Prairie Weather

There's plenty that's ignorant and arrogant, and then there's something a lot worse

I'm talking about the streak of authoritarianism that grips many Americans in their romance with gun barrels and uniformity.  You can see it in Ferguson. You could see it (in spades!) in just about everything Dick Cheney touched.  In the Patriot Act.  In much of the reaction to NSA's leaks.  In individual members of the tea party.

And it creeps Martin Longman out.  He writes in Washington Monthly:

I voted against George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, and I spent most of his presidency actively working against his administration with every tool at my disposal, but I never said or wrote that I would prefer that the country be led by a foreigner or a foreign leader. Not so, for many pundits on the right. Ann Coulter wants Benjamin Netanyahu to be our president, Erick Erickson wants David Cameron to be our president, and Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle would be okay with either Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin being our president.

Someone needs to explain the right’s adoration for Vladimir Putin because it’s creeping me out. ...MartinLongman,WashingtonMonthly

And, as he suggests, it often turns up in the rhetoric of "patriots."  Not patriots, but "patriots."

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Before you rush out to breathe some fresh air, let me counsel you stay indoors if you're anywhere near the border.

The U.S. is in the process of becoming a citadel nation with up-armored, locked-down borders and a Border Patrol operating in a “Constitution-free zone” deep into the country.  The news is regularly filled with discussions of the need to “bolster border security” in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  In the meantime, the Border Patrol is producing its own set of Ferguson-style killings as, like SWAT teams around the U.S., it adopts an ever more militarized mindset and the weaponry to go with it.  As James Tomsheck, the former head of internal affairs for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, put it recently, “It has been suggested by Border Patrol leadership that they are the Marine Corps of the U.S. law enforcement community.  The Border Patrol has a self-identity of a paramilitary border security force and not that of a law enforcement organization.” ...TomDispatch

I haven't been down there much lately, but I have noticed that if you're within about 35 miles of the border you can feel and often see the presence of Authority.

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Mahablog has a report of yet another instance in which the police tried to corral onlookers into lying on their behalf.

And now, the truth about orgasms

Amid all the clamor about white men, those arrogant brutes, we now have the stats on sexual satisfaction and men.  Not good news.  No one's claiming This Explains Everything, but it sure rises to the level of Aw, Jeez!

...A recent study from the Journal of Sexual Medicine reports that lesbians have more orgasms than literally everybody else, be they man or woman, straight or queer. (Take that, lesbian bed death!) ...TheAtlantic

Nasty shock.  However, this comes from an article about how insecure and unhappy LGBT's are in general.  Win one, lose one.

The embittered rich are fighting the super-rich

As the Times reporter points out, this won't be the first time the first and second tiers of wealth have started a revolution against the crass invasion of the billionaires.  Stand up, you old rich bourgeoisie with your pathetic, under-$20 million/year incomes.  Join the fight against the noisy invasions of the top ten percent.

At the turn of the last century it was the bourgeoisie in New York and other major cities who might have envisioned similar gestures of contempt directed at them by robber barons fleeing to Saratoga and Newport during July and August via the era’s own elaborate and expensive means of transport, private rail cars or yachts.

Richard Hofstadter, in his classic work of historical analysis “The Age of Reform,” published in 1955, argued that it was the disgust and disruption felt by those who had previously occupied the highest ranks of the social order toward the new superseding class of self-lavishing bankers and industrialists that ultimately allowed the Progressive movement to flourish. The undermining of status radicalized the formerly complacent, and class politics took shape because one segment of the population had so much money that the merely respectable could now identify with the actually poor. ...NYT

Okay.  We Progressives are delighted to get the news.  Where's the fight and how can we join?

It's out there at the eastern tip of Long Island where the disgust and disruptions of the outlandishly rich -- the wacka-wacka of helicopter taxis -- are driving the quiet, settled, older rich crazy.

Helicopter traffic at the airport this summer has increased by close to 40 percent over last and with it has come a comparable rise in tension between the very affluent and the exceptionally rich.

 "Quality of life truly is being diminished for commercial greed and the convenience of the same people who burned the economy,” a longtime Shelter Island summer resident said to me.

“When I look up at small planes and choppers I see a fleet of middle fingers across the sky.” ...NYT

It's an old story in America.  What we now call the "urban upper-middle class" is behind a change in politics.  The challenger in the Democratic primary in New York, Tim  Wu, nails it.  And the unleashed capitalism is the target.  These newest rich are, of course, the very people whose greed caused the 2007 financial crash and the long recession. Now even the very rich are questioning the extremes of capitalism.

“Mike Bloomberg was a great pragmatist, and there’s something to be said for that,” Mr. Wu told me from a campaign bus, just before he was endorsed in his bid for the nomination for lieutenant governor by The New York Times editorial board. “But we need to get past pragmatism, past the Democratic Party ideas of the ’90s that you could just tinker with capitalism around the edges.” ...NYT

Funny.  Ironic.  The earlier tea party "movement" -- before it was poisoned by the Kochs and the nuts -- included a share of progressives who were solidly against the bailing out of Wall Street.  Now, half a decade later, the increasingly regressive tea party is scarred, ridiculed, and sidelined even as the progressives begin to move in and take a stand against the greed and noise of careless power. 

Not just in danger but being the danger

Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker writer who has been spending some time in Ferguson, writes:

Linda Chavez wondered on Fox News whether “the ‘unarmed teen’ mantra” really fit Brown, who was six feet four and nearly three hundred pounds and had been caught on video shoplifting—and, it perhaps bears repeating, was a teen, and was unarmed. Chavez was roundly criticized, but she was really only guilty of saying aloud what many others have thought. Whatever happened or did not happen between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson on a winding side street, in the middle of the afternoon, in a non-descript outpost on the edge of a midsized city, whatever we imagine we know of the teen-ager, the salient fact is that he did not live long enough to cultivate his own answers.

I spent eight days in Ferguson, and in that time I developed a kind of between-the-world-and-Ferguson view of the events surrounding Brown’s death. I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger....NewYorker

"Being the danger" applies to most Americans -- Americans of all kinds and colors.  Think of the white men you have known who pride themselves on "being the danger." Much of the violence is created by whites, often for our entertainment.  Given the violence -- our cultivation of violence in our laws and in our leisure hours -- it shouldn't surprise any of us if other people around the world cross to the opposite sidewalk, if only figuratively, when they see us coming. 

Our guns, our NSA and our Department of Homeland Security and our militarized local police are props we have created and sanctified as important to our safety and integrity even though we have plenty of evidence showing they're just the opposite.  And how about them police?  If you happen to be black and waiting to pick up your kids outside their school, you are in serious physical danger from the police.

When you add all this up, it's hard to imagine how long it could take us take to achieve the kind of America we fantasize we have, an America with real freedom at whatever hour of the day on whatever rural road or in whatever city.  Or in an elevator in a building in New York.  

Cobb, a "linebacker-sized" black man, writes:

I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.

Fuck you, I think. If I don’t get to feel safe here, why should you? ...NewYorker

Russia trying to expand in other directions

The latest target?  Finland?

Finland shares a long border with Russia and has maintained a friendly relationship with its ravinous neighbor, declining to join NATO.  Now, however, it's looking more closely at NATO and is monitoring the incursions of Russian AN-72 transport planes in its airspace. ...

...Which wouldn't be so extraordinary, except that the air force of Finland says they took the photo while the Russian plane was in Finnish airspace. Even that wouldn't necessarily be so extraordinary, except the Finns say it was "the third event of its kind within a one-week period." And even that you might write off as just one of these things, except that Russia also invaded Ukraine this week so it's kind of hard to see it all as a big coincidence. ...Yglesias,Vox

Using your cellphone to trap you

A Washington state police department just south of Seattle has for years been quietly using controversial surveillance equipment that can collect records of all cellphone calls, text messages and data transfers within a half-mile radius, according to local media.

The Stingray surveillance system, deployed by the Tacoma Police Department since 2009, “tricks cellphones into thinking it’s a cell tower and draws in their information,” local news website The Olympian reported Wednesday.

The device is reportedly capable of indiscriminate data collection, which worries civil rights advocates.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said it has identified at least 43 police departments in 18 states that use Stingray equipment. The rights group said on its website that police use of such a device may violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, and with taxpayers’ money. ...AlJazeera