“So the question a feminist ought to be asking is this: Why do men and women have such an unequal relation to parenthood? Is it biology—we bear children, they don’t? Actually, this difference becomes inequality only in the context of a specific social system for rearing children—the family, or, to be more precise, familialism (since I’m talking about a system that affects us all, whether we’re in actual families or not). A familialist society assigns legal responsibility for children to the biological parents; the society as a whole has only minimal obligations to its children, and people rarely make deep commitments to children outside their families. This system puts women at an inherent disadvantage: Since it’s obvious who a child’s mother is, her parental responsibility is automatic; the father’s is not. And so the burden has always been on women to get men to do right by them. Loesch takes familialism for granted. Nearly everyone does.”

-Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

I’m not planning on voting for Trump or Clinton, but it’s not clear to me that Clinton would be less damaging to the nation or the world than Trump. Clinton will be more effective than Trump, almost certainly, and that is a danger in itself.

That she’s firmly in the pocket of Wall Street in a way that Trump isn’t matters. That she’s more likely to start overseas wars matters. That she will wield imperial power more effectively — that matters too.

Say what you want about Trump, but becoming president is not going to give him magical powers no other president has possessed. The US is a big ship, difficult to turn, hard to stop and even harder to get moving. Trump isn’t going to build any wall across the fucking border (Republicans have been threatening that since the 1920s at least), and he’s not going to ban Muslims. He’s not going to do anything that he’s claimed. That’s just bluster to get the (racist) vote out.

But Clinton? She will hand over more of the country to Wall Street. She will bomb plenty of brown people. She will help upper class white people some. And she will do nothing at all about climate change, and perhaps even make it worse.

Trump’s risk is mostly in his unpredictability. In some circumstances, that might be a good thing.

Clinton’s risk is in her extreme predictability combined with not being incompetent.

In a country where you’d literally have to be crazy to want to be president, is it any wonder who we have a the best we could produce? Any wonder at all?

The nightmare that is Windows licensing is discussed in this thread.

Makes me think about path dependence, sunk cost fallacies and bad idea traps — in the context that I had a person at work try to justify to me one time why it made sense that at many companies it requires one and sometimes two people to do nothing but specialize in complying with Microsoft’s onerous and incomprehensible licensing.

Listening to someone explain why something has to be a certain way when it absolutely does not is one of the reasons that I have given up on humanity, because it happens so damn often.

Do people mistake the reasons that something came to exist for a teleological inevitability? Do they truly believe — as this person did — that Microsoft’s bonkers scheme is the best possible solution rather than one of the worst?

I think some people — most people — just take the world as a given, and then perceive any attempt to change it as a threat. Even if it’s something as byzantine, bizarre, and useless as Microsoft’s software licensing racket.

Here’s how you defeat/bypass a firewall on a local machine where you have enough rights to create a VM: create in that VM an adapter that operates at Layer 2 (such as macvtap in Linux). Use this VM. Firewalls operate on Layer 3. They will not see this traffic at all.

Boom, done.

Is there any distro of Linux where OpenVPN, SELinux and network manager are not some buggy fucking mess?

No?

I thought not. Embarrassing for something most consider enterprise-class software.

It’s only enterprise-class if your time is not valuable.

It’s interesting how liberals are now re-writing the history of NAFTA to frame it as some sort of utopian vision that was only promulgated by our selfless and kindhearted, gentle leaders and lamb-like corporate mandarins to save American jobs.

But I was there. I remember the fight over NAFTA’s passage. And it turns out that Ross Perot was pretty much right about it in every respect, despite his other flaws.

You simply cannot listen to mainstream economists about NAFTA. You just can’t. Their very salaries — their high-status positions in the mainstream of economics and academia — depend on not understanding or noticing its pernicious effects.

Disagreeing with experts is usually a fool’s game — but not if the experts have had their entire Weltanschauung distorted by years of propaganda, falsehoods and threat of loss of livelihood. Alas, this is exactly what the economics profession has experienced so it is completely compromised. It is worse than unreliable. Ninenty-nine percent of the time it is diametrically opposed to reality.

For instance, look at this guy (and most the others) in this piece at the NYT.

Smart people are absolutely the best at lying with statistics, rationalization and self-justification. Of course these people all benefited from NAFTA, as it did precisely what it was designed to do: funnel money from poor and middle-class people in the US and Mexico to the already well-off.

In that sense, NAFTA was a huge and resounding success.

It’s just completely unconscionable that even if you support NAFTA and argue that it it is a good thing (which is just delusional), that you feel you must frame it as something done by the elites for the benefit of the people. No, like most things, it was done by the elites for their own benefit.

Ross Perot was the only one of their class to have the gall to tell tell people what effects NAFTA would really have, and he was roundly punished for it.

If Clinton wins, she’ll be the last president of her kind — pseudo-centrist neoliberal conservative Boomer coddler.

She won’t get a second term.

If Trump wins, he’ll be the first president of his type, since it is not credible that the US elect someone like Sanders when climate change and its associated dislocation begin to take their toll. The US, with no counterbalance like the former Soviet Union, will not lurch leftward.

No, it’ll be demagoguery and tyranny. Trump is the first exponent of this but will not be the last.

And the sad thing is, the US has a much better future under climate change than most other countries and regions. Europe will be destroyed by refugee crises and increasing Islamicization and radicalism on both sides resulting therefrom.

Africa will be little better. Most of Asia will starve.

The US will be better off, but not great. But even with a demagogue or two we won’t have the extreme refugee crisis of millions of people with Western-averse values overrunning public institutions and politics in general. We won’t starve. If worse comes to worst, we’ll take Canada and it’ll become the new breadbasket of the world due to plentiful water and the effects of climate change. (Oh, think that can’t happen? LOL OK then.)

But the world in the next 50 years will not be one of moderation, in climate or in politics. No matter what Clinton does (win or lose), she is the swan song of the status quo.

Wish that were a good thing.

Fucking Kevin Drum.

People are telling you that your statistics are bullshit…because your statistics are bullshit.

There’s no reason to link to the ECI in a piece rather than the actual compensation workers see in their paychecks other than to dissemble, distort and dissimulate. None at all.

And family income vs household income was also a “clever” trick intended only to deceive.

As I said, vote for Clinton if you like. It doesn’t matter much anyway. Climate change is the pressing issue, and no one is going to do a thing about that.

But it just bothers me to no end when there actual honest arguments to be made for Clinton and fucking putzy geriatrics like Drum can’t be arsed to make them, and instead they just tell Millennials that it’s only right and proper that they accept the abuse being dished out.

Worse than that, Drum is telling them that they aren’t even being abused.

Thinking a bit more about the below weight loss article, crash diets almost never work — that’s what The Biggest Loser is, and it doesn’t work.

No surprise there.

I think large weight loss is possible because I’ve done it, and have known other people who’ve done it. It’d probably look something more like this, however.

Doubt it will ever be possible to give people an extreme stubbornness injection, though. I’m not donating any of mine. I need it.

See also this comment.

It seems legitimately hard for people to lose weight and to keep it off. Glad it was relatively easy for me.

Hunger just doesn’t bother me. Most uncomfortable things I can withstand pretty easily. I know this makes me different from most people.

If I lose weight and my body needs 800 calories a day less than what is “normal,” here’s what I do: I eat 800 calories a day less.

Peer pressure, that I’m hungry, that it’s uncomfortable — all mean nothing to me.

But as noted, I might not be the most stubborn human on earth, but the contest to decide who is actually the holder of that title would never end as none of us would ever give up.

So I accept that losing weight and staying thin afterwards is difficult. But it just wasn’t for me.

(As an example of what I do that other people don’t, there were pastries brought into work today. I know they have a lot of calories, but I wanted one. So I ate it. But then I didn’t eat anything for lunch to compensate. So my net intake for the day will be the same or most likely a little less. This is how you maintain a constant weight.)

It’s weird how that when state that you don’t support Clinton, you’re automatically accused of being a “BernieBro.”

No, don’t support Bernie, either. At least not for president.

Aren’t there other candidates in the race, anyway? Why is that assumption made?

“BernieBro” is an epithet spouted when Clinton’s boot-lickers can’t think of anything more cogent to say.

Clinton: when you want an even more Republican Republican than Obama (oh, except she’s a little bit feminist to upper-middle class white women, never mind all the brown women she’ll kill overseas in her useless wars).

What Are Some “Perfect” Horror Movies?

The Shining is a terrible film. Always hated it. It’s an empty emotion in a dark room.

Here are my picks.

Trick ‘r Treat

Jacob’s Ladder

Hard Candy

The Descent

Nightbreed

Mullholland Drive

Let the Right One In

Evil Dead II

The Cabin in the Woods

That last one you’ll have to watch a lot of other horror films before you understand it, and grok why it’s perfect.

“Sarah” by Kate Miller-Heidke might be the best song ever written, considered as a whole.

What a perfect encapsulation of a moment, of an emotion, of a tragedy, in so few words. She has other great songs, but that one…all the nine Muses barreled into her atelier, bolted the door and refused to leave until they’d captured pure plangent truth and channeled it through her.

I’m working on a longer piece about the song — my first real essay in years — but just had to get that out there.

Kevin Drum is in his own little world. A very, very stupid world.

Here he is attempting to defend his delusional Clinton defense yesterday. Look, vote for Clinton if you want to. But don’t lie with statistics to justify it.

All the scared old guys are panicking even though there’s no chance Bernie will win. Not only that, they are doing an intellectualized version of “These entitled millennials won’t pipe down and let those who know best tell them what’s good for them.”

But here’s how not to lie with statistics. As to Kevin Drum’s idiotic contention that

About 70 percent of college grads have debt under $30,000, and the default rate on college debt is about the same as it was 30 years ago.

That’s very convenient. Now here’s what’s really going on.

The average class of 2015 graduate with student-loan debt will have to pay back a little more than $35,000, according to an analysis of government data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at Edvisors, a group of websites about planning and paying for college. Even adjusted for inflation, that’s still more than twice the amount borrowers had to pay back two decades earlier.

Not only is average debt rising, but more students are taking out loans to finance secondary education. Almost 71% of bachelor’s degree recipients will graduate with a student loan, compared with less than half two decades ago and about 64% 10 years ago.

Which of course devastates the ability to do things previous generations took for granted, like being able to buy a starter house or to start a family.

Not to mention this. Oh wait, you pseudo-intellectual putz Drum, I just did. (Read that whole piece. It’s really good.)

In other words, even after the housing collapse, a home today costs approximately three times as much as a home in 1970 compared to the average wage that a person earns.

Any why is Drum talking only about college grads? More than 60% of the country has no degree of any kind. Oh wait, don’t tell me — it’s because it makes his deceitful argument look better.

But let’s take a gander at how life is for the other 60% — those unaccountable wretches Drum is willing to just discard because they don’t matter at all — to him, to Clinton, or to Drum’s sad sophistry.

The gap between those with a bachelor’s degree and those without is wide and (somewhat) increasing.

While — again — all the necessities of life like housing, health care and education rise in price far in excess of the headline inflation number. That’s a whole other post, but inflation in these is masked by huge deflation in electronics, clothes, food and cars over the same period. So you have to be smarter than people like Drum and actually examine what the inflation number is telling you.

Going back a little, I have no idea where Drum got his median household income number of $67,000, but it has never been that high in the US. Notice his number is sourceless but has a pretty Excel spreadsheet (probably from the Heritage Foundation or somewhere).

The real median income in the US is about $52,000. (Linking to Wikipedia, but verified at other places as well.)

And I make fun of Kevin Drum for being a moron (because he is), but he is a particular kind of moron with a high IQ and lots of education so that he believes — correctly in most cases — that he can hoodwink most people. Here’s another example, that of his linking to the Employment Cost Index to “prove” that “total compensation” hasn’t declined.

Well, “total compensation” and the ECI is complete bullshit for most people because it measures things that are (you guessed it) constantly over-inflating like health care premiums that your employer contributes for you. So, the average wage-earner does not see this in their paycheck and it does not help them or the economy in any way (it actually harms the economy as money is siphoned off [basically embezzled] to wasteful uses like health insurance corps).

In Drum’s and Mannion’s views, millennials should just pipe down, ignore the college debt and/or that they cannot afford to go to college at all, scorn the idea of ever buying a home or having decent healthcare so they can get to the really important task of making sure that the oldster’s Social Security payouts don’t fall and house prices don’t decline even a single percentage point.

Drum gives a master class in how to lie with statistics. And really this post could be 10,000 words longer where we really get deep into the numbers and refuting Drum’s duplicitousness and Mannion’s smarmy superciliousness. But I try to not write for more than 15 minutes or so and now I’ve hit my limit — of time as well as exasperation with people like Mannion and Drum.

And in case anyone was wondering, I am not a millennial, and I have a household income that firmly places me in the top 5% of the US. So Clinton would benefit me, and Bernie would not.

Doesn’t make me an oblivious, gormless and brainless statistics-mangling doofus, though.