A train-wreck of close-mindedness and bigotry

Decisions Are Made By People Who Show Up

If I am overly fond of quoting NBC's The West Wing when it comes to American politics it is only because it is a cache of among the best one-liners and summations of the realities of the entire field.  This post's title comes from something White House Press Secretary CJ Craig says at a Rock the Vote rally.  She is exhorting the youth to turn out and vote because for Democrats, the involvement of low-commitment voters is what makes or breaks an election cycle.

Stand Your Ground

With the George Zimmerman trial concluded an an innocent verdict handed down -- a result which should surprise absolutely no one, by the way -- I find myself at once in sympathy and odds with the many people around the country who feel he should have been found guilty.

As the facts of the case stand, George Zimmerman is not guilty but neither is he innocent and the reason for this distinction is Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, a law which absolves those who carry concealed weapons from the responsibility to avoid conflict.

It's The Infrastructure, Stupid

I think I may be one of something like 11 people in the country who are happy with their cable company.  That said, my cable company doesn't sell me cable; they sell me internet service.  When I bought cable service from them it was terrible and then there were 10 people in the country who were happy with their cable providers.

But I am pretty happy with my cable internet service.  It's fairly reliable and I can get 15 MB/s service from them for a reasonable price.

But if Google Fiber showed up in my neighborhood tomorrow?  Sorry Shentel, "don't let the door hit you," as the saying goes.  

Google Fiber's roll-out into the Kansas City area has been nothing short of breathtaking.  Delivering speeds almost two orders of magnitude faster than anything else you can get in most of the country at prices comparable to far inferior services, Google Fiber has spurred, as CNET puts it, a "startup renaissance" in the  region and it's all down to infrastructure.

We Are Monsters

I was catching up on the news from E3 while I wait for some bread to rise.  The trailer for Destiny is particularly good but it presents a view of humanity which is, well, more than a little bit naive.  The premise of the game is that humanity has been driven back from a sprawling interplanetary empire to a final hold-out city on Earth and that we must marshal a heroic push to "reclaim what is ours."  What follows is a bunch of classic sci-fi battle scenes with psyonic powers and lasers and fantasy styled infantry.

Bullshit.

I get that stuff like that sells games.  I get that we'd like to believe ourselves a race of heroes and champions of honor but we're neither of those things.  We're monsters.  We're perfectly prepared to do the unthinkable to each other if the political stakes are high enough.  Look at Syria right now - facing a serious military challenge from a rebellion, the government has turned to the use of nerve gas (if the Obama administration is to be believed).

This is how you deal with sexual abuse in the military

No "nudge nudge wink wink."  This guy will personally kill the next person who steps out of line and by the end of the video there's no possible way to doubt that.



This is the kind of attitude we need in this country when we confront sexual abuse in the military.

Closing Your Digital Blinds

Pragmatic Left is hosted on Blogger which is a Google property.  With news breaking today that Google is among the (numerous) participants in a massive NSA data mining and intelligence gathering operation known as PRISM I'd just like to take a moment to give a shout-out to all my readers over at Fort Meade.

But before everyone freaks out about the NSA spying on their Gmail accounts and their Microsoft cloud services I'd like to ask a provocative question: what's the big deal?