NASA-funded Study: We're Screwed

Apparently, despite the fact that we humans have put men on the Moon, mapped our own genome, and peered into the furthest reaches of time, we still can't not kill ourselves. According to a new study sponsored by the Goddard Space Flight Center, human existence as we know it is headed for a "precipitous collapse". Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "WTH I've been ignoring all of those emergency shelter and freeze-dried seed commercials and now the world's going to end and... WTH?" Well, kind of yes.

Noting that warnings of the collapse of society are often fringe and conspiratorial, the study tries to explain the compelling historical data that reveals "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Oh, good. That's a relief. For a second there I thought this was going to suck. The study explains that even the most "advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent." So exactly the opposite of a Sharpie magic marker.

The interrelated factors in this whole sordid story that is our imminent demise are, not surprisingly, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy. All of which we have been keenly taking care to respect, conserve, and not at all use them like they are infinitely abundant.

Unfortunately, for us humans there are two key social issues that, when combined, create an awful no good situation for civilizations. Take it away, Guardian UK:

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

That doesn't sound remotely familiar.

Now combine that unnerving fact with this similarly unnerving fact from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch research and we get a real shit sandwich. In 2015 we will be seeing a huge male youth boom. And we all know when young men don't have much to do they start in with the masturbating OK, I crossed it out but there will be lots of that too I'm sure upheaving.

There’s a close relationship between surging populations of young men and “revolutions, wars and upheavals,” argue Ajay Kapur, Ritesh Samadhiya, and Umesha de Silva. The Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analysts cite ”civil war in medieval Portugal (1384), the English Revolution (1642-51), the Spanish conquistadores ravaging Latin America were secundones (second sons), the French Revolution of 1789, and the emergence of Nazism in the 1920s in Germany.”

2015 sounds like its going a lot of fun. Please continue, quartz dot com:

When there aren’t enough jobs to employ the supply of young men, that can galvanize conflict, argue the analysts—as can stagflation, rising income inequality, unaffordable property, and other problems facing emerging markets. Particularly if they’re unmarried, these young men have less to lose by banding together and committing crimes, unrest or violence.

To recap, income inequality + strained resources + lots of unemployed, pissed off young men = Fuck the coming decade.

I think I may go sign up for that one-way ticket to Mars. At least there we never had a chance.

We Don't Even Have to Life a Finger

The morons in Conservativeville have been braying their lust for President Putin, the overweight exhibitionist who shoots sedated tigers and calls himself a hunter (no wonder rightwingers love him: he shoots guns at defenseless animals then calls himself a man). In turn, they call Obama weak, feckless even.

But here’s the thing: Putin has already lost.

The U.S. can’t save Europe when it comes to energy. And it can’t impose truly effective sanctions without Europe’s cooperation. Thing is, it probably won’t have to. Putin’s petrostate will eventually implode all by itself.

Even before the Ukrainian crisis began, Russia was headed toward a major decline. Despite oil prices being more than $100 a barrel, its economy will be lucky to grow at a rate of 1% this year–about one-third of the U.S. rate. The fact that the American economy is growing faster than not only Russia’s but also Brazil’s and those of other emerging-market nations is truly amazing. A decade ago, the BRIC countries were supposed to be the world’s economic salvation. Since then, they’ve become complacent, and their growth has been cut in half. Some, like China, are brewing up epic debt crises. Others, like Russia and Turkey, are ruled by autocratic strongmen trying to grapple with tumbling markets and foreign-capital flight on a massive scale.

The world, in other words, has turned upside down economically. Russia’s pain will continue to be the U.S. markets’ gain, as investors seek safety in U.S. Treasury bills and blue-chip stocks. In economic terms, the war over Ukraine has already been won–and not by Putin.

Here’s a situation that all the sabre-rattling and stare-down contests can’t possibly win, but time can. Let me put Foroohar’s already cogent phrasing into an analogy that even a conservative can understand: Vladimir Putin is George Bush in that he can’t make money on a business literally swimming in it.

A one-percent growth rate is practically an economy in a recession. In a time when Europe has some of the strongest growth (particularly Germany, who is substantially reliant on Russian oil and gas exports) on the planet, Putin is somehow managing to run the nation’s productivity and profitability into the ground. The Moscow stock market lost 200 points in one day (from 1500 to 1300) based on the news about Crimea but also by the fear investors have that Putin can’t manage this slack time in domestic product.

His solution – to annex a province that likely would have remained Russian even after the breakup of the old Soviet Union if Kruschev hadn’t given it to Ukraine – is hardly a long-term strategic asset, at least economically. Its major component is tourism and while Crimea has some untapped oil and gas reserves to draw upon, those can hardly be developed in a short enough time span to be of value to the Russian economy as a whole for a decade or two. By then, the world may have moved onto new energy sources.

President Obama has done the right thing here: He’s let his EU allies bear the brunt of the sabre-rattling while he allows Putin enough rope to hang himself.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Facebook….NSA….it’s hard to know who to root for in this one. @MarkZuckerberg does not have clean hands when it comes to privacy, and at least the NSA can be investigated easily.

2) Some interesting developments in the Malaysia Airlines mystery.

3) Could HIV be mutating?

4) By the way, Happy Pi Day!

5) An encouraging sign that Mayor Deblasio is starting to feel comfortable in office.

6) I wonder what kind of benefits you get with those jobs?

7) You may want to start unfollowing some of your friends.

8) It’s official: we’re idiots.

9) As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could slide…

10) Finally, Happy Saint Urho Day on Sunday. I know I’ll be getting my wine on, and if it’s warm enough, chase grasshoppers.

Crying In His Beer

You may or may not have noticed last week, amidst the growing turmoil in Ukraine and Crimea, that Darrell Issa is still – still – pursuing the IRS investigation of politically-oriented 501(c)4 groups, both left and right.

Summary: A 501(c)4 group is a non-profit social group that engages primarily in activities and advocacy of a social nature. They are permitted to do some political work but if they do too much, they can have their tax-exempt status lifted and get hit with penalties and interest on the taxes they should have paid.

Nevermind there’s jail time involved as well. About three years ago, it came out that, indeed, the IRS was doing their jobs and investigating groups that filed for this status. Turns out, the only group that was actually caught and punished was a liberal group, but be that as it may, right wing Teabaggers cried “oppression,” “foul,” and any number of the usual phrases white folks whine when caught in a lie.

Flash forward to last week: Issa held a hearing…excuse me, another hearing…involving Lois Lerner, a former IRS official who was nominally involved in the investigation (since the investigation itself was routine, it’s hard to say anyone was at the center of it. Indeed, the official in charge of the IRS who had knowledge of the work, Douglas Shulman, is a Bush appointee, and it passed his muster.)

Lerner was questioned by only one member of the Issa’s committee: Issa himself.

Lerner, sensing a kangaroo court, refused to testify to Issa, citing her Fifth Amendment rights.

After that, Issa cut off the mics and shut the hearing down, and threatened Lerner with a contempt of Congress citation.

Um, oops!

Democratic committee staff sought the advice of Morton Rosenberg, a former constitutional law and process specialist with the Congressional Research Service and that of Stan Brand who served as general counsel for the House of Representatives in the early 1980s (Democrats were in the majority during those years), who concluded that Issa eliminated his option to move ahead with contempt when he concluded the hearing so abruptly.

Rosenberg writes in a letter to Cummings that Supreme Court precedent establishes a number of conditions which must be met to create a legal foundation for a contempt prosecution, including that the committee must disallow the constitutional privilege objection and clearly tell the witness an answer is demanded, and the witness must be presented with a clear-cut choice between compliance and non-compliance, knowing non-compliance risks prosecution. Rosenberg concludes these conditions were not met, and if a criminal contempt prosecution were attempted, it "will be dismissed."

Brand told CBS News that based on the precedent, any attempts to move ahead with a contempt charge would go nowhere. But, he doesn't take the committee seriously, "I think what they're after is political theater, and that's what they got." He explained that if the committee really wanted to hear from Lerner, they "could have granted her immunity and they'd already have her testimony by now."

I agree. Issa is clearly engaged in political theatre, but to what purpose? His seat is seemingly safe. He carried the seat with a 16% plurality, albeit the smallest of his career. He’s not making friends in Congress by harassing and endlessly opening investigations that end up seeing him embarrassed time and again in the national press. And his, let’s call it “personal history,” is such that any attempt to run for national office will see him humiliated and out of politics.

Not an unpleasant thought to me, and I can imagine he has yes-men all around him ignoring the elephant in the room, but he has to have it somewhere in his consciousness that it’s a “fall on the sword” moment if he were to announce for President or seek the VP nod.

Issa is like a third grader who gets away with a lie here and there, and is emboldened each day to lie a little more. People will miss his first lies, ignore the later ones, but eventually, he’ll get a spanking.

Bill O'Reilly: Blue Nose

It’s odd that a man who claims among his favorite guests both Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart would have a problem with President Obama’s appearance in a comic interview on the website Funny or Die. But he does:

All I can tell is you Abe Lincoln would not have done it. There comes a point when serious times call for serious action. We're a divided nation which Talking Points believes is in decline. Mr. Obama is quick, has a good sense of humor. Those are assets.

Oh, um, Bill? About Lincoln? Yea. He likely would have.

In response to a discussion about the pressure from abolitionists for the president to take action against slavery, Lincoln said:

Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad — ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’

It was a characteristic Lincoln moment. He deflected the question of what he would do about slavery; he used the story as a device to explain his policy; in a display of folksy wisdom, he got his listeners to laugh.

Lincoln understood what Obama understands and what even idiots like Frank Luntz get: if you want to get your point across, you have to hit your audience in their gut with something.

It can be humour. Often, it can be tragedy, or anger. Bush utilized our anger to talk us into two massively destructive wars that made little sense in toto. Yet, to this day – and it even echoes in your network’s offensive, treasonous coverage of our President – people talk about how “strong” Bush was, and how “weak” Obama looks.

On that side note, Obama understands what you morons seem to miss: Bush weakened the United States by crippling our economy and spending whatever diplomatic capital and moral authority we had on wars that were wars of opportunity and aggression.

It’s a little hard to rally people to cry independence at the point of your army’s weaponry.

Lincoln, along with John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, understood that you can support an argument without being aggressive or war-mongering.

For instance, Bill Clinton famously said about welfare, “Mend it, don’t end it,” and neatly summed up the popular (if incorrect) sentiment that the welfare system needed a little tweaking, is all. This appeals to the American sense of not only fair play (get rid of what cheating was going on) with the American sense that we’re all in this struggle together and that each of us has a contribution to the greater good (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” implies that the nation will take help take care of those who contribute.)

It’s sad that the right wing seems to have lost any sense of humour, save for sarcasm and what I like to call “anger humour,” mostly directed at the President but sadly, at even the less fortunate among us.

There but for the grace of God. It seems Christians forget that on the right. Bill should probably swap out the stick up his ass.

 

Speak the Speech, I Pray You

….Trippingly off the tongue:

More than two dozen Democratic senators will take to the Senate floor on Monday for an all-night session of speeches on climate change.

The marathon session will get underway after the last vote on Monday night and could last until 9am on Tuesday, Senate staff said.

The high visibility all-nighter was organised by a new initiative, the Climate Action Task Force, which is trying to galvanise support for Barack Obama's climate change agenda.

The Senators said they would be tweeting throughout the night, using the hashtag #Up4Climate.

Well, at least someone is talking about it, even if it’s only talk and only overnight.

It’s easy to forget global warming in the face of one of the coldest, harshest winters in recent memory, one where we learned a new term: “polar vortex”.

But the planet did not. In fact, January, 2014 was the fourth warmest January in world history. This is not good news if you’re a fan of living.

In fact, it’s been 30 years since the planet as a whole had a month that was cooler than normal, and mind you, “normal” is a moving average, so we’re exceeding our already rising averages.

That Democrats are taking stage tonight to endlessly remind us that we are not America, the planet, but America, a country on Earth, is really pretty important.

Ineffectual, but important.

(A personal note: I suspect this summer is going to be brutal in the US. I don’t have any evidence to really base this upon, except that nature has a way of rebounding fiercely, and winter was pretty cold here.)

I wish I knew what it would take for climate change morons deniers to come around. Bill Maher said it best a few weeks ago: If we’re prepared to repel even a one percent success rate of terrorism, then certainly deniers can admit there’s a one percent chance that the 99.99% of reputable scientists who agree that global warming is real and manmade are right, and therefore, we should take some steps to secure our future and our children’s future.

But I doubt those morons think that deeply. Maybe when the water is over their heads, they’ll finally give it a thought.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) No. They're not. And our headlines are funnier.

2) ♪ Praise the Lord and pass the dutchie from the left hand side… ♫

3) You know, it's not like anyone couldn't see this story coming, or where it's headed.

4) Honey Badger may not give a fuck, but he's never eaten a gator.

5) Um, well, I guess this means Oreos can't get sunburned?

6) Mayor Bill Deblasio of New York has put his foot into a real storm. He wants to improve schools for all children. In order to do so, he has to defund the charter schools that suck the life blood out of the schools they are housed within (sort of mini-schools). Needless to say, parents of children in those schools, a few of which have been fairly successful experiments, are upset. Well, now Governor Cuomo has signaled he's against the Mayor. Personally, I think Deblasio's right: the money that's focused on those schools depletes the coffers for schools that really need a leg up, even as those schools are threatened with closure for underperformance. And there's your hint about what's really going on.

7) I might get behind this trade, if I was a city employee. Admittedly, one of the perks of civil service in NYC is the benefits package, since pay lags severely behind the private sector.

8) Putin twists arms, Crimea river.

9) On the one hand, it's nice that Google recognizes International Women's Day. On the other, do we really have to infantilize women? Crayons? Really?

10) Finally, Sad Trombone

Maybe They'll Finally Do SOMEthing

The CIA searched computers intended to be used solely by the Senate Intelligence Committee in an apparent effort to determine how committee staff members gained access to a draft version of an internal agency review of its controversial interrogation program, U.S. officials said.

The action, some officials say, would mark the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has accessed congressional computers and would be an apparent violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

So the CIA finally decided that Senators are people, too?

It’s not the separation of powers that should concern Senators: it’s the fact that the CIA is directly tasked with espionage overseas, not domestically (that’s the purview of the NSA, thankyewverymuch).

And it’s not like this is an ambiguous situation. We’ve been down this road already once in recent memory.

As with many things CIA, it looks like a case of trying to intimidate and badger people looking into behaviors they would prefer be kept under wraps, no matter how sworn to secrecy that investigator(s) might be. I can understand that a spy agency might want to keep a lower profile about some of the sausage-making it has to perform – after all, imagine if someone got a whiff of Zero Dark Thirty ahead of time – but Senators?

And even allowing for the grandstanding many of them, who really ought to know better, engage in, it might be a good idea to rein in the hounds.

Today In Slanted News

The diplomatic crisis in Ukraine is bad enough and the America government struggles to find a path to work this out are harsh and complex, but see if you can guess where this article was posted:

Is Russian President Vladimir Putin crazy or crazy like a fox?
In remarks quoted by "The New York Times," German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly wondered aloud whether the Kremlin leader was "living in another world." And despite the fact that the German government later denied Merkel's comments, an increasing number of analysts have been suggesting that, with his military intervention in Ukraine, Putin may have indeed taken leave of his senses.
Stanislav Belkovsky, an influential Moscow-based political commentator, says "the poor guy's brain isn't working."
And Andrei Zubov, a professor at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, agrees.
"We always make prognoses based on the assumption that the politician, even if selfish and cruel, is intelligent and rational. But what we see now is the behavior of a politician who has lost his mind," Zubov says.
Rumors of Putin's supposed madness have become so prevalent in recent days that one can't help but recall the "madman theory" of former U.S. President Richard Nixon, whose administration tried to plant the suspicion that he was unbalanced in order to scare geopolitical opponents into concessions.

Any guesses? OK, let me give you some clues: Surprisingly, it’s not Fox News.

In fact, it’s not any of the usual right-wing bellicose megaphones.

It is, in truth, our own fucking Congress. I thought politics ended at the shore?

I guess not.

You’re looking at a very dangerous game being played by a highly partisan Republican party trying desperately to make something, anything, stick to Obama.

12 Years a Slave

It’s rare that Oscar sees things my way:

“12 Years A Slave” won best picture at the 86th Academy Awards on Sunday night, a poignant victory for the harrowing look at slavery in the United States.
Brad Pitt, one of the producers and stars, accepted the honor and then handed off accepting duties to director and fellow producer Steve McQueen.

“Everyone deserves not just to survive but to live,” said the British filmmaker. “I dedicate this award to all the people who have endured slavery” and to those who still suffer in slavery today. Besides best picture, the film received Oscars for John Ridley for adapted screenplay and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o for supporting actress.

It got my vote, and hands down, I might add. If it hadn’t been for 12 Years, I likely would have voted for American Hustle.

And kudos to McQueen for pointing out that this is not a dim memory of American history, but a tragic stain on our conscience, and a current dilemma for so many people.

Even in America. Even. In. America.

It is not a movie for the faint of heart, but let’s face facts: if you’re faint of heart, you probably don’t read this blog, are not a liberal, and would prefer to think of America as this place where anything is possible rather than deal with reality.

The problem, as the Ariel Castro case proves, this is still true: anything is possible. It’s just not the mythology we’d like to accept.

Realities in America, yes, there’s a topic I’d love to see a filmmaker really tackle. If you work hard, you’ll be rewarded? I think not. And that’s just the first (but largest) myth we delude ourselves with.

McQueen tried. He fired off a salvo, albeit in a safely historical context, but what a damaging salvo. It ought to be required viewing in every state that still waves the Confederate flag proudly, and at least once a month. This is what you defend when you wave that flag.

Maybe a remake of Grapes of Wrath, so people can see how migrant workers really live. Or perhaps Elmer Gantry, so we can see through the lens of the Joel Osteens of the world – or Dodsworth and get a shot in at the 1%.

I see uprisings in China, Ukraine, Syria. I see Egypt and Libya still absorbing their “springs” of years past. I see a world where the present danger isn’t Al Qaeda, or North Korea, but the very citizens of each individual nation. And they look to America, and Americans, to lead the way. After all, we had that little “Revolution” a few hundred years ago. It’s time we owned up to it.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) It’s cold. It’s the kind of cold that saps your energy the way staying up for 72 hours straight, then quitting coffee would.

2) Speaking of weather, for the past eight weeks, I’ve seen nothing but gloating from Southern Californians about our cold weather. So there’s a small invitation to schadenfreude today.

3) As goes Texas, so goes the South.

4) I disagree with this article. Here’s how the Teabaggers have changed politics:                *crickets*

5) Introducing Sharkcam

6) OK, so there’s a Mommy and a Daddy and…?

7) The more he opens his mouth, the more persuaded I am that Joe Biden will run for President. It’s not often a sitting Veep gets knocked out in the primaries.

8) Well, if they want two assholes for the ark, they can just invite their Senators.

9) And now we know who cut the cheese.

10) Finally, it’s yoga mats, all the way down.

Veto By Not Vetoing

Jan Brewer was really between a rock and a hard case this week, with the passage of SB1062, which I refer to as the Jim Peacock Law. I’m surprised how deftly she manuevered around it:

In her veto message, Brewer addressed not just SB 1062 but other issues confronting the state, obliquely chiding the Legislature for not focusing on pressing issues.

Brewer reminded lawmakers that she had said earlier that her main priorities were passing a responsible budget and fixing a problem plaguing the state’s child protective services system.

“Instead, this is the first policy bill to cross my desk,” she said.

She went on to say that the bill “could divide Arizona in ways we cannot even imagine and no one would ever want. Religious liberty is a core American and Arizona value; so is non-discrimination. Going forward, let’s turn the ugliness of the debate over Senate Bill 1062 into a renewed search for respect and understanding among all Arizonans and Americans.”

The text of her message (pdf) is revealing. She doesn’t veto it on moral grounds at all. Indeed, the text suggests that she sides with the people who feel it’s a violation of their religion to serve “their kind,” but basically tells the legislature “Go back and try again, and next time, don’t make it so blatantly hateful.”

She heard about it from business leaders, in particular the NFL (imagine an openly gay football player being denied service in a Phoenix restaurant during the Super Bowl) and even Andy Borowitz captured the spirit of the “OMG!”, headlining a post, “Arizona Confronting Awkward Realization That Gay People Have Money, Buy Stuff.”

So yes, be happy she vetoed the bill. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It was an adept political move, raising the art of the possible to a new height in Arizona, but it does not make the Arizona government suddenly saintly.

I Wonder if He'll Include Bridge Toll Revenues?

Chris Christie will make his first appearance in front of the state legislature of New Jersey this afternoon in the wake of the explosive Bridgegate scandal [ed. Note: his State of the State address was just before the shit hit the fan]:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will propose a budget Tuesday afternoon with no tax increases but a slightly smaller pension payment than the state is obligated to make—a proposal that could set off strong pushback from Democrats.

The Republican governor will deliver his fifth budget message Tuesday afternoon in front of the state Legislature, one of his first major acts of governance since a scandal overshadowed the administration last month.

Mr. Christie faces a tight fiscal situation this year, and alluded to tough choices facing New Jersey during his State of the State address last month.

The administration’s proposed budget is set to include a pension payment next fiscal year of $2.25 billion, an amount Mr. Christie will frame as a record amount, according to prepared remarks released ahead of the speech.

Christie has a history of Democratic cooperation, but as the Bridgegate scandal has exposed (and kudos to Steve Kornacki and the crew at MSNBC for being diligent in this story), that cooperation was more along the lines of the Five Families of Mafia fame than a spirit of communal bliss.

You may recall that challenger Barbara Buono was mocked for her concession speeches in which she chided the state party leadership for selling her upriver. Turns out, she has the last laugh.

For instance, Essex County executive Joe DiVincenzo was an early supporter of Christie. DiVincenzo was mentored by Stephen N. Adubato…well, let Steve Kornacki explain the relationships. It’s not pretty. And Buono is partly vindicated. It really comes off as oily behavior all around.

And does explain why Corey Booker didn’t challenge Christie last year as many hoped he would.

I don’t expect Christie to be heckled the way a certain black President is heckled during his addresses to the opposition, but it would be nice if someone called him on this in chambers.

 

Back In The USSR

Well, it sure seems like things haven’t changed much in 25 years:

At least 22 people have died in renewed clashes between protesters and police in central Kiev after a truce agreed on Wednesday broke down, eyewitnesses say.

Witnesses reported live rounds, petrol bombs and water cannon at the main protest site, Independence Square.

A meeting between EU foreign ministers and President Viktor Yanukovych is now under way, officials say, contradicting earlier reports that the ministers had flown out without seeing him.

The EU will discuss sanctions later.

The protestors are pretty smart, too. They set up a makeshift mortuary/field hospital in the lobby of the hotel where foreign journalists covering the protests are staying.

The protests, nominally aimed at the Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych, are really aimed at Vladimir Putin and Russia, as Russia has strongly signaled their intent to dominate Ukrainian governance in a form of hegemony not seen since the Soviet Union lined tanks up along the Czechoslovak border.

This was the nation that Edward Snowden picked as a bastion of human rights and self-governance? It is to LOL.

 

 

In Other News, Dog Bites Man

North Korea is an oppressive, tyrannical, and genocidal regime. One can only hope that, between rehab and this report, Dennis Rodman will stop making an ass of himself:

(CNN) -- A stunning catalog of torture and the widespread abuse of even the weakest of North Koreans reveal a portrait of a brutal state "that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," a United Nations panel reported Monday.

North Korean leaders employ murder, torture, slavery, sexual violence, mass starvation and other abuses as tools to prop up the state and terrorize "the population into submission," the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights (COI) in North Korea said in its report

The commission said it would refer its findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecution. It also sent a letter warning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he could face prosecution for crimes against humanity, and said other options include establishing of an ad hoc tribunal by the United Nations.

Some of the victims drew sketches. You probably don’t want to try to find them online until you’ve digested any food you planned on eating.

In what may have been the only real surprise in the entire report, the UN took pains to point out China’s complicity in the violence and oppression done by the North Korea regime, in that they have forcibly returned refugees from the PRK.

In many ways, some of the punishments sound straight out of 1984, being tortured and imprisoned for thought-crimes like watching soap operas or trying to find food.

Many comparisons are made between Obama and Hitler by rightwingers. The next one who makes that comparison ought to be air-dropped into North Korea.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The Winter Olympics in Sochi have been filled with really bizarre happenings. From the withdrawal of Evgeni Plushenko from the men’s figure skating competition to the abject failure of the American speed skating team to win even a single medal despite having an aerospace firm design their skinsuits – thus proving, I suppose, it ain’t rocket science – to Sarka Pancochova’s infamous helmet-splitting crash (no one was hurt) in snowboard slopestyle, this has undoubtedly been a weird Olympic games. Thank god for shortsleeve cross-country skiing!

2) Man, I am sooooooooooooooooooo over this winter.

3) It’s official: Virginia is finally for lovers (pending appeals).

4) Will they? Won’t they? The GOP has become a cartoonish soap opera this year. Here’s why.

5) So Comcast is buying Time-Warner Cable. This is a little like Oscar Madison buying Al Bundy to help pick up the mess.

6) Let me know when they add “philosopher-king” to the list.

7) I meant to post this last week, but I forgot. Pass the antibiotics!

8) Mayor Bill de Blasio has caught an earful this winter with all the snowstorms the city has had. The latest? He refused to close schools yesterday, despite at least ten inches of snow recorded across the city. Even Al Roker went nuts on the mayor. It was a borderline decision, and I can understand the logic behind much of de Blasio’s thinking: while there was a lot of snow, it changed over to rain ahead of the morning rush, washing a lot of it away. The Sanitation Department did yeoman work clearing roads overnight, and the forecast for the afternoon was much better, with mostly rain washing away most of the fallen snow. Still, just about half the students made it in, which indicates that an awful lot of parental wisdom was against the mayor. I think he probably should have closed the schools, but I’m not adamant about it.

9) I guess the neighbor didn’t mow his lawn often enough?

10) Finally, Happy Valentine’s Day! Men, you need to get your heart on for your baby!

Afgoneistan

To understand Afghanistan, it helps to understand a little economics:

Consider these facts from a highly intelligent forthcoming book, War Front to Store Front, by Paul Brinkley: In 2009, Afghanistan had a nominal GDP of $10 billion. Of that number, 60% was foreign aid. The cultivation of poppy and the production and export of raw heroin--all of which is informal and underground--accounted for 30%. That leaves 10%, or $1 billion, of self-sustaining, legitimate economic activity. During the same year, the U.S. military spent $4 billion per month to protect a country with a real annual economic output of $1 billion.

"Kabul is a metaphor for the country," Brinkley said to me. "It is a city sized for 500,000 people. It has grown to 8 million, who have been drawn to the city by the massive influx of foreign money, military and nonmilitary. But that money is going to slow down very significantly soon. What happens then?"

Now let’s translate that to American terms: Imagine the entire population of the city of New York crammed into Harlem, because jobs are plentiful there and someone is paying $48 for every $1 you produce, and you get to keep the dollar.

Hell, who wouldn’t jump at that?

But what happens when the tap turns off? Now, you’re producing $1 for a population 16 times what your neighborhood can accommodate.

Most people will leave at that point, to be sure, but enough people will remain behind because, well, they can’t easily leave. Maybe they have a sick family member. Maybe that 12.5 cents is more than they’d make back in Bay Ridge. One thing is certain, people are going to get angry and people are going to get sick, and people are going to become desperate.

Hamid Karzai is doing his level best to decouple from the American occupation forces, because he understands that Afghanistan has a history of decoupling the puppets of foreign regimes from their heads. This is why he’s made sucking up to the Taliban a priority and the US security deal a stage upon which he may demonstrate his intransigence.

Worse yet, he’ll need the support of Pakistan, which is a little like saying a mayor needs the support of Al Capone. It won’t end well for anyone except Capone.

We went into Afghanistan to root out Osama bin Laden (and failed: he was killed in Pakistan) who was being protected by the Taliban. We spent tens of trillions of dollars that could have been spent here on real problems for Americans.

And we’re leaving it in as bad a shape as we found it.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

 

1) Kudos to Google for tweaking Vladimir Putin’s nose today by quoting the non-discrimination clause of the IOC charter.
 

2) Another chip of my childhood has fallen off my façade. RIP, Ralph. Heaven now has completed the best baseball announce crew in history. His was one of the first voices I can remember from childhood, and between him, Bob Murphy and Lindsey Nelson, he made watching a perennially losing team worth watching.
 

3) The winter Olympics do start today amidst more concerns for security than any Games I can remember, even the Salt Lake City ones that happened just after 9/11.
 

4) Want to lose weight? Stop eating so much on the weekends. Find an incentive to keep you otherwise occupied.
 

5) Earth, from Mars
 

6) Maybe they took a boat?
 

7) All due respect, India, but WTF do you mean, “back up plan”?
 

8) This diplomat. I wonder if she’s a Bush holdover?
 

9) I can think of one, Joe. Her name is Hillary. I doubt you can beat her without tearing the party apart. But hey, I would have said the same thing about Obama in 2007.
 

10) It was fifty years ago today…where to start to talk about the Beatles and their impact on my life. I remember that Sunday standing in front of the RCA 17 inch black and white television – that’s right, television. Not security monitor, television – and strumming an air guitar to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” In a sentence, that pretty much sums up the impact. I learned that night to dream about something bigger than I could ever imagine previously. And it’s made all the difference. No one since has had the kind of earth-shaking effect on the culture on the planet. Michael Jackson came close, but by the time he was a dominant global force, the weird stories about him started to come out and his impact was softened. The Beatles made rock and roll clean-cut but still sexy. Even Elvis couldn’t pull that off.

Just How Badly Do We Need Obama to Step Up On This?

Now our national power grid has become a matter of national security:

A top former energy official claims that an attack on an American power grid was terrorism.

One or more snipers opened fire in April, knocking out 17 transformers that send power to Silicon Valley, the Wall Street Journal initially reported.

Officials moved the flow of electricity to another site to stop a blackout.

But the man who chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, Jon Wellinghoff, tells CBS News it could be an omen for a future attack. "We have risks on physical security that were evidenced by this attack that have not been addressed that need to be addressed in my opinion, immediately," he said.

The FBI does not believe it was an act of terror.

No, it was probably just a disaffected gun nut, to be sure.

But it’s a really good excuse for Obama to make good on some vague campaign and executive promises he has made with respect to the power grid.

Infrastructure in this country is a joke. It should be the laughingstock of any decent civilized nation apart from ours. It’s tragic that most of the bridges in the nation are one good jolt away from collapsing. About the only infrastructure that is in any decent shape is the nation’s highways and even there, only where a Congresscritter decided to bring a little pork home and name a stretch of interstate after himself (looking at you, Bud Shuster)

The power grid is especially vulnerable and we only need to go back to August 2003 when a third of the country went dark for the better part of a week because of a software glitch in Ohio. This is not just about finding new energy supplies or upgrading the grid itself to a smart grid, but of decentralizing the grid and encouraging people to become energy producers, not just consumers.

You want to see the nation come together, fight global warming, and conserve energy? Get them to become their own utilities. When they realize there’s a profit to selling power back to the grid, they’ll be turning off lights in rooms, buying LED and CFC bulbs, putting timers and motion sensors in hallways and rooms, and upgrading to smart thermostats in no time at all.

And He Didn't Even Need a Gun!

Bass scares away burglar

Today In Exploding Conservative Heads

Clay Aiken is running for Congress, challenging a Republican stronghold in North Carolina.

Welcome News

It’s nice to see a CEO realize that a product is not in keeping with the mission statement of a corporation:

CVS Caremark (CVS:US), the largest provider of prescription drugs in the U.S., plans to stop selling cigarettes and tobacco-related products across the nation by Oct. 1 in an effort to support the health of its patients and customers.

CVS, operator of 7,600 pharmacy stores in the U.S., would be the first national pharmacy chain to take this step, the Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based company said in a statement today. The decision will cut annual revenue (CVS:US) by about $2 billion, equating to 17 cents a share, CVS said.

The move comes as public health officials try to educate about 42 million U.S. adult smokers about the dangers of the habit. Last month, a report from the acting U.S. Surgeon General, Boris Lushniak, criticized the “fraudulent campaigns” by cigarette companies, weaknesses in regulation and a rebound in smoking depicted in Hollywood films. The study, which came half a century after smoking was first linked to lung cancer, cited new evidence that common ailments such diabetes, arthritis and impotence can be linked to tobacco use.

The CVS by me also sells beer, so I suspect that won’t be long for the shelves either.

There is a deep background issue lurking that I suspect CVS may have thought about in coming to this decision: lawsuits. After all, tobacco products are a known carcinogen, and while smoking in general has decreased over the past decades, there has been a recent and alarming rise in teen smoking, as the snippet above suggests.

The tobacco manufacturers have been sued and settled, so it would be a long, hard fight to go back to them and say “Stop it, now!” but a potential avenue for fixing the problem would be to go after the retail and wholesale distributors of the product, whose law firms are, shall we say, less stellar? It’s actually a clever way of enforcing the liability issue without seeming to go after the manufacturers and igniting…see what I did there?...a backlash from the right wing and morons who smoke and feel it’s a god-given right.

One could make the case that the retailers are knowingly selling a dangerous product, despite the numerous warnings and measures taken by stores to enforce that only adults get the product. After all, they don’t sell crack legally, and it would be a first step to having tobacco put on a controlled substances list.

Kudos Are In Order

Steve Kornacki, host of MSNBC’s UP with Steve Kornacki has done signal reporting on the Chris Christie story, going far back into his professional history to point out that the image of Christie as a non-partisan, tough-as-nails prosecutor has some very large holes in it.

 

He makes the case, in fact, that Christie may have been one of the US Attorneys who sucked up to Alberto Gonzalez when Gonzalez politicized the US Attorneys’ staff.

A Couple of Thoughts on The Feetsball

Long-time readers of Simply Left Behind know that I hold no great passion for football. I think it lost its greatness when it decided it was more important to print money from municipalities and teevee than to play the game on the field. It’s become a great gay gang grope.

So I understand that last night was the final game of this cycle of Hunker Games, and featured a rout by the feetsball players from Seattle, beating the feetsball players from Denver, 43-8.

Me, I watched The Kitten Bowl, then The Puppy Bowl, and even tuned in The Fish Bowl to drive away the ennui of a perfectly good Sunday night on the TV, wasted because a piss-poor example of Americana sucks all the air out of the room.

But I have a few observations around the game I’d like to make:

1) A huge uproar came about because Bruno Mars was the halftime show. Given that the NFL audience is starting to a) age ungracefully, and b) winnow away to real sports, it was understandable that the powers that be threw a pale imitation of James Brown by way of Michael Jackson up on stage for the show. I actually watched it. I thought he was pretty good.

2) I wanted to watch the commercials but every time I tuned in there were 22 men standing around on a patch of grass. However, that said, when did Bob Dylan decide to sell out? Not only is it a car commercial, but it’s a lie: Chrysler is a distinctly non-American car company.

3) Continuing on the commercials theme, note to rightwing Freepers: America is built on immigrants.

4) When I heard Percy Harvin would be in the line-up for the Seahawks, I knew that Denver couldn’t possibly win the game. This was touted as a match-up of the best defense (Seattle) versus the best offense (Denver) in the league. Harvin just made Seattle a better team, period.

5) Denver just looked old, but I don’t think Seattle will repeat next year. Maybe 2016. Maybe.

6) To the tourists who came to my fair city: So long and thanks for all the money, suckers!

7) The best matchup of the evening came before the game, when President Obama schooled Bill O’Reilly. He went into the lion’s den and kicked the crap out of Leo.

8) Finally, it’s nine days to pitchers and catchers…HOORAY!

Grimm Prospects

By now, you’ve read about or seen the assault on NY1 reporter Michael Scotto by Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm. As it turns out, it was all anybody talked about in the aftermath of the State of the Union address Tuesday night, and as such, forced the GOP to go off message to defend one of their own.

They can’t be happy about that in an election year.

Grimm, a former Marine and FBI agent, was asked for face time on camera to comment about the President’s address. Scotto, seizing an opportunity as any good reporter would, switched gears and tried to get Grimm to comment on camera about allegations that his first Congressional campaign was based in large part on campaign contributions that were made illegally (to-wit, from foreign sources and some domestic sources that contributed more than the legal maximum through some shady deals with third parties.) Grimm was genuinely surprised by the question, since his initial reaction, to walk away, was probably the best reflex he could have had, but his “second thought” was what got him in trouble, assaulting the reporter by physically looming over him and threatening to “throw you off the fucking balcony” of the Capitol building.

Not content with thuggishly menacing a man half his size, Grimm then walked away muttering that he’d break him in half, like the boy that he is.

The county GOP is trying to get behind Grimm while distancing themselves from him, but here’s the most interesting reaction:

Not everyone agrees that the incident will seriously undermine the congressman’s reelection bid. Coming nearly nine months ahead of the election, they argue, few voters will remember it by the time they head to the polls. And some Republicans say Grimm’s tough-guy image could be an asset in a New York City district where voters are more likely to reward brashness.

“I don’t think [voters] would take a lot of umbrage over him roughing it up with a reporter a little bit,” said David Catalfamo, a former top aide to onetime GOP Gov. George Pataki.

“Boys will be boys!” seems to be the reaction from the Pataki machine, one of the more formidable elements of a completely emasculated New York GOP. For instance, Grimm is the only Republican representing New York City in Congress.

Catalfamo was a member of Pataki’s administration, which means he has ties to Senator Alphonse D’Amato, the former kingmaker of New York politics. Indeed, Catafalmo now works under D’Amato…and there’s a nauseating image.  

Here’s the problem: Yes, New Yorkers like their politics with bare knuckles, to be sure – hell, D’Amato often took a plurality of liberal votes from Long Island – and yes, Grimm was elected because a) he had a flood of campaign money come in that no one had counted on, and b) the residents of his district skew more conservative than the rest of the city, but note that last throw away line he puts out there: “No, no, you're not man enough, you're not man enough. I'll break you in half. Like a boy.”

In other words, Grimm acknowledges that he bullied a little boy. I don’t see how that message gets smoothed over, even in Staten Island.

The Schaden, It Freezes

Y’know, I should be smirking gently over the things happening in the South.

After all, whenever it gets up over a hundred here in NYC and things start to pop and break, inevitably there’s a story from down theyarrrr about how sissypanties New Yorkers are, and how Suthners can handle the heat.

So video of people being stuck in traffic for hours, even days, because of a dusting of snow should be enough for me to take a little snarky moment or two, right?

The problem is, of course, that for the grace of God go I. Much of the trouble is because cities and counties don’t buy salt because, you know, why would you? And they don’t have plows because who needs them?

And then I think: we’re just one real budget crisis – and one really bad winter – away from losing our plows and our salt supply. It could happen. Not likely, but it could. Already in the north, we’re seeing shortages of propane to rural communities because of the difficulty of getting trucks around in the terrible snowstorms and deeply frigid temperatures of the last month or so, doubly so as the frigid temperatures have thermostats working overtime. And all it took was one bus to have engine problems on a bridge to shut down an entire borough. It took hours, literally, to travel less than a mile over water.

It’s not fair for me to mock folks for panicking over an amount of snow that is about as high as the pile of confectioner’s sugar on a donut.

But it’s hard not to!