Al Franken exceeding expectations

Salon has a nice review of our senator from Minnesota, Al Franken (quick, who’s the other one?*). He really has been doing well, working hard, mostly coming down on the side of goodness and reason, and he’s also a darn nice fella in person — he’s even visited our quiet rural backwater a few times.

We could use a few more like Franken in congress.

*No, it’s not Michele Bachmann. It’s Amy Klobuchar, the woman politician from Minnesota who always gets unfairly overshadowed by the kook from the 6th congressional district. We have two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, I’ll have you know.

This is Chief Mark Kessler. He’s an idiot.

Behold the man posturing and asserting his manliness by firing guns on camera, as if that is a talent or an accomplishment. You will not be able to watch this video without thinking “What an ass…”

He’s the police chief of some tiny little town in Eastern Pennsylvania, a place a fifth the size of Morris, Minnesota. I think he might be overcompensating a little bit with the gun-waving.

But besides being an arrogant idiot, he’s a real danger — this is not the kind of tinpot tyrant you want armed and eager to open fire. But at least it leads to a little amusement.

He went to a bar, got involved in a bar fight, and drew a gun. Already you’re thinking this man has crossed the line and ought to be in jail. But here’s the funny part:

He shot himself in the hand.

Mark Kessler is what you get when you give Barney Fife an M-16. Which is kind of a metaphor for America, if you think about it.

Obvious poll is obvious

A poll in Kentucky is asking…

Should state science education standards require the teaching of evolution?

Yes 60%

No 36%

I don’t know 3%

The answer is that if you want to be prepared to attend a good university, or it you want to be an informed citizen of the world, yes, you should be taught evolution in high school. If your dream job is selling popcorn for minimum wage at Ken Ham’s Ark Park* for the rest of your life, you’re probably OK without it.

*Note: Ark Park jobs currently don’t exist, and probably never will.

I get email

And sometimes, it really isn’t my fault. Really. I think there’s a FAQ for Kooks somewhere, and it lists my name and email address as a place where you can send random whininess. Like this one that I got out of the blue a couple of weeks ago.

You are a Coward

Paul,

You appear to be just as much of a useless cowardly dimwit as all the other self-identified “skeptics”. I already pointed out that you have no trouble running you mouth about things you clearly know nothing about. And further taking positions that are clearly and obviously wrong.

So I might expect some response unless you would like to admit your cowardice.

Once again I my take on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/

Perhaps just for fun.

Sincerely,
Alan Tarica

PS
You might find the following an inducement:

Dear Professor Tarica,

Thank you for sending me this copy of your analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which I have read (quickly once) with pleasure. I am not enough of an expert to pronounce authoritatively on your work, but in my perusal I found nothing to object. …

With best wishes,

Morris Halle

Dear Alan,

It is very kind of you to send me your sonnet commentaries. I have already looked at a few and, indeed found them interesting. I won’t go through all of them at a single sitting. I simple don’t have the time or the patience any longer. But I will dip into them over the next several weeks.

It is a great enterprise. Congratulations.

Jay Keyser

Thanks. I am always pleased to see someone engage with the Sonnets in such detail.

Best,

Mike

Michael Schoenfeldt
John Knott Professor of English Literature

What? I looked at the links to see what I’d done, and the one where I’m supposedly running my mouth? That’s not me. It’s someone named Catmando; we have no connection other than that I’m on their blogroll. They wrote a post dismissing various Shakespeare conspiracies, a subject I don’t believe I’ve ever weighed in on, and apparently Mr Tarica is a frothing-at-the-mouth Edward De Vere fanatic, and I’m the cowardly target of his ire, and I guess I’m supposed to be impressed by the tepid acknowledgments of a group of people I’ve never heard of before.

OK, bye.

But then he kept on sending these accusations of cowardice. He was really quite angry with me. And then…

Real Skeptism

Paul

I realize now (I realized that previously and forgot) that you are not the blogger Catmando and thus not responsible for this stupidity essentially reasoning by the fallacy fallacy.

But I still expect an outspoken person like yourself to express some opinion.

https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/

Alan

Wait. He realized that he’d made a mistake, and yet he still kept dunning me with accusations? And instead of an apology, he’s now telling me that I have to express an opinion on his obsession?

Gah. Screw you, Alan Tarica. I owe you nothing.

And now, this has started again:

You are a coward

alan.tarica@gmail.com

You really are a coward aren’t you

OK, Alan Tarica. You win. I’ll express an opinion.

You’re a deep-fried dingaling. A real wackaloon. Your scholarship is a high-falutin’ version of fingerpainting with your own feces. I’d call you silly, except your attitude is so mean-spirited, petty, and blinkered that it isn’t even amusing: you’re a cheap party clown who thinks he’s philosophically deep. Fuck off.

Oh, and do you know who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets? William Shakespeare.

That’s going to be an expensive book-burning

The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will set you back about $350; it’s a massive great thick book. So the homophobes better start saving their pennies, because the Oxford Dictionary is changing to include gender-neutral definitions of marriage.

It really is a marvelous book. Way back when I was in Junior High and High school, my nerdy friends and I liked to hang out in the library and go to random pages in the OED — no, we weren’t looking up dirty words (mostly), we were expanding our vocabulary!

Christ, plastics?

I just took delivery of a big box of plastic trays for my fish setup — and as a bonus, I discovered that these are god-soaked industrial plastic trays. Along with the packing slip, the company, US Plastics, included a little booklet, volume 1 of Stories of Inspiration, featuring various heads of corporations preachin’ about how wonderful Jesus is.

It includes a bog-standard “I found Jesus” story from the founder of US Plastic, which includes a dialog with God.

“What are you asking me to do, Lord!” I prayed silently. “Stanley, if you agree a soul is the greatest value in the whole world and is the only investment you can make in this life that will pay dividends in eternity…would you be willing to go back to Ohio and become an employee of Mine? …An employee, Lord? Isn’t that what I am now? … We’re partners now, Stanley. I want you to turn your entire business over to Me! …I was stunned. It was beyond anything I had ever considered. I managed to pray, ‘If this is what You want, I will obey.” U.S. Plastic Corp.® then became God’s company and to this day supports missionary work all over the world.

(Yes, God speaks like a boring business drone, doesn’t he?)

If you find that to be irresistible writing, you can find even more of R. Stanley Tam’s writings for sale at US Plastic. I am tempted by the title Stanley Tam’s Incredible Adventures with God, but I am resisting; I suspect they are probably just a little too incredible.

By the way, it’s not just the founder, Tam — the current president, Wesley A. Lytle, also has an entry in Stories of Inspiration.

Damn. Now I’m troubled. US Plastic sells gabillions of useful utility containers and widgets, lots of stuff that’s useful in the science world. I will not support missionary work or religious proselytization, so I’m going to have to go to the trouble of looking for less Jesusy sources in the future.

It’s not just the pipelines we have to worry about

The new oil extraction techniques involve injecting super-heated steam under high pressure deep into the ground, liquefying the hardened, tarry stuff so it can be extracted. Only…sometimes there is a blowout, and the toxic gunk starts oozing out in all kinds of unexpected places. Exactly as is happening in Cold Lake, Alberta, on the lands of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation.

“This is a new kind of oil spill and there is no ‘off button,’” said Keith Stewart, an energy analyst with Greenpeace who teaches a course on energy policy and environment at the University of Toronto. “You can’t cap it like a conventional oil well or turn off a valve on a pipeline.

“You are pressurizing the oil bed so hard that it’s no wonder that it blows out. This means that the oil will continue to leak until the well is no longer pressurized,” which means the bitumen could be seeping from the ground for months.

Would you believe the oil companies are keeping the media and photographers away from multiple blowout sites? Of course you would.

But wait! We Americans don’t have to worry — these tar sand extraction blowouts happen around the site of origin. The US gets the benefit of the oil (less the aforementioned pipeline leaks), while Canada poisons itself.

Thanks, guys! This is the season when I see those obscene mega-recreation vehicles tooling around on the highways, and it’s nice to know you’re willing to murder your beaver in particularly nasty ways, and to kill your majestic trees with toxic chemicals leaching into the ground, all so some smug retired Republican can drive a house down the road.

The racialization of danger

Tim Wise reposts an essay from 15 years ago; it’s remarkable for how nothing has changed since. It’s about this peculiar asymmetry in which, when a black person commits a crime, most people are quick to generalize the behavior to their race; when a when a white person commits a crime, blame falls on the individual. I thought it was enlightening to see the litany of crimes primarily committed by white people.

It’s amazing how many crazy whites there are, none of whom feel the wrath of the racial pathology police as a result of their depravity. Killing parents is among our specialties. So in 1994, a white guy in New York killed his mom for serving the wrong pizza; last year, a white kid in Alabama killed his parents with an axe and sledgehammer; and in 1996, Rod Ferrell, leader of a “vampire cult” in Murray, Kentucky, bludgeoned another member’s parents to death and along with the victims’ daughter, drank their blood so as to “cross over to the gates of hell.” Which brings me to rule number one for identifying the race of criminals. If the crime involved vampirism, Satan worship, or cannibalism, you can bet your ass the perp was white. Never fails. But you’ll never hear anyone ask what it is about white parents that makes their children want to cut off their heads and boil them in soup pots.

Ditto for infanticide. When Susan Smith drowned her boys in South Carolina, she had hundreds of people looking for a mythical Black male carjacker, because that’s what danger looks like in the white imagination. We should have known better, especially when you consider how many white folks off their kids: like Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg, in Delaware, who dumped their newborn in the garbage; or the New Jersey girl at her prom who did the same in the school bathroom; or Brian Stewart, from St. Louis who injected his son with the AIDS virus to avoid paying child support; or the Pittsburgh father who bludgeoned his 5-year old twins to death when they couldn’t find their Power Ranger masks, and were late for day care; or the white babysitter outside Chicago who bound two kids with duct tape, before shooting them and turning the gun on himself. None of these folks’ race was offered as a possible factor in their crimes. No one is writing books about the genetic or white cultural causes of such behavior. In 1995, when a poor Latina killed her daughter in New York by smashing her head against a wall, every major news source in America covered the tragedy, and focused on her “underclass” status. But when a white Arizona man the same month decapitated his son because he was convinced the child was possessed by the devil, coverage was sparse, and mention of race or cultural background was nowhere to be found.

Or consider thrill killing, spree killing, and animal mutilation: three other white favorites that occur without racial identification of the persons involved. In October 1997, a white male teen obsessed with Jeffrey Dahmer killed a 13-year old to “see what it feels like.” In New Jersey, a 15-year old white male killed an 11-year old selling candy door-to-door, but only after sexually assaulting him. Late last year, a white couple in California was arrested for “hunting women,” and torturing and mutilating them in the back of their van. At Indiana University, a white male burned four cats alive in a lab, while in Martin, Tennessee, two white teens set a duck on fire at the city’s recreational complex, and in Missouri, two white teens killed 23 cats for fun, prompting their white neighbors to say, not that there’s something wrong with white kids today, but rather, “boys will be boys.”

So all that’s what my genes predispose me to do…good to know. If people are going to assign genetic causes to black people’s behavior, it’s equally legitimate to do the same to use white people, right?

His prescription for what we ought to do about it did make me cringe a bit, though.

And the next time you hear about some flesh-eating, Satan-worshiping teenager who just pickled his grandma, you’ll know his race before you even see his face on the nightly news, and you’ll know that if he’d just spent a little more time in church with the Black folks, none of this might ever have had to happen.