Month: September 2014

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news.

This Month’s Theme: Lazy, Hazy, Summer

“I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.”
Galen Rowell

Link of the Month: Boston – From Space
Astronaut photos from the ISS.

Bob’s Lazy, Hazy, Summer

Next Theme: (Friday, October, 10th): Shades of Gray (Color or black and white are acceptable)

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Random

Former Governor Involuntary Mandatory Vaginal Probe of Virginia was convicted of 11 counts of public corruption (basically) and faces a lot of jail time. His wife got nailed with seven corruption convictions and one conviction for obstruction of justice.

For a moment or two I considered feeling sad for them. But, I got over it.

Ed is correct to note that the current war fever is reminiscent of 2002, although there are some big differences. For one, the clamor for war against the Islamic State terrorist organization is coming mostly in visceral reaction to actual beheading videos and actual, fresh, atrocities carried out in Syria and Iraq. The administration didn’t concoct this situation or cherry-pick the intelligence. They aren’t complaining about atrocities that occurred 15 years earlier.

The threat posed by the Islamic State to American hostages, religious and ethnic opponents, and our facilities in Iraq are not hypothetical. They are very real. Whether the organization presents a direct “existential” threat to our homeland is a matter of dispute within the Intelligence Community, but as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently said, they are an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.”

Perhaps Hagel employed a bit of hyperbole there, but he’s right that the growth of the Islamic State threatens American interests even if they don’t necessarily threaten us (presently) inside our borders.

The question is, is there anything we can do about these threats that won’t make matters worse, that won’t come with unacceptable risks and costs, that will be able to work in a timely manner and have an end game, and that can sustain the support of our allies, Congress, and the people?

To date, the conflict in Syria (where the Islamic State originated) has not presented positive answers to the above questions. At the most basic level, the conflict in Syria has had a sectarian Sunni/Shia divide almost from the beginning. When Bashar al-Assad claimed that his opponents were terrorists, it was more true that we at first wanted to admit. In a reverse of the demographics of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria is a Sunni-majority country run by a Shia-splinter sect known as the Alawites. Opposition to Assad began as an ecumenical affair, but it didn’t take long for the Sunni powers to realize there was an opportunity to win control of the country for their sect. This made it incredibly complicated for U.S. foreign policy leaders to actively side with Assad’s opponents because it would have been seen as a deep betrayal in Baghdad and greatly complicated negotiations with Teheran over their nuclear program. We did not want to take a side in a sectarian war both on principle and for practical reasons. This ambivalence greatly irritated our Sunni allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf Emirates, but it was better than the alternative.

What has changed is that these same Sunni allies who bear most of the responsibility for the rise of the Islamic State are now quite alarmed by what they have created. As far back as February, the Saudis replaced Prince Bandar as their go-to guy for arming the Syrian rebels. In June, some of the top Saudi clerics issued fatwas banning travel to Syria to wage jihad. And just on Monday, the Saudis arrested 17 men for attempting to travel to Iraq and gave them long prison sentences. Meanwhile, the governor of the Sunni stronghold of Anbar Province (home of Falluja) came out against the Islamic State and begged for American assistance in resisting them.

In Baghdad, the government of Maliki stopped accusing the Kurds of harboring terrorists and annexing territory and agreed to send them ammunition. Maliki agreed to step down as prime minister and Haider al-Abadi, a man known for less sectarian tendencies, took over with the mission to form a coalition government. Every government in the region, regardless of sectarian makeup, agreed to al-Abadi’s appointment.

So, what’s going on here is that what had been an escalating sectarian war that had ripped both Syria and Iraq apart is now becoming something a little different and, perhaps, more promising.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are at least to some degree on the same page about who is in charge in Baghdad and what to do about the Islamic State. The government in Baghdad is reconciled with the Kurds for the time being, at least for the purposes of fighting the Islamic State.

This is the context in which President Obama has sent envoys to the region to develop a plan. To see if a plan can be concocted that meets the above criteria, the president, more than anything, needs time. And that’s the best way to understand the bellicose statements from Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry. In saying that we will not tolerate these beheadings and will chase the murderers to the “Gates of Hell,” Biden and Kerry are assuaging the bloodlust aroused by these killings and keeping the Democrats from creating distance from the administration in their impatience for decisive action. The administration will do something, but they aren’t ready to do anything, yet. Unlike the last administration, this administration strives to understand the complicated world as it is and not make commitments based on delusions that have no chance of success.

So, give them some time. It’s what they need, and they’ll be less likely to screw up if they have the space and time to think.

But he’s also right.. Like a stopped clock? Maybe. Read on.

===============

In his recent article Emulating Failure, Booman wrote:

Maine Governor Paul LePage is a bigot and an idiot.

He did so because said governor made a speech opposing unlimited illegal immigration to the U.S. Yes, he used an uninformed example in his speech but if he had been toeing the DemRat line instead of the RatPub one there would have been no negative comment from Mr. Booman.

Bet on it.

I received a missive from one of my favorite bloggers soon after reading it.

Here it is:

Oh!

I completely agree, Booman!!! Let those poor people come in. In fact, I’ll go you one further. Let’s completely open our borders to let anyone in who wants to come, and while we’re at it let’s also make being a citizen of the U.S. really easy by putting up a nice, simple digital sign-up available in every language on earth!!!

But…

Wait a minute!!!

I guess we’ve pretty well done that already, at least we’ve done so on the southern border that connects us with incredibly cheap, incredibly hard-working labor.

Never mind.

Yore freind…

Emily Litella

Read on for more.
Lissen up, Booman.

Anybody who thinks that there is anything even remotely “humanitarian” about the flood of illegals coming over the border belongs in that giant kindergarten class that we laughing call the centrist-media informed public.

This immigration thing is a place where the interests of the corporate controllers and the Democratic Party come into full agreement. The controllers get their semi-slave labor and the Democrats get a massive voting bloc.

Now…I am not in any way against immigration of poor people. I would not be here if a segment of the Central Americans of their day…the Irish…had not immigrated in great waves during the 19th century, and the Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican music that is a very important part of my life would also not be here. In fact, without immigration the U.S itself. wouldn’t be here. Not in the same form, for sure. But when masses of people immigrated here during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, they came to a place that needed workers. There were too many jobs and not enough people to do them and they could see a relatively unobstructed road to prosperity rising up right in front of them. One generation, maybe two of hard dues and they had a good chance of leading a much better life than the one from which they had fled.

Now?

Now we also have need for workers, but it is a different need. Now it’s not that there aren’t enough bodies to fill the jobs, it’s that there aren’t enough bodies willing to fill the jobs at the wages being offered for the work.

That is a big difference.

Why is that?

How did it happen?

i refer you once again to Ross Perot’s prescient warning during the 1992 presidential debates:

If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided i was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.

People whose ancestors have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations simply will not work for the wages that poor Central Americans from strife-torn countries see as acceptable. I will never forget a conversation I heard between two black, project-style/gang banger-style kids on the subway maybe six years ago. They were talking about a job one of them had been offered, and he said:

I don’t work for that kind of money. That’s Mexican money!!!

Then they both started laughing the laugh that does not mean “Ha Ha.”

Meanwhile the Central Americans are taking those jobs…and making it through on that kind of wage…while these kids and millions like them languish in the dreams of Hip-Hop riches fed to them by the controllers’ media machine. Not just poverty-level kids either, and not just black kids. A great deal of the U.S.  “unemployment” problem lies in our working class/middle class population of all races. I’ve seen it happen up close and personal. People just give up and go on welfare and food stamps because the job opportunities and wage levels are so low that they can live better not working. Not working in any official sense, in a day-to-day job. There’s a huge jobs grey market out there, y’know. People with master’s degrees in useful areas (and a college loan debt to match) just give the fuck up.

This all fits the corporate plans…until of course, it doesn’t. Corporations live on a quarterly horizon. One quarter of loss is all it takes to make already fidgety stockholders and creditors really nervous. Two quarters? Three? “Yer outta here!!!” they say. If Obama was on that kind of calendar he’s be gone three times already.

Meanwhile in Never-Never Land America the restaurant dishes still get washed, the lawns get mowed, the car washes are staffed and the building contractors pull up to the local square every day and load up a new bunch of undocumented workers for the day’s work.

The problem is…when does this influx of workers drive the wages down so far that no one will be able to afford to work and live? When does the inflationary cycle that has made my beloved Manhattan uninhabitable for all but the 1% and their workerbees reach Everytown, U.S.A.? We keep welcoming more and more workers, we’re gonna find out real soon.

This Maine governor? I dunno if he’s a “bigot and an idiot” or not. If he is, he’s certainly not lonely. And I don’t know whether he’s saying what he is saying because he’s a dumb motherfucker or whether he has thought this thing through. Either way…he’s got a point. Packing a country with yet more uneducated, low-skill workers…a country that has already pretty much lost things like Detroit , its proudest industrial city…is only a temporary answer no matter how hard these workers have been culturally preconditioned to work. When is the last immigrant that will break the country’s back going to show up?

Any day now.

Aaaaany day now…

That’s what I think.

Just sayin’…

Is a Democratic win in 2016 worth the risk of losing the country that (s)he is supposed to govern?

I don’t think so.

Do you?

AG

Maine Governor Paul LePage is a bigot and an idiot.

In the afternoon, LePage reiterated his message about energy costs at the Ellen Leach Home in Brewer, a residence for seniors. There, he spoke to over 30 people about a range of issues.

The audience was receptive, laughing at his jokes and nodding and clapping when he made comments about his no-holds-barred style and his stance on undocumented immigrants.

He insisted on calling them illegal aliens and explained that “what most people in Maine don’t want to acknowledge is that the ‘il’ makes it unlawful,” referring to the spelling of the word “illegal.”

“They are going to our schools, and that’s a real problem for me,” said LePage, who is running against Democrat Mike Michaud and independent Eliot Cutler.

“If we can’t build a fence high enough … we ought to go to China and see how they built a wall,” he said, which got laughs.

Because the Great Wall of China was so successful in keeping out foreigners.

220 AD – 960 AD

The Feudal Dynasties saw China again break up into disparate, warring states. During this period, northern invaders were successful in breaching the fortifications in an extended fashion for the first time in the history of the Great Wall of China. The nomadic armies learned to concentrate on specific weak points along the wall bringing to bear all their war engines on that one spot.

960 AD – 1279 AD

In the Song Dynasty, the Jin, a Manchu-speaking group from the north, was able to breach the wall and conquer northern China. The emperor fled the northern capital and based his empire in southern China during this dynasty. Despite the downfall of the north, China flourished during the Song Dynasty by expanding trade over the South China Sea.

1271 AD – 1368 AD

For the first time in the history of the Great Wall of China, the entire nation was conquered by foreigners during the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongol armies not only swept through China, but they conquered much of Asia reaching all the way to central Europe with their horse-driven armies. As they were from the north themselves, the Mongols made no effort to maintain or improve the wall wanting instead to facilitate communication between the two regions.

I grow weary of the Stupid.

I think Nate Silver is brilliant and very, very good at predicting elections, but he’s only as good as the data he has to work with, and he is capable of making small mistakes or developing models that are too clunky to capture some of the finer grains in campaigns. One example is his reliance on a “fundamentals” score that really serves as a stand-in for good data in the early stages before he has a robust sample of polls to work with.

If you look at the fundamentals of a state like Kansas, it’s going to look like the Republicans have a huge advantage over the Democrats. The state hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since the 1930’s and it vastly prefers Republican presidential candidates. The voters are very conservative and the president is quite unpopular there.

But this all masks a rather serious split within the Republican Party in Kansas. Under the leadership of ultra-conservative Governor Sam Brownback, moderate Republican lawmakers were purged from the legislature and replaced with wingnuts. Dave Weigel termed it The Great Kansas Republican Purge of 2012. And, yes, Koch Brothers money made it possible.

Much of the dispute focused on moderate Republican opposition to Governor Brownback’s proposed income tax cuts, which were seen as fiscally suicidal. And that has turned out to be the case, with both Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s recently downgrading the state’s credit rating.

The most prominent of those purged Republican lawmakers is former state Senate president Steve Morris:

Brownback’s critics say the degree of the tax cuts is threatening basic services, not to mention the state’s bond rating and requirement to balance the budget.

“People are concerned about education,” said Steve Morris, a member of Republicans for Kansas Values, a group of more than 100 GOP members who are backing [Democratic candidate Paul] Davis. “They’re concerned about transportation.”

Morris is a former Kansas state Senate president who lost a 2012 Republican primary to a Brownback-favored Republican. He said he is backing Davis not because of “sour apples,” but “concern about the direction the state’s heading in.”

The result is that Brownback trailed Davis on all three polls taken in August. Rasmussen had Brownback down by 10 points. Needless to say, when the incumbent governor is doing this badly, the “fundamentals” of the state don’t count for much. Brownback will be on the top of the ticket, not President Obama. And that’s a problem for Sen. Pat Roberts. With a very large contingent of angry moderate Republicans headed to the polls to defeat Brownback, might they also cross-over to beat Roberts?

That possibility is what led me to write about this race last week, and I noted that a Public Policy Polling survey had found Roberts narrowly beating Democrat Chad Taylor in a two-way race but losing to independent Greg Orman in a two-way race. Might Chad Taylor be enticed somehow to drop out of the race? Would Greg Orman agree to caucus with the Democrats?

Well, today, Chad Taylor dropped out of the race, leaving Orman a one-on-one contest with Sen. Roberts. We can only speculate about whatever behind the scene machinations went on to make this happen because Chad Taylor is keeping mum.

Taylor, reached by phone in his car, tells Kansas First News that he turned in the papers to withdraw at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday.

When asked why, Taylor declined to comment and says he “would do some press later in the week.”

As I pointed out last week, Prof. Sam Wang saw this possibility as a complete game changer:

If the [independent senators] and the Democrats win exactly forty-nine seats, Orman would have it in his power to provide—or deny—the critical fiftieth vote to control the chamber. In all the outcomes simulated in my model, this event has an almost thirty per cent probability of happening. Added to the Democrats’ chances of gaining control without Orman, the total probability of combined Democratic and independent control would be eighty-five per cent—a total game-changer.

Nate Silver still gives Roberts a 56% chance of winning against Orman, but that is because his “fundamentals” number gives the Republicans a 25% advantage. That’s an advantage that takes no account of the civil war that has gone on inside the Kansas GOP over the last two years. It takes no account of this, which happened yesterday:

More than 70 former Republican lawmakers announced their support for the independent candidate for U.S. Senate over incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts on Wednesday.

Traditional Republicans for Common Sense, which is made up of moderate Republicans who have served in the Kansas Legislature, chose to endorse Greg Orman over Roberts and Democrat Chad Taylor.

“Our members know leadership because they’ve been leadership,” said Jim Yonally, the group’s chairman and a former state representative from Overland Park. “Our members have been there. They’ve been on the frontline. They’ve had to make the tough decisions.”

The group sees Orman as a pragmatist who can broker compromises between the two parties, said Rochelle Chronister, who has previously represented Neodesha in the House and served as chair of the Kansas Republican Party.

“This has been the most do-nothing Congress ever,” Chronister said. “They can’t even pass an appropriations bill to keep the government running.”

Like I said, I think Nate Silver is brilliant. But Harry Reid ain’t no dummy either. And I think Reid just cooked Pat Roberts’s goose.

Al Giordano’s call to arms is provocative and somewhat inspirational. And when Al makes a prediction, you best take it seriously. I do have some problems with his analysis, however. I think he’s shoehorning a lot of complicated factors into a too-tight box when he focuses so heavily on the age of various presidential candidates. I really doubt, for example, that age or the youth vote were very big factors in Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 victory over Herbert Hoover. I’m not sure Jimmy Carter’s age was much of a focus in 1976, either. Ford’s presidential pardon of Nixon and Carter’s strength in the South and among evangelicals were much bigger factors. Even Clinton’s 1992 victory was more influenced by a strong third-party challenge than the spry Clinton-Gore ticket.

I didn’t mention JFK’s victory because I’d have to agree that his youth played an important role, but it didn’t hurt that his candidacy mobilized Catholics, either.

Having said all that, it’s Giordano’s premise that Hillary Clinton cannot rely on getting the same kind of turnout that Barack Obama enjoyed among young voters (because of her age) or African-Americans (because she isn’t Barack Obama). He also insists that Clinton can’t make up the difference with women because they already vote in such high percentages. These are assertions that are worth consideration. Overall, I remain unconvinced that her age would put her at a generational disadvantage against a much younger Republican. Young people are capable of comparing Clinton’s policies to Ted Cruz’s or Marco Rubio’s or Rand Paul’s or Paul Ryan’s and realizing that they prefer Clinton’s. That doesn’t mean that they’ll be excited about Clinton and get to work organizing on her behalf, however. If she’s going to have a problem with the youth vote, it won’t be that they prefer her opponent. It will be that she doesn’t inspire them. And I don’t think age is that much of a factor in that. Perhaps she’s been around too long, but that’s a slightly different issue.

Where Al and I agree completely is on our assessments of Clinton’s skills as a politician. ‘Overrated’ is putting it mildly. That’s not to say she is a bad politician. She’s hard-working, tenacious, smart, understands the issues, knows how to work the refs, has a huge organization and donor base, massive support within the party organization and in Congress, and has more relevant experience than any possible opponent.

But she does say some pretty stupid tone-deaf things sometimes. And she doesn’t have a good track record of picking smart, ethical people to run her organizations. Still, I don’t think the risk with Clinton is that she’ll lose and hand the White House to the Republicans. The risk is more that she’ll show bad judgment in her foreign policy and that she’ll repeat some of her husband’s more egregious cave-ins to big business.

But, again, you ignore Al’s advice at your peril.

If you were forced to choose between ending legal divorce, banning gay marriage, making contraception illegal, or restoring 19th-Century sabbath laws that banned work and play on Sundays, which would you choose?

One of those things doesn’t strike me as a terribly bad idea, but then I like my New York Giants.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense to poll the public at large about whether “Redskins” is an offensive racial slur. Is it a big surprise that the majority of non-Native Americans think that the term is unoffensive? Non-Chinese people probably think it’s perfectly fine to run a restaurant called “Chink’s.” Is that how we decide whether something is offensive?

Don’t get me wrong. Chronic pain is a real thing and we need solutions for people who suffer from it. But we also need to get real about an epidemic that is slaughtering our people at a very alarming rate. Just in Staten Island alone, more than 70 people died from opioid overdoses in 2012. The deaths were split, roughly 50%-50%, between heroin and prescription pill overdoses, but most likely all of the victims started out with the pills.

It used to be that the medical profession undertreated pain. Doctors didn’t want to create opioid addicts, and the consensus was that patients should suffer rather than risk addiction. That started to change in the seventies, with the rise of the pain-management movement, when pain came to be seen not only as a symptom but as an illness in itself. Now the worry was of “opiophobia.” A widely used pharmaceuticals textbook advised, “Although many physicians are concerned about ‘creating addicts,’ very few individuals begin their drug addiction problems by misuse of prescription drugs. . . . Fear of producing such medical addicts results in needless suffering among patients with pain.”

Strong opioids like morphine or oxycodone already existed for patients with intense, short-term pain from healing trauma or end-of-life illnesses. Long-term, chronic pain was another matter—no existing drug was ideal for that. Seeing the need, Purdue Frederick, a pharmaceutical company in Norwalk, Connecticut, developed a long-term pain reliever called MS Contin, which was a morphine pill with a time-release formula. When the patent ran out on MS Contin, Purdue introduced a time-release oxycodone pill, OxyContin.

The pill entered the market in 1996 and quickly became an iatrogenic disaster. OxyContin’s purpose was merciful—to provide pain relief at a steady rate over a ten- or twelve-hour period, so a pain sufferer could sleep—and millions benefitted from taking it. But for its effect to last that long the pill had to contain a lot of oxycodone. People discovered that the capsules could be crushed, then swallowed, snorted, or injected for a powerful high. Purdue marketed the drug aggressively to general practitioners who accepted the company’s claim (untested and untrue) that OxyContin was difficult to abuse. Overdoses involving OxyContin soon became horribly routine in places like Maine and West Virginia. As the epidemic of “Oxy” addiction and overdose spread, Purdue did not take the drug off the market. Several states and many individuals sued the company, which fought with tobacco-company-like determination but eventually gave in. In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to misbranding the drug by not stating its potential for causing addiction—a felony—and paid a fine that totalled $634.5 million. It also introduced a version of OxyContin that was more tamper-proof. By that time, the drug had made the company many billions of dollars.

I don’t know if it was ever true that “very few individuals begin their drug addiction problems by misuse of prescription drugs” but it is the furthest thing from true today. Almost no one is introduced to opioids by taking heroin. Lower level prescription opioids like Vicodin, Oxy-Contins, and Percocets are now routinely abused as party drugs. Kids get hooked on these pills which are often pilfered from medicine cabinets, and then discover that heroin is more powerful and much cheaper. It’s not even true that everyone who becomes an addict started out with the intention to get high. Plenty of people get addicted to painkillers that were actually prescribed for them for legitimate purposes, usually to manage pain following minor surgery.

Whenever I write about this problem, I get some push back from people who suffer from chronic pain. They’re concerned that they’ll either be denied the medication they need or they’ll find getting their medication to be a bigger hassle than it should be. As the cited article indicates, it’s true that chronic pain used to be under-treated. But it is clearly over-treated today. In the mid-1980’s, when I had four impacted wisdom teeth removed, I was prescribed codeine pills that were pretty inadequate for treating my pain. But I survived, and I didn’t become an addict. Today, I would not suffer. Today, I would be given Percocets or something stronger. And, depending on my genetic predispositions, I might become an addict.

This is a difficult issue where changes in policy will cause pain to shift from one group to another. There are no easy solutions. The cost of lowering the number of overdoses and addicts is that more people have to experience pain. But, if you look at the numbers, you can see pretty clearly that we have moved too far in the direction of eliminating pain. More kids are dying today from opioid overdoses than are dying in automobile accidents.

We need policies that recognize this fact.