The left has an interesting use of "we" and "society."

There should be a name for the use of "we" to mean "you." Husbands and wives employ "we/us" this way-- "We need to fix the gutter" to mean "You have to fix the gutter" or "We have to do something about Child's problem with math" to mean "You're going to have to put Child through drills every night."

It's a variation on the Royal We. The Accusative-Case* We, maybe.

The left considers itself outside society, a critic apart from it, above it, superior to it, as a teacher is above and superior to his students. So any mention of "society" is an attempt to put blame on others. And the "we/us" language is the Accusatory version of the pronoun; they don't mean they themselves.

Have you ever heard someone on the left specifically take responsibility for such a horror? The left could say, for example, "Perhaps by promoting terrorists as icons and to university professorships, we have transmitted the idea that terrorism is acceptable." That would be a real expression of "We're to blame," we including the speaker. The true use of "we."

But of course they never say such things. It's always "We're all to blame, because of various things you and specifically not I are guilty of."

Also note that Melissa Harris-Perry pushes the idea that "we" (by which she means "You") are "Otherizing" the terrorists -- conceiving them as entirely unlike you -- in order to reduce your own culpability for their actions.

Apparently it never occurs to this supposed intellectual that that's precisely what she herself is doing.

Hm: Maybe we can make the different uses of we sound all smart and collegiac and stuff by contrasting the real use of we to mean "a group including myself" as "cis-we" and this rhetorically foul use of "we" to mean "a group specifically not including myself, by which I mean, you" as "trans-we."

* "Bigby's Hearty Handshake" jokes, relying on the fact that there's already an Accusative case in grammar, and since I'm saying "Accusatory" I might as well use that term. So I did.

"Oblig." meanwhile suggests this use of we be called "The Infernal We," to compare with the Royal We. Although I'm not sure that makes a perfect comparative -- what about something like the Proletarian We, which I like especially because they specifically mean that those beneath their vaunted station are the problem.

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 AM | Comments (437)
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Everyone says they were framed, apparently some are.

The Mississippi man charged with sending poisoned letters to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and a state judge was released from jail on Tuesday, federal official said, though the reason for the release wasn't immediately clear.

Jeff Woodfin, chief deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service in Oxford, Miss., said suspect Paul Kevin Curtis has been released from custody, though Woodfin said he doesn't know if there were any conditions on the release.

...

"The searches are concluded, not one single shred of evidence was found to indicate Kevin could have done this," McCoy told reporters after the hearing Monday.

[His lawyer Christi] McCoy also questioned why Curtis would have signed the letters "I am KC and I approve this message," a phrase he had used on his Facebook page.

McCoy said in court that someone may have framed Curtis, suggesting that a former business associate of Curtis' brother, a man with whom Curtis had an extended exchange of angry emails, may have set him up.

Looks like this case is going as well as the Anthrax case from 2001 did.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:06 AM | Comments (245)
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The prosecution wrapped up their case last week and before starting the defense, Gosnell's lawyer asked for the judge to dismiss the charges.

He dropped some but left others.

GosnellÂ’s defense attorney asked the judge to drop three of the charges for killing the babies and the judge agreed with the contention there was not enough evidence to convict Gosnell on those charges. He still faces the other charges the prosecution has brought and the murder trial will continue on them.

The judge also dropped five counts of corpse abuse at the request of his defense attorney Jack McMahon.

Nothing to see here, move along citizen.

Update:

[Gosnell] still faces a third-degree murder charge in the death of Nepalese immigrant Karnamaya Mongar, 41, and four counts of first-degree murder for the baby deaths.

More:

Gosnell acquittal on 3 murder counts came after defense argued DA couldn't prove babies were alive when necks severed. Via @jdmullane

— Sunny (@sunnyright) April 23, 2013

Despite my first reaction, while this isn't good for the case (or humanity) it's not the end either. It's not like prosecutors haven't overreached in charging people before and there are still 5 capital murder counts on the table.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:37 AM | Comments (534)
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Oh good, another seat the GOP should be able to pick up but probably won't.

From conservative-leaning Montana, Baucus has voted against Democratic initiatives on some social issues, most recently last weekÂ’s effort to create an expanded background check system for gun purchases.

Despite ObamaÂ’s double-digit defeat in Montana, Democrats intend to vigorously defend the seat. The leading Democratic candidate is former governor Schweitzer, a popular figure who at times has feuded with Baucus over local political issues in the Big Sky state. In February, Schweitzer hinted at a potential run in a Facebook post.

Yeah well, for all his supposed "conservatism" he did write the Senate version of ObamaCare which was the basis for the plan so...grade on the appropriate curve.

Montana voted for Romney but sent John Tester back to the Senate last year so don't get your hopes up too high.

CAC sends along his analysis via email.

Senator Brian Schweitzer. D's have left 4 seats open so far that
would be targets of a functioning opposition party. Republicans hold
an edge in only one- West Virginia

Posted by: DrewM at 07:22 AM | Comments (214)
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Bipartisanship (noun)--When Democrats and Republicans join together to take your money and/or freedom.

"Now's the time for Congress to act," [Sen. Mike] Enzi [R, WY] said Monday. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., added that it's "time to have a national program to collect this sales tax."

eBay CEO John Donahoe Sunday began rallying users of the auction site against S.743, saying in an e-mail that: "This legislation treats you and big multi-billion dollar online retailers -- such as Amazon -- exactly the same... Those fighting for this change refuse to acknowledge that the burden on businesses like yours is far greater than for a big national retailer."

Taxpayer advocates say Enzi's amendment amounts to a multibillion dollar tax hike on American consumers that shouldn't be rushed into law without a single hearing (S.743 was introduced last week). The National Taxpayers Union set up a petition to Congress saying: "I do not want to be made vulnerable to out-of-state tax collectors." Last month, 15 conservative groups sent a letter to members of Congress saying an Internet tax law is "is bad news for conservative principles and the cause of limited government."

Supporters of the proposal (mainly brick and mortar retailers and big online sellers like Amazon) say it's unfair that online sellers have a price advantage over stores that sell in person.

Naturally politicians and heavily vested business interests think the way to address this "inequity" is to increase taxes on individuals. Another way of looking at is...tough.

Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy and her Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer have also noted that The Marketplace Fairness Act is premised on the idea that "the the government should be able to collect the maximum amount of tax revenue from citizens, and that consumers should not be able to decide where to shop based on tax levels." They actually present a different way of thinking about the sales tax issue that deserves more attention.

Tax competition is a good and healthy thing, as it helps to spur innovation in both the public and private sectors and enhances various "experiments in living" different jurisdictions and communities want to pursue. Residents benefit from being able to choose among different attitudes toward the level of taxation and (one presumes) the level of public services they pay for.

We aren't citizens anymore, we're simply an endless supply of revenue for the all important state. You can and will have to do with less but the government and those that depend upon it never will.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:38 AM | Comments (309)
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I typed up an entire page of links but Moveable Type sent it to the phantom zone with General Zod.

You will have to settle for this hilarious video. Apparently some kid named Nate wrestled Dzhokhar in high school. Nate decided to put video of the fight on youtube. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM | Comments (403)
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Happy Tuesday.

Dzhokhar Tsaraev is telling investigators that his brother was motivated by jihad, but that no foreign terrorist groups were involved.

The Canadian train bomb plotters will get a bail hearing today. They are not Canadian citizens. The investigation has been going on for six months. And their plot is not related to the Boston bombing.

A car bomb injured two outside the French embassy in Tripoli.

Mark Sanford is struggling in SC1. He's going on the air today with an ad knocking Elizabeth Colbert Busch for her union ties. It's still a red district.

The internet sales tax is gaining steam in the Senate. The White House says President Obama will sign it if it passes.

Rep. Rangel is suing Speaker Boehner and six other lawmakers to try and overturn the ethics censure handed out for Rangel's many dirty actions, including using a rent-controlled apartment in Harlem as a campaign office, using congressional stationary and staff to solicit funds for an academic center named after him, and failing to pay taxes on rental income for 17 years.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (444)
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Biochemistry News:

Bioengineered yeast can synthesize malaria drug

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:38 PM | Comments (678)
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Specifically, the Iranian Tea Party, which is just recovering from a Hitler's Birthday bash.

The RCMP said it had arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal, and Raed Jaser, 35, of Toronto in connection with the plot, which authorities said was not linked to the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three and injured more than 200 people last week.

Neither is a Canadian citizen, but the police did not reveal their nationalities.

We have to pass this Immigration Bill to find out what's in our country.

Officials say "no link" to the Boston Bombing, and also no indication of state sponsor as such.

U.S. officials said the attack would have targeted a rail line between New York and Toronto, a route that travels along the Hudson Valley into New York wine country and enters Canada near Niagara Falls.

On the Al Qaeda connection:

[A] U.S. government source said Iran is home to a little-known network of alleged al Qaeda fixers and "facilitators" based in the Iranian city of Zahedan, very close to Iran's borders with both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

...

They do not operate under the protection of the Iranian government, which has a generally hostile attitude towards Sunni al Qaeda militants, and which periodically launches crackdowns on the al Qaeda elements, though at other times appears to turn a blind eye to them.

Yeah I don't really believe all the spin. This is the US attempting to soft-play this stuff so that they aren't asked questions about their inaction.

Posted by: Ace at 03:47 PM | Comments (781)
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From AP:

Two U.S. officials say preliminary evidence from an interrogation suggests the suspects in the Boston Marathon attack were motivated by religion but were apparently not tied to any Islamic terrorist groups.

Well knock me over with a leprechaun sneeze.

But not all observers agree with this common sort of conclusion. Some wonder if the Tsarnaevs might not have been motivated by architecture.

Wait, what?

Well, sure, architecture. Why not? This guy ponders the soul-eroding effects of Brutalist Architecture, which, FYI, is pretty vile. It's that style of using concrete in the forefront of buildings that you often see in institutional buildings from the 50s and 60s and even the 70s. It looks like it should be called Stalinist Moderne. So of course you see it in a lot of government buildings and on college campuses.

This kind of crap.
Hey, who could have imagined that off-white porous concrete
would wind up being such an attractive perching place for migrating grime?
Gotta love a fasçade in the color of "Bottom of a Dirty Gym Sock."

So sure it's hideous. But a motive for terrorism? Huh?

I had just written about people's need to attract attention to themselves by proclaiming counter-intuitive fake-clever things. And thus, a guy named James Russell thinks he's found the motive for the Boston Bombings:

U. Mass Dartmouth, which started life as the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, dates from the same period and is a strange mix of technocratic rationalism and architectural megalomania. A vast parade ground posing as a campus green runs between lines of identical buildings. Hoisted on hefty concrete piers, highway-scaled beams span vast distances, holding up horizontal trays of academic space that jut pugnaciously into the green.

...

Amazingly, RudolphÂ’s design has been barely altered and rarely added to. The newest dormitory has been built in a budget-minded medium-security-prison style that makes the Rudolph buildings look humanist.

...

As I sat stewing under the lock-down order, my thoughts returned to the U Mass campus, which swarmed with students who looked much like Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the bombing suspect. Although itÂ’s too early to know whether he was motivated to violence by political or religious fervor, thatÂ’s looking unlikely as I write this. He was a student at the Dartmouth U Mass campus, it turns out. He seems to have had many friends, but I wondered about the effect of such a deeply impersonal place. ItÂ’s isolated at the suburban edge and unintentionally expressive of the assembly-line education thatÂ’s become the cost-driven norm. Does such a place aid the alienation -- or, at least, impede the forming of deep personal bonds -- of even a smart, sociable kid?

It sounds much too glib an explanation -- as the numerous other theories we are now hearing are likely to be -- but I canÂ’t help thinking it.

Glib? Not a word of it, old man! And congrats on successfully intuiting that it seemed "unlikely" that "political or religious fervor" motivated this.

I gotta say one thing, though: This is a truly ugly, deliberately anti-human style of architecture. It literally offends my sight. It's as if people have gone out of their way to create a massive visual insult to human beings.

And just as a bit of triva: You know who also hated this SPECTRE-Headquarters sort of ugly-futurism-on-the-cheap style? Bond writer Ian Fleming. Goldfinger is named after Erno Goldfinger, one of the architects in this style. Goldfinger threatened to sue and Fleming threatened to change the name to Goldprick.

That said, people really need to stop buying every ticket in sight in the Preciously Overclever Lottery. It's not a contest and you will not win A New Car. Stop it already.

People are so determined to be Clever they're willing to play the Fool to do so.

Update: The Boston Globe hedges, but notes that Islam may have been a secondary motivation for the bombings.

So I guess we're going with Chez Goldfinger as the reason?

Great Quote: Sci fi writer John Scalzi has saying:

The failure mode of "clever" is "asshole."

Yeah. So don't force Teh Clever.

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (263)
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