SAR #15293

“Lies trump truth when people want to believe.” Robert Glinsky, The Friendship of Criminals.

The Enemy Of My Enemy: One thing that the Russian airstrikes has made very clear is that the US/CIA has been equipping al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise with weapons and pretending they are “moderate rebels”. The working theory is that when compared to ISIS, al-Qaeda is quite all right. Tell that to New York.

Asked And Depends On Who You Are: Was Poverty Reduction in the Developing World Worth the Hit to U.S. Workers? “an interesting philosophical question, but it has nothing to do with the reality.” The poverty in the Southern states is largely attributable to the outsourcing of jobs to the developing world.

Logically: If projected third quarter earnings do not justify current stock market confidence and valuations, then...

Our Crowd: The only explanation for the growing support that “the triumvirate of crazy - Trump/Carson/Cruz — has is the identification their supporters share with them. Their supporters do not understand how crazy these candidates are because they, too, are batshit crazy. Many of the others – Bush, Rubio, Ryan – escape being thought crazy because of their practiced ability to lie with a straight face.

Dumbed Up: The Donald has more support from Republicans without a college education than any of the GOPers has among college grads. And Jebbie is Mr. Inevitable no more.

Stupid Works: Drug testing people seeking government assistance has repeatedly been proven to be useless in every way but one. To start with, welfare recipients don’t do drugs more than folks with money, so drug testing requires an unreasonable search. And it is obviously intended to shame and demean those needing help. That's what makes it acceptable – those voters who believe the downtrodden are freeloaders. Make 'em suffer and crawl, it's the Republican way of showing compassion.

Ring Around The Rosy: Wal-Mart's acknowledgement of its sales and profit problems is fair warning to all those in its supply and manufacturing chain that they are going to be squeezed even more. If Wal-Mart goes, so will many of them.

Nostalgia: “It is, after all, rather odd to talk about the virtues of conservatism-that-was without giving a single example of someone who embodied those supposed virtues. Who’s the poster child for the intellectually humble, incrementalist, humane creed that we’ve supposedly lost?” We suspect there never was such a person.

Allah The Merciful: The death toll in the Saudi Arabian Hajj Disaster is now over 2,100.

Datapoint: The data is unequivocally clear: American cops disproportionately kill blacks by a wide margin. Attempts to explain this runs up against this reality: Men who hunt deer have more interactions with deer than vegetarians do. Tend to kill 'em, too.

Text Me: Turns out that social media is anti-social. The under-30 are addicted to their cell phones and think that texting is a social activity. It is not.

Porn O'Graph: Divide and conquer.