart  again has found itself behind the 8 ball as in Ohio a store had bins set up for people to donate food for to help ‘associates’ over thanksgiving as some are having a hard time making ends meet.  The professor wonders gee if only they could earn more money or perhaps someone with a lot of money – at last count the Walton family was worth 150 BILLION dollars – could give them oh a bonus or perhaps pay them better? But no – that would cut into profit.

The sick thing is that both of these firms hideously low pay forces their employees to go on food stamps and other programs to get by. These folks aren’t sitting in a hammock; they are trying to do the right thing and are getting screwed by it. These are programs paid for by tax dollars – our tax dollars which are making Wal-Mart’s bottom line better.

The Professor has a modest proposal – no it does not having the Walton family beaten with sticks and being driven from the land before burning their mansions down – temping as that fantasy maybe – simply set  up a law where in if an employer is underpaying folks to the point where they need government assistance – that money comes out of their profits – and to make it sting – as this really is stealing from the government – they get to pay 3 times the amount that goes to their employees in assistance.

I’d suspect the situation would change a bit after that passed. Not that it would because freedom!

The Second Amendment killed Trayvon Martin

The professor has had a long slow bout of the blues as the trial and the verdict in the trail of George Zimmerman came in followed by the victory laps of the hate filled segment of the internet. They seem obscenely glad a black child is dead and that he was shot. It’s a depressing look into the minds of the hateful. The Professor well understands that most of them would never actually kill a black child themselves but they are more than ready to cheer as it is done.

This brings me, tangentially as always to the point of the mini rant here today. Amada Marcotte in her brilliant feminist blog Pandagon points out that in a sane society George Zimmerman would not have been allowed to own a gun given his clouded personal history: arrested on charges of assaulting a police officer, later plea bargained provided he went to mandatory alcohol counseling, getting fired from a bouncers job for being too violent especially with female patrons, and an order of protection filed against him by his ex wife. Amanda notes that in a sane society this man would not be allowed to own anything more dangerous than balls of string. But the Professor would like to point out that even in a semi-sane society a person with this history would not be allowed a concealed carry permit – which brings us to the point here.

To wit, the Second Amendment killed Trayvon Martin.

Or more precisely the gun nut culture NRA absolutists killed Trayvon Martin.

It’s a simple if depressing postulate; that if George Zimmerman had not been armed he would never have gotten out of the car, followed the kid on foot which led to the confrontation. No gun and nobody would have died that night.

Zimmerman’s defenders offer somewhat twisted supporting evidence for this – they continually cite Trayvon’s height, youth, the menace of the hoodie, and blackty black black; if this was, and one can safely assume it was, Zimmerman’s mindset about black people (given George’s large number of calls to the police to report black men in his neighborhood), Zimmerman does not venture from the safety of his car if he’s not packing and the confrontation does not ensue. He had already called the police who may or may not have been in the process of replying to yet another of his calls of a black kid in his neighborhood.  They might well have harassed Trayvon for being what they would have considered to be the wrong area but if they had, Trayvon would not have ended up on a slab in the country morgue office with a tag on his toe.

It was the gun, more precisely Zimmerman’s posse ion of it that night which lead the death.  It turned a stupid and ugly situation into a deadly one.  But that is what guns do – guns make killing easy and as a result, people die.

The case has started a bit of soul searching on the part of Americas about race and our thoughts on it (save for the ones doing the victory laps) which in the long term that might do a great of good.

However in the short term, and I think the short term is measured in years if not decades in this case, people are going to continue to be insane fear crazed, violent, racist fuck-sticks, so what can be done is to limit their access –cough – background checks – cough – to weapons that all too easily turn someone’s paranoia into something deadly. That is something that can be done. Changing the hearts of men is a long a difficult process and one the poltical arena is one ill sutied to.

Rant 5-24-13

It has been a while since the Professor has gone on these pages. Not that there hasn’t been anything worth ranting about but it’s been a busy time of year. Still the recent events in Oklahoma combined with the horrors in Bangladesh has brought forward a rather unfortunate fact of life under capitalism – powers that be will push against any regulations even the most commonsensible ones as the regulations will inevitably cost money which, is after all the most important thing in the world. At least to the folks resisting the changes.

What happens then is some massive disaster that overrides the objections (for the moment) and allows the new rules to be enacted and we discover that no the economy does not collapse because a steam ship has enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew or there are enough emergency exits for the workers at a factory.

In truth the sad story is that most, if not all safety regulations are the result of the number of deaths passing some threshold or more pointedly someone important getting killed.  As for example the Titanic – there had been other sinking of ships with not enough lifeboats but when one combines the massive loss of life and that a couple of Vanderbilt’s ended up as fish food that was changed pretty damn fast.

As a side note I saw a rather odd defense of the number on lifeboats the Titanic in Wikipedia.  The defense was something to the effect that the idea was that the life boats were to serve as ferries to transferring the passengers to a rescue ship (the writer added a snarky comment about the California’s infamous inaction while the ship sank). This strikes the professor as extremely dubious, even supposing the California shown up, it was going to be one really sticky wicket to unload the lifeboats of the passengers and then row back and pick up another load of passengers which would require the boats to be hoisted back up one presumes. (All this was to be done while the ship was actively sinking by the way). The sponsor of this claptrap idea (the Professor tracked it down to the Wall Street Journal opinion page and frankly any idea posted there needs to handled with tongs) also blamed government regulations for not mandating enough lifeboats (the White Star line in hearings after the sinking took this tack while in full CYA mode) which considering that this was 1912 and any regulation proposed would be greeted with thunderous objections by the powers that be is a bit fucking rich.  Made even richer by this being printed in the Wall Street Journal who last I looked regarded any regulations as being the absolute spawn of the Satan.

There is story related in the book Call me if it’s Murder by George Lebrun as told to Edward D Radin. Mr. Lebrun worked with the city coroner for New York city in the early part of the 20^th century – one of the stories he relates in the book was his attempts to have a simple safety lock put on elevator doors so that they would not open unless there was an elevator car at the floor. This was resisted and resisted successfully by builders and elevator manufactures until a prominent New York City Judge fell to a painful death. After that the Legislation was passed in record time and the number of deaths from folks falling down empty elevator shafts when from about 100 a year to none.

Those other folks were simply, per the powers that be, not important enough to spend the money on, but when one of them died, good god man this sort of thing can’t be allowed to happen again.

So now as the bodies are being pulled out of the wreckage in Oklahoma and the burials continue in Bangladesh the story keeps happening - with some variations – it seems that there were actually laws on the books in Bangladesh that mandated that buildings be so constructed that they wouldn’t collapse but again since money is more important than anything else these regulations were, apparently, and I must say that as all the facts are not in yet, ignored.

In a piece of grim irony another factory burned down some few weeks later in Bangladesh but as it was after working hours only the owner and his staff were killed because the building did not  have stairways that would not fill up with smoke.  The way the world works one has to assume that fire safety standards will be improved in Bangladesh before the problem of collapsing buildings is – can’t have bosses dying.  

There a push to ensure safe buildings in Bangladesh however there is the unspoken threat that the 1^st world companies that use Bangladesh as their sweatshop will pull out if money needs to be spent by them.

In Moore Oklahoma the corruption is of a more insidious sort – rather than needing to bribe city officials the builders had the advantage that the city fathers actually thought that  mandating shelters for developments  (and for schools) was a violations of the free market which is their one true god . 

As a result we have 7 dead kids – which could have been worse and scores injured. But taxes are low.

Which is good yes?

Because money is more important than anything else.

Especially unimportant human life.