Thursday, October 28, 2010

People that should be (at least) locked up for October: Russell Pearce (R-AZ)

So I decided to have a feature.  Because features make for good blogs, right?

Every month, I'm going to give a profile of someone who should be, at the very least, put in prison.  Think of it like Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World, except I'm not an pretentious ex-sports reporter.

So, for October, I present Senator Russell Pearce, a man whose continued existence is proof that God doesn't strike down evil.

Senator Pearce, 63, assumed office last year.  He served for some time as Chief Deputy Sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona.  He was appointed by Republican officials as Director of Highway Safety, but was later discharged after tampering with state driving records.  A real stand-up guy.

He became the Representative of District 18 in Arizona in 2001 and served there until his campaign for Senate in 2008.  But he was by no means idle! In April of 2006, he endorsed J.T. Ready in his campaign for city council in Mesa, AZ.  The same J.T. Ready seen here posing with his Neo-Nazi buddies.  Of course, then-Representative Pearce had absolutely no idea that the buddy he held hands with in his anti-immigration rally was a NEO-Nazi! Why would he associate with white supremacists?

Well, I mean, aside from the fact that he is one.  But he's sorry.  So it's okay.

Pearce has always stood by a hard position on immigration.  In that he don't like it much.  He recently cited a statistic that "Twenty percent [of immigrants] coming across the border already have a criminal history." (source).  He says that there's a lot of violence coming out of these illegals! His stance on violence, of course, being made perfectly clear by the repeated beatings he delivers to his wife.

No surprise that he had a pretty strong hand in the drafting of the Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, AKA, the legalization and institutionalization of racial profiling in Arizona.  But how strong a hand? Well, apparently not a very strong hand, it's mostly drafted by the prison industry.

That's right.  The prison industry.

I strongly recommend reading that article.  It will make you very, very upset.  And that's something you want to be, if you're reading this blog.

Senator Pearce presented before a hotel conference rooms of prison executives (yes, those exist) and legislators a plan to not only build a bunch of new prisons, but also churn out prisoners to fill them! What a concept.  Of course, there was little debate to be had, but a lot of profit.
And so, the bill was drafted there and transmitted, almost word-for-word, to the statehouse.  36 co-sponsors jumped up out of no where.  Well, not no where, they were in the hotel room with the prison execs.  The bill found its way to the desk of Governor Jan Brewer.  It was then signed into law.  30 of the 36 co-sponsors receive campaign contributions and everyone's happy.

Except, of course, the people of Arizona.  And anyone not as racially pure as Senator Pearce and his white supremacist ilk.

So there you have it.  Senator Pearce.  October's person who should be thrown in prison.  At least.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Feeling good about the world? Let me fix that.

This is a really fascinating article.

It explains, albeit very briefly, the cycle of poverty-to-prison.  That people who are poor tend to be more likely to spend more time in prison and, due to their experience, have a harder time holding down a job.  Thus, they stay poor and remain likely to go back to prison.  This chart is really interesting:


The rate of High School dropouts going to prison has increased.  Especially among African Americans.  It's pretty interesting, also, to see that White High School dropouts are more likely to be imprisoned than Latino dropouts.  The article explains that "...if current incarceration trends hold, fully 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979...will spend time living in prison at some point in their lives".  Mind-boggling.

Depressed yet? No? 

How about this

The article explains how from "...rural America to the urban cores of deindustrialized cities, a military caste system is slowly taking shape".  It describes the two major markets for recruiters: Poor people and military children.

"According to a 2007 Associated Press analysis, 'nearly three-fourths of [U.S. troops] killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.'"

Add to this the fact that a large number of soldiers returning from combat service are affected by Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury and Anxiety/Depression, all issues that affect being able to get and maintain a job.

So this is what faces the poor in the US:

 

Excuse the terrible mspaint graph, but there you go.  Left off, of course, is the race element as well as servicemen and women tending to have children who also go off to serve.

So, there you have it.  There is a machinery at work in our society that aims to grind the poor into a pulpy mash to fuel our prison and military economy.

Have a nice day.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Tea Party doesn't exist

Needless to say, I've gotten in a few fights for saying the above.  Which is fair.  It's hard to say a thing that you see on TV isn't real.  And, in truth, it's not EXACTLY true.  But it's true in a lot of ways.

For example, this way.  That's an article from a blog that makes a very good point that Tea Party rallies, or Tea Party-related rallies, or...let's just call them Ballsinthemouth rallies, these Ballsinthemouth rallies are only big when a major network like Fox reports on them.

And that's not all.  This article (whose title I'm apparently stealing) gives several more examples of the Tea Party failing to galvanize anything that would constitute a movement.  Their rally in Las Vegas was cancelled. Their 2010 9/12 rally was a disaster.  Meanwhile, the article explains, a "study done by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting...the February 2010 Nashville Tea Party Convention received far more attention than the U.S. Social Forum, (a convention leftist and socialist activists) which drew 15,000 to 20,000 attendees (compared to the 600 at the Tea Party convention), but received just 1.5 percent of the coverage of the Tea Party convention in a sample of ten national news outlets."

The truth of the matter is, the Tea Party is largely a fabrication.  The people who make up the "movement" are a small cadre of racists, sexists and idiots who, for the most part, subsist on the very welfare they protest.  The rest are the Fox news followers who should never be counted on for their understanding of the issues.  Not at all because they're stupid people, but because the network they trust has been peddling nonsense since 1996.

Fox News operates as the media wing of the Republican Party.  And, with the party in decline, the Republicans needed a group that not only attracted the public eye, but kept the crazies in their camp.  And it worked.  The Tea Party's loud voices and unclear motives make it sexy.  Even to the point that it attracts the attention of leftist groups.

But the fact is, it's a distraction.  It's another sleight of hand like the Swift Boat Veterans and the Willie Horton ad from the party that long ago realized that dirtying the political process was a lot easier than having an actual agenda.  The Tea Party gets the attention while all the groups proposing actual alternatives are pushed aside.  And at the same time, those groups assert they have to fight the tea and lose track of the real issues.

I know this is a weird thing to put at the end of a post talking about the Tea Party, but the best thing to do with these people is ignore them.  Don't give them the time of day.  Let the media spend its time on their every word, but let us progress beyond that. 

So, in that spirit, I hereby resolve I will never mention the Tea Party again.  Probably.

PS: Interesting poll about the ballsinthemouth party.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

I like cartoons

So, enough stupid politics soapbox crap.  Let's go for something different.

I was randomly reminded today of Johnny Bravo.  For those of you who don't remember him, I pity you.  But because I'm generous, I'll remind you who he is:



He had a show on Cartoon Network that basically involved him not getting with women.  It was pretty funny, if for no other reason than that it was a funny concept.  Anything done with an Elvis voice is always funny.

So, for those of you who remember Johnny Bravo, you might remember the Cartoon Cartoon Show that Johnny was a part of.  It included a bunch of boring, ugly and stupid cartoons, along with some gems.  Among the gems was this show:



I only vaguely remember this, but I remember it being pretty hilarious and wondering why no show was ever made out of it, since there seemed to be pretty low standards for what was played on Cartoon Network.  Since then, I have always chalked it up to major media being unable to tell the difference between real entertainment and Reality TV.  This disdain would form a major part of the development of my caustic personality.

But, here's a shocker.  Guess who created Larry and Steve? This guy:
A man with black hair and a black shirt, leans forward slightly to speak into a microphone.
Seth McFarlane.

That's right, Larry and Steve became Peter and Brian from Family Guy.  I guess I was wrong.  I guess the media really does know what's entertaining.  Maybe all this time I've been criticizing the entertainment industry, I've really just been misunderstanding them.  Maybe, just maybe, they really just want to entertain us.

Oh wait.  Nevermind.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Getting it for free

Some fun quotes:
"Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Daryl F. Zanuck, movie producer, 1946.

"The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it." -The New York Times, after a prototype demonstration at the 1939 World's Fair. (source)

There's a ton of these types of predictions made.  For every device that became a sensation, there were a brace of scholars who insisted it was a fad.  And vice versa.  Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point was essentially a treatise on this, that tiny, unexpected factors can make a Tamagochi interesting and a mutant Pepsi disgusting.

One would think people would stop making blanket predictions, or at least mediate their claims with some acknowledgement that they could be entirely wrong.  But what fun would it be for me if people did what made sense.

The article linked to above seems to ignore the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of pictures of cats with corrupted english out there.  It seems to ignore the fact that there are people with government jobs who find enough time to download BOXES OF PORN.  Or start blogs.

The fact is, you cannot underestimate people's capacity to waste their time.  Sometimes $1.99 is worth two hours of digging through torrents.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

How the media hijacked 175,000 people

Wow.  Just wow.

"DC Rally shows support of struggling Democrats".

A bit of a delayed reaction this one, but that's because the headline made me so angry I kept throwing computers out the window.

Let me start off by saying the One Nation rally was by NO MEANS A RALLY IN SUPPORT OF THE DEMOCRATS.  You couldn't swing a protest sign without hitting someone from some socialist/communist/gay rights/etc group.  A lot of them were holding signs asking Obama for the change he promised.  Others handed out literature saying how both parties were flawed.

Hell, even the Associated Press had to give them something:

"Organizers insist the rally is not partisan. They say the message is about job creation, quality education and justice. However, the largest organizations, such as the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union, tend to back Democratic candidates."

This is a cool journalism tactic.  Rather than report on what what the people actually responsible say, make up your own story that follows your paper's narrative.  For example, if you happen to be a reporter with a hard-on for the president working at a paper with a hard-on for any government it's reporting on, you might be inclined to interpret pretty much everything as a rousing cry of support to the sources of your hard-ons.

But maybe not.  The author, Phillip Wilson, found it necessary to put "struggling" in front of the name of the party that is anything but.  From my obsessive checking of the mid-term election polls on wikipedia, it really doesn't seem like the Dems are up to lose that many spots.  The media seems to be under the impression that just because the Democrats aren't going to have their super-majority, they are somehow in decline.  I wonder what they'd have to gain from misinforming the public.

Either way.  The rally was amazing, regardless of what the associated shills say.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Zeitgeist, it ain't.

Let me start off simply: Facebook is NOT a phenomenon.

Facebook is the continuation of a trend of an increasingly social internet.  There was Friendster, there was Myspace, there was LinkedIn.  Facebook simply took ideas from each of these and set up their own shop, ostensibly peddling the same thing.  It worked.  They are popular.  But popularity does not a phenomenon make.

This article summarizes my view on the Social Network movie.  Essentially, it explains how the movie is more or less a fairy tale about a copyright lawsuit.  It's the woes and tribulations of a few rich Harvard kids (I don't even know if they go to Harvard, I really don't even care enough to look it up.) and how they feel so left out and isolated.  Rough.


Facebook is not the zeitgeist of a new online generation.  There is, for sure, a move towards socializing online.  There was a fantastic article explaining how social media is changing us, but I'm having trouble finding it.  This is like the bootleg version of it.

But essentially, the article explained how we're not forced to interact with those nearby, our networks are broadening.  We can find groups of people as weird or smelly as us, we can resist change.  But, on the other hand, we can find people as weird and smelly as us and be able to follow our predilections wherever they lead us.

But the Social Network is not about that.  It's another movie about a utility like Wall Street.  You might as well watch a movie about the water company.  Or your local cannery.  The movie's popularity just boggles my mind.  I could understand if it actually explored the phenomenon, but David Fincher dropped the ball on it and went with making a movie about a made-up character in a made-up situation with only loose connection with reality.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go post a link to this on my status update.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Making militias out of molehills

So this is a fantastic article.

In brief (because everyone hates reading): Independent militias are on the rise since Obama's election.  There's increasing numbers of violent events where the perpetrators attribute their craziness to the fact that, heaven forfend, we got us a BLACK president.  And what's more, he's a liberal! (Of course, the radical right never exactly understood what "liberal" was, they just generally opposed...well, everything.  I doubt even if we all did convert to fundamentalist Christianity and carried around automatic weapons to protect our submissive wives and 2.3 children that they'd be one iota happier.)

And Mr. Gellman has a point.  He lists a few examples of explosions of anti-government violence.  James Von Brunn, member of an neo-nazi group in Idaho and generally pretty crazy guy, drove up to a Holocaust memorial and shot the first non-white guy he came across.  It was senseless, it was vicious and it accomplished nothing.

To add one, in 2009, Richard Poplawski, another neo-nazi and white supremicist (not to mention a marine school drop-out) shot three Pittsburgh police officers who were guilty of...responding to a call for help.  Again, senseless, vicious, wasteful.

But it's been said.  That the radical right, due to a combination of a poor economy and a president of a race they don't approve of (aka, not white), has unified into one violent mass of terror out to kill you and eat your family.

Let's put it in perspective.

The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates there are 932 active hate groups in the US.  This is an estimate,
meaning it could be lower, and it could be higher.  But let's just use it.

The TIME article describes an exercise of the Ohio Defense Force, an independent militia.  It claims 300 members state-wide.  So, let's get terrifying.

932 groups times 300 members = 279,600 military-trained crazies.

Population of the US: 307 million.

Proportion of the US that is military-trained crazies: .0009, or .09%.

Now, keep in mind the Ohio crazies CLAIM 300 members.  And the Ohio group is not necessarily a hate group.  This .09% statistic is probably entirely inaccurate.  The SPLC does not list the criteria it uses to define a hate group, but does list among hate group activities "leafletting or publishing".  Furthermore, it claims to not include works and websites "appearing to be merely the work of an individual" (my emphasis).  Which sounds like it abitrarily decides which works and websites from a single person.  Leaving some room for error.

In truth, the actual proportion of the population in these groups is probably too small for my calculator.

On the other hand, the ACLU claims 500,000 members and supporters.  That's more than double my ridiculously off-point estimate.  That's just the ACLU.

I always get a bit suspicious whenever horror stories like these start flying around.  Whenever people wave their hands in the air and scream "WE'RE ALL IN DANGER!" I hesitate.  Because if you listen to these racists, they're actually just afraid.  Afraid the government's going to take their guns.  Afraid that Mexicans will take their jobs.  Gays will take their children.  Liberals will take their rights. 

Their decisions are based on fear.  Ours shouldn't be.  If for no other reason than that we outnumber them.  At the very least, 10 to 1.

Some other fun numbers:
Number of people who attended Glenn Beck's rally on 8/28/10: CNN says 87,000.
Number of people who attended September 25, 2005 protest against the Iraq war: Between 150,000 to 300,000
Number of people signed up on facebook to attend Jon Stewarts Restoring Sanity Rally: 181,600.

So, eat it, Tea Party.