The Daily Parker

I've had some strange online conversations recently. Just today, one of my friends posted quote from comedian Michael Che:

You can’t have whatever you want, all right? I know the Forefathers said you had a right to own a gun, but they also said you could own people!

One of my friend's other Facebook friends commented: "Check your facts. 'Slave' and 'slavery' were never used in the Constitution." Well, that is literally true but irrelevant to Che's point. The 3/5 compromise and the return of fugitives are both in the original document, and then, not to put too fine a point on it, the 13th and 14th amendments both refer to slaves rather directly.

Of course, for all our fretting about stupid people on the Internet, it turns out that stupid people have always been with us. At least once a month I think about Mark Twain's essay "Corn Pone Opinions:"

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."

I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions -- at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

Today we have the same truth in a different medium. One just hopes, despite the evidence (!), that people whose opinions have no data to support them would come around to the truth if only they could see better data. But if the people in question can't even engage on the argument you're making, it's hard to have hope.

Stuff to read (or watch):

• Yesterday, Labour shadow foreign secretary Hilary Bent made the case to the House of Commons for bombing Syria.
• Republican leaders still don't believe (or pretend not to believe) that climate change is happening...
• ...even while glacier data shows conclusively that it is.
• Waukegan, Ill., may open a Ray Bradbury museum in the library building he frequented as a child.
• Chi-Raq is probably a really good film.

Back to the mines.

That's not exactly the question Richard Posner and Eric Segall raise, but it's not that far off:

Justice Scalia ... predicted in his dissent [in Lawrence v. Texas] that the court would eventually rule that the Constitution protects the right to same-sex marriage. This June, Justice Scalia’s prediction came true in Obergefell v. Hodges. He has vented even more than his usual anger over this decision. It has become apparent that his colleagues’ gay rights decisions have driven him to an extreme position concerning the role of the Supreme Court.

In a recent speech to law students at Georgetown, he argued that there is no principled basis for distinguishing child molesters from homosexuals, since both are minorities and, further, that the protection of minorities should be the responsibility of legislatures, not courts. After all, he remarked sarcastically, child abusers are also a “deserving minority,” and added, “nobody loves them.”

The logic of his position is that the Supreme Court should get out of the business of enforcing the Constitution altogether, for enforcing it overrides legislation, which is the product of elected officials, and hence of democracy.

The entire op-ed is worth a read.

First, the New Republic's Jeet Heer reminds us that Donald Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar, and is that much more dangerous for it:

The triumph of bullshit has consequences far beyond the political realm, making society as a whole more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs. A newly published article in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Making
links “bullshit receptivity” to other forms of impaired thinking: “Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.” 

It’s no accident that Trump himself is receptive to bullshit ideas promulgated by the likes of anti-vaxxers. A President Trump, based on his own bullshit receptivity and his own bullshit contagiousness, would lead a country that is far more conspiratorial, far more confused, and far less able to grapple with problems in a rational way. Trump’s America would truly be a nation swimming in bullshit.

Next, a heartwarming story of how LifeLock allowed a man to set up an account to stalk his ex-wife, and then did nothing when she complained:

Not only did the company not respond to her queries about the situation, she tells the Republic that LifeLock actively tried to block her access to the account — in order to protect the privacy of her ex-husband.

While she was able to block her ex from having access to the service, he was still able to close the account because he was the one who had paid for it. Rather than help her by providing the requested documents or keeping the account open, LifeLock advised that she open an entirely new account.

Finally, from Cranky Flier, the account of the last airplane to roll off an assembly line in California, ending a 102-year-old industry there:

As aircraft manufacturing dried up around the state, Long Beach became the last holdout. When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the entire Douglas commercial line was terminated in short order except for the MD-95. That became the Boeing 717 and made it all the way to May 23, 2006. On that day, the last two were rolled across Lakewood Blvd on the east side of the airport and delivered to AirTran and Midwest. Commercial aircraft production in the state died that day.

But on the west side of the field, the military C-17 soldiered on. The C-17 is a beast of an airplane. It’s a massive military transport that is essential for the US military. The problem is that the military has all the C-17s it needs. Production peaked at 16 a year in 2009, but that has been ramping down every year since. The aircraft was marketed to foreign countries and orders did roll in — enough to keep the production going for longer than expected — but the end has finally arrived.

The last airplane to be delivered took off from Long Beach around midday on Sunday.

There's a video of the plane taking off, too. (C-17s are pretty damned impressive.)

A couple of articles floated through my awareness today:

• Vladimir Putin has gone so far into the language of paranoia around today's shoot-down that one starts to get nervous. (Richard Hofstadter should be required reading.) Josh Marshall, ever the optimist, says it can still get worse.
• Bruce Schneier is nervous, too, about the policy repercussions from the Paris attacks.
• News flash: Donald Trump is a racist liar who sounds a lot like George Wallace and Ted Cruz Joseph McCarthy.
• IFLS outlines what happens when you drink. It's a good reminder, says the guy who had a Gluhwein at Christkindlmarket at lunch.
• WBEZ's Curious City asks, when does the CTA break even on a bus route?

Happy reading.

The good: A new study shows that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day has measurable health benefits.

The bad: A black resident of Santa Monica, Calif., got hauled out of her apartment at gunpoint by 19 police officers after a white neighbor reported someone trying to break in.

The ugly: Yale law student Omar Aziz writes about the soul of a Jihadist.

And the neutral, which could be ugly: forecasters predict 15-30 cm of snow in Chicago tomorrow night into Saturday morning.

Well, maybe Mark Kirk isn't really the narrow-minded tool he seems to be, but a letter his office sent to the President sure makes him look like one. He's yet another Republican calling for us to exclude Syrian refugees on the grounds that a few of their countrymen are extremist criminals.

Here's my response, which I sent to his office just now:

Senator,

The letter you sent to President Obama about not admitting Syrian refugees "unless the U.S. government can guarantee, with 100 percent assurance, that they are not members [of ISIS]" did not represent my views, nor the views of many of your constituents. In fact, it demonstrated not only an immoral conflation of the plight of refugees with terrorists, and not only a surprising lack of historical understanding (recall the Jewish refugees we turned away in 1938 and 1939), but also a total misunderstanding of the goals of ISIS that played right into their plans for their terror operations.

One of ISIS' strategic goals is to goad the US and its allies into knee-jerk overreaction. Vilifying the tens of thousands of Syrians who are just trying to get to safety from their war-torn country because a handful of criminals committed violent acts against one of our allies horrifies me.

We need to do everything we can to help Syrians get out of the killing zones in their countries. We also want people to immigrate here, as the US was built by people looking for opportunity and to get away from war. You know Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, don't you? Imagine if someone had excluded his father from the US.

I think you need to explain to the people of Illinois why we should in any way change our tradition of accepting those who seek a better life in our state, just because some of their countrymen are deranged, religious nuts. We have plenty of deranged, religious nuts in Illinois already, and we're still safe.

Thank you for your time.

We need to stop doing exactly what these guys want us to do. Every time we overreact, or blame entire religions or nations for the crimes of a few people, or invade Iraq, we're helping the extremists. Why is this so hard to grasp?

I haven't commented on Friday night's attacks in Paris for a number of reasons, none of which is relevant right now. I would like to call attention to some of the better responses I've read in the last couple of days:

• Paul Krugman reminds us that if we fear ISIS, they're succeeding—not the other way around.
• Professor Olivier Roy of the European University Institute in Florence says the Paris attacks reveal ISIS' strategic limitations, not their strength.
• President Obama sharply criticized Republican governors (including our own asshat Bruce Rauner) for saying their states won't accept Syrian refugees anymore. (Because of course they were flocking to Alabama, right?) The governors presumably know that this is a foreign-policy issue entirely within Article III and states have no authority here.
• French president François Hollande has declared "terrorism will not destroy the Republic." Of course not; the National Front, which could destroy the Republic, is widely recognized as being a racist, reactionary organization, unlike the U.S. Republican Party.

French reactions are instructive. The French people are pissed as hell, not scared. They understand that the attacks Friday were the work of assholes, not "Islam," and they're responding rationally. Flipping out and transforming France into an armed camp would support the thugs' agenda.

Also instructive is this article from last March explaining that ISIS really are religious nutters first and strategists second, and they really are trying to bring about the end of the world so that the last remaining few dozen of them can go to heaven with Jesus. I am not making this up, though I admit I might not fully understand it, in the same way that I don't always understand the ramblings of four-year-old children either.

The Boston Globe thinks it's time to do away with the TSA:

Let’s face it: The Transportation Security Administration, which annually costs taxpayers more than $7 billion, should never have been created. The responsibility for airport security should never have been federalized, let alone entrusted to a bloated, inflexible workforce. Former TSA administrator Kip Hawley calls it “a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic” and warns that “the relationship between the public and the TSA has become too poisonous to be sustained.” More tests and more failures won’t fix that. Scrapping the TSA would.

Fearmongers might howl, but abolishing the agency wouldn’t make air travel less secure. Given the TSA’s 95 percent failure rate, it would likely make it more secure. The airlines themselves should bear the chief responsibility for protecting planes and passengers at airports. After all, they have powerful financial incentives to ensure that flights are free of danger, while at the same time minimizing the indignities to which customers are subjected. Their bottom line would be at stake. The TSA feels no such spur.

I am posting this from an airplane, by the way. I understand that this has the potential for tragic irony.

Via James Fallows, the story of a marine hit by an IED; something to think about on this anniversary of another war's end:

Some now call it the Forever War, and every day that name grows more appropriate.

Soldiers are dying again in Iraq. President Obama extended the mission in Afghanistan through 2017 after the city of Kunduz fell to the Taliban in October. Leaked classified documents reveal a barely acknowledged drone war in Somalia and East Africa. Plus strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, direct action raids against ISIS leaders, a proxy war in Syria and al-Anbar. Between 1975 and 2000—in Grenada, Panama, the First Gulf War and Somalia—the United States fought a total of twelve days of conventional ground combat. Since October of 2001, it hasn’t ceased.

This longest war in American history has created a warrior caste. Less than one percent of the US population, the “Other One Percent,” served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly half of those veterans completed two or more tours, and 51,000 of them, a Spartan-esque subculture than would barely fill Yankee stadium, have deployed six or more times. The Delta operator who fell in Iraq in October was on his fourteenth tour.

Our professional military is staffed entirely by volunteers. Returning to combat this often is a choice, and our culture has turned to explanations from camaraderie to adrenaline to economics to explain this drive.

But this Veterans Day, it is worth considering another reason, unique to our current conflict: saving a life within a very small world. So small, in fact, that using small world theory, the math tells us that statistically they are not saving the lives of strangers, but of known quantities.

SPQRA.