Things I Wish the President Would Do Just to See What Conservatives Would Do.

Center:

Since the election of President Barack Obama, we've been told to expect everything from having our guns seized to FEMA Camps to Stock Market Crashes and making Conservatism illegal on the internet and so on... none of that crap has happened or even come close, but every time the President has a nice dinner with his wife, chooses one event over another, engages in any normal activity, or just acts human - the Conservatives I know have a fit like he has imposed martial law. Just for their reactions, part of me wished he would do the following:

1) Put himself on Mount Rushmore, but twice as big as the other presidents.

2) Rename every "Ronald Reagan Avenue" into "Cesar Chavez Avenue".

3) Do every press briefing in a grey hoodie.

4) Fly to the Border and personally adopt a refugee child from El Salvador. Name him "Marx Jihad Obama".

5) Hire Stephen Colbert as his press secretary.

6) Participate in a Civil War Re-Enactment. Choose to play "General Sherman" and re-enact the March to the Sea.

7) Find someone who posts they just know the president is going to take their guns. Wear a cat burglar outfit and break in to his house and actually steal every single gun that person owns. That way it would be true for at least one person.

8) Randomly cite the Koran in perfect Arabic. And the Communist Manifesto in the original German.

9) Detain the next White Supremacist / Sovereign Citizen found with a bunch of pipe bombs in Guantanamo Bay.

10) Go on an actual "turn off my cell phone and y'all don't know where I'm at" vacation. Biden can run things for a few days.

"Why?" and "Because." Tools for argument and understanding.

Radiation causes cancer.

Which is why it has warning signs

This statement is true, false, and somewhere in between depending on your understanding of the verb "to cause".

As an introduction, in the most stringent sense of the idea that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Paul Hume used to define "cause", the above is a false statement. Not everyone who develops cancer is exposed to intense amounts of radiation. In another sense of the word, the above statement is entirely true, Radiation exposure can be a contributing factor to whether or not one develops certain kinds of cancer. Finally, there is the more common sense of the word "cause" that we utilize in the English speaking world in which we would all agree with that statement.

You can learn about how radiation from sources like Radon, UV light and Nuclear Fallout have been found to contribute to cancers such as Lung, Skin, and Leukemia here, if you so choose.

Long ago, a chain of thinkers from Aristotle to more modern brainiacs tinkered with the notion of what it means for one thing to "cause" another. They developed some wonderfully specific criteria that have helped guide research in physics for some time. However, the strict causality that works great with questions of physics turned out to be far too inflexible to apply to other fields, where many many factors are at play that may not be possible to isolate to a standard that would satisfy Aristotle, Hume, or Newton. As such we have roughly three, often overlapping, ideas that we may be expressing when we say "X causes Y". Most Formal Logic textbooks and such will break it down into several clauses as follows:

"Oh boy! A list of stuff!

Causation:

Necessary: Condition B cannot occur without A, meaning that for every instance of B, there will be an observed instance of related A. Rain cannot happen without moisture in the air, for example. Moisture is Necessary for rain.

Sufficient: Condition A will ALWAYS be followed by B. For every instance of condition A, B will certainly occur. Heating liquid water at one atmosphere of air pressure is sufficient bring it to a boil.

Contribution: Condition A will, absent other factors, lead to more of B. Drought conditions during growing season will cause lower crop yields. There are a number of situations that could make this not occur for each and every type of crop and farm that exists, and many other factors can come into play (irrigation, GM crops, expanding acreage, etc...) but it is generally true that drought contributes to poor crop yeilds.

Good examples involve water, I guess

In physics, computing, and pure abstract logic, we see many instances of the necessary and sufficient clause. Thousands of tests can be done on a sample to get certainty of causality for a phenomenon regarding it being necessary, sufficient, or both to measurements like 0.9999 certain. If/Then statements, flowcharts and such are great examples of cause it its purest form.

But when talking about environments with more variables we cannot control, in messy real world situations involving things like people, or (gasp!) groups of people, we tend to utilize the Contribution concept of causality.

On some level, if you have grown up and been educated in the West (or most of the world at this point) you have internalized this if not learned it formally. When someone on Facebook links to a headline stating "Exposure to violent images causes violence", short for a study concluding something like "Repeated exposure to violent images throughout childhood correlates to increased violent behavior." and someone inevitably comments "I watched murder porn all day every day as a kid and I turned out fine..." or "Cavemen killed each other, and they never had murder porn..." we tend to feel something is wrong with that. Violent imagery is neither necessary nor sufficient to predict all instances of violent behavior, but in two similar groups, the group with the higher exposure is likely to engage in more violence.

If you let your kids watch this shit, you are a terrible person.

Too often people stating Contribution levels of causality are met with disagreement from those who demand Necessary or Sufficient levels of causality before they will consider the premise. People and groups of people are too complex to expose to the kind of rigor that would "prove" causality at that level. For decades the assertion that "Smoking causes lung cancer" was held back by demands for the kind of causality and statistical certainty that simply does not exist when examining contributory impacts on things as complicated as living organisms. For an example, here is a paragraph from "Freedom-of-Choice.com" that argues smoking does not cause lung cancer:

"Smoking is but one factor that can increase the incidence of lung cancer. Over 20% of all lung cancers occur in nonsmokers.1 Smoking by itself can not cause lung cancer. The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more.2 Some of the known risk factors include genetics, asbestos exposure, sex, HIV status, vitamin deficiency, diet, pollution, shipbuilding and even just plain old being lazy.2 When some of these factors are combined they can have a synergistic effect, but none of these risk factors are directly and independently responsible for "causing" lung cancer!"

"So fuck y'all!"

What made me feel the need to write this was an discussion I was having with a friend of mine about the availability of firearms and homicides. Some states and nations who have systems in place to limit access to firearms (especially for those with criminal histories or mental illness) show lower rates of firearm deaths than other places. There are many, many, other factors (population density, age distribution, poverty, efficacy of a mental health system, even climate and geography) to consider, but using all 50 states as a sample, states with looser gun laws tend to have more gun fatalities, with the correlation being found to be (r^2 = 0.42) which is a rather high correlation with social science studies with a sample size of 50. The study does a great job of reiterating "Correlation alone is not causation" and including case studies (like my home state of Missouri) where specific loosening of firearms related laws (like we had in 2007 eliminating our State's universal background checks) specifically contributed to specific murders. Laws are, of course, only one part of availability - firearms are sold illegally and stolen all the time.

It's a good study, but available in PDF form because academics are allergic to plain html for some reason - you can check it out here

Of course, as with smoking and smoking-related-illnesses, some argue that only "necessary and sufficient" can be taken into account when talking about this particular item. If humanity were as lab-controllable as chemical samples, we could likely do that. 99.999% certainty would be wonderful when discussing when we have to make hard choices about what we do in our society, but we are unique and complicated creatures and that isn't going to happen any time soon.

Making good social decisions saves lives and makes our lives better. This often requires utilizing the Contribution level of causality and ascertaining what level of contribution. Physician John Snow in 1854 saved many, many, lives by showing statistics linking exposure to fecal water to contracting cholera. Not EVERY incidence of cholera came from contaminated water (one baby seemed to get it from an infected diaper) so it wasn't a necessary condition, and not everyone who drank the contaminated water displayed cholera symptoms, so it wasn't sufficient. But is WAS contributory to cholera and by decreasing the flow of shit-water into people's mouths, he saved many lives. His story is an interesting read.

John Snow: Bad Mother Fucker

When talking about groups of people, the contributory level of causality is generally what we mean when we say "X causes Y". More people understanding this would raise our level of discourse.



*Note 1*I would love to shrink this to a more terse piece as a witty answer to every variation of "Well, I drank shit water and I didn't get sick" that would leave the reader with an understanding of Necessary, Sufficient, and Contributory... but that will have to come another time.

*Note 2* Wikipedia actually has a pretty great starting out point for the history of the concept of Causality, from Aristotle to the Modern Day.

We think people sexualize guns because people sexualize guns.

Crap like this is why we think gun people have a weird sexual thing about guns.

The never-ending deadly clown tragedy.

First Note:This post started with a much lighter tone when the situation had not yet turned as tragic as it has become.

Second Note: Been with the wife and my new child these last few weeks. Proud father of a wonderful baby boy! Blogging has been light, focus has been elsewhere, SO MUCH STUFF has came and went since then. The security vulnerabilities in IE, The recently released hacker "Weev" trying to make a hacker-sploit Startup or Hedge Fund (or this might be a BEAUTIFUL example of trolling, we will see). Huge decisions by the Supreme Court have come down regarding race, admissions, campaign finance, and searching your cell phone. The FCC may have just ended Net Neutrality as we have known it. And so much more.

This man is the gift that keeps on giving
But I am not saying anything on any of that right now. I am mesmerized by the gift that keeps on giving that is the Bundy Ranch standoff. This started as Cliven Bundy's long term status of not paying his bills or respecting the law regarding his cattle using land that is not his own without any kind of payment received for twenty years and continuing to have them trespass on Federal land on a daily basis. That is a VERY clear moral no-no. The agents informed Cliven Bundy that the next time his cattle trespassed they would be seized. Cliven responded with threats of lethal force and as such tactical units were dispatched.

The combination of guns, cowboy hats, and faux patriotism proved intoxicating to the least admirable members of America and his home became a camp for armed Anti-American drifters. After the BLM thoughtfully backed off, the inevitable happened.

#1) Two state chapters of Americans for Prosperity (the Koch Brother's political group that orchestrated "Tea Party" events which advocates for right wing cultural issues and the Koch's corporate agenda) decided to promote this cause as "Lone armed white person against the big government blah blah blah jack booted thugs etc...". Remember, there was NO merit to his case at any time in the last 20 years.

#2) Every right-wing grifter and his brother gets of the Cliven Bundy bandwagon. Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, those and many more jump in with support...

Truly a hero of our times, taking cover while civilians without flak jackets just stand around next to him and film.
#3) This situation escalates. More armed-and-weird people show up from across the nation to point their rifles at law enforcement agents and use their women as human shields. Supporters get down right Messianic about Cliven. The BLM decides to avoid slaughtering any American to seize Bundy's trespassing cattle. Bundy likely feels invincible. Rumors (with literally nothing behind them) state that Bundy not paying his bills for 20 years isn't the real issue it's a conspiracy involving Senator Reid, Solar Power, Chinese Communism, and the United Nations. (Illuminati and Reptilians to follow)

#3)The "Pro-States Rights, Anti-Obama, Conspiracy Theorist, Pro-Gun, and so on" guy was given too much time to ponder things on the microphone and said things that are pretty much unforgivably racist in any context:

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”


#4) The great back-away began. Politicians who supported him claimed to never do so, supporters began to split hairs about supporting his noble cause of trespassing against his personal racism. Cliven himself does the standard "I blame the Media for twisting my words" and then posts a photo of him with a black person. Americans for Prosperity scrubs the posts that promoted his cause. The bigger, more corporate supporters back away and Cliven is left with only his menagerie of armed paranoid malcontents. Cliven's supporters eventually do what the most ignorant of racists would do in this situation, prove that he cannot possibly be racist because he has been photographed by a genuine black person (he didn't burst into flames or anything)

Clearly a racist can't possibly pose with a person of a different race!

#5) Oh, the gift keeps on giving! While the savvy grifters move on to their next cause (Sarah Palin had an NRA convention to speak at), the less savvy continue to defend the indefensible. The contortions they have to twist into to make the guy that said "they put their young men in jail because they never learned to pick cotton" into a non-racist are AMAZING. 2nd and 3rd tier paid mouthpieces (like Dana Loesch, but some rather prominent names stick with him for a few more days.

#6) The armed paranoid folks with nowhere particular to be? They're still hanging around. They make the community exactly as comfortable as you would think. Reports of them acting as de-facto law enforcement, setting up checkpoints, intimidating residents and visitors, carrying weapons of war all over the place and such happens. Without a BLM presence to point weapons at, Oath Keepers and Militia Members and such begin to "diversify" their efforts. The gunned up folks keep talking up conspiracies about the constitution being suspended and an imminent drone strike.

#7) The Armed Factions split. The "Oath Keepers" promote a rumor from their "inside source" that Eric Holder (The Attorney General) had authorized a Military Drone Strike against the Bundy compound, which, aside from the fact that isn't how the chain-of-command works... is somehow believed by the Oath Keepers. The other Militias working at the compound reject the crazy bullshit (which is claimed to come from someone inside the DoD - which I guess answers to the Attorney General in his world) as crazy bullshit. The Oath Keepers are kicked off of the compound, too crazy and paranoid for a convention of armed paranoid people. A guy going by "Booda Bear" who is the "Head of Security" for the ranch releases a statement kicking out the Oath Keepers and manages to work in "I swear by the white skin..." which can never not sound creepy no matter what is before or after:

"... now we all have that thought of the fight of freedom and fighting against tyranny and this government that's trying to repress us but ta pull out of town and to go to hotels and say you did it for security -- that's coward, that's coward. My guys sleep in the dirt out here, we're on shifts for 14hours a day and trying to make sure that this family [welfare-king Bundy] stays safe and secure ... and just so everybody knows, as Booda, head of security for the Bundy Family I can swear on the white skin that covers my ass there will not be an Oath Keeper -- there WILL NOT BE AN OATH KEEPER allowed to set foot on the internal ranch property."

He also was rather sane in his evaluation that if a drone strike was being prepared against someone like the Bundy menagerie of armed idiots, only about five people on the planet would be aware of this in advance, and NONE of them would anonymously call up an OathKeeper hotline (it exists!) to give them details. Rather logical thought from a guy camping in the desert to promote Bundy's right to trespass.

There is a vote taken an unanimously the Oath Keepers are kicked out. Like any good meeting of guys pretending to be soldiers pretending to fight a war.. they have to threaten murder: "...you’re lucky that you’re not getting shot in the back. Because that’s what happens to deserters on the battlefield.".

Good stuff.

This is taken from a video where you get to find out that local Republican organizers cancelled meetings to come out in support of Bundy... because OF COURSE.

#8) All their failures are blamed on the government. The Oath Keepers release a statement blaming their promotion of a drone strike as government "Psy-Ops" as opposed "We listened to some GIJOE-wannabe who just makes shit up" for believing the crazy bit about the drone strike. They blame "plants" in the militia movement for them getting voted out after their crazy bullshit. They put out a press release that reads like a journey through the mind of the modern paranoid.

"The info we received stated that Eric Holder of the Department of Justice had okayed a drone strike on the Bundy ranch near Bunkerville, Nevada, within a 48 hour period over the weekend of April 26/27, 2014....That, fortunately, turned out to be “dis-info” – a false rumor...Oath Keepers is tremendously happy that nothing happened and that this was a bad tip, a piece of “dis-info”, a “psy-op”."

E. Stewart Rhodes (The Head of the Oath Keepers who made the above statement and formed Ron Paul staffer for what that is worth) goes on to attack the Militia folks in the harshest terms possible for Militia type people:

"...steroidal psycho-pathic dreamwish of little boys playing “Army” in the fields near the house forty and fifty years ago, who somehow retained that aloofness and swapped it for a job with a badge or uniform and a gun and a retirement plan that could be counted on, or worse, in some cases, self-proclaimed “officers” who never bothered to go into the military when they grew old enough to enlist, or never made the police force.".

He calls out Militia types for what they are, which means a phony soldier called out other phony soldiers for being phony. This is like a hipster calling another hipster a hipster... this is a pretty grievous attack in the pretend-army community. You can read more about the leader of the Oath Keepers here, and HEY they accept BitCoin for donations so you know they are a (self-link) collection of brilliant intellectuals. Some of the guys are straight up begging for cash.

Many of these guys are STILL out there, and hopefully they'll go home to whatever they do at home before they up and shoot someone. We can only hope that after a few weeks of wearing fatigues and camping and pointing their rifle at people they got whatever it was out of their system and can go home and do something productive with their lives for a while.

Relaxing at home and Rand Paul rallies when not defending trespassers
This whole thing quickly seemed to confirm more than a handful of stereotypes about the Militia Movement/State's Rights/WAYYY into guns crowd.

Easy to manipulate by shady billionaire funded groups. Always at least adjacent to racists. Paranoid to a fault. Believe WAY too many things they hear from anonymous sources. Blame their own failures on the government.

The only way any of this makes sense to me is if a group of right-wing political activists wanted to test if they could summon an armed mob from all across the U.S. for a cause with literally no merit just based on hyperbole, lies, paranoia and the right wing media. It looks like they can. If the Koch Brothers are ever convicted of anything, expect this mob to believe whatever conspiracy is put out there and to come protect them.

Truly, defenders of the common man
It did not, of course, end there. Bullies - those who use force legitimized by only their own ego to make others give in to their demands - they tend to respond to any and all capitulation by engaging in more aggressive tactics. Sadly, this happened with two individuals who made their way to the Bundy compound:

They murdered two police offficers and another individual, adorning their victims with a Gadsen flag and announcing a revolution. Video came out showing their time at the ranch. Those who they rallied with have since then (of course) claimed minimal to no support of these people.

Nevada City and Georgia have since also had armed conflicts with "Sovereign Citizens" and Cliven Bundy fans that were horrible.

My final thought: When we legitimize and enable this horrible conspiratorial world view, we lay the foundations of the next crazy shooter. As paranoid delusion becomes more common as a belief system, expect to see more of this.

Post Note, researching this has given me many, many links to peek into the mind of paranoid people. There are MILLIONS of people who believe we are days away from FEMA Camps, Sharia Law, U.N. Occupation, Socialism, and that every crazy shooting tragedy is a "false flag" operation by the illumineworldorder. It's pretty terrible in there.

*This is flowing into my next post, why the gun culture is noise and what that means.

The rightful role of the loyal opposition...

It's a damned shame the right-wing keeps the noise/hate machine turned up to "11" all the time. Now that there is an actual scandal, the ones whose rightful place should be pointing out shortcomings of the current Administration, they cannot shine a light on where efforts to fix the problem need to go as they are used to keeping all the lights on all the time at their highest setting.

People who have spent the last five years jumping on bandwagons like "Birth Certificate! Grabbing our guns!! IRS!!! Ben Ghazi!!!!" have a routine about repeating or insinuating clearly false allegations in hopes of creating a general sense of villiany about their target... and they simply do NOT know what to do when actual wrongdoing has taken place. Already the elements of the noise machine (Fox, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Americans for Prosperity/Koch Bros), Crossroads GPS/Karl Rove) are already using the VA, and the current malfeasance some of the employees engaged in, as a general attack against everything from Obamacare, to the Obama Administration in general or simply the idea of Government providing functions to its citizens (and Veterans).

This isn't some fictional problem media folks invented that makes a handy attack on politicians one does not like. This is a systemic problem that eternal hearings and demands for resignations will not fix. This is an actual problem that needs a unified leadership and serious resources to overcome to fulfill the promise that our nation made to it's veterans.

The Right Wing noise machine is flawlessly engineered to generate noise. It seems to be wholly unsuited to carrying a signal. A damned shame, there are times when something like it is needed.

Vanished!

I haven't been posting these last few weeks. My son was recently born and, while I am the happiest man alive, time has been scarce. I should have something new up Monday.

Congratulations to those we've championed!

Congratulations Weev!
This has been a great week for those who believe in a more open world, freedom of speech (the kind that actually gets prosecuted) and our freedom to explore and learn about the tools we use.

A few days ago, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, who I wrote about as an example of a hacker unjustly punished by a system he was an embarassment to, was released from Federal Prison after his conviction was overturned by the Third District Court of Appeals (on a technicality of jurisdiction, but whatever).

Congratulations to weev, congratulations to his legal team, congratulations to the E.F.F. and everyone that donated to the legal fund. Congratulations even to GoatSec. This is a big deal, even on a technicality, and ESPECIALLY if new charges are not brought. Andrew is out and reportedly enjoying himself, attending a party in NYC with Glenn Greenwald and associated freedom advocates. The young man is fully nerded back up, on twitter and such.

This is truly a good thing as there is no reason that man should be in prison.

Speaking of Greenwald, he has such been awarded The Pulitzer Prize, shortly after being officially given his Polk Award for his reporting (which he stated should rightly belong to Edward Snowden, still in Russia). This means the Edward Snowden revelations and how they have been released to the public have won the most prestigious awards in journalism. Making this known to the public has been validated by press experts as a tremendous accomplishment and something to be celebrated (and not a crime). Mr. Greenwald felt free to come home to the United States after months of hesitation regarding just how "free" journalists are.

And based on statements our heads of National Security have publicly made, he was understandable in being hesitant to come home. It is likely a little harder to imprison a Pulitzer Prize winner than just another journalist.

This has been a very educating week for a bunch of folks about rights, privacy, deep state, and freedom to speak. The Heartbleed exploit was make public... AND the fact that the NSA kept this exploit secret for years so it could use it. Those actions made EVERYONE'S systems less secure just to enable ease of access. Honoring the work the Guardian did with Snowden, the release of weev, the publicity of the exploits in the code that can be used on any of us... these are all pushing things in the right direction.

I am going to embed Andrew's interview with RT. He is very much in the spotlight now and is using that to raise awareness of others targeted by a malicious culture of prosecuting hackers and an unjust law that allows it to happen. He mentions Schwarz and Keys and what they went though and how he isn't pleading or backing down (even though he still may be prosecuted).

Feel free to watch weev's interview, I am just very happy: