Yappity yap
Huey Long after a filibuster.
There's a move to returning the Senate to the real old fashion, talking for hours, filibuster.That is, in fact, how they originally worked. Senators simply refused to yield the floor, talking, in some instances, until they collapsed.
The filibuster has been in the news recently a great deal as the Senate's rules require 60 votes, more than a simple majority (51) to pass most things, although that has been eroding in recent years. This is a rule of the Senate, not a provision of the Constitution, so there's no real legal requirement for this. The Senate has traditionally been a lot more gentlemanly, however, than the House, and the evolved filibuster, which simply requires the extra votes to move along in its current form, is under attack.
There's a lot of fear about altering this, but there's also a lot of criticism about this extra constitutional process which slows things down or keeps things from happening. Whether you want to end the procedure or not depends on if your party is in or out of power to a large degree. Returning to the original form of it, however, might be a good idea for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to demonstrate that the Senate is composed of a lot of old, tired, people.
Worst U.S. Macroeconomic Policy In Forty Years.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned that the U.S. is suffering from the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in four decades, pointing the finger at both Democrats and Republicans for creating “enormous” risks.
From Bloomberg.
Opposite Directions.
At the same time that Wyoming's legislature is seeking to fund lawsuits against states that retire coal fired plants, Congress is taking steps to end them in a bill that has some bipartisan support.
This is interesting for a variety of reasons, but one of the things that it points out that Sen. Case's comments that Wyoming is getting "redder" as the rest of the country turns more "blue" is correct. What that may mean to people is of course subject to individual views, but what should seem obvious is that the state is going to have to start pondering a much different economic future.
Indeed, it already is, even as these actions take place. Recent votes in the legislature would suggest that most of the legislature is more centric than the news might suggest.
Infrastructure
Hard on the heels of the largest spending bill of all time, the House is taking up an "infrastructure" bill.
Discussing infrastructure is a favorite thing for both parties to do, nearly in an unthinking manner. The common comment is "we need to fix our bridges. . ." etc., which may very well be true. Little thought, however, is given to the concept that if New York built a bunch of bridges decades ago that need repair, there's no real reason that Wyoming should help fix them. Fix them, yes, but fix them yourself.
Hardly anyone seems to think of things in that fashion anymore, however, and beyond that the infrastructure bill is rapidly becoming a climate bill, with the concept of "building back better". If the real goal here, however, is to do that, nuclear power plants are what ought to be built, which I predict won't even be discussed.
The added factor is that with the Senate divided 50/50, getting a second big spending bill past the Senate is going to be hard. . . unless the filibuster is done away with. House Democrats seem really motivated by this and other items on their agenda. . . Senate ones less so.
And perhaps wisely less so. The absolute flooding of the economy with cash is reaching the really frightening level. A huge spending bill on infrastructure would ramp up the already rising risk of creating inflation. That might make the infrastructure bill, therefore, a casualty of the last Coronavirus relief bill, much as the Great Society was a casualty of the Vietnam War.
There's only so much money, or rather so much debt, a society can really endure.
Oh, it can't be that.
The nut who killed a collection of prostitutes in Georgia claimed sex addiction as his motive. This was immediately dissed by the experts and pundits.
A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
There's a huge tendency to camouflage news stories in terms of what's really going on vs. what a certain view of what's going on that is pretty pervasive in contemporary society. This isn't new, it's been going on for awhile, but it's corrupting as it tends to cause stories to have a campaign like quality to them at worst, or is simply corrupting to the truth at the least. On the latter, its helped fuel the entire right wing concept of "fake news" that's been so harmful and that's helped some on the right deny the results of the election and all that entails.
This has, literally, nothing to do with that, but you wouldn't know it from the news story. What has occurred, and what is extremely disturbing, is that some people have been attacking people of Asian appearance because of the Coronavirus. People who ran around calling it the "Chinese Flu" or the "CCP Flu" or the "Wuhan Flue and the like have helped create this atmosphere. People like Donald Trump or Patrick Coffin who used one of these terms deserve our moral contempt for doing so and are obligated at some level to try to address it now.
Indeed, even the most conspiratorially minded ought to know that even if the Chinese government launched COVID 19 as a biological weapon, which they didn't, that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the average Chinese person anywhere. Even in China itself the Chinese are the captive of a totalitarian government they have no influence over. It's not like they as a people thought this up on their own or something. Far from it. The whole association of the disease with the Chinese peoples or their cultures is simply stupid.
What's also a problem, however, is associating absolutely everything on earth with the current right/left political divide and, in things like this, sort of giving the entire tragedy a lefty social interpretation.
The truth of the matter is that poverty has been long associated with prostitution, and immigrants are poorer than other people, as a rule. A crime reporter familiar with Atlanta has already noted this in regard to sexual vice in that city, and that's part of the background of this story.*
Immigrant populations, being poor, have over time more than their fair share of vice and crime. Irish Americans today may wish to imagine that 100% of their ancestors were charming folksy people from Cork, but there was an Irish Mob that coexisted, and sometimes was affiliated with, the Mafia in its hay day. The Mafia itself was essentially a Sicilian ethnic gang. Go out from there and you'll find that every poor ethnic group has had a criminal organization. One of the things every criminal organization deals in is prostitution.
Prostitution itself doesn't match at all the movie image of it. Prostitutes aren't people like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Nobody takes it up who isn't blisteringly desperate. Almost 100% of it is controlled by some sort of organizing criminal Off hand, probably the only accurate portrayals of it that I can think of are those given in The Godfather, Part II and in the recent Perry Mason series, both of which are really grim. Most prostitutes are captives of something or somebody.
There's a high ethnic component to it as well. Some years ago in rich Jackson Wyoming the police broke up a prostitution ring in which the girls (and they were that) were almost all underaged Mexican illegal aliens controlled by a Mexican mob. And all over the U.S. you'll find "spas" or "massage parlors" that are actually cat houses.
Indeed, the situation has gotten sufficiently bad in Casper, Wyoming that legitimate spas went to the city and asked for a licensing ordinance to help drive out the illegitimate ones. The legitimate facilities were probably getting tired of being asked for favors, even though the customers who walked in them should have realized that women who didn't look worn out and strung out on drugs were probably not prostitutes. At any rate, prostitution is already illegal in Casper, so the degree to which that will help is questionable.
In Atlanta its apparently the case that prostitution is broken up into three classes, and maybe it is everywhere. Once class is "lingerie models", which is probably made up of strippers. Ethnically, they tend apparently to be white. Actual street walkers tend to be Hispanic and Black, apparently, two underprivileged classes in urban areas. In between them are those who work at "spas", which are Asian, and who are principally controlled by and captives of Asian gangs.
You'd not be aware of any of that if you listen to the news, which keeps addressing the spas as if they're, well, spas. That's unless you are observant of the photographs of them however, and the photos in their windows show that the services offered appear to be rather broad.
Prostitutes are hugely endangered in every way by their occupation. All kids of them get murdered with nobody noticing, and of course others die young by disease. They're slaves, quite often, and treated just as such.
Prostitution is very closely associated with pornography. People may imagine that pornography is produced at the Playboy Mansion or at parties hosted by Jackie Treehorn, but in reality those who make it go where the human material is and pay whomever controls the prostitutes to do what they're getting paid to do anyhow.
And the association of prostitution with violence and sexual deviance is overwhelming.
In spite of that, our society has not only closed a blind eye to this, it actually denies it. Depictions of women prostitutes are as old as the Police Gazette, but starting in the 1930s there was a slow creep of "nice girl" images that crept up on, or crossed over into, pornography. World War Two massively expanded it and society never came back. Indeed, it can be argued that the war not only acclimated society to violence at epic levels, it acclimated it to prostitution to a degree as well.
That was exploited by Hugh Hefner in his pioneering rag starting in 1953 which took the nose art bombshell, impossibly proportioned, girl off of B-25s and on to slick magazine print. And that expanded exponentially from there. We just passed, for example, February, which is the month Sports Illustrated issues its annual pornography issue.
While pornographers may deny it, we well know that everything about pornography and what it has brought about has been destructive. And its more destructive with some than others. Some simply can't handle the images, which anyone can download at any time, and they go from Playboy like images to the sicker and sicker. And that some will go from rags to attempting to get the services that Playboy and its fellow travelers assert are free for the asking is well known. Some will start killing.
The sadistic perverted killing of prostitutes has been a feature of crime for eons. Jack the Ripper gives us a famous example, but he's hardly the only one. And in our age now we have the added factor of the mentally disturbed unemployable male.
But that's a complicated story which, if focused on, would argue for restricting images on the net, finding meaningful employment for the marginal unemployed, and going in and freeing women enslaved in prostitution.
All hard work, with no woke social story to it.
And while we're at, Andrew Cuomo.
Back when Bill Clinton ran for President we were warned that there would be "Bimbo Eruptions" as the election neared. There sort of were, but back in those days politicians were still given an element of benefit of the doubt.
They aren't now.
That's because male authority figures are not, both rightly and wrongly, depending upon the case. Society wide, however, the development has been a good one.
We've noted before that in some ways the irony of this whole movement is that it urges for a very traditional return to morality, while at the same time absolutely refusing to term it that. In the most recent claim to come out against Cuomo, whose princaplly accused of innaprporaite conduct, not of something worse, his accuser notes how he said things he shouldn't have said and was caught looking down her shirt.
Don't look down women's shirts is something that anyone of a certain age knows better than to do. But in an age in which we're simultaneously supposed to look at Kate Uptons' boobs, it gets confusing. A society can't really say "look at Kate's boobs" and "don't look down women's shirts". It's the same thing.
None of which excuses Cuomo, about whom ew shouldn't be surprised. Cuomo is old enough to know that he's not supposed to peer down women's shirts, but as he hasn't been adherent to any prior serious moral code that applies to him, why would we be surprised. Cuomo is a Catholic who is divorced and until recently was shacked up with some cooking personality. If you can get by the several moral restrictions that entails, peeking down women's shirts is an easy next step.
The point here is that we seemingly give all sorts of people real leeway on their self declared moral positions, to include recently both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This makes a person less intellectually honest than a person whose moral code is more lax, which is not a reason to have a lax moral code. But if a person claims a certain thing, and then pretty publicly acts contrary to it, there's no real reason to suppose that they are suddenly morally adherent in a more private setting. Some people no doubt are, but there's no reason to suppose that.
All of which gets back once again to something relatively obvious but which people just don't seem to want to grasp. If part of the moral code is "don't look down women's shirts", by extension part of it is also "don't look at Kate Upton's exposed boobs", and then part of it is "don't tolerate pornography", etc. etc..
Noncompetitive
The GOP has declined so much in Colorado its officials now feel that in 2022, they will not be competitive.
Colorado went form reliably Republican to "Purple" to urban Democratic quickly, fueled in part by the odd world view of chamber of commerce types who think all business is good business. Colorado brought in a lot of business, and a lot of the new workers were Democratic, and then it brought in weed, which is all Democratic in terms of support and the people it brings in. So whatever a person thinks of this, those who were GOP boosters of "let's get all this in. . ." got in just what they were asking for.
Additionally, Colorado is a Western state, and by that we mean a Western state in a West that doesn't include Texas and Oklahoma. That means its politics were never all that "red", as in Trumpist red, or even mainstream Republican red, as people who are outside of the area would believe. At the present time the hard alt right edge of the GOP is noisy in the West, but its support is probably razor thin. It may have elected Loren Boebert, but only, barely, and the support for the GOP in Colorado is evaporating. Chances are, there's been more evaporation from the hard right than those in it, who seem pretty self convinced, may imagine. Certainly recent hard right bills in the Wyoming legislative session have met with limited success.
Reassessing Reagan
When I was a college student a person would have had to be among friend they really trusted if they were going to say anything nice about Ronald Reagan.
For a long time, you wouldn't know that. Reagan became a conservative hero and after that, like Jack Kennedy, he became somebody that members of the opposing party would even point to as a laudable figure.
All of a sudden, that's changed. Several times in the past week I saw printed items going after Reagan for doing away with Welfare, the most notable being an opinion piece by Robert Reich (who at least admitted it was really Clinton who did that). Some of hte commentary was really nasty. It was almost like the late 1970s again.
The interesting thing about that is that it must mean that all the Democrats who praised Reaganin later years, and the ones who were just silent, were really harboring animosity towards him all this time, in the same way that some Republicans still really hate Franklin Roosevelt. Je me souviens, je suppose. At the same time, it's interesting to see the extent to which the left truly feels its unleashed. Moderate Republicans who didn't vote for Trump last go around and middle of the road independents have good reason to feel queasy.
Grand Theft Auto
Fairbanks is experiencing an increase in catalytic converter thefts. Apparently the whole country is. I didn't even know that people stole those. It's odd to think of as its one of the things that I remember people removing from their cars back in the day, although I doubt they do now.
Footnotes
*This may have been unfair, as while it seems clear that there is a sexual aspect to the work of the massage women, it may be more in the nature of being alluring, potentially, rather than actualized.
Having said that, I just don't know. The oppressive nature of the circumstances of these women's occupations is so glossed over in these stories that as of right now, even taking a view that I was wholly incorrect as to its nature, its still not really clear what it was.
1 comment:
Regarding the items above, I saw an MSN headline that, for the first time, referred to the women who were killed in Atlanta as "sex workers".
That they fit this category isn't surprising, but it took days, in at least what I read, for it to be noted. The article worried that investigations and press reporting would dehumanize them, which I suppose is truly a risk. But the fact is that a society that tolerated a situation in which they have that status has already done that, which is also a tragedy. Men going into those shops weren't going in for the employees humanity, but to treat them like an object. And the income probably goes to somebody who treated them the same way, as objects.
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