Something's Not Right Here

You may recall a story from a few weeks ago about a NYC cab jumping a curb and hitting a British tourist, mangling her lower leg and forcing it to be amputated. Her life was saved by a passerby who quickly wrapped his belt around her leg as a tourniquet before paramedics could scoot her to a hospital.

Well, you’ll be pleased to read that the victim is grateful not only to the gentleman who came to her aid but to many other strangers – including TV’s Dr. Oz – who assisted her, and is keeping a very positive attitude about the whole thing.

But…

You will not be pleased with the rest of the story.

First, the driver, Faisal Himon will be getting his license back in a few days and will be out on the streets of NY, terrorizing tourists and residents alike again.

Now that you’ve taken a breath and released your rage, you may recall that a stranger leaped into action, likely saving the girl’s life. Yea?

Yea. That didn’t work out so well for our hero…

Someone Needs to Kick His Legs Out

I’ll give Ted Cruz credit for one thing, and one thing only: he’s not making a bullshit filibuster:

Republican Ted Cruz of Texas was still on the Senate floor talking Wednesday-- a dramatic step in defense of his high profile and controversial plan to prevent any funding for Obamacare.

"I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand," he said

Tuesday. "All across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare. Obamacare isn't working."

Of course, he’s wrong: Obamacare isn’t working, it’s true. That’s because it hasn’t been implemented yet. But no one is suffering. In fact, they are thriving and will thrive even more.

Among Cruz’s concerns about national health insurance is how people will “lose their jobs or have their hours cut” (not a direct quote, but you can imagine that’s in his notes.)

Well, Senator, maybe that enmity should be directed at the people who run the corporations you and your cohorts slave for, to get scraps off their plates? Like Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter, who just yesterday shuttered eight pizzerias and who famously said that Obamacare would force him to raise the prices of his piss-poor excuse for pizza.

By 14 cents a pie, by his own admission. But here’s a man who could afford to give away two million pies at the beginning of this football season (plus spend tens of millions more on advertising that very fact) which likely added dollars to the price of his pies.
As for having hours cut, let them. We have an unemployment problem right now. Cutting existing hours will force companies to cover the slack somehow, and eventually (and in quite short order, I think) everyone will be employed AND working full time hours, as companies realize it’s a small price to pay to be productive, that 14 cents a pie.

Still, someone needs to kick his legs out from under him, so the will of the people, tested twice in elections and affirmed by the Supreme Court, can be carried out.

And Cruz has his own issues here to deal with: he’s flying in the face of Republican leadership, who want an up or down vote on Obamacare to carry with them into the 2014 election cycle. Cruz has his eye on 2016 and the Republican primaries, which is where Teabaggers can hold their party “hostage.”

Sort of. After all, Mitt Romney was not their choice and look what happened. He ended up running against his own health insurance and getting drubbed.

Well, Now This Is Interesting

President Obama made an overture to Iran today at the United Nations:

"This mistrust has deep roots. Iranians have long complained of a history of US interference in their affairs, and America's role in overthrowing an Iranian government during the cold war."

This is the first official acknowledgement of CIA involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the very popular elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was friendly towards the Soviet Union, and installing an ally in the Shah.

Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting.

Kenya Stand-Off

The siege at a shopping mall in Kenya is entering its third day today. While the government has responded forcefully, the attackers – presumed to be terrorists from a subsidiary of Al Qaeda, and who’d have thought even terrorism would be corporatized? – have dug in pretty deeply:

NAIROBI — Loud explosions and sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard coming from an upscale mall here on Monday, as Kenyan security forces tried to dislodge Islamist militants who were believed to be holed up inside the building with hostages for a third consecutive day.

By afternoon, large plumes of smoke were rising from the area, but it was unclear whether the explosions were triggered by the heavily armed militants from Somalia’s al-Shabab militia or by security forces inside the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall.

Al-Shabab is a Somalian-based, Al Qaeda derived group, existing in a nation that has no gun control, no taxes, and no central government. A perfect conservative experiment!

The Kenyan government claims that the hostages have either all been freed or killed (including up to five Americans, with at least one dead.) But then, wouldn’t a government claim they had any situation under control?

The thing that disturbs me most about this attack is that Al Qaeda has long used Africa as a staging area to signal when they were about to attack on US soil. In 1992, Osama bin Laden sent Al Qaeda forces into Somalia to assist the warlords in the battles with NATO forces. Also in 1992, bin Laden moved to Sudan.

Early 1993 saw the first World Trade Center attack by forces of Omar Abdel-Rahman, leader of an organization with close ties to Al Qaeda through Ayman al Zawahiri.

In 1998, attacks were executed against US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Naiobi. In 2000, Al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole.

And then, of course, came September 11. You could make the case that floating a fishing boat laden with explosives is not a bad test run for flying a plane loaded with fuel into an American skyscraper.

So what to make of a mall attack and hostage-taking (and potential destruction) in terms of an attack on American soil?

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The Benghazi "scandal" is like a case of herpes on a drunken sailor: Darrell Issa, the drunken sailor in question, wants to unload it on everyone at any time. Nevermind that every one, and I do mean every one, else has determined there was no wrongdoing involved.

2) The GOP has become like Dennis Moore of the old Monty Python show: ♪ Steal from the poor and give to the rich…stupid bitch…♫

3) OK, this is nauseating.

4) I see a mass killing in Pennsylvania's future.

5) As we prepare to reflect on the first anniversary of Superstorm Sandy in the NY area, it might behoove us to take a moment and reflect that things could have been worse. Much worse. The damage from the 1938 Long Island Express was more costly in real dollars, nevermind adjusting for inflation or population shifts, than Sandy.

6) A new species of lizard was found yesterday….in the jungles of Los Angeles Airport.

7) And now in bad news for cryptozoology…

8) And more news in cryptids.

9) And now, olds in cultural distortion field

10) Today is day 262 of 2013. In 252 of those, a gunman has killed four or more people. Ban. Guns. Now.

When Does It End? When Will They Ever Learn?

The DC Navy yard massacre this week has raised a whole raft of questions, everything from mental health issues to calls for more gun control, which of course I see as the larger issue in this and every other case of mass killings by a single gunman.

(A side note: As my good friend Scott Eric Kaufmann puts it, “I feel sorry for them [conservatives]…if it’s a mental health issue, Obamacare could cover it.”)

When will the culture at large ignore the little thumb-sucking babies who populate the gun nut fringe of the right wing of the country and pass sensible gun control? Moreover, when will those diaper-clad nimrods finally recognize the very evil in their midst, the very evil they perpetrate upon the rest of us?

Could these delusional yahoos really be so out of touch, could they be such blood-thirsty bastards, that they would ignore the tens of thousands of innocent dead just for the sake of stroking their barrels and thrusting their bullets deep into a chamber?

If so, could they please get the fuck out of the way of the rest of us, so WE can be safe?

Guns kill. People use guns to kill, because if they stood there and yelled “BANG!,” I don’t think too many people would die (apologies to Eddie Izzard).

Knives kill too, but a) knives have additional uses, where the sole use of a gun is destruction of life, and b) nobody has ever killed dozens in a random mass knife attack.

It’s long past time for the cowardice to end. It’s long past time for the little boys and little girls who walk around afraid of their own shadows to grow the fuck up.

 

To The Surprise of No One....

….people who score high on GMATs tend to be less ethical than those who do not.

Maybe I should explain. The GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) is the B-school version of the SAT. The higher you score on it, the more likely it is you can get into a top-notch business school and hock your entire future for a seat at the casino table that may help you pay it off before retirement. As with the SATs and college, there are a lot of other factors in play, but suffice it to say that a high GMAT score, other things being equal, will attract attention from admissions officers.

It does not appear the relationship is causal, but correlative, between a high GMAT score and low ethical standards, however:

Here are three traits that make you more likely to succeed on the GMAT (and how they may affect your business performance):

1.    You Don't Like Taking Risks: If you're conservative about taking risks, you're likely to score higher. Researchers found a positive association between "uncertainty avoidance" (what Wadhwa calls "safety first behavior'), and doing well on the test that would seem to discourage entrepreneurial activity.

2.    You're Individualistic: Test-takers from more individualistic backgrounds also do better on the GMAT. Individualism has plenty of positive associations in the business community, like more competitive drive, but the self-reliance seen among successful test-takers makes them less likely to adapt their behavior to formal codes of ethics and informal norms around them.

3.    You're Less Ethical: Higher GMAT scores are associated with less of a tendency for ethical behavior. Focus on freedom and achievement means high-scorers are more inclined to see their actions as above reproach, explained Goodell.

We can glean from these three traits the typical profile of someone who scores high on the GMAT: he’s – because men tend to score higher –  conservative with a libertarian bent, and more likely to engage in unethical behavior than the typical person who takes the test, much less the general population.

This would explain a few facets of American life, don’t you agree?

Private Parts

As you might have heard, this week, Apple introduced the new iPhone lines. These included the iPhone 5S.

The 5S includes a marvelous piece of gadgetry that can secure your phone with the use of a fingerprint. This is a step wayyyyy up from the current four digit password, which most people don’t even utilize (probably because it’s a major hassle.)

But…

In a day and age of NSA surveillance, is this something we really want? Worse, in a day and age of NSA surveillance, we have to make a decision with regards to any security measures we take with regards to anything, full stop.

It’s not an inconceivable conceit to believe that the NSA could hijack your phone, scan at least one fingerprint, and determine if, in fact, you’re a terrorist (or soon, no doubt, a criminal.) Think about it: monitor your touch screen, scan your fingerprint (or just sift it out of the database of information stored there through the backdoor) and take your picture secretly using your phone’s camera.

Contrast this dynamic with the desire to protect your personal data from people who would absolutely use your identity and information to rip you off: the common (and not-so-common) criminal. Clearly, fingerprint identification makes that job much harder, at least until technology catches up. Yes, there are kludges now to get around it, but those leave some trace of activity.

Add to this the plus that you will be able to prune the number of passwords you need to remember, especially as websites instruct you to use more and more complex ones, which force you to store them somewhere, which means someone else can find them and…

You’re back to square one.

The choice then comes down to, taking a slight, possibly insignificant chance that the NSA will compile your fingerprint or other information and begin to track you versus the rather large certainty that people with criminal intent are looking for easy prey. Both are very real possibilities, just one is far more omnipresent than the other.

But then this opens a larger issue: interacting with the public domain at all.

There’s really no way to avoid the potential of a government spying on you. Even if you stayed at home, changed your locks, shut off your cable, your grid-generated electric, shut down your telephones, and never sent or received mail – a scenario that would very likely raise someone’s eyebrows somewhere and possibly create its own problems in terms of staying off the NSA radar – you’d still have to eat food, generate waste, and use water. And even if you grew it all on your own land, and cooked it yourself, and had a septic system and recycled your water and composted your trash, you’d still appear somewhere.

You’d pay taxes of some sort, even if just property taxes. If you walked outside to plant crops, Google Maps might find you and if they can, the NSA can. Satellites, drones – already in use in some jurisdictions to search for hidden marijuana crops – hell, just a park ranger driving past in his pick up. All of these are potential sources of surveillance.

Nevermind that you have friends and family, too, all of whom would have some interaction with you, all of whom are potential informants, even incidentally.

Scary stuff out there, huh?

Sochi Agonists

I’m on the fence about boycotting the Sochi Olympics next year over the LGBT punishments handed out by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

I can certainly see the point of making a boycott, withdrawing our athletes over treating anyone as subhuman – altho it’s interesting that many of the people rallying for a boycott oppose intervention in Syria over a far worse human rights abuse…one of the reasons I’m on the fence here, because I’m on the fence there, too.

Still, something about it all bothered me, and then I happened to catch this on the new ESPN show, “Olbermann,” the new home of an old friend of the blog, Keith Olbermann.

 

Watch what he says, and then tell me that I'm wrong to think it might be a good idea to emulate Jesse Owens' in the German Olympics of 1936 (altho Keith makes a great point about Marty Glickman in the same games.)

 

Thoughts on Syria

A couple of ruminations came up in my head over the weekend when I contemplated the latest from Syria:

1) Do you think that the corporatists are screaming bloody murder that their chosen party, Republicans, are not falling in line like the sheeple they are?

2) Is part of the reason Teabaggers aren’t falling in line to get a pound of flesh out of Assad because they’d finally have to acknowledge that global warming is a real threat to the world and by extension, us? Assad has been diverting water from the rural communities (and farms) to the cities to help ease the thirst of not only the permanent urban citizenry, but also the massive influx of refugees from those self-same rural communities ravaged by drought. As he’s moved closer to the city to divert water – notably, the suburbs – the civil unrest has gotten worse.

3) Would this conflict even be discussed if some bonehead President hadn’t gotten us engulfed (pun intended) in a war of choice that last more than a decade? After all, President Clinton managed to gather a coalition of NATO and other allies, including Russia, to get on board to seek first diplomatic means and then military solutions to the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. One presumes that had we not become a truly evil nation in the past twenty years, we’d have the moral authority now to ask again.

4) I’m not sure Assad understands the Iraq war, however. Is he trying to rally his allies by playing the martyr card? Is it possible he’s telling the truth, as Hussein did?

5) Loren Thompson has a point: If Obama fails to garner the votes to authorize retaliation, he actually wins in the long run, domestically. And I think the US gains a measure of credibility back, too. For 213 of our 236+ years of existence, the United States has been at war with somebody. It’s really long past time to call us “warmongers”. The last time we were not at war? Dec. 6, 1941 (if you include the Cold War. If not, you need only look to Jimmy Carter’s administration.)

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Vlad Putin might want to rethink his bellicose nature. Calling people “liars” is rich, coming from a guy who’s proven he’s all about ethnic cleansing in his own hegemony. Just ask the Chechens. Or the Georgians. Or the Uzbeks. Or Pussy Riot.

2) Iranians wish Jews a Happy New Year. Wait, what????

3) The Schaden, it freudes!

4) Now maybe we have a place to put Arizona.

5) When a New York mayor talks about “low income housing,” I’m not sure this is what most people think of.

6) For folks who thought Obama snubbed Putin, he didn’t. I sort of suspected this was going to happen anyway, just not in Moscow.

7) Perhaps they own dogs, Mike?

8) People still get the mumps?

9) Leapin’ lemurs!

10) And finally, the bulletproof squirrel

While Denialists Double Down....

The insurance industry is already worrying about how to handle Global Warming:

“The debate on climate change and global warming has been intensely polarized. A great deal of this noise has clouded the very real and emerging issues that we as an industry and society need to address,” said Johnny Chan, PhD, director of the Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre. “In order to adapt to climate change and the changing risk landscape, it is necessary to cut through this noise and focus on objective decisions to mitigate both the financial and social risks associated with climate change.”

The evidence of global warming is undeniable and includes increasing air temperatures, increasing ocean water temperatures, tree ring characteristics, ice core characteristics and the retreat of ice caps, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body that reviews and assesses scientific evidence pertaining to the physics and impacts of climate change. While climate change has been documented with supporting evidence in  past centuries, the rate of warming is believed to be unprecedented,  IPCC added.

“Based on consistent and mounting scientific evidence, the IPCC has assessed that it is highly unlikely that recent warming trends can be explained away by natural variability alone,” said James Waller, PhD, research meteorologist for GC Analytics. “Estimates show that the mean temperature of the Earth could rise an additional two to four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This may seem like a relatively small increase, but the impact of rising temperatures, even by a few degrees, could cause a shift in weather patterns, with considerable impact worldwide.”

The impact of weather-related hazards are dependent on the frequency and severity of CAT [ed.note: catastrophic] events, but also on vulnerability, population density, local infrastructure and the property values of affected areas, the report said, and so factors including per-capita gross domestic product, total insured value, population density and annualized property value must be accounted for, according to the report.

So the insurance industry is clearly alarmed at global warming and is convinced that this is not a natural phenomenon but a manmade crisis.

The analysis goes on to point out that sea level rise is the biggest threat to life and property to come out of global warming, which makes sense: higher winds, more frequent storms, and higher temperatures can all be killers but none can kill on the massive scale that floodwaters can – just look at Katrina – and adding water volume can only make things even worse.

And yet, there are still paid derpers prattling…

Cats And Dogs, Sleeping Together!

The NAACP and the Ku Klan Klan hold meetings:

A meeting between the Wyoming chapter of the NAACP and an organizer for the Ku Klux Klan over the weekend is believed to be the first of its kind.

The meeting between Jimmy Simmons, president of the Casper NAACP, and John Abarr, a KKK organizer from Great Falls, Mont., took place at a hotel in Casper, Wyo., under tight security, the Casper Star-Tribune reported.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the United Klans of America said Tuesday that the meeting is a first.

Abarr told The Associated Press that he met with Simmons Saturday and ended up filling out an NAACP membership form so he can get the group’s newsletters and some insight into its views. He said he paid the $30 fee to join, plus a $20 donation.

Say what, now?

The NAACP requested the meeting after there were reports that hate literature was being distributed in Gillette, WY, about 130 miles north of Casper, and that black men were being beaten when seen out with white women. The police chief of Gillette has denied any beatings of black men have been reported, altho he admitted the beatings could have taken place just outside of town and therefore out of his jurisdiction.

Y’know, there are some tunes from the Fifties that really, I’m not nostalgic for. This is one of them.

Simmons called the meeting to suss out what the Klan was up to in Wyoming. Abarr denied any violence, and his attendance was sanctioned by the national Klan.

Abarr is part of a separatist movement that wants to carve out the northern tier of the US as a whites-only territory, from Wyoming to the Washington coast.

This has been Your Day in the Bizarre.

OK, So You Know How You Know Syria Is Probably a Mistake To Get Involved In?

John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain AND Lindsey Graham have signed on:

WASHINGTON — The White House’s aggressive push for Congressional approval of an attack on Syria appeared to have won the tentative support of one of President Obama’s most hawkish critics, Senator John McCain, who said Monday that he would back a limited strike if the president did more to arm the Syrian rebels and the attack was punishing enough to weaken the Syrian military.

In an hourlong meeting at the White House, said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, Mr. Obama gave general support to doing more for the Syrian rebels, although no specifics were agreed upon. Officials said that in the same conversation, which included Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, Mr. Obama indicated that a covert effort by the United States to arm and train Syrian rebels was beginning to yield results: the first 50-man cell of fighters, who have been trained by the C.I.A., was beginning to sneak into Syria.

There appeared to be broad agreement with the president, Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham said, that any attack on Syria should be to “degrade” the Syrian government’s delivery systems. Such a strike could include aircraft, artillery and the kind of rockets that the Obama administration says the forces of President Bashar al-Assad used to carry out an Aug. 21 sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs that killed more than 1,400 people.

Now, to be sure, if Assad – and that’s the nub of the matter, the word “if” – if Assad is gassing his people, then there’s a moral obligation on the part of the world community to step in. We do have a selective attention span, to be sure, and to be sure, it would put us in the embarrassing position of aiding Al Qaeda (among others) in their attempts to topple a dictator.

It wouldn’t be the first time America has stood shoulder to shoulder with an avowed enemy in the name of world “peace”, but that’s a digression for another history lesson. And I say that as an avowed pacifist who, while I would prefer a different method of ending the crisis and ending Assasd’s regime, can understand the world’s impatience and intolerance for that sort of behavior. It historically never ends well for the rest of us if we allow a dictator to commit genocide.

But it would be nice if the US government would lay out an actual case that Assad has clearly gassed his people with Sarin. You know the saying from a few years ago, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…errrrr, won’t get fooled again.”

Now, the administration is holding classified briefings on the matter to Congress this week (so is Putin, apparently), but that’s small beer. Americans are tired of endless war, even if it has been carefully packaged and gift wrapped to be hidden from view.

There is one troubling development, however, that should alarm anyone who supports an attack on Syria or not: Russia’s paranoia and Israel’s…paranoia? Recklessness? You decide:

Amid heightened tension in the region, Israel carried out a missile test Tuesday morning in the Mediterranean -- a launch detected by a Russian early warning system before it was confirmed by Israeli authorities.

Israel's Ministry of Defense said it and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency "completed a successful flight test (of the) new version of the Sparrow target missile."

The trial was carried out from an Israeli test range over the Mediterranean Sea, it said. The Arrow defense system successfully detected and tracked the system, it added.

World War III may be a lot closer than we think.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So the UK turned down quasi-unilateral action in Syria with the US. Surprisingly, France is on board.

2) CIA is the largest spy agency in the United States, says Edward Snowden. In a related story, he tells us Alaska is the biggest state, NY the largest city, and Snowden, the largest front-running has-been idiot.

3) At the risk of pissing someone off, PUSSY RIOT!

4) Muslim country determines Al-Jazeera is the enemy. Wait, what???

5)       The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

6) I would do a summary of this article, but I couldn’t finish it.

7) The IRS: “I now pronounce you ‘ball and chain’.”

8) I was proud to see young people stand up for themselves. I hope it makes a difference.

9) Not news, according to the US media. His estranged wife? News.

10) Finally, you know how ice is melting a little faster than anticipated? I bet it’s worse than even we’ve seen so far, and worse

than we can even fear (read the articles through, in order, to understand my point.)

Lest You Think NYC Is Immune to the Derp...

Here’s an excerpt from last night’s Republican primary debate for the candidates seeking to be the next mayor (because, THANK GOD!, Bloomberg has to leave.) [video at the link]

Asked at the start how they'd react to one of their children getting questioned by police, none of the candidates -- whose families are white -- said they'd necessarily have a problem with it.

A federal judge ruled this summer that New York's stop-and-frisk policy was unconstitutional.

"I'd say to him, 'What did you do to provoke it?'" billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis said of his son, John Jr.

Joseph Lhota, the former MTA chairman and Giuliani administration official, said he'd remind his daughter, Kathryn, of the legal history that allowed police to interrogate suspects, and try to determine whether the officers crossed the line.

Doe Fund founder George McDonald stumbled over the question, but gathered his thoughts and said his child didn't live in a high-crime neighborhood. "My son, John, isn't going to get stopped — and that's the whole point."

I do want to point out that McDonald’s answer, while superficially smacking of elitism, is actually on point (the video cuts off the last part of his statement, so it sounds even worse than it reads). McDonald is the founder of the Doe Fund, a charity that gets jobs for the homeless. His answer actually starts along the lines of “My son isn’t going to be stopped because I live in an affluent neighborhood.”

Yea. As I said, it sounded much worse than it reads.

The other two make McDonald’s answer sound practically progressive and in a city where Republicans almost always have to run as moderates to win (Giuliani, believe it or not, ran as a moderate, and Bloomberg switched from Democrat to Republican to run the first time), it’s actually skin-crawly to hear a couple of actual candidates lecture from a position of patriarchical demeanor.

Lhota’s answer gets downright creepy, something the quote I pulled doesn’t do justice to (again, watch the vid.) Here’s what he actually said:

Front-runner Joe Lhota said one of his first moves would be to read his daughter the Supreme Court decision that legalizes the practice.

"I (would) give her Terry v. Ohio which was given by Chief Justice (Earl) Warren in 1968 that gives officers the opportunity, based on certain levels of suspicion, to stop someone," Lhota said. He added that he would become upset only if the officer did not follow procedure.

Hey, um, Joe? I know a judge in Montana with whom you should get acquainted.

The Dream Is Dying

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963

"But one hundred [ed.note: and fifty] years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition."

 

(NB: Dr. King had the full text copyrighted, so I can’t use much more, but in truth, I really don’t have to.)

Syria's Moonlight

One kind of wonders why both China and Russia are making trouble with the world on Syria:

Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich has called on the international community to show "prudence" over the crisis and observe international law.

"Attempts to bypass the Security Council, once again to create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries of the Middle East and North Africa," he said in a statement.

The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said Western powers were rushing to conclusions about who may have used chemical weapons in Syria before UN inspectors had completed their investigation.

Now, given our rather spotty track record when it comes to the possession of weapons of mass destruction, we might pay a little heed to the warnings both China and Russia have given. Prudence is clearly warranted and, besides, I really can’t stand being the police department to the world.

On the flip side, there’s no Scott Ritter or Hans Blik flapping their arms, trying to point out that, no, Syria does not have WMDs, and my mind wanders back to the 1990s, when we had a chance to prevent the death of 750,000 Rwandans at the hands of their own countrymen, and did nothing.

Syria as a strategic issue is a conundrum. Yes, they are a threat to Israel, particularly through their Lebanese surrogates, but it’s not like Israel hasn’t had bigger threats that they’ve faced down by themselves, with us standing behind them.

That Assad would use (assuming he has) chemical weapons against his own people means the likelihood of using them against Israel is even greater and while Israel has long expected this kind of attack, she’s never been tested the way she’d be tested by short-range missiles tipped with bioweaponry. By treaty, we’d be forced to retaliate, and by extension, so would NATO.

Sort of makes a case for Russia joining NATO but they seem content with offering some low-level assistance to that organization and nothing else.  

One would hope for a better solution to be found in Syria, and that Kerry’s speechifying and Obama’s public pondering are merely a little sabre-rattling. Another war is the last thing this nation needs, and as tired as we all are right now, a major mistake is just a button-push away.

Short-Fingered Vulgarian Reach Much Longer Than Thought

Apparently, Donald Trump’s fortunes have sunk to new lows. Rather than scam tens of millions from institutional investors and banks who lined up to fund his Atlantic City casinos…and let’s face facts: if you can’t make it in the casino industry, you’re a failure. It’s like failing in the illegal drug trade, it’s unpossible…and then file bankruptcy, Trump has been forced to resort to selling to us peons.

You know, things like his ill-fated airline, and his noxious cologne, and his line of “premium” chocolates.

I’m told they make terrific emetics, but I digress…

It seems that Trump was not content with the nickel-and-dime grifting he was engaged in and has allegedly decided to go with the long con, if you believe New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

New York's attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony "Trump University" that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

Trump shot back that the Democrat's lawsuit is false and politically motivated.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says many of the 5,000 students who paid up to $35,000 thought they would at least meet Trump but instead all they got was their picture taken in front of a life-size picture of "The Apprentice" TV star.

"Trump University engaged in deception at every stage of consumers' advancement through costly programs and caused real financial harm," Schneiderman said. "Trump University, with Donald Trump's knowledge and participation, relied on Trump's name recognition and celebrity status to take advantage of consumers who believed in the Trump brand."

A bit of prima facie evidence that there may be more to this charge than – oh, hell, who am I kidding? We all know it’s true! – but one sign that Trump is worried is the reaction he had, both in real life and on the web and on Twitter.

“98% approval rating” – another tactic of the fraudulent, so maybe Trump ought to back away from it, is to make up shit wholesale – is probably based on surveys by people who completed the “University” and hadn’t realized yet how badly they had been ripped off: e.g. the really dumb and ignorant, otherwise known as Teabaggers.

I presume the next step for Trump is to roll drunks for their wallets, and mug kids for their milk money.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Does anyone know where I can obtain a gift subscription to Go Fuck Yourself Quarterly? Asking for a friend.

2) Batfleck? Really? Did no one pay attention to the box office numbers for Daredevil?

3) I’m conflicted over the revelations surrounding Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. On the one hand, I support her right to live her life as she chooses, no matter how icky I may personally view her choices. On the other hand, given the serious nature of the revelations she made as Bradley, this distracts from a very serious, very important story, and diminishes the media’s already miniscule coverage.

4) It seems like the entire western United States caught fire while I was gone. What have you people been doing?!?!?!?!

5) The problem with drawing lines in the sand is that sometimes, people step over them.

6) In other Syria-related news, it looks like Israel is either being pro-active or opportunistic. You decide.

7) I’m worried about where this is all headed in the Middle East.

8) The NASDAQ was shut down for three hours yesterday, apparently due to a glitch in the system software running the trading computers. “Ghosts in the Machine,” indeed…

9) Begun, the Derp Wars have.

10) Oh, Florida, you never fail to amuse.