...And then the tax cuts

My tentacles hurt from trying to keep up with all this nonsense. The other day I actually got a moment of free time and sat down to try and put down some thoughts on doughfacedonny's war with the NFL:

How many hurricanes and superstorms has the United States been hit by lately? Cities destroyed, Puerto Rico without power and practically leveled, escalating tension with North Korea, and we just barely survived another attempt by the death cult of human suffering to take health insurance from millions of Americans. But what is really important that we have to endlessly debate this week? The NFL, and growing protests among players to seriously address the systemic racism and violence by police because they are "disrespecting the flag and the country" by kneeling during the national anthem. In a democratic society we could actually address the above problems and discuss in a civil manner how to reduce racial tensions. But the democratic society in America has very little power, instead we have an aristocratic constellation of the very wealthy and corporations constantly waging war on democracy. The eruption of AstroTurf counter-protest this week starting with doughfacedonny against the "spoiled young millionaires" used by the aristocrats to instill discipline in the right wing authoritarian followers shows what a raw nerve the protests have touched. 

Ugh, that's as far as I could get. Some kind of block just set in, like "by the time you finish this it will be old news" and then that new news will be old and so on. News cycles in the age of the doughface have turned into gerbil wheels that just spin faster and faster while getting bigger. While there is no shortage of things to write about and no shortage of readers ready to consume it, writers far above my pay grade seemed to be slowing down. As though fatigue at the breakneck pace of outrage generated by doughfacedonny and his minions in the death cult of human suffering is starting to catch up with them. I do not blame them one bit.

Then a "retired grandfather," as I have seen him described on Twitter, started shooting at people from from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and many, many people got a shot of adrenaline to start talking again. About gun control. I hate to say it guys, maybe it's just the gloomy historian bobbing to the surface again but that term is a complete loser and will not go anywhere. Just as Donny's fans seemed to start losing interest and drift away, he got them all riled up with the racism everyone can love; ragging on the spoiled, overpaid thugs on the football field. Sure, a normal person is quite activated when news hits about the most deadly mass shooting in American history but nothing liberals have tried thus far has moved the needle one inch on gun control. So we'll lead with our chins once again, shout at trees, tilt at windmills, whatever your preferred metaphor for the futility of passing even the most basic public safety measures into law that could have at least hindered the ability of an individual to acquire an arsenal of deadly weaponry.

Meanwhile, the real payoff of all the lying, chicanery, ratfucking, treasonous footsie with the Russians, truckloads of money spent, and voter suppression has finally arrived. Third time is the charm, the US Federal Government has been dealt two knockdowns by past Republican administrations, this one will be the Technical Knockout if Donny can get those tiny fingers around a pen to sign every billionaire's fantasy of a tax cut. It almost doesn't matter what the specifics of the giveaway are, if it's republican and it has to do with taxes it will blow out the deficit and hugely benefit the filthy rich and corporations. Yes, we have to mourn the dead in Las Vegas. Yes, we have to express condolences and support the survivors. Yes, it would be great if some public safety action came out of this but the bottom line is we cannot get distracted from the entire point of republican "governance" i. e. bankrupt government with tax cuts and force it to stop doing anything to help American citizens that aren't rich.

As tragic as the shooting deaths were, this last weekend the GOP death cult of human suffering was so busy polishing tax "reform" turds that they "forgot" to reauthorize CHIP. As Brother Charlie Pierce put it:

Christamighty, these gossoons spent so much time trying to strip health care from 32 million Americans that they ran out the clock on health care for nine million kids. This is terrible if it represents simple legislative incompetence, but it’s even worse if—as I suspect—it was deliberate...I don’t think it unreasonable to assume that they will use it as a bargaining…er…chip in the upcoming slanging match over the budget, thus making the health coverage for nine million kids a hostage to, say, the elimination of the estate tax. Are they above doing this? Are you kidding me?

As has been making the rounds on social media this week, the cyclical nature of republican administrations in my lifetime has been:

1. Cut taxes for the rich and corporations
2. Cut social spending
3. Increase military spending by far more
4. Send the economy into recession and leave the mess for the incoming Democrat
5. Raise hell about the deficit
6. Scream about the need to cut Social Security 
7. Repeat

Number One has apparently been demoted but the ongoing efforts to strip health insurance and the failure to reauthorize CHIP certainly count for number two. Then number three has sailed through a monster increase in military spending. The tax cuts are coming but the beast will never be starved if it is any of the -industrial complexes. Last time, as George W. Bush cackled with glee over the trifecta of excuses for not balancing the budget, Democrats and outside activists could barely muster an argument against the trillion dollar tax giveaway. That cannot happen again. 

All The Little Things

Occasionally it is good to step away from the mania coming from the White House or the sociopaths sent to Congress and state offices by right wing authoritarian follower republicans. Usually it is no less crazy, horrible, or outrageous but at least on a smaller scale with fewer repercussions to society at large. Almost three years ago I witnessed first hand the Ministry of Truth altering the past for true party members. The manager at a Florida hardware store put up a bunch of little American flags on the public right-of-way in front of the store and the city asked him to move it when copy cats littered other right-of-ways (inspired of course by Fox News, who then got to report on the outrageous and oppressive local government overreach). Next time I checked, poof, gone. That was funny. Then the minor pearl-clutching by loonies about the imminent banning of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which was fun for seeing giant straw men careening down the slippery slope of right wing fever swamp water slides. Amazingly enough that one disappeared too from the link I used, but Huffpost saved the story for posterity. Finally the too smart by half thought leaders of tier 4 internet 'wingers that took the "socialist" part of national socialism literally and pasted it onto Bernie Sanders, admittedly one of many and there's no reason to believe it didn't originate in Russia.

Then there are more important stories that sometimes tangentially relate to my research. Such as when Ben Carson took a big, derpy swipe at Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. Or very serious trolls try to pin a lie about Sanger on Hillary Clinton. I mean, dang, the authoritarians just throw any lie they can dribble out of those diseased brains out there in the never ending war on liberalism and empirical truth. After Charlottesville it is going to be a little harder for Nazi sympathizing trolls to take this particular line of attack, but you know it's going to keep going.

About a month ago I posted this story to the blog's Facebook page about a judge in Tennessee offering thirty days off of prison sentences to convicts who agree to long-term birth control. As I was writing about the American origin of many Nazi race laws and practices the other day it popped back into my mind and I realized I hadn't heard any follow-up stories about it. Progressive sources treated the story like it was the first step towards coercive sterilizations and the rebirth of eugenics. But it fizzled out because the judge immediately rescinded his order when the health department said they weren't offering vasectomies or Nexplanon long acting birth control. Or that they withdrew the offer, it seems a bit he said/she said. So it's all over but the shouting, in this case the shouting is a lawsuit. That seems to be as far as the story went to date.

So next I went looking for some interpretations of the story and found two essays written by different lawyers. The first is from Jeffrey Carr of Grossman Law Offices and Attorney Carr, who used a personal anecdote to illustrate that people in jail are desperate and would jump at any chance to get out early but then focused on the practical and legal implications of the program. It was a good chance to think about the nature of coercion and society's options for "freeing poor people from the burden of raising children," without being overly preachy and morally outraged. On the other hand is Daniel Horwitz writing at the Supreme Court of Tennessee Blog, whose outrage knows no boundaries. He did hold out until the seventh paragraph before breaking Godwin's Law, but receives strong style points for coining the term "eugenics discount" in the first. Horwitz writes that involuntary sterilization is defined as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court without noting that the United States is a conspicuous non-signatory to the Statute and furious opponent of the ICC. He continues that:

To be absolutely and unequivocally clear: eugenics is illegal.  In America, reproductive freedom is a fundamental constitutional right, and the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution forbids the government from treating people differently based on whether or not they choose to exercise their right to reproductive freedom.  Tennessee’s criminal code also contains several specifically-designated mitigating factors and enhancement factors that judges are permitted to consider during sentencing.  Whether a defendant has submitted to sterilization is not among them.

While providing links to the Rome Statute in the previous paragraph and to his previous writings on the outrage of jail time for minor traffic offenses, Attorney Horwitz couldn't even point the reader to a Wikipedia article on the constitutional or legal status of eugenics while making his point. Then he calls for the judge to be impeached, disbarred, and have his law degree revoked. And surprise, surprise Attorney Horwitz is the leader of the lawsuit against Judge Benningfield. The whole tone of the article is "you either agree with me with enthusiasm or you're wrong!"  It's at least mildly humorous. Personally, depending on the day, I'm not sure we don't do enough to encourage people to get sterilized before leaving high school, but it might just be that confirmed misanthrope Chez Pazienza talking through me from beyond the grave.

Here's the thing, when Sir Francis Galton invented eugenics he was much more concerned with increasing the birth rate among smart and capable people than of reducing it among the degenerate. When a third of conscripts failed their physical to fight the Boers in South Africa, English eugenicists were concerned with strengthening the working class men of draft age who would be called upon to defend the Empire. There is nothing intrinsic to eugenics that must be genocidal. It is a question of the relative value of life. When eugenics caught on among certain Progressives before WWI their goal was to reduce the number of imbeciles in the next generation by segregating the unfit of this generation, those with fair skin tone. Though my research is far from complete, it generally seems that life became less valued after WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic. This led to the rounding up and deportation of thousands of "dangerous radical aliens" and clampdowns on immigration in this country. That is also when involuntary sterilizations took off, the general zeitgeist seemed to be that there are too many people around and too many of them are stupid and unworthy so we the worthy are just going to eliminate their proliferation. Life in general seemed to become more valued after WWII and the holocaust.

Do we face a similar situation today? With the loud and growing chorus of anti-immigrant sentiment and weakening of taboos against white supremacy that doughface donny and his ilk represent? Is the country and the world growing so crowded that people are getting less sentimental about the value of life? This could be part of the reason that I couldn't find any fundamentalist "christian" pro-life, pro-forced birth, pro-rapists' rights assholes decrying the loss of reproductive capacity for druggies in Tennessee. That is a little story for another day though.

From Reagan to Trump

Another day in the crisis of American democracy. Where are we in this drama so far? Robert Reich posted this video today and does a good job summarizing at least part of the problem. How many hoops do we have to jump through to finally nail the trump/Russia treason down? Will it ever happen? Will it be sudden and unexpected or long and drawn out? Will the con man simply resign after pardoning everyone he can or will he have to be arrested and dragged out? At this point no one knows for sure but real damage is done every day. Let's be honest, despite some bright shining moments, mainstream corporate media has been absolutely atrocious in dealing with republican sedition for a long time. And today they seem to feel as though they cannot comment on each new day's atrocities without lamenting how pure and patriotic past republican presidents were. It is expected on cable or broadcast news to always try to balance and treat liars as though they have something worth our time to say. At every step the constitutionally-enshrined protectors of our republic pull punches, treat lightly, fail to challenge the lies, reach for something, anything that the Democrats have done to claim a false equivalence, and give an undeserved deference to some of the greatest villains our society has produced.

Democrats then bring butter knives to fight against the mechanized armor division that the republicans have spent so many years building. One of their worst offenses is appealing to the center and for unity, George Lakoff has spent years trying to convince Democrats and Progressives to stop playing into authoritarian hands in this fruitless endeavor. There is no "Center" where the left and the right meet and people could agree to rational solutions to real problems. There isn't even a spectrum or sliding scale of left to right according to Lakoff, but that one is kind of tough to get our heads around after so many years of hearing about that spectrum. So the piece I want to look at today is Vice President Joe Biden's call for the rest of us to reject doughfacedonny's crap and be the good nation we aspire to be. It is good, he hits all the right notes of keeping and building on the moral conscience that elected he and President Obama, and rejecting the hate and racism that donny has dredged up. The only problem is that he doesn't call out donny by name, a small one for sure as I can't even use his name nor put the title of "president" in front of it. Brother Charlie Pierce put it well, "say his name when you denounce his bigotry", though he was addressing the crocodile tear-shedding republicans who mouthed words to the effect of "this will not do donny." But it is the same product.

As evidenced by the naming of neo-nazi marchers in Charlottesville and their subsequent firing, it is effective. It is personal, the so-called alt right and their fellow republican base voters WANT US DEAD, so shaming and shining a spotlight on individuals is the right thing to do. It has to be made so toxic to even be associated with nazis that republicans can't get away with ambiguous statements like what Lyin' Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin made after donny tried to falsely equate "many sides" for violence by broadly generalizing about all hate and all bigotry is bad. No, we're talking about what actually happened, real people with real names who gathered together to support monuments to confederate traitors, the neo-nazis whose antecedents nearly succeeded in exterminating all of the Jews in Europe. It was a big step for Vice President Biden to actually refer to the current president, not some generalization, even if he didn't say the name. Unlike the Democratic Party's latest slogan of "a better deal" that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of an opposition party that made it this bad for regular Americans and constantly try to make it worse. Of course the better deal platform was a response to the fact that the Democrats really don't stand for anything, even if Progressives want to believe and continue to work in the direction of equality, social and economic justice etc., as polls reported in July.

Really, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you act as though current conditions are something that just happened, like a bolt of lightning hitting your home, instead of something that was done deliberately as in a burglar stealing everything before burning it down, then yes people are going to believe that you don't stand for anything. It makes the current state of the union to be fate, instead of something that was consciously made over decades. Which brings me to the response to Biden's article from Ben Cohen of The Daily Banter. Now I don't mean to single Ben out or come down on him too hard, his heart is in the right place and I generally support his positions. And I hear the same sort of thing from his colleague at the banter, Bob Cesca, and from the Stephanie Miller show to name two examples. The problem is letting past republicans off the hook because they weren't the unbelievable shit show that doughfacedonny has been.

Ben starts his analysis like this:

 Whatever you might think of Joe Biden and his politics, he never sought to divide Americans or appeal to their hate. Biden didn’t use minorities as scapegoats, insult women or deride allies, and while he wasn’t perfect, Biden was a man of dignity who always appealed to our better nature.

Why the weasel words? Who do you think this kind of appeal will win over? People aren't perfect, there's no reason to state this. And even the comparison of donny's antics to what Biden stood for in office is ridiculous, that's not the bar of statesmanship. Lakoff would point out that there's no reason to qualify Biden or his politics, that simply gives the right ammunition. And it deactivates the frame of what he's talking about, nothing that is happening today has anything to do with Joe Biden.

Then the gut punch that sucks all the wind out of any Progressive impact Ben Cohen could have with this article:

I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan and completely disagree with his politics, but he did not appeal to hate while in office. He did not vilify immigrants, demean women, or equate Neo-Nazis with anti-fascist protesters. This is why many conservatives and almost all liberals recognize the danger in Donald Trump. This isn’t so much about policy, it’s about politics and the devastating effect divisive language and demagoguery has on the psyche of a nation.

First, what the hell does any of this have to do with Reagan? Why bring him up? That just activates the frame of divinity surrounding Reagan that obviously liberals give some credence to as well. Trying to negate a frame by invoking a supposed "good conservative" only reinforces it. And you might want to check with an actual Reagan scholar like Rick Perlstein before making these claims. Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi by talking "states' rights" clearly dog whistling his continuation of Nixon's southern strategy. Then as president he visited the nazi cemetery at Bitburg despite strong opposition from Jewish groups. What about the lying stories about "welfare queens", did those not demean women? Reagan was really hot to "reduce labor costs" (i.e. Your Pay) by breaking unions and deregulating everything, the undocumented immigrant amnesty was a big part of that and contributed to the anti-immigrant backlash today.

So why commit an unforced error like this? To achieve some sort of artificial balance? Appeal to the brain dead reprogrammable meat sacks that still support donny? Please stop doing this, anyone on the left. I have seen enough sentiments to "George W. Bush is so happy he's not the worst president in history" that I want to tear my own tentacles off. This accomplishes nothing positive and only legitimizes past republican crimes against the American people. I know so many activists and writers are desperately trying to break the cycle of "normalizing" Trump, but letting everyone from Nixon to Bill Kristol off the hook for the harm they did to discourse and society isn't the way to go.

It really has been an almost straight line of crimes from Reagan to Trump, each successive republican raised the bar of awfulness to where we are actually seeing democracy fade away and racism become just another political opinion. They are different only by degrees, not in kind. There is no set goal, Reagan most likely never thought he was pointing us in the direction of a fascist dictatorship, but his actions and the words and deeds of subsequent republicans have led us to this point. Stop falling for it!

They are all Nazis

Is there a word for a feeling of surprise at something that was completely predictable? That was my feeling after the white riot in Charlottesville, VA last weekend. Something like that was bound to happen with 'god-emperor' trump embedded in the White House like a tick. So now that it has, the three quarters plus of Americans who oppose the republican reign of terror are presented with a choice of how to deal with the other quarter whose white supremacy has been exposed to the world like a festering boil of hate and bigotry. It is as though now that the veneer of ambiguity has been ripped away to reveal swastikas and Nazi slogans alongside the confederate stars and bars it suddenly got easier for mainstream media to drop, at least partially, their go-to defense of both sides are equally bad. Good for them, yes hating Nazis should be something we all agree on and as the new meme goes "antifascist should be the default setting for Americans". So finally we can stand up to the republican menace that sympathizes with white supremacy by calling them what they are. Or can we?

This Vox article crossed my feed when published on August 18th but I didn't get a chance to read it. Written by a PhD student named Lindsay Jones whose project is on female African-American education in Virginia and a native of Charlottesville, she is also an intellectual historian and it is on that score that I have to critique her article. Jones probably knows more about Nazism than I know about African-American education but in the realm of current events the former is more valuable. She argues that the very term that permits corporate media to finally blame these assholes for their violence and hate should be dropped because white supremacy is as American as apple pie. However the weasel words start right from the title:

Don’t call all American white supremacists “Nazis.” Their ideology of hate is homegrown.

Using the term distances us from our reality.

...“Nazis” are easily legible as a long-since-conquered enemy to human decency. Neo-Nazis are easily dismissed as clinging to an antiquated ideology of white racial superiority in an age when the idea of a “master race” has long been banished in polite society.

To utter the term “Nazi” is to invoke universally condemned images of death camps, terror. To say “Nazi” is to imply backwardness — that this ideology is a throwback to a more ignorant and intolerant age in human history. To say “Nazi” is to disavow the Americanness of anyone who dons a swastika or gives a Nazi salute, to reflexively cast them as counter to the values of tolerance and diversity that our nation holds dear.

To say “Nazi” in reference to the mobs who wrought havoc on Charlottesville this weekend, arguably, is expedient. After all, reasonable Americans have reached a consensus that the genocidal violence of Nazi Germany was some of the worst the world has ever seen and that the ideas and actions of today’s neo-Nazis are abhorrent. Why split hairs in a search for more precise terminology? Why not refuse to adopt the terminology of “alt-right” and “white nationalist” and instead use a label that we can all understand and that ultra-effectively resists euphemism?

Some people at Saturday’s rally identified as actual members of the American Nazi Party and carried flags with swastikas. But the label doesn’t encapsulate the people who showed up representing America's homegrown ideology of white supremacy.

For me, as a scholar and a resident of Charlottesville, the Nazi label erases the ordinariness of this impulse to display and defend the symbols of a fallen iteration of white patriarchy. The people I grew up with — the families that fly the flag on their property, the teenage boys who wear the flag stitched onto their khaki baseball caps — are not Nazis. They are ordinary white people who deny that their veneration of a mythologized South amounts to white nationalism. The spectacular displays of violence characterizing Charlottesville’s conflicts over Confederate monuments, when viewed in local and historical context, point to white racial pride that has its source right here in Virginia, not Nazi Germany.

I have some bad news to share with you candidate Jones, National Socialism in Germany was highly and extensively influenced by exactly that homegrown hate you are describing. And shame on you as a scholar to write this article without even a sideways glance in this direction.  Far be it for me to explain racism or hate to you, your story is moving and I have no reason to doubt it's sincerity, but the neo-confederate white supremacy has more in common with nazism than you'd think. James Q. Whitman wrote a whole book on the American roots of nazism that I discovered after less than thirty seconds of searching on Google. Much like the African-American blues men that went to England and enjoyed success, in turn leading to the British Invasion, Hitler looked at American race relations and found much to expropriate. Tortured metaphors aside, Indian removal, westward expansion aka Manifest Destiny, slavery, Jim Crow, Eugenics, the Creel commission propaganda during WWI, the Palmer raids, expulsion of Alien radicals, and immigration quotas were parts of American history that the Nazis wanted to emulate and largely did execute. 

American white supremacy historically took two forms; exclusionary in the North, and dominating in the South. Yankees just didn't want Black folks living anywhere near them. Southerners wanted separation of the races but also wanted to exploit Black folks' labor so they built the convoluted system of segregation, and a system of intimidation through outright KKK style vigilantism all the way to building the monuments to confederate leaders as an ever present reminder of who was in charge. Nazism in Germany borrowed from both of these traditions, even the Lost Cause mythology through their "stab in the back" theory. Though admittedly if you search for any kind of consistency in Nazism you'll be hard pressed to find any. They worshiped technology and strove to return to the land for a simpler life. The only thing that really held them together was the shared hatred of out groups. It is completely understandable that hate is hate from the victims' point of view, but as intellectual historians we must dig deeper no matter how distasteful it may be.

This hatred towards the Other really isn't different than the various strands of derpitude displayed by the mass rally (ho ho) in Charlottesville of white supremacists. Maybe this group hates Jews a little more than immigrants, maybe that one puts Islam at the top of their hate list. Does it really matter? This is one time where generalization is warranted. At a time when good jobs are hard to find and most manual labor has been eased by machines and technology, does the old Klan ideology of keeping African-Americans on the land and in their place hold true? If the Klan no longer seeks to dominate but chants the same slogans of extermination that self-proclaimed Nazis bluster about, is there really any difference between home grown hate and imports? 

It is not expedient to lump them all together, it is necessary. In order to get the elite media to pay attention to this disgusting underbelly we need to shock and sensationalize, or they will just get back to blaming both sides and normalizing the fascist takeover of America. If Hitler and the Nazis in Germany were inspired by what they saw in America, then it is correct to tar them all with the same brush. What word would you like to use instead? This is the area of the internet where we actually can debate ideas. Yes, the hate is real. Yes, it comes from right here in white America. And yes, we absolutely have to shine as bright a light on it as possible so it will slither away again. But to say Nazism is simply an exotic foreign import and puts too much distance between the idea and the actions is doing a disservice to intellectual history.

Prime Day!

Okay, set aside for a moment the less-than-stellar flavor Amazon has been getting lately, or the fact that "Prime Day" is more like a pretend holiday that doesn't have any real traditions attached. Or that there's no time off work. Let's talk about value for a minute. I try not to do this often but I, like lots of independent bloggers, am an Amazon Associate where I link to items I have used/read/watched/listened to/etc. that are available on Amazon, and if you are convinced by my pitch or in the market for them and buy it I get a little cut. Using an Associate's link does not increase the price or change anything but the (probably starving) Associate gets a small percentage of that sale. Hence, we are pretty motivated. Like door-to-door salesmen, but less annoying and we can't jam our foot in the door.

So the idea is that Prime is like membership at a wholesale club, at least that's the way it always seemed to me. I have been a Prime member for a decade now and have always gotten value above and beyond the price.

Here's the first link for Prime Day, it's not too late to sign up for a free trial and get some of the deals Amazon is offering only to Prime members. I first signed up in college so I could get the sweet free two day shipping on textbooks and then I started using it on other products that were not available in my area. The service has improved quite a bit since then, I promise that if you do a lot of shopping this alone will pay for the membership.

Next is for Prime Video, when I first signed up it took a while before I realized what this was. At that time I didn't have a smart phone or ability to stream video on my TV so I just watched stuff through my computer monitor, but even that was awesome. I actually had this before Netflix or Hulu, and it works really well on both my phone and through my Roku 1 Streaming Media Player (2710R).

Then there is Prime Music. Oh man, I was never a big fan of Pandora, which is the only parallel I can think of but I know there are other comparable streaming services. This one lets you stream whole albums or make playlists without any ads. And it is included in a Prime Membership but you get a free trial for each one through these separate links. The only concern I've ever had is that you can only use it on one device at a time. So Mrs. Kraken and I sometimes duel over it, and we also use it as bedtime music for the junior sea monsters as well. I found one day that they had given me a 6 month free trial of Unlimited, which is pretty much what it sounds like because I have yet to not find a song/artist that I looked for. I can even stream Jello Biafra's spoken word albums and stuff, which I used to have on CD but have since sacrificed to the moving gods when settling in a new nest. I will be renewing this service. It is beyond convenient to have every song I want to listen to available at a moment's notice and not having to thumb through racks of CDs. But I'm ancient, you may not even remember those days.

The last one is for Audible. Now unfortunately you don't get a completely free trial here but you do save 40% for 6 months. I started using this service in college too and took advantage of a commute to listen to history books, or maybe it was using the audiobooks to ease the commute I forget. But I have to say that it is great value even at full price. You get one credit each month to add a book to your collection and then a big discount on additional books each month. There's a very easy app to access the collection on your phone or sync them to whatever device you use.

I'm not going to link to the Kindle promotion because I don't personally have or use a Kindle. Maybe it's great, maybe not but I have always enjoyed print and turning pages. And not having to plug in my book. I guess I'm old fashioned that way. If you use a Kindle or similar E-book reader let me know how it works, I'd love to hear your story.

Thanks for taking a look at these links, I only want to plug things that I really use and value. It may be cliche but Amazon Prime is a great value and has been great utility for my family.

Gin and Tacos: A Beginner's Guide

Gin and Tacos is a political satire website. This is the first and foremost guideline for beginners. If you read something there or on the Facebook page that serves as kind of a Fight Club for over educated, underemployed, and cynical Gen Xer types that doesn't make sense to you, then you should seriously consider refraining from commenting on it. The boss's name is Ed, and I for one am tired of him having lecture the community when their friends and family show up and bleat about him being a communist, socialist, elitist, and whatever ad hominem attacks bubble up from random synapse firings, with no sense of humor. Or worse, take the satirical posts as sincere. However and wherever you come into a GnT post, be assured that most members of the community (at least the politically left-leaning ones, including me) were once outsiders as well. Surrender your pride and go to the back of the line if you want to be a part of this rogue's gallery. Be prepared for hazing and ridicule if you comment and didn't get the joke, they aren't laughing with you.

We all wish we had had that friend to take us aside and explain the joke while growing up. The eldest child in a family, the youngest kid on the block who was lowest in the pecking order, the transplant from another school, or any of a million reasons why you are the new guy/gal. What happens when you are exposed to some new form of art, humor, pop culture, or biological function? Usually it's not pretty. Pull up a chair stranger, and let ol' Uncle Kraken slip a sticky, slimy tentacle over your shoulder and explain what's what around the barnyard. Like Fight Club, we have a few rules for clean livin'.

1. Ed is smarter than you. Lay aside your ego and remember that fact before popping off an indignant or self-righteous quip in the tone of "well I never!" Or a comment to the tune of "this can't be serious" because no, it's not. His essays on the actual site are often serious, as well as insightful and necessary analysis into the evils of right wing government and political types but many of the Facebook posts are sturdily-constructed jabs at rural baby boomers who have been such a drag on progress. If these upset you, reexamine your life.

2. This is our clubhouse, we are under no obligation to dumb it down for you. If you don't catch on to the satire or obscure pop culture references, remember that Google is your friend.

3. Everyone has a sad story to tell. Your's isn't unique. Unless it will add something immediate and relevant to the thread, save it. There's a reason many of Ed's posts include a section about their relative's friend's roommate, etc. Anecdotal evidence is dubious at best. If you can't prove something, don't bother introducing it.

4. The humor here is often on the dark side. As evidenced by the sometime slogan of "Everything is terrible, all the time" employed by Ed and occasionally featured on GnT-branded merchandise. If you believe in a limitless future where things will be significantly better, stow that dream sunshine it's not going to do you any good here.

5. Be prepared to defend your arguments and be on the unpopular side at least half the time. About the only thread tying us together is the intelligent observation that we were too young to have made it in the old economy but too old to have prepared for the new. There is great comical significance to things like "retirement", "paying off student loans", "finding a fulfilling and prosperous career." Everything else is debatable.

6. You can comment but you can't publish original posts. If you have objections to this, see rule #1 above.

7. Remember, most of #1's posts are satire but the rest contain a heaping dollop of irony. There is very little that is straight-forward. Ed likes it this way to confuse the low-information trolls. See rule #1 and #2, political analysis does not need to be dumbed down to a childlike level just because cosmopolitan sophistication makes doughfacedonny's supporters' heads hurt.

8. If you see satire and immediately take offense because it sounds like you... Just leave, we don't want to deal with trolls. You'd be happier somewhere else.

9. Pop culture references have a pretty long shelf life here. If you recognized the Joker's voice in #8 you might be okay. Jack Nicholson's Joker that is.

10. #1's influences include H.L. Mencken, if you are familiar with Mencken's work, welcome. If you had to look up the name and cannot fathom why we need a voice like Mencken's (minus the racism and other 1920s vices) in this insane asylum of a republic, seek political engagement elsewhere.

So, depending on your circumstances, this list forms a baseline of introduction. And again, this is only for the impulse-control issues crowd that MUST. COMMENT. ON. ANYTHING. THAT OFFENDS. ME. IMMEDIATELY!

The Power of Political Satire

Political satire is the tip of the spear in combating the trump crisis, according to Carlos Maza of Vox. I posted the video that Maza made to contrast late night comedians treatment of this political theater of the absurd we find ourselves in with the supposedly serious news media to this blog's Facebook page but I didn't have a chance to comment on its significance. I am not sure how to actually embed the video but here's a link that should prove durable enough to last a while if for some reason you don't use the actual Vox link. Drawing on Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University Sophia A. McClennen's work on the subject, Maza lays bare why it is that watching cable news especially can oftentimes leave the viewer more confused on a particular issue.

It is not easy to cut through the crap. A reporter or anchor needs to present context and adheres to the 
journalism standards of balance. Which means they have to treat peer-reviewed science and conspiracy theory as equally valid sides of a story. Satirists and comedians do not. They can get right to the point, obviously ridiculous ideas and the people regurgitating them should be ridiculed. When the republicans are caught blatantly and obviously lying people like Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, everyone on Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher, and Seth Meyers have no reason to pull punches. The late night comedians can call it the straight bullshit that it is and do it with humor so the average American who can only process about fifteen minutes of news will actually pay attention.

And it is being done on boring old cable television. Despite the telecommunications and technological leaps made since George W. Bush was taking a giant dump on democracy and the rule of law, these shows are anchored in a medium that hasn't changed much in almost four decades. That said, it is great to be able to catch a video clip of Colbert, Oliver, and Maher through Facebook or Twitter when I have a free minute. So the social media revolution that is responsible for so many of our ills, ideological clustering, trolling, decimation of attention spans, fake news, and so on can actually also be used for good. Though Mark Twain's apocryphal quote about lies shooting around the world while truth is putting on its shoes may still be appropriate for the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Satire is powerful and comforting at the same time. I would not have made it through the bush hell without my copy of Al Franken's Lies and the lying liars who tell them among other titles. Now Senator Franken's voice was about the only one I could find that helped understand what was happening and to find the courage to resist. To refuse to accept the right wing version of reality, in short, to call bullshit on them. Jello Biafra used to call building critical thinking skills "cultivating bullshit detectors" and told a simple anecdote about his dad laughing at TV commercials. "Son, that woman jumping up and down about how great her laundry detergent isn't really that happy because detergent isn't that exciting, she's just trying to sell you laundry detergent."

Unfortunately, critical thinking isn't something culturally transmitted from generation to generation anymore if it ever was. Each person has to hone and sharpen their bullshit detectors on their own it seems. Why that is could be several doctoral or post doctoral programs, but it comes down to this: the very wealthy and business people are always waging a bitter class war for their own benefit. The political right carries water for them and duly "works the refs" who are supposed to be watching the goalposts of truth. They did so by furiously attacking "bias" in the news media through boycotts, direct mail campaigns, buying a single share of stock in a media company to raise hell at their annual meetings and other stuff detailed a decade ago by Eric Alterman and others. Reporters and editors all the way up the food chain of news became so intimidated by these relentless attacks that they abandoned the search for truth in favor of balance. Then there is the fact that political discussion has gotten so toxic that most parents just prefer not to talk to their kids about it. When those kids get to college age or so and start taking an interest in the world around them, they are often without political socialization and have to start from scratch. That is where the cowed media and propaganda machine really fails the republic.

Watching the late night political satire can correct this. Tune in any night to any program and you will see a host shooting all kinds of holes in whatever the lies of the day are. This does two things, first it helps you see the lies and see through them, second it gives you the confidence that you are not alone and are under no obligation to treat the nonsense and vicious cruelty as anything but a ridiculous scam. And it is important to be able to resist while laughing. The trump crisis, president shithead himself, his cronies, the servile minions in the media, and his insane supporters are such a laughing stock that they make themselves easy targets for talented satirists.

The road back to a functioning democracy and a healthy republic with responsible discourse is going to be long and difficult. But it doesn't have to be all grim struggle as more sober commentators like Keith Olbermann present this quest. There is plenty of room for laughs. I hope you check out the link back to Vox, I know I will be looking into Prof. McClennen's findings more closely.