The world is broken

My news is full of one picture: a toddler, drowned, lying face down in the surf on the shore of Turkey. He was one of a great many Syrian refugees fleeing their country in desperation, and dying in the process.

It’s a shocking image. It’s heartbreaking. It tore me up to see it, so I’ll spare you all. Instead, I’ll show you another image that popped up in my newsfeed that is, in many ways, even more terrible.

We need to remember that our friends, our enemies, and the innocents in between are all human beings, and all deserve to live. Remember when we vote to give politicians the right to launch missiles into cities, and when we stand by and watch and do nothing as the suffering grows.

My plan to get elected president

wall

Donald Trump declares his intent to build a wall along the US-Mexican border. Scott Walker one-ups him, and additionally declares that he will consider building a giant wall along the Canadian border. I will beat them all.

I notice we also get brown people drifting onto our shores from those balmy islands to the south. I propose we also build a colossal Caribbean wall, from Texas to Florida. We can also use it to prevent storm surges from hurricanes along the Gulf coast — New Orleans is saved!

We won’t stop there, either. We will extend that wall along the East coast, to connect up with the Canadian wall. There will be no sea level rise along that shore while I’m in charge. Also no Africans or Europeans.

The next frontier is the West coast. A wall along that shore will not only block the Yellow Peril, it will end the danger of tsunamis.

Finally, I’ll take a bold step no other candidate will consider: walls between the states. Wisconsin is a failed region, thanks to Scott Walker, so we’ll build a wall between Minnesota and that terrible place. That will inspire other construction projects — the Mason-Dixon Line will become the Mason-Dixon Wall. Californians are all jerks, so we’ll quarantine them with a wall. Utah can isolate itself with a Great Wall of Mormon.

There is no downside to any of these projects, except for one: the only party that will be impressed by the extent of my proposals is Republican. I don’t think I could join that party — I have some standards, you know.

The Walking John Birchers

jbs

Anyone else remember the John Birch Society? I had relatives wrapped up in it — they were dangerously nuts and full of evil ideas that even I, as a young kid, could tell were demented and destructive — and that last article brought back ugly memories. They seemed to have declined rather precipitously in the 90s, but I should have known…they were just going underground. They’ve risen from the dead now, as the Tea Party.

Here’s an account by a woman who grew up in a John Birch family. I only saw these jerks tangentially, on the fringe of my family, but I can tell you that this story rings true, and I agree — life in that kind of society would be hell.

I recognized the anti-government rhetoric and the unlimited money and I realized that Tea Party had locked arms with libertarians, big business, the religious right and the John Birch Society. This was a potent coalition of ideology, money and power—a coalition fifty years in the making.

Most Americans have no idea that these “new” ideas are the same “old” ideas that the John Birch Society preached fifty years ago.

I do.

I lived in the heart of radical right-wing extremism. I left the movement when I realized that living in a Birch society, libertarian America would be hell.

Who elected Jack D. Ripper?

Here’s a treat: a congressman who has been in office since 1989, and is on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.


claiming Global Warming they create powerful Global gov. Claiming tooth decay they mandate chemical fluoride in our water

He’s a Republican, of course.

[Read more…]

Ben Carson did experiments on tissue from aborted fetuses

madsci

The paper leaves no room for ambiguity.

carson3

Note that there’s nothing at all wrong with this — the use of fetal tissue in these kinds of experiments, and many more, is ubiquitous, and it is not obtained by magic, but by the ethical donation of fetal material from abortions and miscarriages and stillbirths. I don’t object at all to Carson having participated in this kind of research.

I do object to him now declaring that it is unethical in all circumstances.

[Read more…]

Bernie! In Seattle!

Several members of my family back home attended the Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle, and my niece took a few pictures.

bernie

I have also been chastised for saying I’d be willing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the election. I find myself in the strange position of being the conservative member of my family. I’m almost afraid to go back to visit next week: have I become the cranky old right-wing uncle who makes a nuisance of himself once a year at family reunions?

[Read more…]

Breitbart for sale

forsale

While Fox News is frantically struggling to scuttle the Trump’s presidential campaign, there is one media outlet that has been proudly and loudly in his corner: Breitbart.

They’re actually running articles titled THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT REASONS TRUMP WOULD MAKE A GREAT PRESIDENT and DONALD TRUMP RISES TO POSITION OF TOTAL DOMINANCE. Wow. They must truly believe.

Or maybe not.

According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website — using it to hype his political prospects, and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying “despicable” and “embarrassing,” and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which “multiple writers and editors” said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the “pay for play.”

Breitbart also went all-in on the idea that gamergate was about ethics in journalism. I don’t think they’d recognize ethics unless it ran up and paid them with a big check.