Goodbye, Mr. Craven

Wes Craven has died. Hollywood Reporter has the obit. I'm sure everyone will be gushing about A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream.  The People Under the Stairs and Shocker have adherents as well. For  me , though, the film that Wes Craven should be remembered for is The Last House on the Left.

LHotL is a difficult and disturbing film. The first half is abhorrent torture and rape visited on innocents. The second half is abhorrent torture and death visited on the guilty.  This is a movie that makes the audience uncomfortable. Mostly, it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves. As it should.

Craven manages to force his audience to rethink their view of things like morality, revenge, justice. That's a lot for an ultra-low budget horror movie to accomplish.

But he managed it.

So long Wes, we are gonna miss you!

Seriously, Scott? Seriously?

Scott Walker wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Canada?!?!!??!!!???!!!!????!

Apparently, yes, this numbnuts empty suit is serious.

Interview with Q

This interview with Quentin Tarantino is amazing

Frankly, sophisticated audiences are not a problem. Dumb audiences are a problem. But I think audiences are getting more sophisticated — that’s just a product of time. In the ’50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they’re not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line. With Pulp Fiction, people were like, “Wow, I have never seen a movie like that before. A movie can do that?” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I’m not talking ridiculously over anyone’s head anymore. I think people watched Django and Inglourious Basterds and thought they were really out there, but they got it. They felt themselves on solid ground. It wasn’t just, “What the fuck was that?” And people understand what I’m doing with genre. They’re not befuddled. They don’t think I’m doing it wrong. They get it.

I cannot wait for The Hateful 8

Luntz fears the Trump

“We know his goal is to make America great again,” one woman said. “It’s on his hat, and we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it — it’s to make America great again.”

Frank Luntz (Republican scum bag "polster") is starting to freak out about Trump. He ran a focus group to try to get to the bottom of the Trump Phenomenon. What he found frightened him.  They like his message because they can understand it. It is simple. hate and ignorance tend to be simple, after all.

What Luntz doesn't understand is that they (Fox, the Koch Cabal, the Republican establishment) built this. They drove insane ideas and insane narratives to rile uneducated, uninformed, bigoted people and get them into the political process; to get them invested in candidates that would serve the corporate philosophy. They birthed Trump. Now we all have to live with it.

Raw Story has the deets

Tonight the links are coming

It's not just me, right? Scott Walker always looks stoned:

And now, the links:


End of the world appeal

Christianist History

That Benson thing continues

Social Politics

Brooks and Trump

Campaign Zero

Racism and JEB!

Zombie Club

That's it, kiddies.

Worried about made up things

American conservatives worry a lot. They worry to a horrible degree. In fact, it often seems that American conservatism is fueled by fear and distress. What’s really fascinating is what they worry about. It seems that much of their energy is spent being very worked up over things fully imagined. Maybe it’s the religious side of their minds that cause this. Christians believe a lot of weird things, and maybe that spills over?

We know that Conservatives worry about THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS, which doesn’t exist. They worry about “Partial Birth Abortions”, which don’t exist.  They worry about totally made up satanic murders and ritual abuse.  

And now, led by Trump, they are very worried about imaginary anchor babies. As the article explains, the idea doesn't even work in a reasonable way:

In order to apply for such an option, the parent of a so-called anchor baby would need to do all of the following.

• Wait for his or her child to reach the age of 21.
• Leave the United States.
• Return to their home country.
• Have their child begin the lengthy process of applying for a family reunification immigration request.
• Clear consular interviews and a U.S. State Department background check. (One or both would very likely provide evidence that said parent, at some point, lived in the United States illegally -- long enough for that "anchor baby" to be conceived or born. And despite widespread belief to the contrary, there is indeed a penalty for that.)

If a person has lived in the United States unlawfully for a period of more than 180 days but less than one year, there is an automatic three-year bar on that person ever reentering the United States -- and that's before any wait time for a visa. So that's a minimum of 21 years for the child to mature, plus the three-year wait.

That's right! It's easy: sneak into the country, have a baby, go home, wait 21 years, have the grown up child fill out tons of papaer work, wait three more years and, if you get lucky, PRESTO! You made it into America! Good planning, there.

Hat tip Ed Brayton

Trump and the Mirror

Everyone is talking about what a hate filled, bigoted, slow witted, unserious candidate Donald Trump is. Well, everyone who isn’t one of his millions of rabid acolytes, anyway. In truth, the everyone I’m talking about includes only those members of the punditry that aren’t also hate filled, bogoted, slow witted, unserious people. So, a few people are talking about what a hate filled, bigoted, slow witted, unserious candidate Donald Trump is. 

But, what isn’t being mentioned is that he isn’t an outlier. The GOP debate was filled with people who fit that metric. Jeb! May not hate the Mexicans as much as Trump, but he certainly hates the poor and all those “Asian anchor babies”. Walker is as slow witted and unserious as anyone ever. Rand TM Paul isn’t all that far from his Daddy Ron’s white power newsletters. Huckabee is one step away from saying gays must be stoned in the town square. 

They all seem to either hate women outright or at least view women as weirdly subservient sex providers and child raisers.

They all support policies that will gut freedom, wreck the economy and redistribute what is left of the wealth into the hands of a few wealthy individuals and corporations. 

They all fall in line with anti-science corporate greed.

They all support authoritarian police state tactics that lead to the murder of unarmed black men, women and children.

They all suck.

When will the media notice that all of the Republican candidates are just like Trump, but with better manners?

The truth about drug dogs

Having worked in law enforcement, I already knew that drug dogs were bogus. Even many of the handlers that use these dogs know that they are fabricating probable cause, but continue to do so in order to carryout searches that they hope will lead to cash (the real target in today's civil forfeiture society).  Now this article confirms much of what I already new:

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs' credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers' discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.

So what went on here? Did the handlers simply cheat and pretend they'd seen their dogs show the correct responses to smelling drugs, or did the handlers somehow lead the dogs to provide positive responses with unconscious cues? This is a difficult question, which requires further research, but a clue to the likely answer lies a century ago in a horse called Clever Hans.

The article


The police will create any hint of cause they can to facilitate a search so that property can be seized. 

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs’ credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers’ discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/08/24/another-study-shows-unreliability-of-drug-sniffing-dogs/#sthash.hTAI9Rbs.dpuf

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs’ credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers’ discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/08/24/another-study-shows-unreliability-of-drug-sniffing-dogs/#sthash.hTAI9Rbs.dpuf

Fixing the police.

Campaign Zero


I like these common sense ideas to fix the issues our society faces with police. I like these ideas a lot. I would shuffle the numbers a bit (I think demilitarization is more pressing than community representation, for instance), but this is a workable plan. Put it on a ballot. I will vote for it. I'll fight for it. 


hat tip to Balloon Juice

Alito - Thomas 2016

Lawyers Guns and Money nails it:

Let me be clear: I cannot possibly endorse this more strongly. Alito should run. He should be the nominee. The discussion should be over. And needless to say the ticket should be balanced with the nation’s most prominent African-American conservative. ALITO/THOMAS ’16! Make it happen.

Read it here!


I never would have thought of it, but damn. Please let this happen. Please! I am begging.

Lawyers Guns and Money

Then they came for the pokemon

I am not in the least bit surprised. It was bound to happen:

Two men have been arrested after allegedly threatening violence to attendees at the Pokemon World Championship in Boston.

The plot against the Pokemon


 I remember when Yu-Gi-Oh attacked Magic the Gathering with knives and bats. It was horrible.

hat tip to balloon Juice for this story.

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Award winners are out and thanks to the puppies (both sad and rabid) a lot of categories have no winner. Sad that a bunch of nuts have stopped the Hugos from giving awards this year. I hate people who try to game these things for their own annoying purposes.

Erin Ivey

I love Tom Waits. Now I love Erin Ivey, because of this:

Alice

That moment when Donald Trump stopped being funny

Police in Boston say that one of two brothers who allegedly beat a homeless Hispanic man cited Trump’s message on immigration as a motivation for their attack. “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” Scott Leader, 38, told officers, according to a police report cited by The Boston Globe.

The whole story


Remember when John McCain had to dial his shit back because the crazies that supported John McCain were getting riled up? Can you see Trump dialing it back? Their words have consequences and it is important to remember that. We will see more of this. 

Mr Overby

Mr. Overby is Falling, my novella that should likely be forgotten, is sort of being adapted for film. A short film based on sections of the book is underway in Los Angeles as we speak. I will give more information when it is available.

Compelled Labor

Little Green Footballs brings us news of this story.

I would just say this: … ’30 to 60 days from now anyone who is in the state of Iowa that who is not here legally and who cannot demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities here in the State of Iowa, become property of the State of Iowa.’ So if you are here without our permission, and we have given you two months to leave, and you’re still here, and we find that you’re still here after we we’ve given you the deadline to leave, then you become property of the State of Iowa. And we have a job for you. And we start using compelled labor, the people who are here illegally would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state rather than a liability and we start inventing jobs for them to do.

Yeah... that sounds oddly like, well, slavery. Seems like we have an amendment in out constitution that says something about that. maybe? I'm not sure. My head hurts.  Anyway, Jan Michelson, who is actually given access to radio airwaves and such, actually fucking said this.

More at Media Matters

This image says so much

John Oliver

When John Oliver filled in for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, I was impressed. At the time I told a friend that I was sure Oliver would get his own show. I was right. He did. And that show has developed into the best thing on TV*


A taste


* Oliver was also on Community, which was the best thing on television.

These are the links

Abstinence asshole.

Supreme mathematics?.

Ride the Trump=o-Copter.

President Carter.

Brooks, of course.

This is it.

Bible thumping dick.

I should bring this back

Wu-Tang Yeah

I love Wu-Tang Clan. Really love. But the wikipedia article about Enter the Wu-Tang is insane.

To wit:

The true meaning of the album's title is not well known or understood. According to a Five Percent philosophy, known as the Supreme Mathematics, the number 9 means "to bring into existence," and this meant everything to the group's debut album. The group was made of 9 members, each of whom had 4 chambers of the heart, which are 2 atria, and 2 ventricles. All of this is the root for "36 Chambers", being that 9 x 4 = 36.

 I do enjoy reading random shit at night.

The Atheist Pig

The Atheist Pig is my new favorite comic. Funny and on the money every time. You should check it out.

They are killing us in Bangladesh

Atheist bloggers are being hacked to death in Bangladesh. Why isn't this at the top of every newscast? Why isn't the internet bubbling over about this. Silence isn't an option. I'm glad someone is talking about it.

The Friendly Atheist has more on the horror

hateful People Suck

President jimmy Carter, a fine man, recently announced that he has cancer. It's no surprise that some on the right would take glee in that.

In the ever-deepening abyss of lower bars that modern Republicans are setting for themselves, conservative movie critic, political commentator, and generally disgusting individual, Debbie Schlussel took to Twitter to make fun of President Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis.

Yes, you did read that correctly — and this is not satire.

Hateful news


Yes, these people are really that low. This is where they live. 

You don't have to be a weather man

So this idiot who has access to writing tools wishes that a hurricane could destroy Chicago just like Katrina destroyed New Orleans. Kristen McQueary of the Chicago Tribune actually argues that New Orleans is better off for having been hit by a storm that killed thousands and left countless others injured, homeless and broke. Her arguments run the gamut from idiotic to border-line evil.

Has she apologized for this, you ask. Well of course. Sort of. She seems to be sorry that we are too stupid to understand her higher order thinking. I'm personally sick of people like her. Their contempt for the lives of poor minority people is more than I can handle.

Gay Slaves

Some links for your night:

I had no idea that supporting gay rights would lead to slavery! Boy have I been misled.

Some history on Poe's Law.

A short history of The Horde.

Harding really got around.

Seriously, fuck this asshat.

Bernie takes the lead in New Hampshire.

Hillary sez: all the Republicans are like Trump. She's right, ya know.

This speaks for itself

And finally, Bible verse that you can really dig, bro

I agree, but still choose to argue because I'm like that.

I agree very much with this article, but I do have a bit of a quibble with this statement:

[Hillary Clinton is] the woman who has been the target of possibly the greatest amount of sexism and misogyny over the course of a single political career.

While it could be argued that that statement is true, only the length and profile of that career makes it so. In any given female politician's career she will likely suffer at least as much sexism as Ms Clinton has, if we break it down on a year by year basis. Sadly, female politicians in this country face outsize hatred from the right (and sometimes the center as well). I don't think Secretary Clinton's experience is notably worse than that of any woman in Democratic politics.

Women on the right tend to get a bit of a pass from the rightwing pundits and pols. Ann Coulter will never have it as tough as Rachel Maddow. Olympia Snowe with never suffer what Debbie Wasserman-Schultz does. That's sort of a given.

The aliens are actually octopi

Or maybe they aren't...  Octopuses are certainly odd, though. Octopode? Whatever.

Black Folks Be Scary!

Or maybe Paul Giamatti is the problem. Seriously, why the hell does anyone think that they need to increase security for Straight Outta Compton? That's freakin' stupid.  The theater shootings I remember were during The Dark Knight Rises, Trainwreck and The Godfather Part III. Those movies seem pretty white to me...

I plan to see it soon, by the way. NWA is straight outta my childhood. What I'd really like is a biopic about Public Enemy. That's something I could dig.

Vote for Laura Ingalls Wilder!

Okay, sure, she gut shot her pa that one time. And, maybe she made her sister blind. Still, you kinda want to vote for her. Laura Ingalls for congress

Today's Links

Did I call it? I called it! I will not be eating my hat. Trump surged (surged!) after being crazy in the debate, picking a fight with FOX news and acting like an all around ass. Everyone should be about ready to start agreeing with me: Trump is a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

Dr. Cornell West and DeRay McKesson have been arrested during a protest.

Brownback's Brother Sucks too.


LGM talks about public opinion and Planned Parenthood.

Imaginary Gods.

it continues

Another among the dead in Ferguson.

It is too damn early to predict an election

This article discusses an election prediction from Moody's. It makes good points, but leaves out the fact that it is too goddamned early to predict the fucking election. Sure, Moody's predicted the last election correctly. So what? Any idiot could have predicted that Obama would trounce Mittens.

Presidential elections in this country are weird beasts. We see trends that involve economics (a sometimes great indicator, but sometimes lousy), social issues, international issues, personalities, the moral climate, the weather (yes, kids, weather influences voting) and too many other factors to list.

Demographics play an outsize role. Right now, the Dems have a leg up due to demographic trends, slight economic improvement, and changing views on social issues. That all equals a slight advantage, not a huge one. 

I also dislike the fact that Moody's thinks, this far out, that they can state that the election comes down to Virginia and Ohio. They are making a huge error calling Florida for the Republicans. Right now, I'd put FL as a toss-up - if the Republicans nominate either Bush or Rubio, FL goes Democratic (I'm going against conventional wisdom here, but I bet I'm right). Ohio could (could) be important, but my models suggest that North Carolina is more likely to be the key this time out.  Virginia is going blue again.

The article in question doesn't care who the candidates are. That's a mistake. A Hillary V JEB! match up is a very different beast than a Bernie V Cruz fight. Let's assume that the candidates are Webb and Walker. In that case, who the fuck knows who wins what?!? Webb is as likely to win Georgia as Walker is to win South Carolina.

Driftglass

Driftglass gives us the best image of the campaign. If you aren't reading that site, you are missing out on some of the best commentary on the internet.

Justice

Bernie Sanders has released a racial justice platform. This is a great start!

Let's discuss Trump

This snark at wonkette got me thinking about just how much racism is behind the rise of Donald Fucking Trump in the Republican party. It almost seems to obvious, and as such may get overlooked. Of course Trump's supporters are racist. They love that he attacks brown people (rapist robots swarming over the border and such). But is that all that there is?

Five Thirty Eight has been arguing for a while that Trump isn't a serious contender. I disagree. In past elections, Trump would have been a non-starter, but changing demographics, economics, and the shrinking conservative base have altered the calculus.  I would argue that in today's climate.

The extreme wing of the Republican party (the group that has been groomed by the Koch - FOX cabal), the Tea Party contingent, has grown to have an outsize impact on Republican primaries. These people are bitter (and they cling to their guns and religion, as someone once pointed out). They are afraid of the other (be that other brown, gay, or something else) and they badly want to return to an imagined America of the past. In their minds, the tea party contingent sees a world in which the gays didn't exist, brown people knew their place and women weren't always up in your face with their "rights" and stuff. They think that this weird utopia existed sometime in the 1950s and that Liberals have stolen it.

These are people who believe that  the 2nd amendment says that you can have guns because you have a right to overthrow the government if you want. They believe that rich people drive the economy. They believe that blacks and latinos and gays have been given a lot of special rights that "Real Americans" just don't have. They are angry. They don't trust the media ( and that includes Fox news - they trust FOX over NBC, but not on its own). They don't trust the politicians. They don't trust the Other.  They want a revolution. Bloody revolution. They are angry.

And along comes Trump.

"In Trump's case, he appears to be cornering the market on white voters, the backbone of the current Republican Party, the poll shows," he wrote. "Republicans need as many white votes as possible to offset demographic shifts in the United States that have handed Democrats an electoral advantage in the last two presidential elections."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/who-are-donald-trumps-supporters-2015-7#ixzz3iMoNzwI3

 Those white voters? Make that White male voters according to the polls.


Republican White Men. Specifically Tea Party affiliated Republican White Men love The Donald. When he spews racist shit, he goes up in the polls. When he attacks women, he goes up in the polls.  This is the new road to a Republican nomination. It ain't pretty, but it works.


Side note: in head to head match-ups, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden beat Trump easily. 

Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter

I have long believed that when you share common cause with someone, you should work with them even if this involves overlooking their flaws or other issues on which you do not agree. As an example, I am an Atheist. I still find myself allied with religious people against the death penalty. I will stand side by side with deeply religious people whom I find to be deluded. I will fight against state sanctioned murder with these folks, knowing full well that at another time I may be shouting them down outside an abortion clinic while they wave crazy religious signs and try to block access.  I accept their friendship on the issue for which we share a common cause and goals.

I support Black Lives Matter. I believe that most of the leaders of that movement are committed, reasonable, kind people working to improve the world. If I should learn that those leaders were actually dicks; mean spirited cruel people, I would still work with them. Want to know why? Because  unarmed black men and women are being murdered by the police. Because black children are being murdered by the police. This must stop. Anyone who isn’t part of the solution is, as the old saw goes, part of the problem.

My question to BLM is this: why attack your natural allies? Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley are not the enemy. They are the candidates that, if elected, would actually attempt to do something about police brutality and racism.  Sure, ambushing Bernie gets headlines, much imagine the headlines if we shut down a Rubio or Walker event.  Imagine if we forced Jeb! To answer some questions about mass incarceration, police racism, and the militarization of police forces. Imagine that.

I’m not telling anyone what to do (and no matter what, this movement will not lose my support, it is too important for that). I’m just wondering why we can’t all work together toward what are the common goals of the left.

Just my two cents. It probably isn’t worth that much

A link round-up

Little Green Footballs notices the hypocites at Red State

Daily Kos finally realizes that we don't exist

Balloon Juice marks a horrible anniversary

Driftglass talks about the debate

Dowd, Trump, etc at Lawyers Guns and Money

Republican strategy at Pharyngula

vent says things

Lion on Lion Crime at Wonkette

What's left to say?

Trump leads

The first post debate polls are starting to come in and, like I predicted, Trump is still in the lead.  Lo and behold, TPM is making something akin to the argument I have been making. Glad to see others getting on board with my way of thinking on this.