Do we support bombing school buses full of children?

Apparently, we do. The US is part of this Saudi-led coalition killing civilians in Yemen, and an American-made 500lb bomb was dropped on a bus with 40 kids on their way to a field trip, killing most of them.

This is just the latest string, unfortunately, of really brutal attacks on civilians in Yemen. It is not the worst of its kind in terms of the numbers of people killed, but certainly because all of the—40 out of the 51 people who were killed were children, it really is just an extreme form of this Saudi-led coalition bombing in Yemen. Here were these kids on a school trip. They were excited. There’s footage—we see them laughing and really being excited. Some of the parents said that they couldn’t really sleep the night before because they were so looking forward to—and here’s the sad part—they’re going to a cemetery just to be able to enjoy some time outside. And as the bus entered a busy market, it was targeted by the Saudi-led coalition and most of these children were killed. Of course, we know that the U.S. is part of the Saudi-led coalition, so we are in fact responsible, just as much as the Saudis and Emiratis are, in the bombing of those children.

You might be wondering how we can justify our participation in these crimes. Have no fear! The excuses are flowing faster than the blood of shattered children. Here’s an AP reporter explaining the logic of the attack.

What is very hard to determine in Yemen is what the children were doing. We worked on covering Yemen since 2015. We know that the Saudi-led coalition has bombed civilian targets all the time—markets, hospitals, schools. This is not a surprise. But we also know that the Houthis are actively recruiting the children and then they send them to the front lines. And the question marks here that are not answered yet—what were the children doing at the time?

There are no schools right now at Yemen. There are no buses carrying children from one school to the house. This is a luxury. The children were visiting a cemetery, and that is where they promote the whole notion of jihad and martyrism. So I mean, on one hand, the Saudi-led coalition is blamed for killing the civilians and this has been ongoing without any—no question about it. But at the same time, we have a look at the other side of the picture and see what the Houthis were doing with the children.

Dude. I’m having flashbacks, man. I grew up during the Vietnam War (I was too young to go, fortunately, but this stuff was in the news all the time), and I remember all the rationalizations for dropping napalm on villages. This is the same old story: we don’t know exactly what these kids were doing, but we can imagine all kinds of nefarious schemes, so let’s pretend after the fact that they were all evil terrorists in training. It is all too familiar.

Let’s ask a Yemeni scholar to reply to that.

To just quickly respond to what your guest just said, it doesn’t really matter what the children were doing. They were children, they were in summer school and for the Saudi-led coalition to bomb a bus full of children is a war crime, regardless of what the children were doing.

Exactly. We’re done. It’s inexcusable.

But he does go on, about all the other children killed in this war.

And to talk about really what the U.S. intervention in Yemen looks like, we know what it looks like. We know the devastation that it has caused. Yemen is falling and all of the services have been failing. 113,000 children died in 2016 and 2017 alone of starvation and preventable diseases such as cholera. What we need from the Senate, what we need from Congress right now is to continue to push toward ending the U.S. involvement in Yemen, given how much the Saudis and the Emiratis rely on U.S. support, on U.S. weapons, on U.S. maintaining and repairing of their aircraft, on U.S. midair refueling and on U.S. targeting assistance.

We know that they cannot continue to wage war on Yemen without extensive U.S. assistance, and Congress needs to act quickly to continue to introduce resolutions in the Senate and in the House to push the U.S. out of Yemen.

The United States has been awfully good at minimizing blood shed on our side, and awfully good at maximizing blood shed and terror in other places. Can we stop, please?

The November elections will be…interesting

I took a look at the Minnesota primary election results. There weren’t really any surprises, although there was one disappointment.

The disappointment is that Tim Walz will be the DFL candidate running for governor in November. I despise Tim Walz — he’s a conservative Democrat who has been in the pocket of the NRA for years. What’s particularly galling about it is that I keep seeing people saying that they voted for Walz because he was most appealing to outstate (the obnoxious term people in the Twin Cities use for the region outside the Twin Cities) voters, so they were supporting the DFL candidate most likely to win over those Neandertals who don’t reside in the metropolitan region.

I live in “outstate” Minnesota. Grrrr. Don’t assume we’re all gun-totin’ rednecks out here.

The one bit of good news was the election turnout — record numbers all around. Most importantly, there were 600,000 DFL voters and 300,000 Republican voters. You’ve got to wonder how any Republicans ever get elected.

(Rhetorical question: it’s because of criminal levels of gerrymandering, and because in most elections voter apathy is high.)

You know you’re a Republican when…

You fall for a Sacha Baron Cohen stunt.

The guy is a gun nut named Dan Roberts, and is considering suing Baron Cohen for tricking him into doing something humiliating.

If I were in such a situation, I’d be arguing with the guy and refusing to go along, and I think that might be the difference. It’s not whether you’re conservative or stupid, it’s about how willing one is to submit to authority.

Slapping Ben Shapiro down

Little Ben Shapiro made this request of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Miss Ocasio-Cortez, I’m really excited that you’ve been elevated to that position and I would love to have a real conversation with you about the issues. You’ve noted that you think Republicans are afraid to debate you or talk to you or discuss the issues with you. Not only am I eager to discuss the issues with you, I’m willing to offer $10,000 to your campaign today for you to come on our Sunday special.

Before getting into Ocasio-Cortez’s reply, just think about that statement. It’s so patronizing — he is rich enough (why?) that he’ll pay her a substantial fee to appear on his show so he can argue with her. He is making the implicit assumption that he has something to contribute to a “discussion”. He is confident that he can debate her.

I’m just thinking that Ocasio-Cortez can and will discuss the issues without having to engage a twerp like Ben Shapiro. I don’t know what he would add to the discussion. It’s like all the creationists who want to debate me on evolution, and while my first thought is usually “ugh, debate”, I’m also wondering what makes these clueless ignoramuses think they’re even competent to talk about the subject.

Ocasio-Cortez made an excellent response.

Among the key words there are “entitled”: Shapiro certainly is feeling entitled. He thinks he’s negotiating from a position of strength, when the fact is that he has nothing to bring to the table. Except his money.

Others are “bad intentions”: Ocasio-Cortez can see right through him. Shapiro is not interested in an honest discussion. He thinks he’s found a chew toy he can bat around for the entertainment of the dull reactionaries that constitute his audience. The faux sincerity is an obvious ploy.

That tweet is a response to badgering from Shapiro fanboys. She had appropriately ignored Shapiro altogether, and here she’s responding to the hectoring crowd by telling them she doesn’t “owe a response”. She doesn’t. Shapiro is a nobody who plays no role in government, isn’t a political ally or opponent, isn’t a constituent, and is just a guy who babbles propaganda into a microphone. Guys who have an adoring fanbase of regressive men are dime-a-dozen nowadays. Yes, let’s start ignoring them instead of thinking they have some authority.

The comparison to cat-calling is apt. That’s what guys with an unwarranted, inflated conceit in their worth do.

A rip-roaring horror story

I picked up this book (actually, my brother gave it to me), and I couldn’t put it down. It’s got everything. It’s got a brave heroic protagonist. It’s got a god-soaked repellent psychopath for a villain who could have stepped straight out of a Steven King novel. It’s got establishment schemers who make everything worse. And most of all, it’s got grisly body horror. I kept reading because I had to know what abomination would be perpetrated on the innocent victim next.

Only it’s not a novel. It’s Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, and it’s about the assassination of James Garfield.

The protagonist: James Garfield was one of those forgotten, minor presidents I didn’t know much about, because he served less than a year and months of that was was spent slowly dying in agony. But, I learned, he was a rather progressive candidate who accepted a nomination by popular acclaim reluctantly, and was a vigorous defender of civil rights who campaigned for dignity and equality for all races. He was a Republican. That tells you how much the party has declined in the last 140 years.

The assassin: Charles Guiteau was a cheap grifter, a narcissist with delusions of grandeur. He wanted to exploit the spoils system, whereby an incoming administration would freely hand out jobs and high ranking positions to their pals and people with money (hey, so the system hasn’t changed that much). Guiteau talked himself into thinking he deserved to be ambassador to France and that he was good friends with various politicans (he wasn’t), and when he didn’t get his due, decided to murder the president for the fame.

The real assassin: Guiteau pulled the trigger, but the real killer were the swarm of incompetent doctors who wanted the acclaim that would fall on whoever saved Garfield. Worst of the bunch was Dr. Doctor Bliss — his first name was actually “Doctor”, which would have been improbable in a novel — who seized control of the patient and limited what could be done, all the while issuing enthusiastically optimistic daily progress reports as the President spent months in steady decline. A later analysis of the treatment found the aphorism “Ignorance is Bliss” appropriate.

The body horror: the American doctors did not believe in the germ theory of disease, and rejected Lister’s antiseptic technique. So, as Garfield lay bleeding on the filthy train station floor, what did Bliss do? He stuck his unwashed finger in the bullet hole. He pulled out a series of non-sterile probes and poked them in there. He’s looking for the bullet in the worst way possible, and further, he ends up misdiagnosing him. The bullet had gone through to the left side of Garfield’s body, but Bliss was confident it was on the right, and so he kept probing on the right — every day, he seemed to be torturing Garfield further with this pointless insertion of his finger into the open wound — and eventually got the confirmation he wanted: an abscess formed, and a river of pus ran through the track he’d made with his dirty tools.

Really, you will learn more about pus than you ever wanted to know in this book. Pools of the stuff form in Garfield’s body, streams of it drain out of him, boils full of pus erupt all over his body as sepsis sets in. It is not for the squeamish. I probably just ruined everyone’s breakfast by mentioning it.

It doesn’t have a happy ending. Garfield dies. Bliss is disgraced. Guiteau is hanged. Oh, sorry, spoilers.

The one glimmer of optimism at the end is in Garfield’s vice-president, Chester Arthur, another of those easily forgotten presidents. He is a product of the spoils system, and a minion of a scheming senator who opposed Garfield and who groomed Arthur as a tool to serve his ends. Arthur was also something of a bumbler who’d lucked into appointments without actually getting elected, and who was terrified at the idea of taking over the job. He spends most of the book offstage, blubbering in fear, aware of his own incompetence. But then, when the president dies, he steps into the role, tells the scheming senator to take a hike, and rises to the occasion. His main accomplishment is the reform of the civil service, doing his best to end the spoils system.

I guess that sort of counts as a happy ending.

Anyway, if you’re one of those people into horror novels, who enjoys harrowing, gut-twisting tales of nightmarish experiences, try reading some history. It’s far scarier than anything fictional.

These people exist

I’ve been seeing versions of this claim since at least the Reagan years.

I don’t think the proper response is to point out that Michael Moates is kind of homely himself. The core problem is judging people by artificial standards of appearance — something that is totally irrelevant to their humanity and moral standards and intelligence. Isn’t the “We win the political debate because we can find pretty women in our clique” intrinsically wrong and fallacious?

I think we can just say that someone who makes this stupid argument has already lost.

The Koch brothers are not on your side

The Kochs have been in the news lately because they’re expressed unhappiness with Trump, and Trump has sniped back at them. This is a reminder that the enemy of your enemy is not your friend — the Kochs are major backers of the Heartland Institute, and have been and still are promoting science denialism. They’re all evil liars, even when they’re having a falling out among themselves.

I agree with that video: keep all capitalist enterprises out of the school room. Capitalism promotes short-term thinking, and short-term exploitation. But of course places like the Heartland Institute and the fully-owned subsidiary of moneyed interests, the Republican party, have been working for years to starve the educational system so that teachers will be reliant on handouts from corporations.

Also, keep religion out of the classroom. Religion promotes delusional, fantasy thinking. Can we just keep the schools focused on reality?

Dam every river! Chop down every tree!

Our President* is now claiming that allowing rivers to flow into the ocean is bad, and that we could stop wildfires but clear-cutting everything.

We could probably end all the fires if we paved over the entirety of California.

We really need to elect a swarm of Democrats in the midterms so we can end this misery.