Skip to content

Obama punts on climate

Saturday, March 16, 2013

No surprises here:

The Obama Administration has, tragically, signaled it may retreat on two major climate issues.

The UK Guardian reported Friday:

Barack Obama’s grand vision of action on climate change shrank to $200m a year to fund research into clean fuel cars, with signs of retreat on the big environmental issues of the day….

But on the most immediate environmental decision in his in-tray — the future of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project – White House officials indicated on Friday that Obama’s green and liberal supporters would be in for a disappointment. Officials signalled that the president was inclined to approve the project.

(via ThinkProgress)

On the plus side, this may very well mean that it doesn’t really matter if he institutes chained CPI and otherwise cuts social security and Medicare, as we may not be around to experience the devastation when the effects of those cuts really kick in. (By the way, as the Think Progress writer notes, since Obama needs Congressional approval for the money on clean fuel, and he’s not likely to get it, it really means he’s doing pretty much nothing on the entire issue. Money talks in the Obama administration; not as loudly as it would have with Romney, but plenty loud enough)

Filed in Environment, Obama | | Comments (0)

Statistical questions

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Apparently, Wayne LaPierre said this yesterday.

“The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun,” he said.

(via Washington Post)

It would be interesting to know the following statistics:

  1. How many rapes are foiled on a weekly basis by good women with guns. (I am having a bit of difficulty constructing a scenario under which such a thing is likely to happen, but then I’m a bad man without a gun).
  2. Does the weekly number of foiled rapes equal the weekly number of children mowed down by negligent parents. (Kagro X, at Kos, has been reporting an average of two a week, in that minor category of accidental gun violence alone.)
  3. Have the number of such foiled rapes in the history of the entire United States equaled the number of deaths at Sandy Hook?

I’m assuming, of course, that there’s a media conspiracy (the media such as Fox being liberal, and all) to keep the facts of foiled rapes from the American public, though it’s hard to understand why the NRA doesn’t publicize each good woman who saves her virtue at the point of a gun. If there were no such conspiracy, and but for the NRA’s surprising reticence on the subject, I wouldn’t have to ask such obviously stupid questions.

Filed in Crazies | | Comments (0)

Spring comin’

Saturday, March 16, 2013

We’re in Boston. Yesterday, we took in the Boston Flower Show. Herewith some pictures, none too great, but at least they serve as a reminder of things to come. In my defense, photo-wise, the lighting at the Seaport World Trade Center, where the show is held, is a nightmare. It’s almost impossible to get a proper color temperature setting. Pictures tend to come out with an orange cast. 

Filed in Pictures | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music-35th Anniversary Edition

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Tuesday will mark 35 years of wedded bliss for me and my girl. Well, not all bliss, especially for her, but we’ve been hanging in there ever since the JP made us legal in our living room before a crowd of four. Somehow, against all odds, she’s put up with me for that long. So, this is dedicated to her. Oddly enough, for such a wonderful song, this is the best video version I could find. The pickings were slim. I was disappointed I couldn’t find a decent video (as opposed to audio with pictures of album covers) that included the introductory verse.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Here comes the new pontiff, same as the old pontiff

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

But of course, we’ll all get fooled again. This is from an article written in January of 2011:

Benedict XVI gave us words of great comfort and encouragement in the message he delivered on Christmas Eve.

“God anticipates us again and again in unexpected ways,” the pope said. “He does not cease to search for us, to raise us up as often as we might need. He does not abandon the lost sheep in the wilderness into which it had strayed. God does not allow himself to be confounded by our sin. Again and again he begins afresh with us”.

If these words comforted and encouraged me they will surely have done the same for leaders of the church in Argentina, among many others. To the judicious and fair-minded outsider it has been clear for years that the upper reaches of the Argentine church contained many “lost sheep in the wilderness”, men who had communed and supported the unspeakably brutal western-supported military dictatorship that seized power in that country in 1976 and battened on it for years. Not only did the generals slaughter thousands unjustly, often dropping them out of aeroplanes over the River Plate and selling off their orphan children to the highest bidder, they also murdered at least two bishops and many priests. Yet even the execution of other men of the cloth did nothing to shake the support of senior clerics, including representatives of the Holy See, for the criminality of their leader General Jorge Rafael Videla and his minions.

As it happens, in the week before Christmas in the city of Córdoba Videla and some of his military and police cohorts were convicted by their country’s courts of the murder of 31 people between April and October 1976, a small fraction of the killings they were responsible for. The convictions brought life sentences for some of the military. These were not to be served, as has often been the case in Argentina and neighbouring Chile, in comfy armed forces retirement homes but in common prisons. Unsurprisingly there was dancing in the city’s streets when the judge announced the sentences.

What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentine hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church’s collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church’s complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment

(via Hugh O’Shaughnessy | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk)

So, if Mr. O’Shaugnessy is correct, we’re about to find what scandal will ensue, for Bergoglio is now, indeed, infallible. As regular readers know, I am an expert on the Catholic Church, having been rigorously schooled by the Sisters of St. Joseph at Our Lady of Sorrows School, and no, you are not reading that wrong, and I still can’t believe that I was probably in my forties before it occurred to me that it is really a bizarre name for a school. Sorry, I stray. I was about to say that, expert that I am, even I don’t know if a pope’s infallibility is retroactive. If it is, then there is obviously no problem in naming a man who chose to aid murderers to the papacy, since as soon as you do so his prior sins are retroactively converted to works of mercy or something. I am afraid I can’t share Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s belief that a scandal, any scandal will ensue. After all, if we can blithely accept a Pope who was a member of the Hitler Youth, we can easily accept one who hid mass murderers from the clutches of the human rights police.

Acknowledgment: Source material shamelessly stolen from a post my younger son put on Facebook.

Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

Painful

Monday, March 11, 2013

Sports headline in this morning’s Day (not repeated on-line):

Huskies win easy 

Filed in Language | | Comments (0)

More adventures in semantics

Saturday, March 9, 2013

As one ages one acquires the right to become a curmudgeon, or at least one tends to believe that to be the case. Having reached a not yet ripe, but still old age, I am going to indulge myself. The object of my not-quite-wrath? Why, as often, the New York Times, whose style book, in my cranky opinion, needs some fine tuning. Today we learn that British bankers, much like their American counterparts, are getting paid big pounds for destroying the institutions for which they work.

But the region’s banks cannot easily defend their outsize pay in the current environment. British institutions, already struggling to bolster profits since the crisis, have been tarnished by a series of scandals. In the latest disclosures on Friday, Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 82 percent owned by the British government after receiving a bailout during the financial crisis, announced on Friday that 93 of its employees earned more than more than £1 million, or $1.5 million, last year. The payments came even as R.B.S. reported a multibillion-pound loss last year. The bank did not disclose the similar figures of staff compensation for 2011.

Barclays, which came under fire after agreeing to a $450 million fine with American and British authorities related to the rate-rigging scandal, said in an annual report on Friday that 428 of its staff members still earned more than $1.5 million in 2012. (Emphasis decidedly added)

(via NYTimes.com)

I would humbly submit that in context the word “earned” is misused here.

I suppose that one could make the argument that the first definition in my dictionary might apply, if only faintly:

obtain (money) in return for labour or services,

though it is hard to argue that these bankers provided either labour or services from which anyone derived a benefit. But really, isn’t the second definition far more germane, and (perhaps) unwittingly implied by the Times:

gain deservedly in return for one’s behaviour or achievements.

Most objective people would be hard pressed to argue that these guys (and a few gals, I suppose) did anything to actually deserve these outlandish bonuses, unless you believe that tanking their own bank and the economy is an achievement, or, in the alternative, engaging in a massive conspiracy to commit fraud. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to substitute “were paid” for the more value laden “earned”. This may sound trivial, but can you to imagine the term being used by the Times to refer to a drug dealer’s ill gotten gains?

Filed in Corporate Crime, Language | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, March 8, 2013

It’s yet another snowy Friday, it being exactly one month since the actual blizzard we endured four weeks ago today. I spent some time looking for songs about winter, and trying to find suitable videos for the titles I found. Not much luck, until I found this one, in which the video and audio quality are not that great, but you can’t have everything. Ray Charles and Dionne Warwick at the 1987 Grammys.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

What an a******

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Eric Holder, two days ago:

Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday said the suicide death of internet activist Aaron Swartz was a “tragedy,” but the hacking case against the 26-year-old was “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.”

Holder, the nation’s top prosecutor, is the highest-ranking member of the President Barack Obama administration to defend the indictment and prosecution of the former director of Demand Progress, who committed suicide in January as his April trial approached. Holder’s comments come seven weeks after Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, whose office was prosecuting Swartz, said the authorities’ actions were “appropriate in bringing and handling this case.”

(via Wired.com)

Meanwhile, here’s what he said the next day about how he elects to use his own prosecutorial discretion when the perpetrator is a bank:

Yesterday Attorney General Holder stated openly what was already apparent. The Justice Department believes that Too Big to Fail Banks are Too Big to Jail. Criminal indictments against banks or leading bankers might endanger the economy and thus were too big a risk.

Here’s what Holder said

“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” he said. “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

(via Reader Supported News)

It’s not just that he believes these things. It’s the fact that he follows one statement with another, without, apparently, any idea of how they play against one another. It’s fine to drive a kid to suicide for doing things some of the victims didn’t even mind, while you give a free pass to people who are engaged in criminal conspiracies to game the financial system for their own benefit, with economic catastrophe a side benefit the rest of us have to experience, though not the guys who brought it on. Not to mention that if Holder feels these banks are too big, maybe he ought to give some thought to the fact that he’s the guy whose supposed to do something about that.

Filed in Equal Justice | | Comments (0)

Graphing inequality

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

No time to actually post anything, but I thought I’d pass this along, which I saw here.

Filed in Economics, Occupy | | Comments (1)