Stanning for Lancaster, Texas

I guess Lancaster City Manager Opal Mauldin-Robertson is doing what she thinks a good city manager would do, but this PR statement after a shooting in Lancaster is a transparent howler:

While shootings do happen, City of Lancaster City Manager Opal Mauldin-Jones said she does not feel like Lancaster’s shooting is unusual since the city is “pleased to have commercial businesses in our community. Sometimes, with business comes challenges, and the movie theatre attracts customers from across the region. Regrettably, the incident involved visitors to our community. The City has worked with the movie theatre ownership to ensure they have proactive measures in place to prevent large youth loitering opportunities.”

Opal could have said something like: "Well, we're not Wilmer or Hutchins. We DO have a movie theater."

Good old Rita Cook writing that story, too. If not for her, Focus Daily News would probably be the rest of the way in the toilet. That said, the lede sounds just as non-exciting as did stuff she wrote nearly 20 years ago.

Texas Progressives talk vouchers and more

Quo vadis vouchers, Switek asks at the Trib, even as Strangeabbott released an endorsement list of House Rethuglicans. No voucher foes got one, but the four flip-floppers on the last bill, including my own David Spiller, who is being primaried, did. Abbott calls the 21 foes "pro-union," as of course that's a smear (unless Rethugs tread around cop unions). Further related? Andrew Murr, one of the House managers (along with Spiller and others) of the impeachment of Ken Paxton, isn't running again.

The TSTA Blog keeps on chronicling Greg Abbott's lies about vouchers.

Frank Strong recaps a dismal night for books in Conroe.  

In the Pink Texas reviews a bad day for textbooks at the SBOE. 

For the 60th anniversary of JFK's assassination, SocraticGadfly stumbled into a brand-new conspiracy theory.

Just when I thought James DiEugenio couldn't get any more fucking stupid in his JFK conspiracy theory grifting, he does. Compared to him, Jefferson Morley looks like pure sanity.

Whoa, now. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals actually ruled in favor of environmentalists and ordered TCEQ to fix its mistake.

Off the Kuff takes a closer look at recent voter registration and turnout numbers.

UT-Dallas decided to stifle student discourse on Israel-Gaza. 

House Intell head says it's likely there's no more money this year for either Zelensky or Bibi. Hot damn, and I support it from the left on principle and on it pissing off #BlueAnon.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project noted the Trump, Abbott, Texas law enforcement rally at the border. 

 Law Dork surveys the legal landscape and sees a lot to be worried about.  

The Current reads Ted Cruz's new book so you don't have to, not that you would have anyway. 

Science news roundup: mammal gayness

This one dips a bit hard into the ev psych world, so take it with a grain or two of salt, but reportedly, homosexuality in mammals may have evolved to reduce group conflict. Given that same-sex sexual behavior has been seen in non-mammalian animals as evolutionarily ancient as crickets, that's part of why I'm skeptical. 

This:

Dieter Lukas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the new study, was skeptical of this conclusion. “Taken together, the findings in this study have not convinced me that there is a single explanation for the occurrence of same-sex behavior,” he said.

His skepticism came in part from the data on which the scientists based their study. The challenges of observing animals in the wild may mean that same-sex behavior in some species goes overlooked. “It will be much easier to observe whether the behavior occurs if individuals are on open ground and active during daytime,” Dr. Lukas said.

Is a good starting point. 

And, per others, those crickets may suggest another answer:

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, commended the researchers for focusing their study on mammals alone, rather than the entire animal kingdom. “We’re trying to steer way from one explanation to rule them all,” she said.

In April, Dr. Zuk and Jon Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher in her lab, put forward a different explanation for same-sex behavior based on an experiment on crickets. They showed that male crickets will sometimes produce courtship songs and try to mate with other males and with juveniles.

Since the crickets don’t live in social groups, that can’t explain the behavior Dr. Zuk and Dr. Richardson documented. Instead, crickets and perhaps many other species may engage in same-sex sexual behavior as part of a strategy to take advantage of as many opportunities to mate as possible.

Dr. Zuk likened the strategy to a smoke detector. “You want a smoke detector that is sensitive enough to detect all fires,” she said. “And if it does that, occasionally it’s going to go off when you burn your toast.”

Or at least, per Lukas, that there is no single answer.

Another reason to be skeptical? It's a meta-study. They can be good, but overall, no better than the weakest of the individual studies. 

Yet one more reason for skepticism? Dean Hamer. Yes, I went there.

In addition, males of many of the species involved generally do NOT form social groups much of the year. Only in winter, for example, do wild ungulates become part of herds, and they're going to be more socialized at that point because they're testosterone-exhausted after the end of their rut.

At a minimum, I think we should say that already existing homosexuality perhaps underwent cultural evolution in some eusocial mammals.

Kicking Henry Kissinger with a side-kick at Christopher Hitchens

Greg Grandin, who wrote THE book on Kissinger, has the best straight-up, news but realism, obituary.

With people like Hank the Knife, though, my angle is always for the "takedown" obituary, though, and Grandin is a distant second to Spencer Ackerman's work of brilliance. And, I'm not going to try to improve on it.

Beyond Grandin's book, it's good that both obits mention Bangladesh as well as Cambodia. "The Vortex" will tell you all about how Kissinger and Nixon abetted (West) Pakistan's genocide in emerging Bangladesh as well as how we nearly got into a shooting war with the USSR in the Bay of Bengal. It's one of the top two books on modern world history and geopolitics I've read in the past five years. Kissinger / Nixon were likely responsible for the death of even more Bangladeshis than Cambodians, if that's possible.

No, really. High-side estimates for the Bangladeshi genocide run in the 2-3 million range.

And, per this Jeet Heer Tweet, Hank's rank immorality extended to his own Jewish people, willing to abandon them, in the case of Soviet Jews if he thought his own Realpolitik required them to be abandoned. Or, if his will to power required them to be abandoned. Here's the Forward piece to which Heer tweets.

Yes, power as aphrodisiac.

One other note, per the many on Twitter talking about Christopher Hitchens' book-length callout of Kissinger? First, as noted in my brief review, Grandin's book is better.

Second, there's Snitchens' Iraq War rank hypocrisy that sullies his reputation, as shown in his late-life book "Selected Essays."

And, we're going to give him, Hitchens, a kicking while we're here.

I gave him his own takedown obit in 2010. Beyond that?

He was wrong about the nobility of the Kurds he backed.

And, beyond THAT? The big picture?

Snitchens was quite arguably a hypocrite who was not a leftist. And, doing so in some alleged romantic and idealistic nation-building makes it worse, in one sense, than Kissinger.

Once again, Michael Hudson needs to leave biblical exegesis to others

I've called out Hudson before for his apparent belief that the biblical year of jubilee, or the seven-cycle culmination of sabbath years with an extra year to make 50, was actually real. The truth is that, as Edward Chancellor details in "The Price of Time," kings in the ancient Near East (anachronism, but still often used) would occasionally, upon their accession, have a debt jubilee, but only then, and only for certain types of debt. And, the reason they did them was not because of divine mandate but (derp!) to quell social unrest. It was a one-off of Rome's bread and circuses. No ancient kingdom or empire had anything like the biblical ideal, and the 7x7 numerological artifice should alone indicate this isn't real.

But, Hudson still thinks he's an academic biblical exegete, and his latest proffering is based on the current Israel-Gaza war. Many people, not just academically trained (if not in actual academia, like me) exegetes, but people in the general populace, know about I Samuel 15, where Yahweh orders Saul to commit a holocaust (I used that word specifically, not just "genocide," precisely because of the current situation) against Amalek, the Amalekite people. In fact, via the prophet or judge Samuel, Yahweh tells King Saul to kill not just all the people but even all their livestock.

Hudson, perhaps in part acting Jesuitically or Pharasaically (take your linguistic poison) on parsing the verbiage, claims it ain't so:

Netanyahu has evoked what he claims to be a Biblical excuse for Israeli genocide. But what he pretends to be a covenant in the tradition of Moses is a vicious demand by the judge and grey eminence Samuel telling Saul, the general whom he hopes to make king: “Now go and smite Amalek [an enemy of Israel], and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3). 

These were not the Lord’s own words, and Samuel was no Moses.

Really?

Let's quote the start of 1 Samuel 15, specifically, verses 1-3, not just verse 3:

And Samuel said to Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. 2 Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction[a] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”

’Tis so indeed, Hudson.

But wait! Hudson gets better:

It was not the Lord offering that command to destroy Amalek, but a prophet anxious to place a king on the throne.

Really? So, in essence, Hudson is calling Samuel a false prophet. And, lying about the run-up to Saul being anointed on top of it.

That also ’taint so, as selected verses from 1 Samuel 9 and 10 tell us. We start with 9:15-16:

15 Now the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed to Samuel: 16 “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince[c] over my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen[d] my people, because their cry has come to me.”

Then to chapter 10: 1-2:

Then Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on his head and kissed him and said, “Has not the Lord anointed you to be prince[a] over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the Lord and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies. And this shall be the sign to you that the Lord has anointed you to be prince[b] over his heritage.

Now, later in chapter 10, in what is surely another "hand," we have this, in 10:17-19:

17 Now Samuel called the people together to the Lord at Mizpah. 18 And he said to the people of Israel, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you.’ 19 But today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him, ‘Set a king over us.’ Now therefore present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands.”

This is preceded by another "bookmark," the full chapter of 1 Samuel 8, also having Yahweh telling Samuel it's the people's fault, not his. But, opening verses there show this was partially Samuel's fault that the people wanted a king. We read in 8: 1-5:

When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. 2 The name of his firstborn son was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beersheba. 3 Yet his sons did not walk in his ways but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice. 4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah 5 and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”

So, it seems clear there are two narratives. Chapter 9 and the first half of 10 have an enthusiastic embrace of a king, it seems, sandwiched between warnings. Proof of this? A bad transition from from the end of 8 to start of 9. 8:22 has:

And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey their voice and make them a king.” Samuel then said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his city.”

Followed by 9:1-2:

There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Becorath, son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of wealth. 2 And he had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man.

But it gets better. 9:15-16 says:

15 Now the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed to Samuel: 16 “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince[c] over my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen[d] my people, because their cry has come to me.”

Note the footnote there, that Saul here is not called "king." That's another example we're dealing with two hands. Indeed, one thread appears to end at 1 Samuel 12 with Samuel's death, with him missing entirely in chapters 13-14 before popping up again in chapter 15. Somewhat Joshua, but definitely, Judges and the two books of Samuel of the Former Prophets, as shown in various Greek versions and also at Qumran, have a torturous history.

I Samuel 13:1, Masoretic Text version:

Saul lived for one year and then became king, and when he had reigned for two years over Israel

Is proof positive of this torturous history.

The positive thread starts Chapter 10, then, as noted above.

Clearly, the previous narrative not only has Samuel being told by Yahweh to anoint Saul, but it being presented as a good thing in Yahweh's eyes, overall.

But, Hudson nowhere at all wrestles with how this evolved.

The rest of Hudson's piece is more crapola.

He is clueless about just how torturous the text-developmental history of 1 and 2 Samuel in general were, first of all. Second, whether Saul was a real person or not, or even David, for that matter, later kings who perceived themselves as David's heirs needed to in some way justify what seemed to be a usurpation.

Next, Hudson gets on his debt hobbyhorse:

The Jewish Bible is remarkable in criticizing the kings who ruled Judah and Israel. It is in fact a long narrative of social revolution, in which religious leaders sought – often successfully – to check the power of a selfish and aggressive oligarchy that was denounced again and again for its greed in impoverishing the poor, taking their land and reducing them to debt bondage.

’Taint so, Michael.

First, there is no "theology of the Tanakh" any more than there is a "theology of the New Testament." And, given the torturous history of 1 Samuel in particular and all four of the Former Prophets/Deuteronomic history in general, there's no unifying theology of the four books, or even the one book.

Hudson is also wrong about MMT and other economic issues. And, it was in part knowing that he identifies as a Marxist (probably still a Democrat sheepdogger, though, like an Adolph Reed) that I said "MMT is Maoism."

As for his attempting to rescue Judaism from the Jews? He reminds me of Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann had the exact same problem of pontificating about biblical Yahwism without talking to actual scholars.

(Update: If Hudson does want to go hunting for a background to the issue of debt that stands on better ground than his attempt to base it on biblical jubilee years? Per comments by David Graeber in "Debt," it's the old hunter-gatherer world he needs to look at, and, like the Inuit, preferably looking at a hunter-gatherer world with limited interaction with the agriculturalist world. The fact that he doesn't, along with this, reinforces my thought that he is in part acting as an apologist for Judaism as seen through certain eyeballs, as a "good" Jewish socialist Trot would do.)

Sidebar: UMKC faculty meetings could be a hoot. Besides Hudson, you've got "How Not to Kill Yourself" sobriety confidentiality violating Clancy Martin among tenure profs.

Anyway, for purposes of this piece? Yahweh ordered a holocaust on Amalek. Pure and simple. Hudson's lying, and a in a way that makes it look like he's carrying water for, if not Zionism, something that walks, talks and quacks like it.

==

Update, Feb. 26, 2024, Hudson's on his debt schtick again, and the Independent Media Institute is platforming him by publishing his book-length maunderings. No, IMI, I haven't "rushed" to read it and have no desire to.

Laborhutt: The Uber of Uhauls

A press release run through the Texas Press Association from Laborhutt said that was the best analogy to explain who they are.

Basically, people sign up through Laborhutt to help people in their neighborhood move.

Big old questions pop to my mind, related to Uber.

Are these people insured in case they damage items in moving?

Are they covered by workman's comp?

As for as size of moving help, the press release says "pickup truck," so if you're wanting an entire apartment moved, rather than just a couch or single appliance, you're SOL.

'The Unforgiveable Hypocrisy of the American Liberal' and other Israel-Gaza stuff, from sheepdoggers at The Nation

The title piece in the headline comes from Mondoweiss. It's a great piece. That said, while it's written specifically about the current situation with Israel, it applies to about all of American liberalism from this leftist's point of view.

For instance, this:

It helps in this regard that the American liberal understands very little about politics outside an American-centric frame. He has barely even learnt to question the framing narratives of mainstream U.S. news media.

Could easily be applied to Russia-Ukraine. (This sets aside supposed leftists like Eric Draitser who are comfortable repeating MSM tropes on that conflict. Interestingly, I've not seen him run a single Counterpunch Radio episode on Israel-Gaza. Does silence give assent, Eric?)

That said, much of what it is about is Palestinian specific, if not Gaza specific. This is pretty much the bottom line, along with further development and spinoff later in the piece:

the American liberal is only recently and haltingly educated about the entrenched history of structural racism and white supremacy in the U.S., so he inevitably finds it difficult to apply the lessons of that history to the world around him. He fashions himself a hero who would have stood against Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid in their time, but somehow the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” appears too “complicated” to take a moral stand. In his mind, American democracy is an inexorably self-perfecting experiment, even though the institution was founded on genocide, slavery, and apartheid and is incessantly subject to anti-democratic capture today.

And, the #BlueAnon types either sit smug in their #VoteBlueNoMatterWho ivory towers, or sheepdogging horseback saddles, knowing this is true, or else go into "who, me?" denialism.

Next, two recent pieces from The Nation.

First, Jeet Heer writes about the Biden Administration, and ultimately #GenocideJoe himself, and the Western mainstream media, being so willing and so gullible on peddling Israeli hasbara.

Second, seen via Steven Donziger on Twitter, James Bamford writes about an Israeli spy unit in the US, operating on college campuses to undercut Palestinian students. As with most of Bamford, per his recent SpyFail, it's great on the knowledge level of Israeli skullduggery.

Problem? Sure. 

As I said in a quote tweet, to get up above to the Mondoweiss piece, it's not just Blue Anons, or #BlueMAGA, whichever your handle is, that are sheepdoggers.

I don't know about Heer or Bamford, but otherwise?

The Nation is loaded with them, if you look at its masthead. Current editor D.D. Guttenplan is a big one, at least on anything Zionism. President Bashar Sunkara is one, AFAIK.

Among top-level writers? Listed right next to Heer? John Nichols is a huge one, has been for years. 

Contributing writers? I've called out Liza Featherstone before. Adolph Reed? The Communist who votes Democrat? Gregg Gonsalves has been a sheepdogger against the lab-leak theory on COVID.

The Nation, long ago and led by Nichols, had a boner for the Democratic Socialists of America. That said, it hasn't written a word about the recent DSA crack-up (I searched the site), with Hasbara Harold Meyerson and other old-timers recently deserting the part. Since then, Nichols has slurped Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (something else that pissed off allegedly pro-union Hasbara Harold was younger DSAers calling AOC a hypocrite on the railroad no-strike bill), drank the Beto for Senate Kool-Aid, and found Biden's "green" taint tasty.

Head honcho Katrina van den Heuvel is, by her silence if nothing else, a sheepdogger. She's the jefe; she could write a "Vote Green" house editorial if she chose. And hasn't. But, The Nation under her leadership DID write a Hillary Clinton endorsement.

So, unless this changes next year on official editorial stance, The Nation can print all the stuff like this it wants. It doesn't mean anything.

Fuck the IRS and fuck Biden for the politicization

I don't know why exactly Joe Biden's new, agent-enhanced IRS decided to scare the hell out of middle-class Americans like me by sending us a letter, months removed from the end of normal tax-filing season, out of the blue ... 

Urging us to sign up for Obamacare.

As this was NOT a month after I had filed my annual tax return, I knew this couldn't be getting notified that I had failed to sign my return, or something like that — which I have done before.

So, my first thought, before opening the letter?

"I'm being audited."

Way to scare the shit out of me.

Put a stamp-like notice on the front of the letter next time.

Second, I consider this a politicization of the IRS.

Maybe it's not Tricky Dick's weaponization of the IRS in the 1970s, but it is a politicization.

And, given that wingnut Republicans fought Biden tooth and nail on the issue of hiring more agents, politically, it's also an incredibly stupid one.

And, ultimately, it's Genocide Joe doubling down on not doing anything to fix our health care system, as in, no national health care.

No, that's semi-ultimately.

Ultimately is that this is yet another reason not to vote for Warmonger Joe.