May 28, 2014

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s--- that you feel sorry for me”

We hear it after every mass shooting: politicians on both sides of the aisle intoning their deepest condolences to the victims and their families. We hear a lot about thoughts and prayers and sympathies. We especially hear it from politicians who kowtow to the NRA and the gun lobby, usually framed in the language of unnamed inexplicable evil that mere humans cannot control.

But the father of one of the victims of the Isla Vista shootings put it best when he said:

Damn straight.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/father-of-victim-in-santa-barbara-shootings-to-politicians-i-dont-care-about-your-sympathy/2014/05/27/8a030d10-e5ad-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.htmlhttp://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-is-what-legislative-courage-on-gun.html

May 27, 2014

someone's sister no more....

a sobering reminder of how commonly their full personhood is denied.

https://twitter.com/narrynicotine/statuses/470433215275352064
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/women-react-to-a-murder-spree-at-ucsb-with-an-airing-of-grievances/371568/

May 26, 2014

Remembering

This photo of a mother mourning her fallen soldier son was published in The New Yorker several years back.

It captures the pain and loss this day is about as well as anything could. Corporal Khan was 20 years old.



Juan Casiano at the grave of his fiancée, Captain Maria Ines Ortiz, in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/09/29/slideshow_080929_platon?slide=16&mobify=0#slide=16

****************


Remembering
Posted by Betty Cracker at 4:05 pm



Read More: Wife Sleeps Along Side The Casket Of Her Husband…A Fallen U.S. Marine | http://1079ishot.com/wife-sleeps-along-side-the-casket-of-her-husband-a-fallen-u-s-marine/?trackback=tsmcliphttp://1079ishot.com/wife-sleeps-along-side-the-casket-of-her-husband-a-fallen-u-s-marine/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/05/26/remembering/#comments



WAR SUCKS



Albert Einstein
A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.

Benjamin Franklin
Never has there been a good war or a bad peace.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

Ernest Hemingway
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Gandhi
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

George McGovern
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.


PEACE and a few good tears,
kp

May 26, 2014

"I'm used to massacres. Whatevs."

MON MAY 26, 2014 AT 01:39 PM PDT
"I'm used to massacres. Whatevs."
by brooklynbadboy

That's a direct quote from a 14 year old family member this Memorial Day. Needless to say, we adults were shocked at the callousness displayed by my cousin's son. But in reality, we adults are to blame. Furthermore, the approving nods from the other youth present served as kind of indictment, as they were quick to point out. "We're not in charge. Ya'll are!" Left speechless, we could do nothing but look at each other with shame. The Constitution was brought up, and that sparked derisive laughter as if the document itself were a sarcastic joke.

This is what we as Americans have become, a group of people who have come to accept massacre and mass murder as a way of life. So much so that our children now feel that this it is perfectly normal to expect that at any moment their young lives could be cut down at random. Massacres are nothing new in America. What is new is how incredibly tolerant we've become after witnessing it time and time again. We can do nothing about this, we tell them. This is the price of freedom, we tell them. Just a few crazy people, we tell them.

And so, this brings our youth to the point of 'whatevs' or 'whatever, I don't care.' We have set up massive, well funded bureaucracies in every state for the protection of children from abuse. But a massacre? Well, we tell them they'll just have to get used to it. If this boy is indicative, they have.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/26/1302135/--I-m-used-to-massacres-Whatevs

May 26, 2014

In a final videotaped message, a sad reflection of the sexist stories we so often see on screen

The real culprit in all of this is a culture of thriving misogyny, in which women are dehumanized and regarded as grudging dispensers of sex candy, who must be punished if they don’t do their job of servicing men.
Elliot Rodger was a spoiled, entitled kid who had his brain poisoned
with this attitude. First he learned that women are disposable, then he
learned that they were evil for not having sex with him, and then he
rationally put together two delusions and acted on them.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/25/well-that-explains-everything/comment-page-1/



Ann Hornaday:

In a final videotaped message, a sad reflection of the sexist stories we so often see on screen

As deranged manifestos go, the final YouTube video made by suspected Isla Vista, Calif., mass murderer Elliot Rodger was remarkably well-made. Filmed by Rodger in his black BMW, with palm trees in the background and his face bathed in magic-hour key light, the six-minute diatribe — during which he vows revenge on all the women who rejected him and men who were enjoying fun and sex while he was “rotting in loneliness” — might easily have been mistaken for a scene from one of the movies Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, worked on as a director and cinematographer.

Indeed, as important as it is to understand Rodger’s actions within the context of the mental illness he clearly suffered, it’s just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in. With his florid rhetoric of self-pity, aggression and awkwardly forced “evil laugh,” Rodger resembled a noxious cross between Christian Bale’s slick sociopath in “American Psycho,” the thwarted womanizer in James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” and every Bond villain in the canon.

...............

As Rodger bemoaned his life of “loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desire” and arrogantly announced that he would now prove his own status as “the true alpha male,” he unwittingly expressed the toxic double helix of insecurity and entitlement that comprises Hollywood’s DNA. For generations, mass entertainment has been overwhelmingly controlled by white men, whose escapist fantasies so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfillment (often, if not always, featuring a steady through-line of casual misogyny). Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike.

..........................

Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it. The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.




MORE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/in-a-final-videotaped-message-a-sad-reflection-of-the-sexist-stories-we-so-often-see-on-screen/2014/05/25/dec7e7ea-e40d-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_story.html?hpid=z4

May 26, 2014

Veterans Groups Completely Unload On GOP Senator

Veterans Groups Rip Into Sen. Richard Burr For Questioning Their Priorities

...........................

Burr accused the groups (with the exception of the American Legion) of being more invested in maintaining access to the secretary than with fixing a troubled health care system. He questioned why they haven't called for a leadership change at the VA, and pointedly charged the groups’ leaders with not caring about the health and well-being of their members.

Burr’s letter was in response to the testimony that Shinseki and seven of these veteran service organizations (VSO) had given before his committee the week prior, concerning revelations and allegations of long wait times, bureaucratic malfeasance and insufficient care at the VA.

Not surprisingly, leaders at the veterans groups Burr named were not pleased with the letter.

In their own letter, Veterans of Foreign Wars responded to Burr by calling his letter a “monumental cheap-shot” and labeling it “one of the most dishonorable and grossly inappropriate acts that we’ve witnessed in more than forty years of involvement with the veteran community.” If the tone wasn’t clear, the group added that Burr’s conduct and allegations were “ugly and mean-spirited in every sense of the words and profoundly wrong, both logically and morally,” in addition to breaching “the standards of the United States Senate.”



http://www.scribd.com/doc/226021691/VWF

May 26, 2014

0 die of gay marriage, voting without an ID or too much health care.

3 women a day are murdered by a partner/ex.

83 die of gun violence.

https://twitter.com/LOLGOP

May 26, 2014

"Don't Goat Me, Bro!"

https://www.facebook.com/OperationAmericanSpringbackup
https://www.facebook.com/treygowdyforspeaker?ref=streamhttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/24/1301646/-Operation-American-Spring-Hijacked#

May 25, 2014

An amazing chart showing global military spending

https://twitter.com/conradhackett/statuses/470555199681994752http://www.vox.com/2014/5/25/5750044/an-amazing-chart-showing-global-military-spending

May 25, 2014

SALON: "Toxic bankers, captive regulators: Everything you think about the housing market is wrong"

"Toxic bankers, captive regulators: Everything you think about the housing market is wrong"




Excerpted from "Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business"


The news cameras kept recording after the power failed. Complete darkness. Then a heavy red curtain was swept aside, allowing a bit of sunlight to stream into the woodpaneled hearing room. This natural illumination had a strange effect on Alan Greenspan, the day’s first witness. He was seated before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a ten-member panel of private citizens appointed by Congress to examine the causes of the financial and economic crisis. By that day, in April 2010, the FCIC had already conducted several hearings and public meetings. Greenspan had spent much of the morning before the power outage in a defensive mode, denying that, as chairman of the Fed for nearly two decades, he had the tools to predict or prevent the subprime mortgage meltdown and the connected global financial crisis.

Yet he had admitted to the panel: “I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time. And there are an awful lot of mistakes” over the years. Now, in the semidarkness, Greenspan retreated a bit. He responded to a question about whether he believed there still was excessive debt in the banking system with a nod, a gesture not captured on the official record. The commissioner who posed the question remarked that he saw Greenspan nod. An audience member said he had not nodded. Greenspan sat silently, not offering to clarify. Minutes later, the hearing adjourned and the witness departed.

That was classic Greenspan: bright moments of clarity followed by obfuscation and retreat. Eighteen months earlier in October 2008, in his most candid moment, he told a congressional subcommittee that he had found “a flaw” in his entire system of thought. He had adhered for decades to a particular view of how markets operated, only to discover several decades later he’d been very wrong. Yet the question for the panel that April morning was whether the crisis could have been avoided.



.............


Notwithstanding this pay negotiator’s assertion that Wall Street was not to blame, when put under oath, bankers do not concur. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told the FCIC: “Over the course of the crisis, we, as an industry, caused a lot of damage. Never has it been clearer how poor business judgments we have made have affected Main Street.” At an FCIC hearing in January 2010, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the Commission, “I blame the management teams 100% . . . and no one else.”




MORE Most xlnt, many myths debunked:
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/25/toxic_bankers_captive_regulators_everything_you_think_about_the_housing_market_is_wrong/