brainiac conspiracy

Dick-Swinging Contests

It's just, like, such a Guy Thing. Why is this? Is it pathological?

Not being completely snarky here. Olbermann doesn't need the money. Current TV won't survive or die based on a single programming decision. So what's with the brinksmanship and the battle of egos and We Will Fight Them on The Beaches, etc.?

I swear, in some way I'll never understand what makes my gender tick when it comes to the Alpha-Male Power Dynamic. It's like, who can lift his leg and spray more musk in the room. Have we failed to evolve beyond that point, or are we still only a few degrees of separation apart from our Australopithecine ancestors? Sometimes, I really wonder.

---Vitelius

Hint: Not Concern Trolling

I think Cole is missing the point here, just a bit:

Yes, each and everyone of the murders that halfwit Lowry mentioned is awful. Yes, black on black crime is awful. But in each case above, the victim’s family are receiving some semblance of justice.

And that is all anyone wants for Trayvon Martin. Justice.

Lowry just can’t be that stupid.

Only if you read his missive as a plea for justice for unsung black-on-black crime victims, but that's not what it is. He's simply providing his readers with more part-and-parcel examples of what murderous little savages urban black people are. Once that's established, the argument for using the murder of a black kid to wage ideological jihad against liberal do-gooderism is an easy one to justify. Because in the wingnut version of a "colorblind" society, Trayvon Martin wouldn't have been mourned any more than those other black victims because none of them deserve to be mourned. Because they got what they had coming to them. Because at heart they are morally deficient. He's not mourning those people, he's mocking them.

To be fair, people like Rich Lowry are equal-oppotuity bigots since the same overarching principle holds true for the poor, the jobless, immigrants, gays, Muslims, women, you name it. In the wingnut world, bad things only happen to bad people, which is why liberal attempts to subvert the existing moral order must be stopped at all costs. That's just how these people think. Period.

And some of my best friends are conservatives. Also too.

---Vitelius

Towards a Clean Green Energy Future

Just shoot me already:

The journal Environmental Science and Technology reports in a new study that the Fukushima radiation plume contacted North America at California “with greatest exposure in central and southern California”, and that Southern California’s seaweed tested over 500% higher for radioactive iodine-131 than anywhere else in the U.S. and Canada [...]

In addition, radioactive debris is starting to wash up on the Pacific Coast. And because the Japanese are burning radioactive materials instead of disposing of them, radioactive rain-outs will continue for some time . . . even on the Pacific Coast.

Toxic seaweed? That's shit's just flotsam, so what's the big deal?

[S]eaweeds (kelps and other algae) and microscopic planktonic algae . . . serve as the primary producers in this ecosystem. The planktonic algae support small planktonic invertebrates such as copepods, which in turn are consumed by filter-feeding sessile invertebrates such as hydroids, scallops, barnacles, sea anemones, bryozoans, and tube worms, as well as other smaller mobile predators like fish and certain crustaceans.

The larger seaweeds are eaten both directly by a broad range of animals, including sea urchins, fishes, small snails, shrimp-like crustaceans, sea stars, and crabs, and indirectly (as large and small loose pieces of "drift") by abalones, sea urchins, mussels, and barnacles. Many of these animals are then consumed by mid-level predators, such as other sea stars, larger crabs, larger fishes, and octopuses.

I guess in addition to growing my own vegetables, I will need to figure out how to start farming my own fish in my apartment bath tub. Guess I'll start with some Sea Monkeys, and work my way up from there.

---Vitelius

RIM Jobs

Apropos of nothing, been following this story a bit more closely than I usually follow tech news because I bought a Blackberry Curve last summer to replace the (company) iPhone I lost when I was laid off. The reason I went with a BB was because I'd had one several years ago, and loved it, and I don't really need a lot of the bells and whistles (and the price tag to match) that the iPhone offers---plus, AT&T wireless coverage in my neighborhood, frankly, blows. Anyway, back to 2005 or so, the old BB's keypad was spacious enough for even a big-thumbed user like me to bash out some lengthy e-mails in fairly quick order, the trackbar had notches that made for precise screen navigation, and the wireless coverage (Singular, I recall) was decent most places, though the browser app could be slow to load pages.

Anyway, the latest version I bought last year just looks and feels like cheap knockoff crap compared to the previous generation. The keypad is tinier, the view screen is tinier, the swivel-ball trackbar is hideously unresponsive, and while the wireless coverage is awesome and never drops calls (Verizon), the browser app is still prehistorically slow---and as soon as my contract expires, I'm switching over to an Android.

In short, I think the take-away from the RIM saga is this: Yes, the Apple touch-screen Changed Everything®, but there are plenty of people who don't really care about that, and who won't want to pay a premium so they can stream Angry Birds and upload photos to Facebook because they just want a functioning mobile device. So while you don't necessarily have to compete toe-to-toe versus the iPhone in every facet of UI technology, the one thing you can't afford to do in the consumer market is cheap out the product. Not sure why I mentioned this today---maybe was wondering if anyone else is still using a BB, and what their impressions are of the latest models.

---Vitelius

No Good Deed

Sure glad these people got a seat at the table when the Affordable Care Act was being written. You can never have enough good-faith negotiators in the room.

Can't say I'll be shedding too many tears when the Supreme Court throws out the law.

---Vitelius

Pretty Easy Math

Ayn Rand + Baby Jesus = Teabilly Frankenstein:

Gauchat further validates the argument of The Republican War on Science by showing that the decline in trust in science was not linear. It occurred in association with two key “cultural break” points that, I argue in the book, heightened right wing science politicization: The election of Ronald Reagan, and then the election of George W. Bush.

Which just happened to be the points in GOP history when the religious nuts were (a) first welcomed into the party policy machinery, then (b) handed the keys to the store and given free rein over the bureaucracy. Of course, the materialistic atheism of Ayn Rand---the plinth of old-school industrial-age free-market Republicanism---and the repressive moralism of ascendant Christian fundamentalism are philosophically incompatible with each other, and that's frankly why so much of what passes for conservative discourse these days sounds like incoherent babbling. Because basically, it is. But either way, this is another good reason why we really, desperately need to get this Religion Crap out of our politics. We can't really legislate it, but we can withhold our support from legislators who pimp and pander to it.

---Vitelius

Nothing Will Change

The "legitimacy" of the Court after they trash the Affordable Care Act. Three reasons:

1. Most people don't follow this stuff all that closely, so when the Court rules against ACA, the public at large will simply internalize the decision to harmonize with the conventional external narrative that their preferred media outlets have barraged them with, i.e., that "Obamacare" was an example of "executive overreach";

2. The religious crusaders on the Court don't give a shit about "legimitacy" because that's not something that can be bestowed by the rabble:

Every one of these men was a member of the Federalist Society. Every single one of them was groomed for exactly what they are doing right now. This is their time to shine, to do what they have been groomed to do. When you train soldiers to fight, and drill their mission into them every day, and drill the rightness and correctness of their mission into them every day, and assure them they are fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, only a fool would be surprised that they are eager to go into combat.

3. In the most painfully obvious way, the Court stopped being a "legitimate" arbiter of Constitutional disputes on December 12, 2000. What, this is news to anyone?

---Vitelius

Biting The Hand

We can never really have enough Sista Souljah moments, now, can we.

Screw Citizens Elect. Someone needs to start up a Labor Party in this country.

---Vitelius

Heartbreaking

Read this now. Because it makes you realize why all of these legalistic arguments we've been hearing over the Affordable Care Act are so hollow, and really, so offensive, whether for or against it. Because people are dying every day in America because we won't confront the simple reality that the demands of capitalism and the needs of sick people simply cannot be resolved to the mutual benefit of both parties. And because we have opted to favor the former at the expense of the latter. (Via DeLong.)

---Vitelius

Give The People What They Want

Technically in politics, it's not how you win an election, but how you win re-election. Recent chattering about health care and abortion and open-carry laws aside, what people---and young people in particular---have wanted most these past three years are jobs, and money, and debt relief.

They really haven't quite gotten enough of them:

Obama’s approval rating among college students dropped to 46 percent last December from 58 percent in November 2009, according to a Harvard University poll. Fifty percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they would “definitely” be voting, an 11 percentage-point decrease from the fall of 2007. A third of respondents said they approved of Democrats in Congress, and 24 percent approved of Republicans. Just 12 percent said the nation was headed in the right direction

“The turnout will not be great,” Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, said in a phone interview. The war in Afghanistan, a lack of progress on closing Guantanamo Bay and a dismal job picture taint Obama’s prospects, he said. The unemployment rate among 18- to 24-year-olds was 16.3 percent at the end of last year, the highest since record-keeping began in 1948, according to a February Pew Research Center report.

I hope the administration can figure out how to galvanize some constituency of its winning voter bloc from four years ago. With GOP state legislatures working overtime to deprive millions of Democratic voters of the franchise, I don't see how they can stand the double-whammy of Teabilly vote suppression in states like Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania and Florida and a depressed youth vote. And yes, I know the President's poll numbers look pretty good for now---and Romney is such a detestable figure, he may be simply unelectable---but there's a long way to go between now and November, and until those voters actually show up at the polls, we can only consider Obama's current polling edge a hypothetical margin.

---Vitelius

Contagion

It used to refer to some sort of infectious disease, the implication being that the infected host needed to be quarantined to protect the "other" healthy organisms (i.e., people) in its immediate vicinity. Now, of course, we use it to dehumanize entire nations of people whose economies have been ransacked by organized crime syndicates international job creators, and who must now be allowed to perish in isolation for the good of the leeches who've bled them. Glad that's settled!

---Vitelius

Lesser Blog Morning

Out for more periodontal hijinks today. Hilarity ensues.

---Vitelius

Random Late-Night Musical Thought

I'd probably like country and/or gospel music a lot more if there were more country/gospel acts that played music like this. But don't it always seem to go, etc.

---Vitelius

Why Americans Are Conflicted & Confused

This is not difficult at all to decipher, even if we grant the massive disinformaton campaign that's been waged against the ACA. Here's why:

1. Too many provisions of the law have taken too long to phase in.

2. The administration has done a shitty job of conveying the benefits to the public.

3. There are insufficient cost controls for people with pre-existing conditions to obtain affordable health care, so very few people have taken advantage of it.

4. The administration has done a shitty job of conveying the benefits to the public.

5. Even with the doughnut-hole fix, people are still overpaying for prescription drugs.

6. The administration has done a shitty job of conveying the benefits to the public.

7. For-profit health insurers are still ruthlessly jacking up their rates.

8. The administration has done a shitty job of conveying the benefits to the public.

9. The benefits to the public are . . . ???

10. Wouldn't you be a bit confused at this point, too?

This isn't a matter of public ignorance, really, though the Mighty Wurlitzer has played its role in the obfuscation game. It's more a matter of the public wondering why it should support a "reform" policy that doesn't reform the worst practices of an industry it claims to be regulating.

But it is of a piece with this administration. As with its approach to banking reform, it has chosen to rely on the same profit-driven markets that caused the crisis in the first place, and which are hopelessly dysfunctional and systemically corrupt, to solve the problems they created. Yes, if it survives a court challenge, the ACA will eventually give us something marginally better than the current system, but at a tremendous cost of money and time when simpler, more understandable and more affordable solutions were readily available. And yes, if the Court strikes down the ACA in totality, the decision will represent an outrageous disregard of judicial precedent. But in the final analysis, the administration will get what it richly deserves for being the smartest guys in the room for thinking that the way to beat the Republicans at this game was to co-opt their bad policies instead of ignoring them altogether. Sometimes, making no deal at all is better than making a Big Deal, especially if it's the wrong deal.

---Vitelius

Also Too, Unforced Errors

Speaking of which, wasn't it the administration's idea in the first place to fast-track a review of the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court this spring instead of letting the appeals process run its course through the year, by which time more of the ACA's provisions (e.g., the exchanges) would have taken effect, and which might have made the Act more legally problematic for the Court to overrule?

Uh, trying to remember precisely, but . . . yeah, it was.

Reckon they figured it was a slam-dunk case. They just didn't understand which team had control of the ball, a hand on the shot clock, and the referees on the payroll.

Either that, or they assumed the Roberts Court, concerned as it must be with its legacy and its legitimacy, would do anything to avoid a partisan 5-4 vote on yet another hot-button issue so soon after Citizens United. If so, they failed to understand (again?) the Federalist opposition: An army of Hegelian foot soldiers who do not see legitimacy as something that is conferred upon the rulers by the consent of the governed but as something the rulers confer upon themselves. A fortnight hence, I guess they'll find out.

---Vitelius

Reality Check

Frustrated as I have often been at the administration's willingness to co-opt Republican talking points---and even Republican legislative initiatives that are on the verge of being declared unconstitutional---a couple of numbers are jumping out of my head:

80. And 75.

Those are the ages that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer will turn in 2013.

I may have to hold my nose to vote for Obama come November, but vote for him I surely will. What other choice have we really got at this point?

---Vitelius

Bork is Just an Excuse

They've been railing against "liberal activist judges" for as long as I've been alive (Eisenhower was President when I was born), and four of the five GOP Supreme Court nominees that have come down the pike since Bork was rejected have been well, just as extreme as Robert Bork was. (For the record: Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts; only Souter was the red-headed stepchild). So if there was some score to settle against the high crime of Borking, I'd say it's long been decided in favor of the whackadoodles, and that the reason why Republican Presidents keep promoting so many Borks to the bench is not because they're still harboring a grudge against mean Teddy Kennedy for what happened in 1987 but because they won't be satisfied until the entire federal court system is 100-percent fully Borked and purged of any judges appointed by Democrats. Because these people do not accept the legitimacy of pluralistic government and haven't since at least 1994. It really is that simple, and they're not going to stop for the foreseeable future, so there's no point in any Democratic political figures trying to reach a state of "compromise" with them. The word doesn't exist in their lexicon.

---Vitelius

Because It's Always 1984

And it's Morning in America in our nation's capital, and there are no Fat Tonys or Federalists on the Supreme Court, and not any even ideologues except maybe for that idiot Renchburg and that darkie Marshall guy on the other side of the aisle. Nope, just sensible centrists with names like Blackmun and Powell and O'Connor and Stewart who always rule on matters of law based strictly upon the constitutional merits, never their own biases, whether they were appointed by Democrats or Republicans. Why look, they even ruled 9-0 against Dick Nixon!

Because an entire generation of our media and political elites willfully blindered themselves from the reality that what mainstream conservative political discourse, and mainstream conservative legal theory in America have evolved into is not informed debate or even reasoned polemic but the reactionary ranting of talk-show Tenthers.

And now, they are on the verge of extracting the vengeance they've been dreaming of since the early days of the New Deal. But hey, Democrats do it too, which I guess is why nobody could have possibly predicted, etc.

This really was not difficult to foresee. One only needed to be wearing a clear set of untinted lenses. You could even have written a book about it.

---Vitelius

Tinseltown Rebellions

You're going to encounter a certain amount of tension between preservationists and urban planners whenever any wide-ranging redevelopment plans are being trotted out for long-established but somewhat-rundown urban enclaves. And certainly, when you are dealing with a community that holds such strong sentimental value for a lot of locals, the prospect of redevelopment will elicit even stronger feelings than normal. The only salient questions, to me, in any kind of renewal project like this would be:

(1) Will it promote increased economic activity, i.e., more jobs and money for the area?

(2) Will it take advantage of existing infrastructure and transportation to attract commerce?

(3) Will it increase overall public safety and well-being for the community?

(4) Will it at least maintain (if not enhance) the community's existing public amenities?

Now, in the case discussed here, just about any redevelopment would answer these questions affirmatively since, sentimentality aside, most of central and east (i.e., "Old") Hollywood is, frankly, a low-rent crime-addled eyesore, and has been for decades. Hollywood Boulevard between LaBrea and Vine has become a bustling destination for dining, dating, nightlife, etc., over the past 20 years, but the "trickle down" effect upon the surrounding neighborhood has been marginal (and in the case of parking, arguably to its detriment), and should you stroll more than two blocks off the main drag in any direction, you had better be packing.But,

(5) If the aim of the redevelopment is to encourage more people to stay out of their cars and "live more locally," can people of modest means afford to live and work in the newly redeveloped neighborhood?

That's a genuine sticking point since most modern mega-developers want to design their mixed-use spaces for a more affluent clientele with plenty of disposable income for dinner, drinks, shopping, etc., the better to attract front-line anchor tenants---and as a rule, poor people don't have the kind of disposable income these businesses favor. That's not to say you can't shoehorn an upscale development complex into a decidedly downscale neighborhood---the LA Live/Staples Center complex downtown has been a roaring success, both for attracting commerce and as a magnet for trickle-down development of affordable housing on adjacent parcels of land. But unlike downtown's South Park district, where plenty of vacant lots provided ample space to build out for lofts, parking, etc., undeveloped real estate is almost nonexistent in a place like Hollywood anymore.

How to fix? Well, most of Hollywood's neighborhoods---away from the high-traffic commercial pockets---are fairly low-density (detached single-family housing, triplexes, bungalow courts, etc.), though it was not ever thus; when the community was smaller, a greater percentage of the population lived in multi-story, tenement-style buildings as one finds in the eastern cities. Though earthquakes and past renovations have taken a toll on their number, there are still quite a few of these old structures in existence, many in close proximity to subway/transit stops, but a lot of them have been either allowed to deteriorate to slum properties or have been re-zoned for commercial/storage use.

So, perhaps a solution to the "Hollywood gentrification problem" would entail a more scattershot "community-wide" (as opposed to a boulevard-centric) initiative that would trade off new upscale commercial development near the historic center with rehabs of structures in outlying neighborhoods, to be re-zoned for residency and reserved for low- and middle-income housing. Most of the people who live there already fit into this income demographic, so you'd be able to retain the area's attraction/affordability for its existing residents, plus you'd be giving lower-income people a stake in the greater redevelopment effort, which translates into a stake in their own community's well-being. (I'm sorta thinking "Broken Windows" here, which Hollywood certainly suffers a great deal from, and how to empower local residents to do something about it on their own without having to rely on already-stretched police/city services.)

Looking back from an hour ago, this was supposed to be a short, pithy post. I guess this means that balancing all the needs of a community before the bulldozers show up to raze it is a difficult, knotty subject requiring of plenty of time and devotion to detail. Fortunately, planners in LA have gotten a lot smarter about this over the last generation or so. Hopefully, they'll get the formula right this time too.

---Vitelius

In Other News, It's All Bullshit

Glad to see this explained in plain, unambiguous English:

For all practical purposes, the economic power of the federal government is no longer constitutionally constrained. By using its tax power, the federal government already forces you to save for retirement (Social Security), insure against disability (ditto), provide for health care in retirement (Medicare), and pay for all manner of stuff you may neither need nor want. The government could perfectly well use its tax power to pay for universal health insurance. Obamacare is a milder dispensation in terms of personal liberty than tax-and-spend schemes that are already in place or any number of tax-and-spend alternatives to Obamacare that would immediately pass constitutional muster.

Am I forgetting the Broccoli Question? If the government can force you to buy health insurance, what can't it force you to buy? The common-sense answer to this, as we've just seen, is straightforward. Nothing. The government can make you pay for whatever it likes---that's where things already stand, and striking down the mandate won't change it. The Constitution as interpreted by the Court these past decades allows the federal government to put your taxes up and use the proceeds to send you a weekly box of broccoli. If Washington instructed you to choose your own basket of fruit and vegetables or else pay a penalty, that would be a smaller infringement of your freedom than the Constitution already allows.

As a practical matter, in other words, there's no "limiting principle".

Now I'm no constitutional scholar, obviously, but I've read my share of constitutional history, and my share of Supreme Court decisions/dissents, and since I like to think of myself as at least a halfway-savvy layman, I was wondering if I'd lost a few too many brain cells over the years to make sense of Justice Kennedy's question about the "limiting principle" in the ACA.

Put more plainly, my initial reaction was, "What's he talking about? Any 'limiting principle' is whatever our elected government says it is at any given time in history. If the governed don't care to abide by the 'principle', they are free to unelect the government and replace it with one that will advance a 'limiting principle' that enjoys the consent of the governed at that particular time. And in those cases where the parties involved can't quite agree on the correct interpretation of what a 'limiting principle' is, well, that's why we have courts---to provide a little guidance."

This just seemed to me like a case of hiding in plain sight, something so obvious and self-evident that it wouldn't need to be explained to a first-year law student. It almost seemed as if Justice Kennedy was asking the government to do the court's job of interpreting the law for them.

Of course, at this point I assumed that that I was missing some sophisticated, arcane point of law here since it didn't dawn on me that a Supreme Court justice would waste litigants' time engaging in legalistic sophistries and "gotcha" tricks on such a historically significant case.

Then again, it also didn't dawn on me---as it does now, sort of---that Justice Kennedy, like his conservative colleagues, might have been, well, patently full of shit, i.e., that this whole three-day charade was a calculated exercise to force the Obama administration to rationalize a lot of straw-man legal theories that are either (a) largely irrelevant to the matter at hand, or (b) phony broccoli pseudo-theories that rely on Chamber of Commerce talking points rather than on federal case-law texts for their provenance.

Think about it: If they were really only interested in hearing arguments on the constitutionality of the ACA, they could have done it in a single hearing that lasted maybe a couple of hours. But the Federalist Five strict constructionists didn't do this because they wanted extra sessions to (1) get it read into the record that the law's prescribed penalty for lack of insurance coverage is not a "tax", which means the law doesn't fall under the "taxing power" of Congress and is hence unconstitutional; and (2) get read into the record the argument that any federal constraints/guidelines on states receiving federal funds (e.g., for Medicaid) is a violation of the Commerce Clause---which now gives them the precedent they can leverage in future rulings to invalidate just about any piece of federally funded social-welfare legislation that's been enacted since the 1930s, perhaps earlier. Well played, boys.

But mark my words, kiddies. What we learned the last three days is, it's just like wrestling, only with robes instead of tights; the masks, unfortunately, are transparent these days. Get ready for the wrecking ball to fall in a second Obama administration.

---Vitelius