I did a no-no and did not check out this story before I posted it. It’s probably not true, so if it’s not, just laugh and move on. We do satire here. If something is true, I will tell you.
The White House forecasted 250,000 new jobs, instead the economy added 528k jobs – this is how Fox News spins this story.
Juanita has done a great job covering this as she obviously has an inside track. So, I will not add any details here. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides, I usually get long-winded here. So, I will offer two rhetorical questions that the beloved community here can chew on if they like. Some of these have obvious academic answers, so this is more on a philosophical level.
Yes, I took Abnormal Psychology and Psychopathology. I know the literal textbook definition of this. This is usually where “well actually” guy comes busting out the DSM-V with the textbook definitions of psychopathy and sociopathy. Yup, we all know that. What we also know is that those conditions really aren’t curable. That makes the second question easier to answer in his case.
However, on a personal or philosophical level it is quite disturbing. He made up to 800,000 a day knowing full well that he was not only lying but also really hurting those people. That takes a special kind of cruelty. I’m not a psychologist and I can’t practice counseling outside of a school setting, but it produces a vexing question. How much do people like Jones really know? He knows that his lies were in fact lies. He knew he was making money off it. He willfully spurred his minions on those poor families. I can’t tell you how the psychopathic brain works exactly. I don’t know how much they are really cognizant of and how much they are able to compartmentalize away from whatever humanity they actually have.
2. How do we decide exactly who gets redemption and who doesn’t
I know two things. First, I know that sociopaths and psychopaths cannot really be redeemed and it is dangerous to try. Alex Jones doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. Tucker Carlson doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. These are people that know exactly what they are doing and are aware on some level of the damage they are doing. As I said above, I don’t know exactly how much they know, but at least a large part of them knows.
The second thing I know is that some people can be redeemed because they already have to a greater or lesser extent. People have turned on these folks after the fact. Usually, they need a little legal pressure to do so, but they have done it. So, how do we draw the line between the redeemable and the unredeemable? If they can be redeemed then what does that redemption look like?
The best analogy I know comes from my own religious education. Forgive me for those not religious. Yet, that word is the very word we are concerned with. In order to get absolution, we first have to admit what we have done wrong. Then. we get some sort of penance depending on the offense. I think a number of people skip one or both of those. Some people admit they are wrong, but expect immediately to be welcomed in without atoning for their sins. Others pull the “why don’t we all just get along” without actually admitting they’re wrong. Both of those need to be present for it to work. Yet, none of that answers the question above. We can’t redeem everyone and yet we also can’t write everyone off either. So, what gives?
Thank you guys for all your kind words about my son. If you have any memes or stuff I just must read or things you want to say to Mark, you can do it here.
Yes, I am proud of Mark but I am equally proud of his big brother, Bryan the librarian, who not only found the clip of Jones calling Neil “slow” on his broadcast while Neil was testifying but also got it to Mark within minutes, clipped and ready to go. Bryan goes to work every day to push back frontiers of ignorance and he loves it.
We will all wait semi-patiently for the jury verdict, but the team at Farrar & Ball are taking comfort in the realization that they followed this case for almost four years and did their best. Sometimes hard work pays off in getting lucky.
Hey, I am also proud of my daughter-in-law for ordering this mug for her husband. I was there when he came up with that line.
UPDATE: Mr. Jones’s attorney filed a motion for a mistrial this morning due to the fact that he screwed up. That wasn’t a real starter with the judge. I just asked Mr. Bankston for a clarification before I told you this: I did, in fact, hear that there are text messages between Mr. Jones and Roger Stone in the data dump and that he has heard from the J6 committee.
The defense filed an emergency of protection regarding #AlexJones' attorney F. Andino Reynal accidentally sending Jones' cellphone record to plaintiffs' attorney Mark Bankston. The defense asked for a mistrial but was denied. pic.twitter.com/Tj8eoZRiV9
— Law&Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) August 4, 2022
MORE UPDATE: The jury came back with $4.1 million in compensatory damages. Tomorrow they will decide punitive damages – ie., the damages to punish Jones.
A friend sent me a picture of Mark on tv after the verdict. He’s pleased.
Last night in Kansas the voters spoke up about the right for women to make their own healthcare decisions without interference from politicians. Turning out like never before, voters struck down Republican efforts to strike abortion rights from the state constitution and impose a strict ban that would cost lives. This election was the bell cow for other states that were trying to do the same thing. Had pro-choice efforts failed here, it would have cast a dark cloud over vast areas of the entire country as ideologues imposed their religion and dogma over tens of millions of women and their families.
More significant, Republican legislators cheated their asses off to get the result they wanted, making their loss even more sweet. Kansas Republicans had already put this measure onto the ballot for the PRIMARY election where no Democrats were running, hoping that they could ban abortion under the radar in a low turnout election. After the SCOTUS stupidly and wrongly struck down Roe, that strategy went out the window, and Kansas became the focus of national attention. That attention drew a turnout estimated at 54%, almost 20% higher than typical primaries, and more important, the measure was struck down in red areas of the state by almost 20% higher than Trump received in 2020. What this tells us is that not only are abortion rights strongly supported by those who vote Democratic, it’s also supported by Republicans.
What happened last night is the logical result of gross overreach which always happens when politics are dominated by one party. The Republicans should learn a lesson from this (but they won’t) that overplaying your hand can be costly. With issues as important as Constitutional rights under threat, Americans who are normally asleep at the wheel wake up and actually vote. We saw that during the Viet Nam war, after Watergate, after Bush’s foray into Iraq, with veteran’s healthcare just this week, and now women’s right to choose.
Hopefully this motivation to the polls sticks for the November mid-terms and beyond. The only way our government works is for elected representatives to be held accountable to the voters for corruption and power grabs. The GOP has proven itself to be irresponsible and callous to the needs of its voters. It’s long past time for local, state, and federal governments to be brought back to actually representing the people. ALL the people.
As is want to happen every now and then, I got into a debate over the PACT Act with a high school classmate of mind on social media. I’m sure many of you have been following this story. I’ll leave a little video below to catch people up in case they have missed it. Suffice it to say, my conversation with the former classmate was brief because he simply parroted the same talking points as Ted Cruz and Pat Toomey. It was easy to dispense of.
The conversation quickly went to term limits. I find this is a normal go to response when conservatives know they’ve lost an argument. They throw this out because they think it is something we can all get behind. They throw it out because they have a definite picture in their head of what that looks like. The see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. We obviously see different people.
I know this will be an area of disagreement amongst people on both sides. We have a perfectly good mechanism for limiting someone’s time in Washington or Austin. They are called elections. Serving in Washington for too long doesn’t cause the level of cruelty and mendacity that John Stewart is describing. Ted Cruz has not effectively changed fundamentally. Those that knew him back in the 1990s have said he’s a jackass. I’d assume Pat Toomey has been the same guy all along as well.
The specific mechanisms that keep someone like Cruz in office are the same mechanisms that got them there in the first place. Term limits don’t prevent assholes from representing you. It just means it has to be a different asshole after 10 or 20 years. Fixing the mechanisms is something the Democrats in Congress have tried to do but have been unsuccessful because the Senate is where good legislation goes to die.
We can get a lot of change if we simply have computers draw congressional districts instead of political parties. What has been created has been a gap where only jackasses and extremists can slide in. According to the chart in the link, the vast majority of races are decided by more than ten points. If you draw those districts out then a lot more of them are competitive. If they are competitive it is a lot easier to defeat jackasses and carnival barkers.
However, the biggest responsibility is on us. Republican voters don’t like Ted Cruz. They know he’s full of crap. So why do they keep voting for him? Maybe it is to own liberals, but I also suspect they don’t want to do the homework to catch him when he is obviously BSing them. This is simple. If you don’t like the job Greg Abbott has done then don’t vote for him. If you think Ted Cruz is a lying sack of excrement then don’t vote for him. It’s really just that simple.