Category: Psychology

Roid Rage

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Marjorie Taylor Greene got in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face to demand a debate.

Seriously, given her background as a Gym Rat, one has to wonder if she is abusing anabolic steroids: (As some folks noted in the comments)

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists,” leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains “a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”

Two Washington Post reporters witnessed Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) exit the House chamber late Wednesday afternoon ahead of Greene (Ga.), who shouted “Hey Alexandria” twice in an effort to get her attention. When Ocasio-Cortez did not stop walking, Greene picked up her pace and began shouting at her and asking why she supports antifa, a loosely knit group of far-left activists, and Black Lives Matter, falsely labeling them “terrorist” groups. Greene also shouted that Ocasio-Cortez was failing to defend her “radical socialist” beliefs by declining to publicly debate the freshman from Georgia.

“You don’t care about the American people,” Greene shouted. “Why do you support terrorists and antifa?”

………

On Thursday morning, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) criticized Greene’s behavior.

“While I may not agree with @AOC on issues, I’ve never seen her confront a colleague like this,” he wrote on Twitter. “The house was created to debate emotional issues professionally, and it seems some just want attention or cannot handle their emotions.”

Greene is as nutty as a fruitcake.  I do not know whether it is because she is juicing, or if there are other underlying psychological problems, and honestly I do not care.

She is a clear and present danger to fellow members of Congress.

Quote of the Day

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This is an important distinction, because it means we’re not up against some intrinsic aspect of our being here. We’re up against a small minority of manipulative sociopaths and psychopaths and a system which rewards a lack of empathy.

—Caitlin’s Johnstone explaining how she sees the current state of affairs as a function of a relatively small minority of assholes, and not the while human race.

This is actually one of the more optimistic statements that Ms. Johnstone has made, and I hope that she’s right.

Certainly, human survival has for most of our existence depended on empathy and cooperation, hunter gatherer societies, upwards of 95% of our history could not function without this.

The current state of affairs, we can call it Neoliberalism, certainly does seem to cater to the absolute worst in us and of us.

She is a Psychopath

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Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML

— RootsAction (@Roots_Action) March 5, 2021

Horriffic

It’s one thing to vote against raising the minimum wage, even if you are, as Kyrsten Sinema (D=AZ) is, nominally a member of the Democratic Party.

It’s quite another to show up dressed like a Japanese school girl, and then cast your vote with a thumbs down as one is a roman emperor.

It’s even worse when one sees the unholy glee she expresses in crushing MILLIONS of American workers.

Kyrsten Sinema is even more of a psychopath than is Mitch McConnell.

At least HE has the decency to skulk in the shadows while he does evil.

Sinema revels in the evil that she is doing.

Getting rid of her and Manchin is worth losing the Senate.

Admittedly, Just One Report, But If True, Nice Was Not Terrorism

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There is a report that  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the alleged perpetrator of an attack in Nice that has killed over 80 people,  may have been depressed because his wife left him.

If this is true, it means that this guy was not ISIS or al Qaeda, but a spree killer driven over the edge by family problems,

That would make him culturally American:

A terrorist who used a hired lorry to kill at least 84 people in a rampage during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice has been named as a convicted criminal well known to the police for armed attacks.

Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel – described as a “weird loner” who “became depressed” when his wife left him – was a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.

The 31-year-old delivery driver’s wife is this afternoon in police custody as officers question her about his alleged Islamist links. Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives – and are also looking for possible accomplices.

………

Neighbours described him as a “very weird loner” and father of three who had recently become estranged from his wife and had become depressed following the breakdown of his marriage.

Seriously, if these reports are accurate, he sounds a lot like the majority of the white mass shooters in the United States.

This is the Least Surprising News in ……… Ever

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One of the theories in modern economics is that people will engage in behavior that will provide them with a perceived benefit.

This is literally Economics 101. (Really. It’s in the text books.)

It’s called Rational Choice Theory, and it is a bedrock of Neoliberal (free market mousketeer) economics.

One of the blind spots amongst the followers of Rational Choice Theory is that whenever excessive executive compensation or control fraud is brought up, they suggest that managers operate in the best interests of the shareholders, and further argue that their bloated remuneration is what leads them to take this course.

Of course this has never happened in the history of ……… ever:

It won’t surprise any market-watcher to learn that in the run-up to earnings season, companies tend to lower the bar for top and bottom line performance, thereby giving themselves better odds of exceeding analysts’ expectations.

 However, a new working paper suggests that the sins of omission that occur during the corporate “cheating” season, as it was dubbed by Societe Generale Global Head of Quantitative Strategy Andrew Lapthorne, are far more insidious.

 Authors Kenneth Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik, and Ronnie Sadka conclude that managers mislead analysts and shareholders during earnings reports, and that their penchant for massaging expectations downwards may be employed in order to open up a window to buy their stock on the cheap in the near future.

It’s not just about buying stocks, its about manipulating the price of stock options.

The researchers developed two hypotheses: either managers make disclosures in a timely matter (and their forward-looking information is quickly reflected in stock prices) or members of the C-Suite actively “lean against the wind” to understate good or bad news — or even offer the completely wrong impression of what’s transpired since the last quarter ended.

 Their findings suggest that guidance (or “bundled forecasts”) provided by managers as well as the general tone of the conference call (analyzed using a “bag of words” approach) “point toward rejection of Timely Disclosure in favor of the Leaning Against the Wind alternative.”

“Leaning against the wind,” huh?

I would call it lying, and some would call it fraud, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

The Poor Do Have Self Control

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One of the myths about the poor is that they cannot defer gratification for greater future benefits.

Well, scientists have found a way to objectively test for the ability to handle stress, it involves “Vagal Tone”, activity of the Vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how well people handle stress.

What they discovered is that poor children who are best able to think things through the take the immediate reward, while rich kids will delay gratification.

It turns out that poor children use a different calculus:  Having never experienced the stability of their more fortunate cohorts, they go for the the immediate payoff, because experience has shown them that the any plans for the future will make their plans moot:

In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants’ families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated.

 Many of the children had trouble resisting the single, immediate treat (a marshmallow), which was to be expected. The magnetic force that exists between kids and candies is no secret. What was surprising, however, was that that tendency — the inability to forego something good right now in exchange for something better in a bit — was associated with all sorts of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of academic achievement and higher rates of obesity.

 ………

 The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there’s an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.

 “When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain,” said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. “When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them.”

 A recent two-part study conducted by Sturge-Apple shows how the tendency of poorer children to pounce on immediate rewards might not be the result of impulsiveness but rather of careful consideration.

 In the first experiment, she monitored the heart rate of 200 low-income 2-year-olds. The monitoring allowed her to approximate each child’s vagal tone — a measure of the activity of the vagus nerve, which has been shown to indicate how well a given individual performs under stress (i.e., reads social cues, reacts to environmental contexts, and adjusts behaviors). High vagal tone is good: it suggests a heightened ability to act relatively calmly under stress. Low vagal tone is bad: it suggests just the opposite.

 Two years later, at the age of 4, the same children were presented with a choice. Each was sat a table where two plates and a bell were placed. One plate held two M&Ms, while the other held five. The children were told that they could either ring the bell and have the two M&Ms immediately or enjoy the plate of five as soon as the experimenter returned.

 Interestingly, each child’s vagal tone appeared to have a significant effect on their decision. But — and this is an important but — it didn’t have the sort of effect many would have imagined. The higher the child’s vagal tone — the greater, in other words, a child’s ability to act calmly under pressure — the more likely the child was to ring the bell. The calmer the children were to think it through, the more likely they were to choose the immediate reward.

 ………

 The children born to college-educated mothers of high socioeconomic status acted exactly as one would expect. The higher their vagal tone, or calmness under stress, the more likely they were to hold out for the five extra M&Ms. For children born to non-college-educated mothers of low socioeconomic status, on the other hand, the outcome was exactly the opposite. The higher their vagal tone, the less likely they were to wait.

 The chart below, plucked from the study, shows just how stark the divergence is.

This is rational behavior, not evidence of lack of moral fiber.

If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you eat whenever you can.

QED.

To Protect and Serve

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It’s confirmed.

The Baltimore PD is nothing at all like the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street.

First we learn that for many years, the company doing psyche evals for would be BPD cadettes was phoning it in, which explains a lot:

Baltimore’s spending panel has cut ties with two contractors.

 Baltimore’s spending panel voted unanimously Wednesday to take action against two companies accused of violating contracts with the city.

 The Board of Estimates, which is controlled by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, voted to immediately end a contract with a psychology firm that conducted mental health screenings for many prospective Baltimore police officers. The screenings were far shorter than required.

 The $730,000 contact for Psychology Consultants Associated of Lutherville had been on suspension since last year, pending the results of a city investigation. The city’s inspector general reported this week that its investigation found that nearly three-quarters of officers and trainees said that their pre-employment screenings with the firm lasted 30 minutes or less.

 The contract required at least an hourlong interview for each job candidate.

 In a letter to the inspector general, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis accused the firm of “cutting corners” and putting the public and the department “at risk.”

This might explain a lot, including the fact that Baltimore cops were caught looting during the Freddie Gray unrest:

Three Baltimore police officers were accused of theft in two separate investigations — including two charged after being caught on video looting a store during the unrest that followed the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

According to the Baltimore Sun, correction officers Tamika Cobb and Kendra Richard were suspended without pay after footage showed them exiting a local convenience store holding Slim Jims and Tostitos chips on April 25.

That same day, riots broke out in the city after six hours of peaceful protests calling for charges to be filed against the officers who arrested Gray earlier that month. Six officers were later charged in connection wih Gray’s death.

Both Cobb and Richard were assigned to corrections facilities downtown, near the site of the unrest. They face charges of burglary and theft, and bail was set for each of them at $35,000.

Yes, I know that the 2nd story is from a year ago, but I came across both of them today, so I just had to comment.

They seemed to segue nicely one into the other, or as Zathras would say, “At least there is symmetry.”

Seriously?

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Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, aka the “Human Bowling Jacket”, is proposing a return to the guillotine:

Maine Gov. Paul LePage says his state is too easy on drug crimes, suggesting it should bring back the guillotine for serious offenders.

The Republican governor, known for his controversial statements, was speaking on local radio Tuesday about combating the drug epidemic in his state.

“What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he told WVOM. “We could have public executions and have, you know, we could even have (guessing) which hole it falls in.”

He said that he was “all in” on fighting drug criminals and said a recent proposal to establish a minimum sentence of four years for drug traffickers was too lenient.

“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers,” LePage said.

………

Even as the hosts of the show tried to wrap the interview, LePage interrupted to show his resolve, suggesting the guillotine be used for public executions, joking that the idea was part of his French ancestry.

“I like French history,” he said.

It’s only the latest controversial comments from LePage. Earlier this month, he made waves talking about drug dealers in his state.

“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”

Seriously, can the legislators of Maine please impeach his flabby white ass?

We already know that he has abused his official power to engage in a personal vendetta, and the investigation is ongoing, but it needs to move faster.

This guy is a clear and present danger to the state of Maine.

H/t Charlie Pierce.

F%$# Me. Now I Have to Defend Sarah Palin

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I understand that Track Palin, Sarah’s kid, is alleged to have beaten and brandished a firearm at his (hopefully former) girlfriend.

I also heard Sarah Palin blaming Barack Obama, because Track was in Iraq, and has PTSD.

I’m inclined call bullsh%$ on former ½ Governor Palin, because the best evidence is that Track Palin has always been a been prone to violent outbursts.

That being said, articles like this one that claims that Track could not have PTSD because he never saw combat, are crap:

………

The head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Rick Rieckhoff responded to Palin’s statement, saying she shouldn’t “politicize” the issue of PTSD and hoped it “doesn’t become a portable chew toy in a political campaign.”

In addition, Track Palin’s public records indicate that not only did he only serve one year in Iraq, which was under the George W. Bush administration, he also didn’t even see one moment of combat. An anonymous fellow solider also spoke about the issue, debunking Palin’s earlier claims. “Speaking as a combat vet who literally slept in the same barracks as Track Palin, his mother is wrong and her son is not a victim.”

Let’s be clear here: This is NOT how PTSD works.

There are doctors, and nurses, and MPs, and supply officers who never saw a shot fired in anger who have PTSD.

Not being shot at, or shooting someone, does NOT rule out PTSD.

Honestly, I think that the PTSD explanation is likely Palin alibiing (again), but painting with that broad a brush maligns a lot of people who have a very real condition, and need treatment. 

Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah Just Experienced the Comedy Rapture

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Kind of like Norman Rockwell ……… On Acid

Because the crack smoking, peeing in public, murder threatening, formerMayor of Toronto, Chris Farley wannabee Rob Ford has announced his candidacy for Mayor of Toronto:

Smoking crack, urinating in public and threatening murder might each be the kind of behaviour you’d expect to put an end to any politician’s career.

But Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, seems to be the exception to the rule. And if he has his way, he might once again represent Canada’s largest city.

During a Twitter exchange on Wednesday, Ford was asked if he planned to return to office.

“I’ll be on the ballot running for Mayor in 2018,” Ford replied.

………

But after months of speculation, Toronto police found the recording, and Ford was forced to admit that he had smoked crack – probably during a “drunken stupor”. Yet he refused to resign.

Over the following months, Ford’s behavior only grew more erratic, and stories of his previous behavior started to emerge.

In 2003, he called a colleague at a city council meeting a “slithering snake” who “should be back in his cage where he comes from”. A year earlier, while discussing a public meeting on the possibility of a homeless shelter in his district, he asked: “why don’t we have a public lynching?” and he was thrown out of a Maple Leafs hockey game after getting in a fight with fans while drunk.

In October 2013, he was spotted urinating in public behind an Etobicoke public school. The following month, during a raucous debate, Ford barreled over an elderly politician, Pam McConnell, knocking her to the ground. Also during that month, a video was released of the politician in a dining room raging about killing someone while apparently high, staggering and slurring.

This guy is comedy gold, and if he is elected, the people of Toronto are stupid beyond belief.

I Can Haz Impeachment?

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I used to say that Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia would die by choking on his own bile.

It turns out that I was wrong.

It appears that bile and resentment have driven him insane:

Government support for religion is not only justified by the Constitution, it was the norm for hundreds of years and it helped the United States become a free and prosperous nation, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday in Metairie.

Speaking before a small crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it.

The Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn’t mean the government can’t favor religion over nonreligion.

That was never the case historically, he said. It didn’t become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice.

If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. “Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”

BTW, it appears that the first thing to go is a sense of irony, because he unironically quotes Charles de Gaulle insulting the United States:

Citing a quotation attributed to former French President Charles de Gaulle, Scalia said “‘God takes care of little children, drunkards and the United States of America.'” Scalia then added, “I think that’s true. God has been very good to us. One of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor.”

Seriously, He’s lost it.

I do understand that technically impeachment is for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but the juxtaposition of batsh%$ insane and just does not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut, particularly when he has no interest at all in recusing himself on cases where he has explicitly stated that his mind is already made up.

This ain’t the first time.

Bear Who Swims Seriously Considers Move to Norway*

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My brother, AKA the Bear Who Swims, is fond of winter.

In fact, my brother has frequently expressed a sense of loss at not experiencing Minneapolis weather now that he lives in Seattle.

Well, Bear Who Swims, have you considered Norway?

Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months.

As the days get darker and colder in much of the northern hemisphere, it’s easy to indulge in gloom. For the next few months, you’ll be shivering. You’ll be battling foul weather. Thanks to daylight saving time there will be no chance to see the sun after work.

The gloom leads to a common question: What can I do to cope with the dark and cold?

If you truly want to be happy during winter, though, this is the wrong approach to the season. Changing your mindset can do more than distracting yourself from the weather.

That’s the takeaway from research done by Kari Leibowitz, currently a PhD student at Stanford University, who spent August 2014 to June 2015 on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway. Tromsø is so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon. Leibowitz went to study the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

………

It turns out that in northern Norway, “people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,” says Leibowitz, and that makes all the difference.

………

And finally, people are enamored with the sheer beauty of the season. Leibowitz grew up near the Jersey shore, and “I just took it as a fact that everyone likes summer the best.” But deep in the winter in Norway, when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon, multiple hours a day can still look like sunrise and sunset, and against the snow, “the colors are incredibly beautiful,” she says. “The light is very soft and indirect.”

I rather imagine that as he reads this, my brother is thinking wistfully of the thought of sub-zero evenings and the Northern Lights.

*Actually, to be fair, Stephen has never expressed an interest in moving to Norway, I just think that he might now.

The Car for My Midlife Crisis Has Returned

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1980s Version


New Version

For some reason, the styling of the original always appealed to me, and if I were to get a car with just two seats and a tiny trunk, that would be it.

And now, it’s back:

Fiat unveiled a “new” two-seat sports car at the Los Angeles Auto Show Thursday — the reborn version of the the Fiat 124 Spider.

It marks the return of a model name that hasn’t been available in the United States since 1985.

The original Fiat 124 Spider was a small, fun-to-drive sportscar that had adoring fans, but also a reputation for mechanical troubles boiled down to the memorable joke “Fix It Again, Tony.”

That bit is not quite fair.

The 80s Spider was a simple, and, at least by the standard of 1980s vintage Fiats,* fairly reliable.

I’ve not had my midlife crisis yet, but if I do, I will get the model with manual transmission, because if you are going to have a midlife crisis, and buy a 2 seat convertible, it’s lame to use an automatic transmission.

I think that I’d get the model with the manual roof too, because ……… well ……… midlife crisis.

There are two ways to go with a midlife crisis car, super car, or something that you would have driven as a kid.

I swing the latter way.
*Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Because We Know that Eliminating Human Physical Contact Improves the Development of Children

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Out on Mercer Island, Washington, the school district has banned the game of tag as a sweeping ban of all forms of physical contact between students:

Webster’s defines “tag” as “a game in which the player who is it chases others and tries to touch one of them who then becomes it.” Wikipedia explains that the game, also known in Britain as “it, tip you’re it” is “a playground game that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to ‘tag’ or touch them, usually with their hands.”

So is the game of “tag” still “tag” if tagging is banned?

That is the question for the Mercer County School District in Washington state and for some unhappy parents.

It all started with a social media report earlier this week when a group of parents, responding to what they had heard was a ban on the game of tag in elementary schools, formed a group called “Support ‘tag’ at Recess.”

It was their impression that there was indeed a ban and the word soon spread to the news media.

………

A spokesman for the school district seemed to reinforce the impression with a statement:

“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students.

“School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”

“Good grief, our kids need some unstructured playtime,” mom Kelsey Joyce told the TV station. “It’s a game that practically everyone has played – but if you go to public school on Mercer Island, keep your hands to yourself.

“I totally survived tag,” said Joyce. “I even survived red rover, believe it or not.”

More significantly, the school board ignored the fact that physical touching is an necessity, particularly for developing children.

The reason that children play touching games is because children need touching.

I Cannot Believe that I am Saying This………

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It turns out now that the best evidence now is that at least one of the protesteris a bit of a nut, who was in the not too distant past a Teabagger supporter of Sarah Palin.

IMNSHO, you cannot manufacture this kind of lunacy, so I’m going with a small group of nuts:

An interesting development has occurred within the Black Lives Matter movement and it has caused many outside and from within the movement to question the wisdom in the most recent interruption of Bernie Sanders campaign. While no one can deny its effectiveness, especially considering Senator Sanders newest addition to his team is a Black Lives Matter activist, this interruption happened after Bernie had already begun shifting his campaign towards publicizing his stance on racial issues.

When individuals place themselves in the public eye they become scrutinized at every level. While looking into these activists for the Black Lives Matter movement, it became readily apparent that either they were not officially a part of the BLM movement, or they were not organized until just around the time of the incident.

………

Then more startling information came out concerning Marissa Johnson, the main agitator who berated Bernie for being a racist. According to her own Facebook profile she was a huge Tea Party supporter and had supported Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice Presidential candidacy.

………

While none of that necessarily qualifies her as being a troll, or as some on the internet have accused an operative who is just trying to delegitimize the Sanders campaign. It is very possible that Johnson was a staunch Tea Party supporter in 2008 and has now changed her political persuasion to more closely mirror that of Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. Eight years are a long time for an individual to reflect upon politics and their effects in the real world.

Although it is quite disquieting when you dig deeper into the facts. The Facebook page and social media presence of Johnson’s faction BLM Seattle did not exist until the day of the rally. Two hours after the interruption her Facebook page had been live for less than 24 hours and had garnered less than 50 followers. Again, this may all relate back to poor planning and nothing nefarious, but it is certainly not indicative of someone attempting to achieve legitimacy within the political spectrum. Johnson is also a member of a group called Outside Agitators 206, a movement within the larger Black Lives Matter movement, based out of Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to hold the same goals as the larger movement and actually made a public statement declaring their intent was to “declare war on the Democratic Party“. ………

I would note that there has been no formal comment by BLM on this protest, and I would argue that there can’t be one, because, much like the Occupy movement, there is no head, there is no tail, and there is no way to determine if someone is official, a nut, or an agent provocateur.

On the other hand, I think that the preponderance of the evidence here is that this specific protest is the product of the bat-sh%$ insane wing of BLM, so I apologize to the Clinton campaign.

BTW, read what the Bear who Swims has said about Occupy and its ilk about the tendency of groups like Occupy, and BLM to function as “Useful Idiots”.

Here is a particularly good bit:

Say what you like about the reactionaries, they have spent the last 30 years do these things. They have

  • Used mass media to explain their theories, and why they are better.
  • Popularized goals and objects and made them part of the political discussion through poltical organizing and outreach.
  • Created a cadre of individuals who are willing to take on public office at all levels of govenment to implement their policies.
  • Created a core group of constituencies who are loyal to their cause — even against their own interested.

Let us put that another way, they have play practical electoral politics effectively.  In the course of this they have created a separate reactionary nationalism, which while at odds with the views of many, has no counter balance.

Go read what the Bear, AKA my brother, AKA the hairiest Saroff, AKA Stephen wrote.

He has been involved in politics for a long time, and has little patience for folks who think that it is noble to rearrange deck chairs on a certain White Star Line ocean liner as an alternative to identifying and avoiding icebergs.